Do Tell

At one point during our first evening out, my date turned to me and said, “You know, your stories are really long.”

To know me is to know that she could not have wounded me more. It is because I love a good story, and if you have lived a life that has led to a good story to tell, then we are likely to be become good friends indeed. If not, then you would not want to sit next to me on a long flight or pass the time on a first date at a sushi bar waiting for your dragon roll to arrive.

In my view, we are nothing without our storytelling, without narrative, without the unique and personal lens through which we experience and share the world and our lives in it. Cultures are sustained through storytelling, passing down the subtleties and nuances that define them, ensuring their transcendence from one age to another.

I have leaned in fully on narrative – hearing it, speaking it, reading it, and writing it. A professor of comparative literature and writing with whom I have studied told me that my own writing can be categorized as ‘creative non-fiction.’ Who knew?

But whatever you call it, I see storytelling everywhere. Some years ago, while staying in a Nashville hotel, I picked up a copy of American Songwriter magazine in the lobby. Of course, that magazine would be found in Music City, where songwriting and storytelling are the lifeblood of thousands of lives. I perused its pages over the course of the evening and while I had never written a song, came to see the similarities with poetry and other narrative forms.

I also found that in every issue, there is a songwriting contest where the editors and judges choose winners from the applicants and feature them in the next issue. It has since become a mainstay of the magazine. Like other disciplines, I found that stretching yourself by delving into other forms of your craft helps strengthen the muscle that helps the overall creative process, regardless of what form it ultimately takes.

And in the corporate world, I have learned that if you want to create change in a positive way (and isn’t that the mission of every leader?), don’t give people statistics; give them a story, bring the data to life, and make it human.

As a young ad agency copywriter years ago, I was schooled by an old ad agency copywriter who told me it would be a very good investment of my time if I were to read Bernice Fitz-Gibbon’s Macy’s, Gimbels, and Me, an account of how she became successful (and how you can too) in writing advertising for the famous New York retail stores that defined an era. One of her writing lessons was, “Say it square, then say it with flair.” In other words, don’t worry about your prose being perfect from the start; the important thing is to get the idea out of your head and onto the page where you can continue to refine it.

That tip has helped me immensely through the years, perhaps not with shorter stories, but hopefully with better ones. It seems to be working since that first date. We’ve now been together for ten years.