The story: Coming around full circle

I started my career as a journalist, working for a daily newspaper that covered the coal counties of Southwest Virginia. A few weeks after I joined the paper, fresh from journalism school, I made a routine call to the sheriff's department in a mountainous county. A deputy there said, “Well, there is one thing that happened,” then proceeded to tell me about a fire in a remote valley in which three children burned to death. He referred me to a social worker who knew the family. Apparently a single mother had left her home to gather in water from a nearby well when the house erupted in flames from an over-turned kerosene lantern. It was a small frame cottage and it went up like dried moss. All the mother could do, the social worker said, was stand at the window and scream for her children.

The story means more to me today than it did when I wrote it. Then it was news and a pat on the back. Now there’s something unforgettable in its retelling.

I spent about three years as a journalist; some of that time writing about troop exercises on the Czech border and how to navigate the bahnhof as an Army writer in Germany.

Once back in the states, I took a job in advertising--as a copywriter--veering off from straight reporting.

I soon discovered that creative work, the craft of it, pretty much boiled down to beseeching the universe for a concept. Even so, a lot of great work spun around the retelling of human experience; around some form of story that triggered a response--wonder, maybe, or dismay, or curiosity. In other words, the best work, as I saw it, even in the micro-world of a :30 commercial, once again had to do with story.

When the nineties drew to a close, the world I knew began to shift. Less advertising, more work involving longer pieces; more web work, more brochures, more magazine development (in print and on-line), more portraits of causes and institutions.

Now I’m part of another sea change: blogging as a world-wide phenomenon. As a communicator, I love the idea of it and I’m crazy about the form. Here’s why:

• It’s fast. You can get a blog out as quickly as an email; okay, it can be an email—to virtually any constituency you want to clump together in a working list-serve, whether for yourself, a social change organization, small business or non-profit.

• It’s flexible. You can totally tailor what you want to say to fit and resonate with anyone in the known world

• It has an inherent viral quality. And can be passed along willy-nilly or purposefully across vast social networks

• You can marry all the strategic, conceptual and visual impact of advertising with the intimacy of a diary and/or the news-worthy and linear qualities of good reporting

• And, finally, it’s a great medium for telling stories--long or short stories, rambling or to the point, epic or not, the stuff of good journalism, good advertising and good memory.

Looking back, I feel like I’ve come a long way from the nervous chat I had with a social worker in Ft. Blackmore, Virginia, thirty-five years ago. But I’ve also come all the way back around to that very starting place. Back to the importance of a critical piece of information, well-told, delivered in a timely manner, then retold and passed along (sometimes with great rapidity) person to person, story to story to story to story until it’s embedded in the social fabric and the history of our time, and a part of the human experience.