Can anyone's life make a good story?

I do believe that anyone’s life can be made into a story - and a good one, at that. I don’t think it matters if you had the most boring life in the middle of nowhere with a nuclear family and a complete lack of childhood trauma and a satisfactory but unsavory adult life. As readers we instinctively want to read about that which we do not know - it’s one of our primary ways of discovering the unknown. Before google could instantly transport us to different cultures, homes, psyches, etc., books paved the way and held our hand as they guided us into the minds of people we could never be.

Given that readers want to experience something new, if a person’s story (however boring or nondescript of a life it may seem) is different from my own, I would be interested in reading it. This brings up an interesting point, though, and one which is coincidentally a question we are required to answer for this blog post: If there were a story that transposed my life onto the page, would I read it?

I suppose I would, but for a different reason than I talked about above. Obviously I know everything about my life, and so would not be interested in reading it because it offered insight on some aspect with which I was unfamiliar. There is nothing in my life I would find surprising, or insightful, or new; I have seen it all. So why would I read it? I suppose it would just be out of curiosity. That, and the fact that there is something to be gleaned from reading your own story from an outside perspective. There’s a good quote about how to write poetry - I can’t remember it word for word and the internet is being really unhelpful, but basically it says that to write good poetry, you need to take those raw emotions that initially inspired you to take up your pen, think about them for a while so that you’re not so emotional, and then dive back in and get those emotions out onto paper. This way, your emotion has been processed and you are thoughtful, rather than led by your feelings.

In the same way, it might be incredibly useful to read your own story. You are removed from your own feelings, expectations, and sense of what is up and what is down. It would be a really cool experience to read your life from that perspective. While my own story would be nothing new to me, that added experience of an outsider telling it for me would be something entirely new. But if the author tried to get on an authority trip and put their authorial presence all up in my story, I wouldn’t have any of that. That would be the only clause in our contract. That, and the suggestion that they should maybe consider making a comic instead.