Why writing?
When you voluntarily become a creative, this is a question you get a lot. With so many reliable, lucrative, secure career options out there, why would you become a creative? Well, I’m sure a lot of us dreamers will tell you the same answer. We do it because we love it.
If we didn’t, there’s no way we’d be able to weather the unpredictability, the dinner table defenses, or the struggle to find a company willing to give us benefits. For me, writing is just about the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, besides becoming a singer, and I can’t hit a single note. I think we’re all better off that I chose the former.
Writing is how I make sense of the world. It always has been.
Growing up on a ranch with no neighbors in sight, I had to get creative with my play time. I’d ideate stories, write poetry, scribble journal entries, and construct my own magazines by printing out articles I wrote alongside photos stolen from the internet.
A lot of the stories I wrote were allegories. Weird for an eleven year old maybe, but I was a weird kid (shout out homeschooling). Embedding morality in fiction helped me understand and internalize it. As an adult, I often say that reading taught me empathy. Stories can contextualize experiences in a way that deepens our understanding and broadens our perspective, giving us insight into the big, wide world beyond our own.
As a painfully (clinically) shy kid, writing was also the way I was best able to express myself. Maybe the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth, but they’d flow on paper. And while it didn’t exactly make me friends at the time, I think being that shy kid who always carried a journal made me more observant, introspective, and thoughtful. All of which help me in my career today.
If you would have told me at sixteen that I’d get paid to write stuff someday, I would have been stoked. I didn’t know what kinds of careers existed for writers, I just knew I wanted to be one.
Copywriting, branding, and content provide me with a way to nurture the storyteller in me. The way I look at it, marketing is mostly about storytelling. It’s about finding ways to communicate, many of which don’t actually involve speaking. So as you can imagine, I’ve been honing this skill for decades.
My process is to identify the heart of a thing, then build out a creative strategy from there. To craft stories that resonate with others and deliver value, I need to understand the “why” behind it.
Now you know mine.