It never occurred to me that it might be difficult to switch back and forth between writing with a flat-facts-news mindset and writing with a storytelling mindset.  I like talking to people and hearing their stories, but apparently somewhere in the last couple of years more or less I started looking for things as stories as opposed to people as stories.  That’s just silly, really, considering that stories don’t really happen unless people are involved.  Even if it’s a story about a thing (talking just stories now, not newsy stories), those things are anthropomorphic.  Someone tells a story in which we follow the journey of a leaf falling from a tree and off around a city and everywhere the leaf is doing something.  “The leaf drifted sleepily…”  Leaves can’t get sleepy.  They are inanimate, non-sentient objects, but people give them thoughts, emotions, personalities.  The leaf becomes a person and so we have a story.  I chose a handbell festival as a story subject.  The festival didn’t do anything, but happen and it only happened because people made it happen, and that’s all interesting in passing, but I feel like (and the teacher told me as much as well) nothing’s really happening.  This would have really been something to follow as it came into being as opposed to just covering it when it was already a full grown thing.  It would have been good to talk to the people as they made it happen, see who those people are and how they came to be there, what they felt about the whole thing.  That might have been a story.  What I have isn’t much of anything.  Not that it couldn’t have been, but I really stepped into the handbell thing too late to do a whole lot.  The director, however, is still happening.  He can tell his story, unlike things which can not tell you anything about themselves without help.  Or the bass bell player who is a 6th grade teacher in love with performing (she was getting ready for a performance of “Little Women” at the same time as she was practicing for the festival).  ((She’s my mother-in-law, so maybe it’s too personal for me to do?))  One of the things I’m afraid of is that I might find these stories interesting, but that they aren’t really Stories.  The sort an audience will care about or could be drawn to care about.  Ah well, just have to keep trying, I guess.