---
title: "A Life of Its Own: An Essay About an Article That Was Never Published"
date: 2012-02-08
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2012/02/08/a-life-of-its-own/
---
# A Life of Its Own: An Essay About an Article That Was Never Published
I refined and refined the language. I made sure each fact was accurately paraphrased and referenced. The article occupied so much of my attention, I worked on it over the weekend, and once late at night. After several days of focusing on practically nothing other than the article, I submitted it to the appropriate person for review.

After reading through the article, the reviewer noted that it was good, but it wasn't entirely what she had it mind. Whereas I focused on information in the present, she wanted more stories from the past. More stories and anecdotes that show the larger point she wanted to make about the technology.

I returned to my desk, thinking about a new approach. She was right. Somehow, in writing the article, I had neglected story. Story was a key missing element.

The next day, I traveled to the main library for my organization, in downtown Salt Lake, to look for stories from the past. I immersed myself in old books, theses, articles, almanacs, and journals -- looking for stories or interesting anecdotes that might illustrate the larger point we wanted to make. You have to read to find stories, or talk to people, I realized. Stories don't just arrive at your desk while you're hacking away at the language. You have to look for them as you might look for lost money.

While searching for stories, I realized a thing or two. Story is the form that speaks most clearly to our psyche, but life does not naturally play out in stories. For example, the events of my day are mostly mundane. Today I woke up, worked on some wordpress projects, drove to work, worked on some writing projects, played basketball at lunch, came home, ate lasagna, played in the backyard with my kids,  talked with a client on the phone, watched some TV, and here I am typing this blog post. Not a particularly memorable day. Next week I will remember almost nothing of what happened. It will become a blur in my past, just an average day of life.

If this were the substance of journals, histories, biographies, and other records, no one would read them. They would slip into non-use. It's our nature to craft the mundane events of our lives into stories. We demand that a person's life is no mere series of humdrum events. Life is a battle against conflict. It's an attempt to reach a difficult goal. It's a struggle to move in a particular direction that resists us. As such, we select the events that matter for that purpose. We heighten the detail that poses the antagonizing force. As we tell the story, we focus on the information that can be bent and shaped into a plot. And then we move towards a defining moment, which if we capture at exactly the right time, changes everything. We do all this even if it does not match history in a matter-of-fact way, because we thirst for story.

While researching and brainstorming stories, I began to see a different story develop than I had originally intended. Leveraging as many details as I could, I made a revision. I found all the ingredients I needed to rewrite the article in an interesting way. And with the help of a colleague, who supplied a fascinating quote, I landed a perfect ten in the conclusion, or so I thought.