Becoming a Better Storyteller

When I was a young girl, I wanted to be an artist. And my father told me that artists don't make money and he believed, I think, in that whole starving artist cliché. So I spent 15 years in tech, specifically, though, in tech that was not your everyday kind of tech: globalization, computational linguistics, concepts that are pretty difficult to understand for the layman. And so I became, oftentimes, chief storyteller in my companies. And people used to say that I was among the best storytellers in our industry, which I would joke and say it wasn't much of an accomplishment in an industry that doesn't tell stories very well.

And what ended up happening is, after 15 years, I got a little burned out, decided to take a sabbatical, and I decided to apply to Columbia to study theater. And to my good luck, the folks at Columbia have a pretty decent sense of humor because why on earth would somebody in tech come and study playwriting with some of the best storytellers in the world?

I think that in order to tell the stories of our lives, of our businesses, of our causes, we have to be good storytellers. But when it comes to living life, I think we have to step aside and stop framing things necessarily in the form of a three-part, nice, neat story with a button at the end, and we have to start thinking about living life in its messy, chaotic way. And sometimes, that doesn't feel like it's a story. If you look at the dots in my story, they seem very circuitous and unrelated, and there were plenty of people who thought that leaving my tech career and studying playwriting was an irrelevant and confusing part of the story; and it's only now, in hindsight, that it really makes sense.

There's an amazing talk by a woman named Kelly Corrigan, who is a writer and a storyteller, and she refers to this compulsion to try to fix everything into a story structure as "story creep." And I love her advice, that sometimes it's less about telling a story and it's more about just accepting life as it is. But when you're in the thick of it, I think that if you're trying to attach your life to a nice, neat story, it can feel like you're failing and life isn't neat that way. Life can be chaotic and messy.