Every writer gets asked this eventually

Published about 2 months ago • 1 min read

"Have you written anything I’ve read?"

It's one of the first questions people ask after I tell them I'm a writer.

My answer is almost always the same: “Maybe, but you’d never know it.

Most people picture writers as authors, novelists, journalists, or poets. And that's a perfectly reasonable assumption.

While I have written a handful of articles with my name on them over the years, most of my work takes a different form.

Website copy, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, keynote speeches, course content, webinar slides...the kinds of words people encounter every day without giving much thought to who wrote them.

I also do my fair share of ghostwriting, so while I actually have written a book, someone else’s name appears on the cover.

Womp, womp. That's rarely the answer people are hoping for.

We’ve been conditioned to think of storytelling as something you only see on big screens and spine-bound pages.

I guess that's why it’s never bothered me when people assume storytelling belongs to novelists.

We've been telling stories for thousands of years.

Long before we had books.

Long before we had movies.

Long before we had LinkedIn or podcasts or PowerPoint presentations.

Stories are how humans have always made sense of the world, and of each other.

Which is why I don’t think storytelling belongs to novelists. It belongs to us all.

It isn't something you have to become qualified to do. It's something you've been doing your entire life.

That’s one of my favorite moments when I'm working with clients: watching them realize they were a storyteller long before they ever considered themselves one.

You’re already a storyteller. You just might not call yourself one.

Erin

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