I’ve struggled with the term origin story for a while — both with its definition and its purpose in the context of writing craft. I’m not referring to a character’s back story that the writer might produce to reveal earlier events that give essential context to the current plot or as a throwaway piece to understand their protagonist’s actions and reactions. What I am talking about is the origin story of the writer who is creating these stories – where do we come from and what made us what we are today. I’ve also struggled with whether my origin story, if I’m writing memoir, serves the part of my life on which the memoir focuses. If it’s fiction I’m writing, I wonder how my origin story influences, consciously or subconsciously, my writing and if I should be excavating this.
My thinking on origin story has evolved. The first long work I completed was a 42,000-word narrative set during my childhood chronicling the illness of my younger sister and its effects on the family. In that short book, my origin story was a small town outside the New York metropolitan area, on the edge of suburban and rural. It was an agricultural town, where kids spent days running wild in the woods, developing a robust imagination which evolved into pre-teen angst and teenaged boredom and a longing to explore parts unknown.
Later, I realized my origin story was about feeling different from everyone in town and wanting to feel the same as them, or an essential part of the town, accepted by the people there, a sense of belonging. Perhaps that is what led to my teenaged rebellion being particularly virulent of spirit.
Still later, after my journey abroad and back — the subject of my second full-length manuscript — I began to relate more to The Heroine’s Journey than an origin story. Still, seeds from that journey prompted me later to theorize that another origin story might be relevant. This one was centered on a specific difference that my family and I’d always had from most of the people where I grew up, but I hadn’t thought about at the time. I realized that being from a minority religion in a country where, in the 1970s, 90% of the population identified as Christian perhaps fostered that sense of difference, of not quite fully belonging. As a child, I was taught the countries in Eastern Europe where my great-grandparents immigrated from. Was Eastern Europe my origin story?
Later still, I learned that my grandparents’ ancestors had immigrated to Eastern Europe centuries earlier from Southern France, Greece and Italy, and perhaps Turkey, Iran, Mongolia. Before that, the Middle East. Was millennea of migration, displacement, exploring my origin story?
Before that, humans first evolved in Africa. I feel a connection to Africa after living there for months in each of three countries, making many friends, even visiting sites of archeological excavations of the first humans. Which leads me to wonder if an origin story is your actual, accurate story or the one you tell yourself.
These threads seem to constitute as good of themes as any for a memoir, where the work of finding universal themes in your specific story that readers could see in themselves is essential.
If you’re writing a memoir and are interested in writing exercises to assist in identifying your origin story(ies), check out this helpful article: https://www.scottishbooktrust.com/articles/writing-prompt-origin-stories
This feels horribly relevant to the place I’m in just at the moment. I’m 63, dealing with deteriorating health of my husband and myself, but at the same time, looking into the next phase of life, that of being either retired or semi-retired. How we handle this phase is largely up to us: we have the freedom to make choices.
At the same time, I am finally coming up with answers to mental and emotional health problems caused by childhood abuse. I am finding it rather uncomfortable that the facets of my personality which I regarded as being ‘me’, ie, my origiin story, are actually all related to and in many cases directly caused by cPTSD. Not me at all.
So, lacking a self-convincing origin story, how can I expect to handle this choice of shaping my, and our, futures when it would seem I am still mainly driven by cPTSD and my childhood reaction to today’s events?
Who am I, and who is everyone else, then, is especially relevant as I grapple with these issues. And my writing, currently suspended, is part and parcel of all this, being my primary means of self-expression and slated to become a significant retirement occupation.
Thanks for sharing your thought, Rachel. I suspect it is this phase of life (I’m 57) that has us thinking in similar ways about our origin story, what we tell ourselves our origin story is – I’d like to think we can choose, and I’m still working on that – and what we want our later stages to look like, if we are fortunate enough to have at least some agency over that.
Thank you, Kimberley, thought provoking.
Thank you, Gill, I hope you found it somewhat useful in your writing.