Telling your story

I picked up a book at Borders yesterday, Inspired Marketing!: The Astonishing Fun New Way to Create More Profits for Your Business by Following Your Heart by Joe Vitale and Craig Perrine. The book explained a new form of marketing: Come from the heart. Your personal story can be what pulls new customers to you.

As a writer and writing coach, I cannot agree more. In your personal story sits your integrity, your belief system, your values. Potential clients can see who you are and will be drawn to you in a more authentic way. I've certainly noticed in my writing coaching business that being authentic with who I am has meant that the clients I attract come to me with greater love and respect. I notice more synergy with the clients I do attract. I notice fewer and fewer difficult clients.

Personal stories are not the only way to attract customers. Any form of good storytelling can create an aura around your business, can affect the soul of your customers. I am not talking here about stories that manipulate our emotions. I'm talking about stories that are real, the sort of storytelling that has been used since humans could communicate. I'm talking about the ancient art of storytelling. Forbes magazines did an article about the power of storytelling in business a couple of years ago. I posted the story on my blog: http://literaryexecutive.blogspot.com/2008/05/forbes-power-of-stories.html

I've become even more intrigued with the way personal stories might affect "customers" because I'm a novelist and as I try to get my first novel, Earth, published, I keep getting this message: Your personal story will sway the publishers. The fact that you are different will help sell your book. So, here's my story:

I grew up in the Midwest, on a subsistence farm. Until I was 12, we had no store-bought food. We ate from deep in the earth -- carrots, potatoes, onions. We butchered the small band of livestock on our property. My father and brothers fished, carp, catfish, trout. They hunted, deer, quail, ducks. I grew up learning how to live with the land. I was the land.

My mother insisted my father start a floor covering business. They made some money. The first luxury item my mother purchased from the grocery story? Cheerios.

No one told stories in my house. There was no time for it. The only book we had: The King James Bible. I was voracious for books. With nothing else around, I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom and read the King James Bible word for word, page by page. Finally, a teacher introduced me to a closet of paperbacks she usually reserved for the older kids. I ate them up.

I was passionate for story. I knew how we told our stories defined who we were. I knew stories changed the world.

I earned a scholarship to one of the best journalism schools in the country. I hated the roughness of the farm still in the blood of my family (I don't now; I did then). I wanted out. I moved abroad with no money, no contacts, and no precedent – no one in my family had ever been farther than Mississippi. I landed in Tokyo. I became an editor at a major English daily newspaper. I became a travel writer through Asia. I became a journalist at the major dailies in London. Years went by. I didn't go home.

We all must come home again. It's all about the cycles of the earth. Growth upward toward the sun, then death, and mulch. I moved back to the U.S. I turned my attention to becoming a fiction writer. I wanted to write my story in fiction form. I have just finished my first novel Earth, one in a series of four: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Each follows the life of Pearl Elizabeth Swinton, a girl who grew up on a farm (Earth), was uprooted from the land, moved abroad where she floated above the culture (Air), burned like the Phoenix in London (Fire), and ended up near the healing waters of the Pacific Northwest (Water).

I also started coaching fiction and nonfiction writers, especially women (but also men), who needed to tell their story, who’d somehow lost their voice and needed to find it back. I knew the truth in my gut of the Hopi proverb: The one who tells the stories rules the world.

Now, let's say a publisher went to my fiction writing website and read the bio -- graduated from this college, experience with running fiction seminars and coaching, published here and there. Interesting, perhaps, but not all that deep. How little the publisher would really know about me.

How little we all know about the other people in our various networks. We see a professional bio, we make some judgments about the person. What if we could read their story, their real story? How would that change perceptions? If you wrote your real story, how would that change the type of clients you attract?