Change Your Story, Change Your Life

by Stephanie S. Tolan

In this mind-expanding book, Newbery Honor and Christopher Award-winning author Stephanie S. Tolan, who has been telling stories in the form of plays, novels, non-fiction books and articles for children and adults all her life, shares what she has learned about the power of story not just to express our experiences, but to create them. What Tolan calls Story Principle, explored in these pages, challenges the common view that reality is fixed and immutable, that we have little or no control over it, and that we live our lives within it as best we can. Story Principle suggests the radical idea that we live the stories we tell. Therefore, reality—a collection of stories—is infinitely changeable, one story and one story-teller at a time. Included here are not just ways to recognize stories and the ways they play out in your experience, but specific techniques for replacing them if you wish. This challenging book is an invitation to change your life by changing the stories you live.

330 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Stephanie S. Tolan's earliest memories involve books. Those that were read to her and those she read to herself, often late at night with a flashlight under the covers. She always thought there was a special magic in the little black marks on paper that could turn into whole worlds and real people. Born in Ohio and raised in Wisconsin, she wrote her first story in the fourth grade. It was thrilling to discover she could make the magic herself, and she decided then and there to be a writer.

Other ambitions came and went, but writing stayed on, and she majored in creative writing at Purdue University, then went on to a Master's Degree in English. Marriage and the sudden addition to her life of three young stepsons, and then a son, forced writing into the nooks and crannies, but she wrote poetry and plays for adults as she taught college English. In the mid-seventies, Stephanie began working in the Poets-in-the-Schools program in Pennsylvania. Her first group of students were fourth and fifth graders, and she found among them a new generation of intense readers, still using the flashlight-under-the-covers trick.

"They brought back to me that special reading joy that most adults, even the readers among us, have lost, and I wanted to try my hand at writing for those kids, so like myself at their age and yet so different."

The difference, she felt, was less in the children themselves than in the fast-changing world they lived in. Her writing for children and young adults, beginning with Grandpa -- And Me in 1978, has reflected that contemporary world.
Stephanie Tolan is also well known as an advocate for extremely bright children. She co-authored the award-winning nonfiction book, Guiding the Gifted Child, and has written many articles about the challenges gifted "asynchronous" children and adults face as they find a way to fit into their world. She lectures throughout the country to audiences of parents, educators and counselors attempting to find ways to meet the children's needs. Her experiences with these "amazing, off-the-charts" young people inspired the themes of Welcome to the Ark, a powerful novel about four brilliant young misfits in a world teetering on destruction.
Stephanie Tolan currently lives in Charlotte, NC, with her husband.