Writing with iHub

If all you have is your written words to stand for you, what story are you telling? You are creative, brilliant, brimming with ideas: do your words reveal this, or disguise this? How do you make your words say more than they simply say? These are the questions we started out with at the interactive writing workshop I had the pleasure of teaching yesterday with the bright entrepreneurs of iHub, a tech innovation incubator in Nairobi. What was interesting about this particular workshop is that we engaged with writing of wildly different types: emails, proposals, reports, project narratives, websites, social networking, resumes, text messages. Each person at the table has a story to tell, and while in ordinary writing workshops we might work together to make that story into one coherent song that appears in one particular place -- its beginning and ending appear in the same space -- here we were composing a coherent song across mediums, across time, and across networks.

 

 

Because this is a group of entrepreneurs, we talked about all the baggage and myth that comes along with a moniker like "professional writing." That professional writing is, for example, boring to read and boring to write. That it is long. That it is formal. That it must have a lot of serious and multi-syllabic words. That great writing is merely a flourish, a decoration, upon the real work. That writing that appears on, say, Facebook, doesn't count as professional writing. I've seen this in every sector I've encountered: people who want themselves and their ideas taken seriously feel like their writing needs to be dour, chronological, and dull.

Which is a damn shame. A lot of brilliant ideas are drained of their inspiration and creativity when they pass through the portal of "professional writing." It is as if people assume their writing is meant to be skimmed: text in the research report or the cover letter is meant only to look official, to take up space, to simply be there, rather than to actively tell a good story. And no good purpose is served by this: people ultimately aren't inspired by those brilliant ideas, if they even recognize an idea somewhere in the clutter of what George Orwell would call "verbal false limbs." There are fewer connections between people (and, really, what is more important than connections between people?). Brilliance dims. Things don't happen.

 

Professionals or not, we're all people. We fall in love with a good story. And while there is quite a lot to choreograph for those in the business of making things and taking risks, as these iHub entrepreneurs are, our stories are worth our attention: indeed, our stories are told whether or not we're paying attention to them. I'm talking both about the nuts-and-bolts of writing -- the tools that lie in grammar, punctuation, medium, formatting, design, and style -- and of building potent narratives that cohere across platforms and that carry forward into time.

In a way, entrepreneurs are the perfect narrators: they have a vision of something that doesn't yet exist, they have their audience in mind, and they are working in real time. Navigating this can be playful, like a game, rather than merely a "to do" on the build-a-business list. Let's find the joy here! I want to see spark in the "professional writing" of these entrepreneurs. I want a good story. I'm listening.

 

This post also appears over at iHub's blog.

Comments

[Angela]

Thank you for your wonderful workshop Anna! It was great to have you at iHub!

[Andy Seiler]

Hi Anna,
This reminds me of a great speech I heard by Robert Krulwich from the NPR show Radiolab. It was the Cal Tech commencement address, and he encouraged all the grads to go out and talk about what they do, even to non-scientists. He felt telling stories was the best thing they could do to help people understand and accept science more. Here's the episode if you like:

http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2008/jul/29/tell-me-a-story/

hugs!
A.

[Anna Clark]

Ooo, good tip, Andy! I just downloaded it. I'm really interested in this connection between stories and science, and in scientific literacy. (Probably in no small part because I am a non-scientist who is really interested in science.)

Without having listened to the show yet, it sounds like there is a link between Krulwich's project, and Natalie Angier's. Angier is the biology writer for the NYTimes, and she wrote this book about scientific literacy: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780547053462 While it's primarily set up as a tool for learning and celebrating science, the introduction is a nice macro-view essay. I kept reading it aloud to people...

[Anna Clark]

Andy, just got a chance to listen to the podcast. Loved it! I think he's spot-on, and I was really intrigued by the differences in communication by Newton and Galileo ... Thanks for sharing.