"Can I Tell the Same Story?"
Yes.
My students always ask me: Why are you like this, and is it legal to tell a story more than once? As if we’re not living in a Marvel Cinematic Universe. As if we’re not in the middle of a story we’ve heard before as MAGA tries to reboot the Holocaust.
I’ve told one story infinite times. Once for a writing workshop; once for the internet; once for an anthology; again for the internet; once as a sample chapter in a book proposal; once as a book chapter; again for the internet. This one story has been a short humor piece, a personal essay, an op-ed, a long-form cultural critique, a chapter, a performance, a nightmare, a residency writing sample, and a chapbook. This same story has been rejected and has won a prize. Am I done telling it? Probably not. Is it the same story other people have told? Yes. And that’s part of the point.
We are doomed to tell the same stories as we learn new and singular ways to tell them, with new perspective and new skills and new cute pens.
Actually: it’s not an option to tell one story one time. To publish a book, you have to publish many pieces about the book—before you publish the book (to sell it to publishers) and after you publish the book (“companion pieces”) to sell it to readers.
In the funny memoir This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something—Anything—Like Your Life Depends On It, author Tabitha Carvan interviews a history professor who also writes fanfiction and gives some history on repeating yourself:
Medieval authors never thought, “‘What can I write that is wholly original and uniquely mine?’ Because nobody would want to read that,” she says. “They wanted to read about the characters they knew and loved and that were in popular circulation. You would never see a medieval reader or writer saying, ‘Oh, no! Not another story about King Arthur and his knights.’ It’s more like, ‘King Arthur and his knights!’” she says. . . It’s not hard to reimagine Greek tragedy as a kind of fanfiction, with ancient gods and goddesses appearing over and over again to explore permutations of the same themes for adoring audiences.
The history professor fanfiction writer also says:
“. . . originality, or total innovation, ex nihilo, was not interesting to medieval people. What they valued as original was the ‘creative recombination of inherited materials.’”
Does anyone want to read another medical memoir? As someone who has read them all and wrote one, yeah, I want to read another one. And do I want it from another POV that creatively recombines inherited materials? To quote Pride and Prejudice, yes, a thousand times yes.
Every time you tell yourself that your story exists already and no one needs another version, try this:
Call out the problem as you see it, which is funny and self-aware, e.g. “I’ve written about this too many times because I’m obsessed with myself, because we’re all obsessed with ourselves.”
Find a mirror and say to it: “Keep telling the same stories until something fucking changes.”
Remember that certain people tell the same story and get paid well to do it. See: reboots, sequels, prequels, trilogies, film/series adaptations of books/video games, and TV based on podcasts based on books based on dating profiles.
Ask a therapist to ask you what’s beneath the question “Can I tell the same story?” My guess is: questioning if you can tell the same story is another way to reject your writing before you’ve written it.
Just let an editor decide if the same story is publishable—that’s their job. Your job is to show up, write until your glasses hurt, try to enjoy the writing however you can, and get better at what you’re doing and what you want to do.
Take an edible. An edible can tell you It’s okay to do what everyone else is doing for years and years until you figure out what you want to do.
Live, laugh, eat drugs. Photo by Chil Wellness on Unsplash
Literally everything has been done before. Nothing is free from legacy. Don’t let that or anything else stop you. Let it and everything else embolden you. Tell your story over and over again until it changes, until something changes, until you crack it, until you like it, until IT SINGS, until you’re dead, until they’re dead.
What story do you keep telling or want to tell that’s been told?
New seminars:
Writing the Impossible Seminar
You’ll learn and practice narrative, stylistic, and comedic devices to write the unspeakable and the indescribable. We’ll break down pieces on illness, violence, and more, and you’ll use your secrets, lies, truths, fears, and farts to write more and better. The stupid cliché “everything happens for a reason” is true for writers who impose meaning on experience and make everything happen for a reason.
May 18th (Sunday)
2-5pm ET
Online & recorded
*
Tragedy Plus Time: Writing Traumedy
Tragedy plus time equals comedy, and in this seminar, we’ll do that math and make readers laugh while PUNCHING THEM IN THE HEART. To repurpose tragedy, we’ll read other sad-funny writers to steal their tricks, and we’ll cover every known device to turn a diary entry into publishable writing. Because if you can’t say something straight (if it’s too saccharine, confessional, or harrowing), then say it slant. Prerequisite: being in therapy.
June 9th
1:30-3:30 MDT
In-person, for Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Lit Fest
How to Write a Comedic Memoir: A Two-Day Intensive
You don’t have to be a celebrity comedian to write a funny memoir. You don’t have to be born with a sense of humor or have had anything funny happen to you. A memoirist must make a meal out of her experience, however minor, however unfunny–that’s the job, and that’s the job we’ll learn to do in this very good two-day writing workshop experience.
June 11th & 12th
4-7pm MDT
In-person, for Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Lit Fest
ICYMI: I’m Elissa Bassist, and I teach short conceptual humor/satire writing, funny personal essays, tragicomic memoir, emotional emails, and that’s it. I edit the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus, and I wrote the award-deserving book Hysterical. My next book is Inside Jokes: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers, co-written with Caitlin Kunkel and forthcoming in 2026.
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Um, one of THE most helpful posts ever!! I laughed at the Marvel reference and cried at the MAGA. Bit THIS MAKES SO MUCH CLEAR and obvious SENSE. A master! You always are.
I've been sitting on the story of my hysterectomy forever because I feel like such things are saturated.
And then there's the story of my financial abuse in my previous relationship that I talked myself out of because too many people have it worse.
But this reminder makes me question my thoughts. 💙