I Think I Live My Life to Tell Stories

I think I have always been a storyteller. Not a writer, necessarily — that came later. Storytelling came first, long before I knew anything about structure or grammar. I knew how to make something ordinary feel like it might have something extraordinary hiding inside it. I think it started when I was five.

Where does a storyteller actually begin?

The week before my fifth birthday, I had a terrible asthma attack — bad enough to land me in hospital. I don't remember every medical detail now, but I remember being released on my birthday, and I remember the nurses giving me a present: four story tapes, in a beautiful box, that might as well have contained treasure. A cow that escaped and went wandering. A man making nail soup. Animals facing a terrible famine, searching for a magic password which was 'Awongalema.'  I adored them completely. I'd listen and disappear. Someone had taken sounds, put them in the right order, and built a world inside my head.

Those nurses probably had no idea they were doing anything life-changing. They were giving a little girl recovering from an asthma attack something nice for her birthday. But I sometimes wonder whether they unknowingly opened a door I never really closed.

The rock, the tuck box, and the pen

By primary school I was already turning things into stories. There was a rock in the grass of our playground — small, unremarkable, never moved by anyone for reasons nobody questioned, which meant it obviously needed a mythology. According to me, my grandparents had planted it there. Pirates wanted it. It was enormously valuable — a ruby, perhaps, with magical properties, and everyone was in imminent danger of losing it. I can't remember every version. That's the wonderful thing about childhood stories: they don't need continuity, only enthusiasm. The rock wasn't something I was looking at. It was somewhere I could go.

Then there was Brownie camp — everyone sitting around with their tuck boxes, mine containing a jam roll so intensely sweet I can still remember my teeth aching. While everyone else rummaged through sweets, I told stories, entirely invented, out of nowhere. One was called Adam and Eve and the Bog Holes. I have almost no idea now what happened in it. I'm not convinced I knew where it was going while I was telling it. That wasn't really the point — the girls listened, I talked, and something appeared between us that hadn't existed before.

When the coach pulled in at the end of that camp, one of the other girls walked straight up to my mum before anyone had even got off.

'Are you Fran's mum?' she asked. 'I just have to tell you — Fran's stories have been the highlight of my camp.'

I don't think I've ever been prouder of anything, before or since, quite like that.

By secondary school it had turned into performance properly. In GCSE drama, my friends and I wrote an entire play about a flight attendant called Pammmmmm, who murdered every one of her passengers with a poisonous Parker pen. Ridiculous characters, one increasingly implausible death after another, everyone in stitches by the end. Bonkers, start to finish — and I loved every second of building it.

Living the story instead of just telling it 

Perhaps that's what I've always loved most about stories — they're collaborative. Even when one person is speaking, everybody is building. I tell you there was a castle; your castle won't look like mine. I give you a handful of words, you create the rest. I'll pretend this happened. Alright, I'll come with you.

As I got older, something shifted. I didn't stop inventing stories. I started living them.

I grew up at a time when going out drinking young wasn't unusual in my circles. By college I could be out five nights a week, always looking for wherever the after-party was, whoever knew somebody hosting something. At the time I'd have said I simply loved going out. And I did. But looking back, I wonder if part of me was always hunting for tomorrow's story — something unpredictable, something I could tell people afterwards. A normal night was lovely. A night where something completely ridiculous happened was better.

Sometimes I'd manufacture the story myself. Someone would ask what I did for a living, and I'd say, "I'm a professional dancer" — and then inevitably end up on a dance floor where it became instantly, gloriously obvious that this was not remotely true. I wasn't trying to deceive anyone in any real sense. I just loved seeing where a story might go once somebody agreed to step into it with me.

One night I met a man called Jonathan. Within what felt like minutes, we'd convinced an entire table that we were married — not newly, either, that would have been too easy. Ten years together. Two adopted children. A whole shared history, improvised between two people who'd known each other for less than an hour. And the strange part is that something real grew out of the fiction. Jonathan became one of my closest friends for a summer. We'd sit on a blanket on my apartment floor, beneath one of those ceiling projectors that fills a room with stars and galaxies, and tell each other stories underneath an artificial universe. Two people surrounded by stars that weren't really there, talking about worlds that weren't really there, somehow having a friendship that absolutely was.

When storytelling turned up somewhere I didn't expect it

Years later I trained as a Sexological Bodyworker, and part of the programme involved reading Jack Morin's The Erotic Mind. Morin spent years studying peak erotic experiences and arrived at the idea that most people have a recurring pattern running through theirs — what he called a Core Erotic Theme, built from his broader formula that attraction plus obstacle tends to equal excitement. As part of my own exploration, I kept circling back to something that surprised me at first: story. The adventure. The experience worth having specifically because it would be worth retelling afterwards.

That raised a question I still find genuinely interesting. Was I seeking experiences because I wanted the experience itself, or because part of me already wanted the story? I don't think those two things have ever been separate, for me.

Some people collect postcards. Some collect countries. I think I've been collecting narrative — characters, moments, ordinary situations that take a turn. Something to bring home.

Storytelling comes home

Then I became a mother, and it all came back to where it started. I read to my daughters, though "reading" undersells it — I perform. Characters get voices. Some become inexplicably Scottish. If there's a rhythm in the text, it becomes a song. Books aren't allowed to stay quietly on the page in our house.

We used to make stories up together at bedtime too, going round the room, each of us building our own. My youngest, without fail, would begin: "One apon a time…" Every single time. We'd all start giggling before she'd carried on completely seriously, building whatever world had appeared in her head that evening.

I look at my children making things up and wonder whether this is simply how it happens — not through lessons, not because somebody teaches you the correct shape of a story, but because somebody else once treated your imaginary world as though it was worth visiting. Those nurses did that for me without ever knowing it. Maybe I'm doing a little of it for my daughters now.

The gap between the story and the page

The strange thing is that, despite all this, writing has never come easily to me. The stories are easy. The words arrive — too many of them, usually. It's getting them down that's hard. My dyslexic brain doesn't produce ideas in neat paragraphs; it produces weather systems. One thought crashes into another. A memory surfaces halfway through a sentence, and now there's another story, and another, faster than my hand or even dictation can keep up with.

Then AI arrived, and that's been unexpectedly emotional. Not because a machine gave me stories — it didn't. I've apparently been making those since I was five. What it gave me was a way of catching them. I can talk ramblingly, repeatedly, disappear entirely off-topic, dictate a whole memory while wandering round the kitchen — and afterwards, something can help me find the thread, put one thought beside another, check the bits I've misremembered, and turn the enormous messy heap into something someone else can actually follow. For maybe the first time, the pace of the tool is close to the pace of my mind. That feels like a kind of freedom.

The memories already existed. The playground rock was already waiting for pirates. Jonathan and I already had our two imaginary children. The nurses already gave me the tapes. My youngest still says "one apon a time." The life was already there. The tool just helps me carry more of it onto the page.

Why this feels like the same thing as Wonderment

Perhaps that's why this publication feels so natural to build. Something happens. I notice it. My brain starts doing what it's apparently always done — what else is hiding here, why did that happen, has anyone researched it, is the thing I believe even true? A dog by a gate becomes a story about time. Hairy legs become a history of normality. A Facebook comment becomes a hungry bird. This is simply how I seem to understand the world — through stories, always looking for the one already hiding inside the ordinary moment.

I've started wondering whether storytellers live their lives twice — once when something happens, and again when they tell it. Maybe three times, if you count the remembering. Memory is a strange editor. It keeps the jam roll that made your teeth ache. It keeps one sentence someone said twenty years ago. It keeps the stars on a bedroom ceiling and a small rock in a primary-school playground, while quietly discarding entire years around them.

That rock probably meant nothing to the hundreds of other children who walked past it. And yet here it is again — my grandparents still planted it, the pirates are still after it, the ceiling projector switched off years ago, Jonathan and I haven't sat beneath those stars in a very long time. And yet, for as long as you've been reading this, they've all come back on. Five-year-old me has just opened her birthday present again. Fran's mum is being told, for the first time, that her daughter's stories were the highlight of someone's camp. Pammmmmm is still murdering her passengers with a poisonous pen, somewhere in a school hall that no longer exists.

I don't know whether I became a storyteller because I lived adventurously, or lived adventurously because I always knew there'd be a story afterwards. Perhaps I've been doing both, the whole time, without ever really separating the two.