Did it get too hot, for a while, to think about storytelling?
OK, but we seem to have caught a break. Time to get busy writing something for “Everybody Has a Story.”
That feature runs most Wednesdays right here in the Neighbors section, offering true-life tales by your friends and neighbors. In recent months, we’ve enjoyed their overseas adventures and homefront war stories, family projects and street-level whodunits, childhood reminiscences and considerations of aging, battles against sexism and missed encounters with scary intruders.
That’s just a random sampling. “Everybody Has a Story” can be virtually anything — as long as it’s a truly true story and as brief as possible. One thousand words is the limit — and that’s already pretty long.
Words to the wise: Think about what’s crucial to your story and what’s not. Revise and compress. Fight the urge to warm up with a list of ancestors and their movements, or to squeeze in every name you can recall, relevant or not. These are common missteps.
