Your Life as Story:
Writing Narrative Non Fiction

Lisa Dale Norton

". . . trust that the next piece will be there for you when you need it."
—NORTON

The challenge, once you’ve leaped into the writing of a story about your life, is to trust that the next piece will be there for you when you need it.

Recently I returned to the old fishing cabin that’s been in our family for 50 years now—my mother and father bought it and started fixing it up in 1960. I have come here to write, as is the pattern in my life. I come in the summers because it is only a summer cabin, and I paint, work in the yard, listen to the cicada’s sing their urgent summer songs, watch cottonwood leaves dance in the clean blue sky, and I wait, some days more gracefully than others.

I push forward on the manuscript of narrative nonfiction I am writing, a tale about my life, but more, and some days are surprisingly good, like magic, things come I could never have anticipated, never planned . . . and then I will go into left brain over drive, planning, trying to map out where the story will go, how long it will take for me to complete it. The next day at the screen is balky and uninspired.

I drive down the river road, chastising myself along the way—You know better, trust, it will be there when you need it—park under an ancient cottonwood and crawl down the bank into the Cedar River, fount of all inspiration, and push through the knee deep water, going with the flow, down and around the bend, watching the tree tops for the great blue heron who lives there, the kingfisher, and daredevil swallows who simply throw themselves at their goal, pump those elegant wings then fold them in and ride some invisible force I can not see, never once tumbling to earth.

Water soothes; its easy, go-along nature reminds me I can not shape the flow that comes through me. Trust.

I find a hawk feather. I find at least one hawk feather every time I go to the river. I know it will be there if I just go quiet and look.

Blessed I return to the creaking cabin and watch night come to the land.

The next day at the screen sentences flow. Words come I have not used in years. Whose language is this? Ideas pop. Where did they come from?

I feel relieved. Some divine thread still tethers me to the larger story—in ways I can not name. I simply have to trust.

May you, too, be blessed with the same willingness to let go in your pursuit of a story.