The voices in my head

As a writer, I sometimes encounter stumbling blocks in storytelling. I love to tell stories about my life if I think that the hearing of the story will help the person I'm telling it to. I have even had a few of those stories published in the AA Grapevine (the monthly journal of Alcoholics Anonymous).

Currently, I am writing an e-book of those stories and the problem I keep running into is that I write the way I talk. I remember well the times I thought I was Tolkien or Stephen King or George Carlin and I tried to write my stories the way they told theirs. These days I find it much easier to write my stories the way I tell them.

There is a story in my book that I have told numerous times. It's the story of how Nancy and I met, fell in love, and decided to walk this road together. One version of that story has already been published so the rights to print that story have been sold, meaning that I can't publish the story anywhere else without permission from the publisher. I had considered getting permission to reprint the story, but I have already rewritten most of it and I would prefer to use the newer version.

The voices in my head tell me it should be okay because I didn't sell the "story", just the words I used to tell the story. I'll let you know how that works out.


UPDATE: I sent an email to the Editorial Department at the AA Grapevine and they informed me that I could use phrases from the original story without violating copyright and if I wanted to use the original story I could do that as long as I included a copyright credit to the AA Grapevine. So, that's good news because the book just wouldn't be the book without that story in it.