September’s Writing Yoga exercise

For September’s Writing Yoga, I challenge you to write a mythic tale from your own experiences.

Choose an event from your life you’d like to write about, and see if you can match it with a myth, legend, or fairy tale. Or, choose the legend and look through your life for an event that has something structurally in common with it.

For example, you might compare your job search to the Goldilocks fairy tale. Or, perhaps something about your life makes you think of the tale of Sisyphus, doomed to push a large boulder up a mountain until, at the last moment, it rolls back down.

Now try writing your story by alternating between the two tales: your own life and the legend.

Braided Storytelling

I learned about this technique from Jessica Piscitelli Robinson, who uses it to great effect in her upcoming book Stages: Stories from My Life. (I read a pre-release copy.) Jessica even teaches a course on braided storytelling.

Of course, braided storytelling is much more powerful and sophisticated than what I suggest here. However, I think it could be really fun to play with, even in your journaling.

By comparing our life to well-known stories, we can see narrative structures and story arcs that might otherwise escape us. This might just open up new ways of creating the narratives of our lives, or expand our storytelling skills.

If nothing else, I hope it’s fun!

Try it out. If you’d like to share your results with me, go ahead! I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Related content

Find Jessica’s website and courses here: BetterSaidThanDone.com.

Review the other Writing Yoga exercises.