Three different ways of telling what story?? How can you tell a story in an atypical way? I ended up thinking of stories in my life that loaned themselves to different mediums of expression in the first place. Phone conversation, prayer, chat/email.
Phone-based
1) My friend from Kazakhstan was arrested in May for an expired visa, and it took her international friends - an Indian, a Syrian, a Russian, and I, the American, a month to find her and get her out. I can consider it a story because it was a confusing situation, with a lot of quirky detail in spite of the seriousness, and it has elements to it that lend themselves to narrative. There was a strict chronology of things: the day of arrest, the day of release, the day I learned where she was, the days I met her in prison, the days I met the lawyer, the day we finally paid the bail bond amount, etc.
What strikes me most about that story is that most of the affair was directed by phone calls. The day she was arrested, I couldn't reach her by phone, and a few days later, another friend confirmed she wasn't answering her phone - since the past week.
-I called her employers (one revealed to me that he learned she was arrested)
-I called local prisons
-I called immigration lawyers, to whom I yelled, hysterically, because they couldn't tell me where she was
-I called an immigration service line (the proper name escapes me at the moment)
-I called the prison phone lines again and again to learn that she was there, the visiting hours, etc.
-I needed to purchase an account with a service that would enable me to receive calls from my friend - installments of $25, to receive precious few minutes of her telling me important information like her registered alien number.
-I called the lawyers
-I called her friends,
It became necessary for me to contact a Russian friend of a friend, because my detained friend's family in Kazakhstan began messaging me through Facebook out of concern, and they couldn't be satisfied with my adjusted English. I asked this Russian girl to interpret between us.
But if it were to be told in an atypical format, I would definitely make use of the phone numbers. The prison phone numbers, the immigration service hotline - those are definitely public. Unfortunately and obviously, I don't have exact transcripts, except for perhaps the Facebook messages in Russian and English. As a non-fiction writer, could I reimagine the phone conversations, if, theoretically, I could get the right people to approve? As time goes by, I'm starting to forget details.
Nevertheless, would I tell the story like a series of phone transcripts, like the recordings of police transcripts? Could I reinvent those conversations by recording audio? Even with spoken Russian.
BUT
I don't usually tell this story, it's kind of personal, it's not a conversation that's easily introduced or told. And it's not something that should be so dramatic. There was no hero, we all just had to work together to get her out, and painfully, we made her wait for us to figure it out. And I don't think it's something I could or should sell in any sense.
Prayer-based
2) I could definitely arrange a diary of different stories. When I was younger, I used to be a zealous Christian, and I wrote in a prayer journal, as some Christian institutions encourage - desperate prayers that were always miserable. I suppose a story could be told as a series of prayers that tell the story of someone's struggle with faith, even if it ends in atheism (how would one illustrate that?? Prayers getting progressively shorter, or angrier). I still have zealous Christian friends who could make their own project of it. And on the subject of prayer as a story, there are all the archaic visuals of prayer beads, stained glass, statues, pews, Latin chanting/singing, ringing bells. Such a story could be audible.. But I suppose that this route of a story has already been done to death - visit a Christian bookstore. But if there's the right level of skepticism, doubt, and denial, that might be more compelling, I think, at least in my own worldview. Besides this, prayer is done differently in different countries.
Chat/Email-based
3) I know full well that most of my communication is definitely text based. I know there are other published works that are arranged as chat transcripts and emails. To build on this, perhaps one would have to really make a collage of various things.
Can you narrate a relationship with a person as more than chat conversations - the emails someone couldn't send because it was too personal how they felt, letters you scribbled in a notebook, pictures you saved on a computer, pictures of social network account profiles. I suppose this has all been done before.
No, this is unoriginal. And dumb.
I guess what this exercise encouraged most was for me to consider the idea of portraying correspondence, with others and or with oneself. Perhaps that's also the nature of social media world: People go back and forth between each other so quickly while so far apart. This is not a new idea. But, it's probably good I considered it for a lab.
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