I have built a small part of my online life around the importance of story. I co-facilitated a writing program for ten years. Each week the participants would share these immensely personal and occasionally heartbreaking pieces about some aspect of their lives. They offered up a piece of themselves for criticism or for praise. They were brave. We would sit around the table and listen to these stories and we were always moved in some way. Each story, or poem had something of value to offer about what it means to be human. What it means to have loved someone and lost them to another, or to death, or when they just walked away. These stories offered us a place where we could reveal a part of our own lives that had been in pain and needed healing.

Each week as a facilitator I would hear these stories but when I went out the door I noticed that stories were being taken away. Instead of mom and pop stores there were now chain stores. Gone were the family run businesses with their unique take on products. Gone were the kids working the stock room preparing for college. In their place were cookie cutter version of the same story manufactured by someone in a back room who decided what story was important. Highly impersonal.

In a conversation about blogs, my co-facilitators asked why they had to be so personal. I asked why not? But more importantly there is a deep, deep desire to be heard. People want to stake their claim in the landscape of story. Intimacies are shared because we want to take the power back. Why should a conglomerate define what is our story?

Story for me becomes the thing I can control, define and learn from each time I tell it. I am the creator.

Read Chris Brogan’s review on Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. See below for his contest.

Get a Copy of Donald Miller’s Book

(This is only open to folks in the US for this particular project. But you should still consider getting the book, no matter.)

Here’s what I’d love to do. I’d love for you to write a quick blog post about the importance of story in your life. That’s it. If you want, link back to http://www.chrisbrogan.com/importance-of-story, so I’ll see the trackbacks as well.

When you’ve submitted your post, fill out this form, and give us the URL where we can see the story. Work for you?

It’s a great book and deserves a lot of attention in 2010. I hope you decide to check it out.