That’s Not A Story

How to turn your anecdote into a proper story

This is part of an ongoing series of workshop pieces for writers.

Years ago, I wrote a short piece about a genius who lived in my attic and smelled of garlic and old sweat. True story. I showed it to Abigail Thomas, the renowned memoirist and former literary agent, and she said she really liked it. She suggested I expand it into a larger story, but I didn’t know how to do that at the time. I’d written everything I thought I knew about the memory. I’d told all the interesting bits. There wasn’t anymore. The memory itself was intriguing because life is strange, but it didn’t go anywhere. It was just a curiosity. It wasn’t even a story, it was an anecdote, which is not the same thing. I didn’t know how to take it any further.

I’m using the word story here to stand for a complete essay with a beginning, middle, and end, where the writer overcomes some obstacle, a truth is learned, or some other sort of meaningful shit occurs. An anecdote is just something that happened — an incident. You go to the dentist and someone says something funny. It might be an amusing bit for the dinner table, but it’s not a story because you haven’t made it one yet.

This is the difference between retelling something that happened to you and what a writer does. If something crazy happens to a normal person, they have been gifted a story. A writer creates stories out of the flotsam and jetsam of life. We take the mundane and bring it to life. We make it a story. You can’t wait for life to drop gold in your lap, you have to be an active participant in seeking it out.

A professional photographer makes a photo, they don’t capture one. Anyone can take a good picture in perfect circumstances. The difference between a pro and an amateur is that a pro can do it on demand, and do it every time no matter what the conditions. The amateur needs all the planets to be aligned.

Every time I see one of those “nofilter” hashtags, I think, “What a schmuck.” Pros use filters to trick the camera into revealing what our eyes see. An amateur uses an Instagram filter to try to make a mundane photo look faintly interesting. What they really mean, is that they captured something spectacular by accident.

The humorist David Sedaris has a Masterclass on writing that I highly recommend. In it, he talks about his process, and keeping a diary is a big part of it. Most, if not all, of his published essays go on to become books, but they begin as entries in his diary. His diary is the storage space for all his experiences and observations, a filing cabinet for ideas, where they sit until they become useful.

David carries a notebook with him at all times so he can scratch down ideas and observations that amuse him, little snippets of conversation, whatever they are, whenever they come up. He doesn’t carry a phone. These little morsels become the basis of his writing when he sits down to write in his diary each day.

“Some of my diary entries have gone on to become essays,” David says, “and others, I just have them in a file. I feel like they all get a good response, and they’re strong openers, but the thing is, they’re incidents, they’re vignettes, they’re not essays.”

One note about his diary entries, though. His diary reads like what a lot of writers think of as fully formed essays. They’re not a mix of to-do lists, scribbles, and bits of conversation. If he decides to turn it into an essay, not only does he rewrite it 15–20 times, he reads it in front of dozens or hundreds of live audiences to perfect it.

He also voluntarily and compulsively picks up trash by the side of the road for eight hours a day, so we won’t use him as our gold standard for everything.

Comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Patton Oswalt were talking once about the difference between a panel story and a bit. A panel story, according to Jerry, is a story you tell on a late-night talk show. It’s too good to throw away, but not good enough for your comedy act. A bit, on the other hand, is a fully-formed joke, a piece of gold.

“There’s nothing better than a bit,” he says.

A bit, a story, an essay. This is what we’re after. The gold. We start with panel stories, diary entries, and amusing anecdotes, but we aren’t always sure what to do with them. We don’t yet know how to turn an anecdote into a story, and that is the process of becoming a writer. Learning to separate the wheat from the chaff, the bullshit from the gold. The art and craft of taking an anecdote and building it into a story, by design.

This is where life experience, craft, a bit of patience, and a lot of diary entries, come into play. This is when the real work starts.

In my experience, the travel story where everything is lovely and nothing bad happens is a complete waste of everyone’s time. It’s like showing us your Instagram feed from Jamaica. Why do we give a damn about the vacation you took? You gave us nothing. We learned nothing. You just made us watch your shitty home movies. Writing flaccid travel stories where nothing happens is the modern equivalent.

This is where the writer comes in.

I don’t often write that much when I’m traveling because it feels too much like work. But I do write in my “journal,” which is just my romantic way of saying I typed on my iPad into a document that lives in the cloud. I carry physical notepads sometimes to scratch bits into, but I can just as easily type them into my phone.

I take notes so the days don’t pass by in a blur. I’ve found that if I don’t, in the end, I’ll retain next to nothing. What the hell did we do for two weeks? I try to make a note of interesting details, strange characters, or bits of conversation. The name of this restaurant or the ingredients of that dish. Just enough to jog my memory when I get home. Three-legged dog. Haunted tree. Our waiter is an elf. If I looked at it a year or more later, it wouldn’t mean anything to me. Toucan Sam at the bikini barn? What the hell does that mean?

Still, it’s usually good for a few weeks.

When I do sit down to write, I never start at the beginning. We left for the airport at 6 am. I begin by writing a scene in the middle that struck my fancy. I need that first sentence to tell me what it’s about, or at least where I want it to go. The story doesn’t always cooperate. More often than not, I start with the title and the subtitle. They provide a pretty good roadmap for where I think I’m going. While they are quite likely to change before I’m finished, this helps to guide me. What do I think I’m trying to say? It can change, but you have to start somewhere.

It doesn’t really matter what the story is; it has to connect to some part of my life so that I’m interested and engaged. Something learned or remembered, a piece of literature or a movie scene, a bit of information that connects the dots for me to a larger truth about myself and the world in which I live. The event — the anecdote — is merely the catalyst for bringing that idea forward. What did this experience teach me about myself and the sweaty mass of humanity swirling around me?

These don’t have to be dark secrets, past traumas, or deep thoughts. They can be funny or exciting, romantic or nostalgic, silly or stupid. You get to choose what you want to reveal about yourself. I will say this, though. If you’re worried about revealing too much about yourself, maybe you shouldn’t be writing personal essays or memoirs. Write fiction, poetry, or non-personal essays about Pygmies or Penguins. The art of writing memoir is a defiant act of bravery that reveals oneself to the world. If you shy away, you just end up with a weak, lightweight story.

For me, it’s usually something that adds one more tiny piece to the puzzle that helps to explain why we do what we do on this big blue marble. I’m endlessly fascinated by behavioral psychology and what it can tell us about how illogical and delusional we are. Why we make the decisions we make and why we’re wrong about almost everything. I allow myself to be the test case, the guinea pig. How do I react in these situations? Poorly. What does that say about me, and possibly everyone? We’re all pretty nuts. How can I use this experience to tell a larger story that will resonate with a larger audience? Provide interesting details and be as vulnerable as you can.

The easiest way to expand an anecdote for me is to tie it to some other place or time. If it were an old memory, such as my story about the garlic-eating genius, then I might try to tie it to my life now and what I know of socially awkward, highly-intelligent people and my place among them. If it happened today, I might try to tie it to something in my childhood, say the wacky Mennonites I grew up with or my sweet, nutty conservative Christian family.

There are all sorts of artists who seem to sprout out of the ground fully formed, but I’ve never been one of them. I was born with oodles of creative talent, but it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with it. I started drawing, and then got into photography, graphic design, copywriting, filmmaking, and branding. I’ve been writing professionally for over 30 years, but it was mostly copywriting, with a few magazine articles here and there.

Truth be told, you could do a lot worse than spending a decade or more learning to write ad copy if you want to write about anything else, from movies and television to novels and magazine articles. I didn’t start writing seriously for myself until about ten years ago, and with any real intent, only in the last five.

What that has given me is a lifetime of experiences and endless references to pull from, literature and movies, music, and world travel. If something happens to me that I find irritating, interesting, or amusing, I don’t have to search my memory banks very hard to come up with personal references that apply. They’ve been there the whole time. I just needed a trigger to bring them out to play.

I’m always looking for an emotional connection with the reader. It might be anger, disgust, romance, love, hate, fear, or hope. It’s all grist for the mill. I don’t intentionally set out to make the reader feel a particular way. I might be asking them to join me on a little journey and experience the emotional roller coaster we’re on. Other times, it’s clear that I’m out of my gourd and I’m simply spinning out for their amusement. Sometimes, I’m just revealing how cracked and broken I am because that’s how I feel that day, and I know that many others feel the same and will relate.

I realize that sounds like a lot of emotional woo-woo. What I’m trying to pull out of you is this: What does that boat ride you took have to do with me? It doesn’t have anything to do with you, you say, it’s my story. Ah, so you want me to be engaged with something I have no interest in or involvement with?

If we can’t relate to your story, we stop reading. But if you give me details that grab my attention and reveal a certain amount of vulnerability, humanity, and personal connection, I can empathize, and suddenly I’m not watching from the shore. I’m in the boat with you.

What does that have to do with turning an anecdote into a story?

When you take a small story and begin to relate it to your own life and experiences, suddenly you have all these possible paths to explore. Suddenly, it can become a much larger story. It gives you the space to have your own character arc, with a beginning, middle, and end. You are met with an obstacle, work to overcome it, possibly with the help of a guide, and are transformed somehow in the end. A classic story structure.

We could still be talking about a trip to the DMV or the Post Office, mind you, because it doesn’t matter. I enjoy a darkly funny trip of misery into the mundane. When I’m in full writer mode, I’m game for anything, the worse the better. If you’re open to the story of your life, you’ll see things you never saw before and notice things you never noticed. Look forward to that tedious chore or errand. There’s gold out there waiting to be mined.

When I’m open, I talk to people, random people, service people. They’ll tell you all manner of crazy shit if you just bother to be friendly and ask them questions about themselves. You won’t believe how quickly they’ll spill their guts. The trick is to remember to get into writer mode when you walk out the door. It makes the world such a more interesting place.

I’m fascinated by openings. Opening sentences and paragraphs. For me, it’s an amalgamation of ad copy, literature, poetry, and song lyrics, but with a purpose. It’s an exciting opportunity to really craft something special. A perfect combination of intrigue and wordplay that entices the reader to carry on. When I’m writing fiction, I begin each chapter as if it’s the beginning of the book. You can do the same thing in your essays.

You’ve written your anecdote down to the best of your ability, and it’s good, but it’s not enough. What do you do now? Where do we go from here? I hit return and then type three asterisks in a row, “***” and then I begin again. Forget what came before. Start fresh. What’s the next chapter of the story? Tell another story about a similar experience, or begin with some exposition about what the previous act meant to you. You don’t have to know where you’re going yet. Your mind will fill in the details.

What did the first part remind you of? What movie, song, poem, memory, or arcane piece of knowledge does it evoke for you? Start there and see where it takes you. As you write, things pop into your mind, and you chase them for a while. You’ll reach dead ends and have to go back a paragraph or two and begin again. I’ve taken six to eight paragraphs out of this piece already, one at a time, because each one was getting off course. I don’t delete them. I cut and paste them into another document to be used later. I have two to three more essays already waiting for me. I waste nothing.

In my experience, if you’re having trouble writing, you’re not reading enough. It’s good to read a wide range of things, but if you’re working on a personal essay, read personal essays. If you’re writing fiction, read fiction. My biggest problem with getting through books is that I’m constantly stopping to write something down. I’ll read six pages, and a lightbulb will go off, and I’m off and running, writing about something of my own.

In the summer, I mow the lawn and listen to podcasts, and I’m constantly stopping to jot down a few notes. My head is full of arcane facts from a wealth of sources. I love learning new things because I trust that at some point I’ll end up using them in my writing. I’m endlessly collecting puzzle pieces that will fit together with the ones I already have. The ones that don’t fit go into an infinite box to await their companion. Some of those pieces have been sitting for a while.

Learn to do research on things that fit your piece and allow you to expand on them. I once wrote an entire essay titled “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” based on Petrichor, that unique smell that occurs right before a summer rain. It was about politics and culture. Metaphors are your friends.

Your job as a writer is to find connections in the world, between people and ideas, between you and the reader. I heard Judd Apatow say that he was fascinated by comedians as a kid because they appeared to have figured something out about the world and had come to some insight concerning our predicament. They had answers. That’s how I view the job of the writer. We’re thinkers, and we have some of the answers. We have the gold.

Everyone wants the gold.

Follow David Todd McCarty on Mastodon.

Story Writing