How to tell the story of your business

I'm standing in front of a class in my art studio in Lowell, Massachusetts. Around me are easels, a paint spattered tabourette, half finished abstract paintings, messy twisted tubes of paint. Round metal studio lights throw beams that crisscross along the white washed brick walls. The students sit at long tables that are caked with dry acrylic paint. The eight students range in age from 20 to 60. Half want to learn to write fiction, the other half to write better marketing material for their business. I am a fiction writer/visual artist/writing coach. I actually pitched the class for these dual purposes, creative and business. How is it possible for fiction writers and marketing writers to get what they need out of the same class? Learning how to tell a story is the same if you're writing a novel, or if you're trying to sell your business. You must tell a story and tell it well. It's that simple. Most inexperienced business owners want to write clever copy that sums up their products. This is useful for some sections of marketing material, but fully understanding and expressing the story of your business is a soulful way to attract people. And it can help to attract more compatible clients and customers and weed out the time wasters. I use myself as an example. I'm a 45-year-old novelist and visual artist. I used to be an international journalist.  I want to revamp my website copy for my personal art/writing website. How do I begin? I must tell the story of how I went from journalist to visual artist. How do I do that? Pick a provocative scene to begin the piece, something very specific that was epic in your life, something you can't get out of your mind. If that event is deep and soulful and touches you, it will touch the reader. If you tell it step-by-step and add visceral detail, it will engage your reader too. Write a rough draft straight through without stopping --beginning, middle, end. Just tell it. Here's how my rough draft looks. Notice how I put myself in a real moment in the past and how I give specific details. God is in the details, as they say, or the devil. I get quite personal below, but it's a rough draft and I can take some of the more personal stuff out if I need to. I remember that this is for an artist/novelist website. My customers want to buy my art or publish my novels, and I may want it to be provocative. For more professional purposes, you may want to pick an incident to begin the piece that's related to the work you do, to the product you have to sell. Here's the piece: I'm sitting in a newsroom and the police scanner is on at the next desk. It buzzes with news of violence. Not the sort of news we're editing to put in the newspaper, but events that are happening in real time. A woman's cracked voice from her car after an accident. A man's desperate pleas that he's lost his child in the mall. I am breathing this all in like smog in a dirty city. It fills my body as I edit and polish other stories on the daily traumas of our modern life. Sometimes even I am surprised by the course my life has taken.  I grew up on a farm in Missouri where I butchered animals. Right out of college, I got a writing/editing job at an English-language newspaper in Tokyo. Suddenly, I was in the Orient as a journalist. I loved it. It was epic. I left the Tokyo daily after three years and became a travel writer for a year through Asia. I ended up in Great Britain. I worked at London dailies for several years. As I sit in the newsroom, my arms are going numb again. I've been having problems with my arms from typing so much. Around me a half dozen other journalists pace and type and fret, working diligently. You can hear the tap, tap, tap of myriad fingers filling the cavernous open-plan newsroom like miniature drumbeats. Why are my arms so numb? I rub them. I know deep down that for a long time I've been getting Repetitive Strain Injury, not carpal tunnel, but something at my shoulders. I know but I ignore it. I have so much work to do, I don't have time for these arm issues. I rub them again and then force myself to focus on the story on my computer screen. On the scanner comes a small boy's voice. He's under the bed. He's grabbed the cordless phone, and snuck under the bed to call 911. Daddy has a gun and is going to kill Mommy. His voice trembles. I can't believe this is the background noise of my life. I stop working. I stand up. My arms have gone completely numb. Something has snapped and I can't use my arms. Thus was the beginning of a severe case of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, a condition where nerves are pinched at the clavicle and result in something the doctor's call Dead Arm Syndrome. It took me more than a year of treatment to get my arms back. I would never work in a newsroom again. My epic life was over. I have a lot of energy. The worse thing you can do is take away my work. During the long relentless hours of no work, I memorized short fiction pieces in my head and promised myself I'd write them or voice them when I was better. I started to use my hands to make art. I received myriad forms of healing. I became a healer. A friend said: In that newsroom, it sounds like you just couldn't "handle" it anymore. I just couldn't handle the life of storytelling that was all about violence. I understood from that point forward that I needed to breathe in beauty and soul and have that come out of my hands. Today, I'm on my second novel. I can type in short spurts again and I use voice software. Today, I run a successful writing coaching business. Today, I have an art studio and massive canvases that shout color and light. Today, I am hired as a design consultant for page and web design in developing countries all over the world. What story do you have to tell? What specific incident marks a turning point in your life or your business. Write out the incident. Tell the story. You'll engage your clients and customers in a soulful level. As the Hopi proverb goes: "The one who tells the stories rules the world." 2009-01-08T14:34:36Z

2009-01-08T17:14:42Z

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2009-01-08T17:14:35Z

How can you capture in writing the soul of the work you do? Tell the story. It's that simple.

How to tell the story of your business

2009-02-24T09:48:22Z