A Sentence Is A Story. How To Diagram Your Life.
Or...Don't be a British immigrant. Show your work.
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Call for Heroines delivers bi-weekly Pocket Quests and travel-soaked Postcards from a Midlife Elsewhere, both designed to help you shift your story and reclaim your plot.
And don’t miss the “Totally Awesome Mini-Quest Show” (LIVE every Sunday at 2:30 pm ET) for even more bold quests, story reframes, and real talk about what midlife reinvention actually looks like.
The Realization
I hate my shape.
I don’t remember the first time I said this sentence out loud, but I remember the first time I meant it. I was creeping up on fifty, but my shape had always been something I didn’t think twice about. Until then, I’d been genetically blessed (Thanks, Mum!). I’d had a tiny waist (My husband could wrap his hands around it and practically lace his fingers together on the other side), skinny (even if so bow-legged I looked like a cowboy) legs, and a perfectly flat tummy (Oh, flat tummy, how I miss you now).
Now I was out shopping in Sicily, and standing in a dressing room, under buzzing fluorescent lights with my husband waiting outside for me to appear with a flourish as usual (“Well this ol’ thing? I only wear it when I don’t care what I look like.”) I was near tears. Holding a summer dress I’d just whipped off my now traitorous body. When I’d slipped the thin, stretchy floral over my head, it was supposed to look how it always looked. I was supposed to feel how I always felt trying on new clothes.
Instead, I felt like a stranger. The sentence came out quietly, like a verdict.
“I hate my shape.”
Not my body, not my weight. My shape. As if I were fundamentally built wrong.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Our lives are made real by the stories we tell ourselves.
Carol Pearson, in her book What Stories Are You Living, reminds us that, “More and more fields of study are recognizing that we create our individual and collective sense of reality through the stories we tell about it.”
Then Pearson makes a mind-bending statement:
“The very construction of an English sentence is based on a story pattern. The subject is the main character of the story. The verb (especially if it is an action verb) suggests the action of the plotline, followed by a person, place or thing or, perhaps, something about why, where, when, or how the action took place.”
Do you know what this means? Our lives are made up of thousands of sentences, and…
Every single sentence is a story!
My main aim of hanging out here is to relate to you the power of stories. Story structure, even a story as small as a single sentence, holds something deeper: a blueprint for transformation, hidden in plain sight.
Some sentences in your life become beliefs. And some beliefs become cages.
“I hate my shape” is a sentence that became a story I lived inside.
Showing My Work.
I arrived in the United States in the 6th grade. Because of the drastic differences in schooling schedules, I was way ahead in some subjects and way behind in others.
I remember, having just arrived in this alien landscape called “intermediate school,” being called up to the blackboard to complete a math problem in front of the class. In my memory, it was a long division problem, but it must have been more complex than that because I think long division must be taught earlier. Still, since I can't remember any math whatsoever (seriously, put me in front of an algebra problem and I will fake a faint), we'll go with long division. Surprisingly, given my current math abilities, I was excellent at math back then, and far ahead of the rest of my class of American students.
(Side note... I started writing dialogue here only to discover I can't remember the name of my sixth-grade teacher. I was unaware of this fact until my fingers came to a screeching halt on my keyboard. Thanks, brain fog!)
"Lisa, why don't you come and solve for us?" said my sixth-grade teacher, whose name I can't remember. Let's call her Mrs. Six.
"Okay."
Denim mini-skirted me walks up to the blackboard with gleeful snickers and whispers of "Brady Bunch" following me. (I'll have you know that England was way ahead in fashion, and those girls would be eating their words while buying denim mini-skirts 6 months later.)
I solved the problem in my head (as we were taught to do in England, god forbid we tried to write anything down or count our fingers) and wrote the answer on the blackboard.
Mrs. Six looks at me in confusion.
"Yes, Lisa, that's correct. But I need you to show your work."
"Pardon, Miss?" I reply amidst more classmate snickers (we were taught to address all teachers as Miss and always use the word 'pardon' instead of the dreaded 'what' Are you feeling sorry for poor little 6th-grade me yet?)
"You need to show your work. On the blackboard."
By this point, I was probably on the verge of tears. I spent too much time in 6th grade on the verge of tears.
"I don't know what that means," I said, and Mrs. Six's shaking head sent me back to my seat.
Sentence as Story.
The point of this story is to illustrate the fact that there were so many instances in my new school where I was wrong. Not because I didn’t know the answer, but because I’d never been taught to break things down. I didn't know how to show my work. Not only did I miss breaking down a math problem in early 6th grade, but I also missed 5th grade and never learned how to break down a sentence (aka, the dreaded sentence diagramming). I'm unsure if they teach breaking down sentences in England, but they certainly don't teach it before age 12, because I never learned it.
That’s what we’re doing here today. Not with math (thank god), but with story.
Your story. One sentence at a time.
According to practically every person I've ever spoken to, I should be happy about missing the sentence stuff. Sentence diagramming was frustrating, boring, lame, and so totally unnecessary for life.
Now I'm a grown woman, and at 54 years old (with a Ph.D. in Creative Writing, for goodness’ sake!), I'm still learning the intricacies of grammar because I was never taught it. So, I returned to sentence diagramming to see what all the fuss was about.
Imagine my utter delight when I discovered that sentence diagramming was a magical way of visualizing a story. As perhaps only a story-obsessed human knows (me and Carol Pearson apparently), a sentence is the smallest story form in existence.
How could this activity possibly be boring? I felt like Gertrude Stein, who said in her lecture on Poetry and Grammar, "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."
The reason why sentence diagramming is Gertrude's vibe and why it's now mine? You can see the structure of that story by breaking down all the elements into a diagram. So fun!
Story Rewrites
“I hate my shape” is a shitty story to tell myself. Especially when, as it gets repeated, it becomes more and more the story of my reality. I’ll bet you have these sentences in your life, too.
“I’m too old to start over.”
“I’m not creative.”
“I don’t know what to do with my life.”
“I always ruin things.”
When you tell yourself these stories over and over, you start acting like they're the only stories that matter. Sometimes, you may shrink your dreams to match your story sentences. Like me, you might begin to avoid mirrors (unless they are the sneaky mirrors in the Italian dressing rooms that make you look thin).
But what if the story you are telling yourself isn’t true? Or, even if it once was, what if it doesn’t have to be?
The magic of narrative alchemy is that once we know the secrets of breaking down these story sentences into their story pieces (aka: sentence diagramming), we can rewrite the story sentence into something that serves us instead of believing the sentence that leaves us mired in the struggle of beating ourselves up.
Let’s consider my story sentence: “I hate my shape.” Look what happens when I make minor changes to the grammatical elements of the story I am telling myself about how my body is wrong.
What if I change the sentence's subject to “my husband”? The sentence (and the story) becomes “My husband hates my shape.” The story then becomes a joke. It’s laughable and easily dismissed. I know this story to be false.
What if I change the verb to “redefining"? The sentence becomes, “I’m redefining my shape,” an empowering call to action. What was a story of giving up becomes a story of agency and reclamation. It changes a fixed conclusion to an evolution.
What if I change the possessive to “this”? The sentence becomes, “I hate this shape,” and a story linked deeply to my identity gets some distance. It’s more situational or circumstantial. It’s this body of this moment, not my body forever.
You see what we’re doing here? We’re not just deconstructing grammar or doing that boring old sentence diagramming; we are performing narrative alchemy. We’re showing how small shifts in syntax change the entire emotional architecture of a story.
So... I have a Pocket Quest™ for you.
The Pocket Quest™
What's a Pocket Quest™? I'm glad you asked.
Well...In every great story, there’s a moment when the heroine stops thinking and starts moving. That’s a quest.
In the Heroine’s Adventure midlife reinvention framework, Adventure Quests™ are the larger step-by-step courses where transformation (fulfilled character arcs) happens, not in the planning or the learning, but in the doing. Pocket Quests support these larger Adventure Quests™.1
A Pocket Quest™ is a free, doable, four-day worksheet-driven mini-course, designed to create real transformation in your everyday life. These quests fit in your pocket (literally), but don't let the cute size fool you. The right quest, at the right time, can unlock everything.
Think of them as micro-adventures for your soul. Pocket Quests are invitations to notice, choose, disrupt, and step forward into your Extraordinary Life.
Don’t worry, I won't ask you to start diagramming sentences in this one. I know many Americans are traumatized by sentence diagrams, even if they love grammar now.
Here's how Pocket Quests™ work.
The first thing you do is download the pocket workbook. It looks like this...
Follow the instructions and fold accordingly. Stick it in the back pocket of your jeans or leggings (if your leggings don't have pockets, why are you even reading this right now? Go buy leggings with pockets!) with a pencil or a pen with a cap (please remember the cap unless you want a bum-shaped ink stain on your favorite upholstery).
Then read the daily lesson below. The Pocket Quest™ workbook has reminders, but if you need to return to this lesson, pop your phone over the QR code on the worksheet to bring you right back here.
Good luck, my heroine. There's magic swirling around this quest, and I can feel it.
Don't be British like me and do this all in your head. It's time to show your work.
Love,
LM x
Professional Threshold Crosser, Recovering Good Girl, Story Midwife to the Midlife Heroine in You
Sentence by Sentence: Rewrite Your Life in Micro-Moments.
A Pocket Quest™
Download your Pocket Questbook here.
Quest Objective:
Rewriting a single sentence can realign your story so you’re headed toward your Extraordinary Life, so we’re revealing the narrative structure hiding in every sentence. You’ll move from believing your story is fixed to seeing it as editable.
DAY 1: Spot the Sentence
You already write beautiful stories with your sentences every day, but perhaps you haven’t noticed them. Instead of digging into problems, today’s quest is about noticing the ordinary moments where everything quietly clicks into place. These are the building blocks of your preferred story.
Workbook Action:
Today, document 3–5 micro-moments that felt good, light, aligned, or easy. Tiny, ordinary, everyday wins. Then, for each, try to capture it as a sentence:
I accidentally chose the slower line and didn’t get annoyed.
I drank a cup of tea and didn’t check my phone.
I opened the window, and the spring air wafted in.
DAY 2: Break It Down
Every day we live a thousand sentences, and every sentence has a story. We are leaning into what Carol Pearson had to say and analyzing our sentences from yesterday. Here's her breakdown
The subject is the main character of the story. The verb (especially if it is an action verb) suggests the action of the plotline, followed by a person, place or thing or, perhaps, something about why, where, when, or how the action took place.
Workbook Action:
Today, choose one of your Day 1 sentences and dissect it using this framework:
Subject – Who’s acting?
Verb – What’s the plotline?
Object/Context – Toward what? In what setting or emotional tone?
Why/Where/When/How – What background or intention supported this? And why did it feel good?
Example:
I made tea and didn’t check my phone.
Subject: I
Verb: made
Object: tea
Context: didn’t check phone
Why/How: I needed grounding before I started my day, and I resisted the doom scroll.
This is how we begin to see that every sentence already contains narrative agency. “Yeah, okay, LM. What the heck does that mean?” (That’s you speaking.) It means, my dear heroine, that as a choice agent, you have control of the narrative (i.e., how you perceive your life).
DAY 3: Rewrite a Sentence
Now that we recognize the story sentences for what they are, it's time to move on and discover where the magic lies in this discovery. Today, please start with one painful sentence you believe about yourself.
Workbook Action:
The Sentence Shifter Exercise:
Change the subject. How does the story shift?
Change the verb. What does it become about now?
Add a modifier. How does it feel more human or more hopeful?
Reflect: Which version feels most true and most useful?
Special bonus:
Maybe you don't want to dig into the negatives or rewrite anything. Perhaps, instead, you want to pre-write your sentences for the day. What might that look like? You could set up your day with amplified or alternative sentence versions representing the reality you’d like to live more often.
DAY 4: Reflect and Repeat
Maybe we've learned this week that sentences are more than just tiny micro-stories. Maybe sentences are incantations. Perhaps they contain secret swells of power, and when you put all the words together in the right order, that power becomes a magic spell of change. Maybe the stories that sentences represent are all decisions in disguise.
Workbook Action:
Choose one rewritten sentence to act out today. Then reflect: What happened? How did the rewrite feel? What shifted, even slightly?
Journal:
What stories did I write today?
What’s one sentence I want to live again tomorrow?
I’m building the Adventure Quests™ as we speak, and you get all the beta products as a membership benefit when joining The Lab.
Would you like to read more about reinvention and snag some thought-provoking journal prompts? Check out these posts…
First, I adore sentence diagramming. But then, my other claim to fame is finishing Joyce’s Ulysses ;)
Second, this is v timely! I’m editing my Substack serialized memoir chapters thus far—9 of 13 planned. I lost my direction for the narrative arc, have now audited the 9, and may tape index cards of the beats on the office wall for reference, reviewing them as you suggest. Most have literally been rewritten IRL, but capturing and releasing the epiphanies in a way that’s helpful to other moms requires closing loops and keeping promises—except for the those teasing Vol. 2 ;)
I realize this isn’t exactly what you meant for the assignment, but it fits rather perfectly, doesn’t it?! :) Thanks so much!
I LOVE this!!!
This part, "...we are performing narrative alchemy."
Reframing a sentence as a story changes everything (and I hated diagramming sentences - thank you!).
In the last couple of years, I've become a little obsessed with neuroscience. It's fascinating what we do to our brains with the stories we tell ourselves. Rewriting a sentence as a story and choosing to create a belief that serves us can change our brains.
Downloaded the Pocket Quest - can't wait to print it and do it!