I have never considered myself a storyteller. I don't tell them well. I have trouble pulling people into the emotion of it all. Growing up, I wasn't even much of a story reader. Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as having said, "Do something everyday that scares you." I've often thought about that and tried to figure out what I could do that scares me. I'm not afraid of a lot of things. I can walk up to anyone and say anything. What else is there? I decided to write a story. That scares me. What if I can't get the concepts down right? What if I can't follow a storyline? What if it just gets boring? That really scares me. I have plenty of experience writing papers, talks, and articles on websites, mainly non-fiction, but to write a fictional story that will follow a plot and have a protagonist and everything else that I didn't pay attention to in English is something that I have no experience with. So, I started to write. I don't think I ever plan on publishing. I just want to write.  Maybe publishing will be the scary thing I do another day. But, something interested happened when I sat down to begin writing the story. I felt the storyline coming together and I could see the timeline in my mind and see where different events were going to be placed. I would figuratively pick up events and drop them into other areas and move things around. I saw it coming together. And that's when I realized, I've done this before. I am a storyteller. I like to tell stories with music. When I hear a piece of exceptionally moving music, I will listen to it over and over again until I can imagine the whole story that it's telling being played out in a video, on stage, or in any other format. I keep listening to it, memorizing when certain events take place. Sometimes I actually turn it into something, if I have the resources. For example, the videos I post on youtube are mostly stories that I feel certain music was attempting to tell. Most of the stories are still in my mind and will likely never result in anything because I don't have the resources to create the story it should be telling. That's the case with "That Next Place" from Meet Joe Black's soundtrack. I can tell you at any given moment what is occurring, but I don't think that I will ever be able to make it happen the way I see it. You might say that those are artistic things and writing a story is not that far from what I'm already doing. Well, I also enjoy telling stories with powerpoint. I hate reading through powerpoints that are loads of information with no emotional pull. I think powerpoints should tell a story and that's how I try and make them at work. Most of my powerpoints never get seen, but that's alright. I still enjoy making them. What I'm saying is, I think we are all storytellers. We have different ways that we tell stories, but it's almost anything we do that involves creativity. Cooks may see a story coming together while preparing a dish. Engineers may see it coming together while working on the design. I think that it's something we all experience or at least have a desire to experience, in many different formats. So, learn how you tell your stories and go out there and make the world a better place by doing so. It's when we're storytelling that I think we release our best work and do the most to enhance the environment around us.

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