Storytelling and Why Reading is Easier than Writing

The craft of writing is similar to social media management. Because everyone can do it, everyone thinks they can do it well.

Banging out 300 words of brochure copy, a letter from the president, or a 1,000 word feature story takes more than the amount of time it takes to read said copy. In fact, there is probably a figure out there that translates reading time to project time. For instance, if it takes you five minutes to read a story, it probably took five hours to complete. Especially when you factor in all the interviews, revisions, layout, and the muse. The latter is what is often left out. It has been said that one's writing is 90 percent of what they have read and 10 percent of what they are currently reading. As much as I like to think the genesis of all my ideas come from yours truly, they actually come from other ideas I've read or heard that have been filtered through my mind. Blah, blah blah, Inception reference. My point is that I need to be constantly reading good writing and learning about new ideas and new technology to have more meat for my writing.

The editing process is another brutal and thankless endeavor. No one notices when you are good at it, only when you screw up. Remember that time one of your readers called up and and said, "Excellent job on that magazine! I didn't find a single grammatical mistake." No? That's because it never happened in the history of the world.

It's perhaps because it is so easy to read through a magazine or brochure or web story that people assume it must be easy to create. "Oh, you wrote a 350 word story about some student and posted it to the website? What else did you do with the rest of your morning?" Never mind the relationships I had to build to even get that story, the time I spent tracking down the student, the lengthy interview process because the soft-spoken student did not want to talk, or the part-time photographer I transformed into to take the shot.

But it goes even deeper than that. I'm not just firing off stories for print, web, and media to fill my day. I'm building a brand. I'm telling the story of the institution. I seek student stories and ask questions that fit the mold of what I want the story of my employer to be.

Building a brand is not an overnight process. It is a quilt sewn together with strategic content. This is a fast moving digital world. The tone and delivery is changing. There is so much noise that only those in a particular key are going to be heard. Only those with their finger on the pulse of what that key is are going to know how to play.