Wehadababyitsabread
I’ve been baking bread a lot lately, and I’ve realized my favorite things to bake use minimal ingredients but require novels for instructions. I’m intrigued by the idea that baking is a story in itself. To make my case, I present Exhibit A: Sourdough Bread and the Eight Parts of the Story Circle.
A character in a zone of comfort: Me, sitting on my couch watching TV
Wants something: A subtle hankering begins to tingle in my stomach, one which only carbs can sate
Enters an unfamiliar situation: Feeds sourdough starter, unsure of its mood: how active will it be, when it will ripen, will it give me any sass?
Adapts to it: Waits 12 hours, gets into a groove of working the dough over the next 5 hours, waits another 12 hours, preheats oven 1 hour, bakes 1 hour, cools 2 hours
Gets what they wanted: A delicious, crispy ball of carbs is sliced, toasted, jammed, and consumed
Pays a price for it: Puts burn cream on my forearm and fingers and spends the next two hours cleaning the kitchen
Returns: Plops back down on the couch
Changed: Hankering sated
If you’re confused by the title of this section, here you go.
Homework for Life
I’ve talked about using story to live a more fulfilling life, and today I want to hit that topic again by sharing a cool practice that I got from the book Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks. The book is about how to tell good stories at open mic nights (like The Moth), but it also has great insight into how to live a better life through story.
Dicks has hundreds of stories from his life that he has gathered through a practice he calls Homework for Life. The concept is simple, and you may say “this is just journaling,” but I think it’s different enough. If journaling is flying, Homework for Life is falling with style.
Step 1: Take five minutes at the end of every day and ask yourself this question: “If I had to tell a story from today—a five-minute story on-stage that took place over the course of this day—what would it be?” Even if it’s something boring or dumb or random, there’s still one thing that the story could be about.
Step 2: Only write down a snippet of the information—a sentence or two that will help you remember when you come back to it. That way you don’t have to feel pressured to start to draft up a story right there. You’re just logging the basics and giving yourself enough information to jump back in later.
Bonus: As you start to do this, you will notice other memories pop up in your mind—things you had forgotten but now remember. It’s all about putting your brain in story mode and letting it do its thing. Jot those down too.
Life in Slo-Mo
Whether you go back and develop these ideas into stories is totally up to you. But it’s not required for you to get all the benefits. Homework for Life is a powerful tool to help you savor every individual day. If you’ve ever felt like life was going too fast, try this for a few weeks and watch it slow down. You’ll look back over your entries and be able to pinpoint every single day instead of letting all your days run together. You may also feel more inclined to make more protagonist-type decisions to make your life more interesting so you have better stories to jot down at the end of the day. Like all good stories, it all comes full circle.
Sentence of the Week
Here we are going back to rad obituaries. I could not pass up the opportunity to feature one of the many fantastic sentences in Renay Mandel Corren’s obit.
There will be much mourning in the many glamorous locales she went bankrupt in: McKeesport, PA, Renay's birthplace and where she first fell in love with ham, and atheism; Fayetteville and Kill Devil Hills, NC, where Renay's dreams, credit rating and marriage are all buried; and of course Miami, FL, where Renay's parents, uncles, aunts, and eternal hopes of all Miami Dolphins fans everywhere, are all buried pretty deep.
Thanks for reading,
Braden