Everyone Has a Story

A brand once asked me whether everyone really does have a story. They sounded worried. As though I might have to gently explain that, unfortunately, they were the one business on earth with absolutely nothing going on.

I’ve had versions of this conversation with profile subjects, too. They’re happy to talk, but they’re not sure what I’m going to write about. Their life? Their work? Surely I’ve met someone more interesting.

Meanwhile, I’m already hooked. 

I want to know how you ended up here. Why you left that job. Why you started this business when a perfectly sensible person might have talked themselves out of it. And that thing you just mentioned before saying, “Anyway, that’s probably not relevant”? I would like to hear considerably more about that, please.

TL;DR

• Investigate your own “that’s just what we do.” What feels routine to you might be the very thing a customer values or a reader recognizes. Ask someone outside your daily orbit what stands out.

• Trade adjectives for evidence. Before calling your brand “passionate,” explain what you care enough about to do the hard way.

• Revisit the bits you usually leave out. Your career detour, that decision you agonized over, the customer comment you still remember. Before dismissing something as irrelevant, ask why it stayed with you.

• Let yourself tell a story that’s still in progress. You don’t need to have conquered your fear and delivered a TED Talk about it. Being honest about what you’re figuring out can help someone feel less alone.

• Give the reader a reason to care. Your experience can help someone understand, feel, or decide. An interesting story becomes more useful when the reader can find their way into it.

• Bring the messy version to your writer. Half-formed thoughts and “I’m not sure how to explain this” are sometimes the best starting material. You don’t have to solve the story before hiring someone to help you find it.

You may be too close to your own interesting

I understand why people struggle to see their story. You’ve been there for all of it, including the paperwork. What looks like an interesting decision to me might look to you like something you had to figure out between drop-off and pick-up. 

The same thing happens inside a business. You’ve explained what you do so many times that the explanation has become muscle memory. You know which words belong in the pitch, and you’ve likely stopped thinking about whether those words actually sound like you.

Then someone comes along and asks why you do it that way, and suddenly we’re having a much better conversation.

This is one of my favourite parts of being a writer. I get to be professionally curious, which is a very convenient arrangement for someone who has follow-up questions. I want that detail you’ve learned to leave out to keep the explanation short. I want to understand the decision that still matters to you, even if you’ve never thought to put it on your About page.

Sometimes, people worry they don’t have a story when what they mean is that they don’t have a dramatic one. There wasn’t an extraordinary origin or triumphant moment accompanied by a film score. But there is so much worth paying attention to in the things people recognize.

I learned that quite early in my career, courtesy of a stranger’s fridge.

The fridge is a very high bar

When I took over a publication as editor-in-chief, I wrote my first editor’s letter about how I was shaking in my boots, but here I was, doing it anyway. There I was, introducing myself to readers in a new, very intimidating role…and my opening contribution was essentially an admission of nerves. It was also the truth.

A woman wrote to me afterwards to say the letter had spoken to her so much that she’d cut it out and put it on her fridge.

I still think about that.

Your fridge is valuable real estate. Things go there because someone needs to remember them, look at them, or explain to a child that yes, this is an excellent drawing of a horse. This woman had decided my words belonged somewhere she could see them again. Whatever she was facing in her own life, something in that letter had been useful to her.

To this day, that’s one of my best measures of success in my career. I’d written about a feeling I could easily have dismissed as ordinary, even somewhat shameful, and someone else had found something she needed in it. I didn’t need to arrive in that experience with every perfectly practiced answer locked and loaded. Being honest about where I was reached her in a way that was probably more important. 

It’s a good thing to remember when someone tells me there’s nothing particularly interesting about them.

Finding the thing that makes you you

When I’m interviewing someone, I’m listening for the point where the conversation gets specific. A person starts explaining a decision, gets a little more animated, and suddenly I understand something about them that their job title could never have told me. That’s usually where I want to spend more time.

With a brand, I’m just as interested in those moments. Tell me what you care about, and then tell me where that shows up in the business. What do you insist on doing properly, even when it would be easier not to? What do customers thank you for that you barely think to mention?

There’s often more personality in the answers to those questions than in a whole page of carefully approved adjectives. I can do something with an actual conviction. I can find language for the care you take, the way you think, or the problem you couldn’t leave alone. Those are the things that help a reader understand who they’re dealing with.

That translation is a huge part of what I love. I get to take what I’ve learned about someone and work out how to make it mean something to another person. A profile needs to help a reader care about someone they’ve never met. A brand’s voice needs to feel recognizable and give people a reason to listen.

And yes, somewhere in there I also have to cut the paragraph I’ve become unreasonably attached to because it isn’t helping. Curiosity gets me into the story. Editing helps me figure out what the reader actually needs.

Asking questions forever

While working on a story about energy healing, I spent time with an energy healer who later sent me a message she said had been interpreted just for me: “May your writing prowess bring light to the world and healing to those who need it.”

That has stayed with me, too. It put words to something I feel deeply about my work: I want what I write to reach someone who needs it. I want to help people feel understood, bring something important into view, or make it a little easier to find the words for an experience they haven’t known how to explain.

That purpose comes with me whether I’m writing a personal profile, pulling at the thread of an investigation, or helping a business figure out how it sounds. The questions change, but my interest in finding the essence of someone, understanding what matters, and helping it reach another person is always there.

So yes, I believe you have a story. You don’t have to arrive knowing which part of it matters, or with a rehearsed explanation of what makes you interesting. That’s something we can work out together.

You can start with the bit you were about to tell me wasn’t relevant.