One True Story

A five-week online lab — every Sunday morning 11am to 1pm in March 2026.

Some stories don’t surface in a single sitting. They appear, retreat, change shape. They ask for time, not urgency. Attention, not pressure.

Staying with the Story is a five-week online lab for people who want to remain with one true story long enough to understand it, shape it, and carry it through to a complete telling of your choice on stage, on the page, or sense-make for yourself.

What is this lab?

This is an intimate, guided space designed for sustained attention to YOUR Story.

Over five weeks, we work with one lived experience from your life—something real, remembered, and unfinished in some way. The lab is structured to help you stay with that moment without rushing to make it impressive or resolved.

This is not a writing course, and it’s not therapy. It’s a place to work carefully with memory, meaning, and narrative—using simple tools that help you notice where a story begins, where it turns, and where it asks to stop, and often, where it leads.

The aim is not to extract a story. It’s to honour one by giving it time.

What people leave with?

By the end of the lab, most participants arrive at one complete story. Not because it was forced into shape — but because it was stayed with long enough to finish itself.

People leave with:

One True Story
a clear narrative spine they can return to or revise
trust in their own memory and point of view
Permission to take their story seriously
an embodied sense of pacing — when to linger, when to stop
the experience of completion without performance pressure

The story is finished enough to be spoken or shared on the stage, page or even at your next gathering of friends. A story that’s honest enough to last.

What to expect?

Each week, we meet live online for two hours.

Sharing is always optional. Listening is as important as speaking. Nothing needs to be polished while it’s in progress.

The pace is deliberate. The work unfolds week by week.

Sunday March 1: Discover and Identify Potential Stories

2 hrs

This is the place we sit down to uncover your story. We often say “everyone has at least one great story.” This is untrue. You have many more than JUST one. But it always begins with one story. And this session of the lab is dedicated to finding that story.

We will use games, prompts, writing exercises and some fun tools to help you dig and uncover moments from your life, memories you may have hidden or stayed away from, moments you cherish that keep recurring in your life or a moment in time when the universe simply made too much sense (or none at all).

You can also come in with a story in mind and find everything we do helpful in uncovering more layers and context to the story you have in mind.

Sunday March 8: Collection and Connections

2 hrs

The difference between a story and an anecdote is that a story is a collection of several anecdotes, or moments strung together to form a cohesive and polished whole. In this session, we discover the connect-ability of several moments and memories we’ve uncovered in our first lab. The secret to any good story is that it needs to NOT sound like a laundry list of things that happened but there is deeper meaning underneath the moments selected. How are these moments selected? Which moments seem necessary and which ones can fall out in the edit with a trim? And what is the deciding factor beneath all these decisions? This lab session answers it all.

Sunday March 15: Understanding Scene and Summary and Applying it to your story

2 hrs

We aren’t here to understand narrative theory but what we do aim to understand the basics of what a scene in a story is and what a summary looks like. These simple basics can catapult your story into one that an audience passes by to one that remains lodged in a listener/reader’s memory.

Here we will not just understand the basics of narrative craft but apply them to the story we are building together through these labs. Using the cumulative tools from each of the preceding labs, you’ll exit this lab session with a story prototype, one that’s ready to be shared to a select few for feedback and understanding of how that story moves and plays out.

Sunday March 22: Structure — building and rebuilding

2 hrs

Our lab leader is biased here, but structure is his favourite part of the entire story crafting process.

Adding a layer of structure to a story ensures the story stands on its own. It allows the story you’re telling become easy to follow and becomes highly enjoyable to the person consuming it. This is the only part of the lab where light learning will be introduced. The reality is that you are born as a storytellers and you already know these aspects instinctively — but knowing them in detail, naming them defines what these Story elements are and can be applied directly to your story in the lab and out of it.

Includes time for story tinkering.

Sunday March 29: Voice, sharing and beyond

2.5 hours (the additional time is added to ensure everyone who wants to share get a chance)

By this time in the lab, you’ll have 95% of your story ready. The last remaining 5% is you. How are you going to share your story, what medium you choose, what words you select and how do all of the decisions you make reflect you and your voice. This is the lab session where we take the story you’ve worked on, built, rebuilt, scratched out and crafted into YOUR STORY.

This session will include you sharing your story with others in the cohort — totally your decision but encouraged — and gaining valuable insights from everyone involved.

One on One Sessions

During the labs, each individual in the cohort will schedule one 1-to-1 session with the lab leader to develop their story, answer questions and work primarily on your story. These sessions will be mutually scheduled between lab leader and cohort members, and will be outside the dedicated cohort lab sessions.

Who this is for

This lab is for open for everyone wants to work with their story. You don’t need to be a writer or performer. You just need to be willing to stay with your story.

About the Facilitator:

Akshay Gajria is storyteller and writer. He lives in London where he is mighty scared of the extremely stubborn pigeons found everywhere, which make the pavements feel tiny. But London makes up for it by having pubs around every corner which he frequents with his friends he made during his time studying an MA in Creative Writing. He absolutely loves bringing people together, especially if they are willing to share a story and does that professionally as a regional producer for The Moth story slams in London.

He interviews authors that are often featured on Mechanics Institute Review, Writers Cooperative and others while his essays and short stories appear in a variety of places, print and online. His craft extends to telling live stories on stage to an audience and he has appeared on stage with True Story London, The Moth, Spark Storytelling, So This is What Happened and Tall Tales. One of his stories was broadcast globally on The Moth Radio Hour.

Logistics:

The lab will be held on every Sunday of March 2026 online via Zoom. And you need to register in advance. You will require your preferred writing tools (a pen and paper are recommended).

This will be a small intimate group of 10 people. Tickets are on first come first basis. Get them soon.

More

This lab is part of a larger campaign to help discover, shape and eventually share true stories from individuals who have lived them. The campaign is called The Stories We Never Learnt To Tell.