Welcome everybody!

As you can probably tell, I’m a little new to the world of newsletters and sharing my thoughts this way, but I figure the only way to start is to forge ahead and learn as I go.

I made a YouTube video this week about my writing process (that was supposed to be a very simple weekly writing vlog) and said something that I didn’t get to fully explore in the video because I didn’t really think about it until I was watching it through after I had uploaded it. Yeah, I could probably have redone the whole thing, but with my internet- in this economy? No thanks.

Plus, I thought it was a pretty good idea to explore in a newsletter.

Now, to what I had actually said- It was a bit of a throw away comment that you might not even catch. Do we, right now, write and learn to tell stories in order to become better storytellers? Or have we come to a point where storytelling has become so monetized that we learn to tell a story just well enough to appeal to the masses?

I think there are a few things that we can consider in this discussion-

1) Storytelling as a business versus storytelling as a means of survival (see Lisa Cron- Wired for Story) or coming to terms with our own reasons for storytelling. (Just adding for clarification that both are valid avenues- Mama’s gotta pay the mortgage- and take a lot of time and effort to achieve)

2) Where we’re at in terms mass produced books that ultimately sell because of their snippy intros and effective marketing strategy and their ability to string a reader on long enough before they realize they’ve been duped.

3) The availability of AI as a writing tool, both in terms of writing full novels for the writers themselves, or as a supplementary tool to the process- this is one I’m really curious about!

4) In each of these, I sound a little divisive, possibly like I’m saying that those who are writing specifically to publish are only out to make money, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I do think there are those who take advantage of our desire to consume a good story, but I also think that for the most part, storytellers in general have a greater desire to have people read/watch/enjoy what they’ve produced.

Obviously, there’s a lot we could explore in this sort of dynamic, and I want to know your thoughts on this writing for publication versus writing for good storytelling. There’s a very wide spectrum of the two!

For those of you who opened this email, thanks! and actually read to the very short end, THANK YOU. We’ll see if I improve with weekly newsletters.

Until next week, keep writing forward!