Why You Should Learn the Art of Storytelling and Marketing To Shine as a Writer
One big lesson I learnt after writing online for more than three years
I wrote my first article on Medium on July 8, 2021. With 2024 coming to an end, it’s been quite a long time since I’m writing online for someone who’s just 18 years of age.
I have always admired people who craft beautiful stories. Have you noticed those gregarious people who can engage you, make you listen to them to the end, and even make you crave more when you met them just a minute ago for the first time? I have.
They fascinate me. They make me realise the true power of storytelling. I don’t think there’s a better way to make a stranger comfortable and want to listen to you.
The same goes for writing. There can always be a better, more engaging way of communicating through screens in written form, aka writing digitally.
Writing for a digital-first audience is how I define digital writing. With a growing internet connection and plummeting physical book sales around the globe, there hasn’t been a better time to write for and cater to a digital-first reader.
But there’s a bigger problem lurking at us, the writers, than you can see at first…
The big problem
I will come straight to the point: the decreased attention span and an ongoing, fierce battle for the same.
There is one example that I love to give to illustrate my point. Imagine the war by thinking of it on a scale so huge that you cannot escape it. “Tell me, Vritant,” asked my friend once who was probably getting bored with me but suddenly his curiosity piqued.
Wherever you can find an ad being shown to you is a battleground where invisible components are fighting behind that billboard or your phone screen for your attention.
The battle is intense out there and with written words, another layer of boredom presents as a problem in front of us.
Challenges in front of us
I was once reading a travel story on Medium when suddenly the writer became stuck on how she didn’t like a certain cuisine in this picturesque country she was visiting.
I kept waiting for her to move on from this point. I scrolled a little, jumping a couple of paragraphs. Despite that, it was the same topic. I skimmed through another couple of paragraphs, but I only met with more disappointment.
I gave up on that story. And that’s a challenge we contemporary writers need to pay heed to.
We are writing for an audience that doesn’t think twice before clicking that back arrow, left swipe, or press that cross button. It’s unlike the previous generation of readers who gave the book another chapter’s worth of time to see if it’s worth the read.
There’s this scarcity and fierce competition whose perfect — and dare I say the only — solution exists as storytelling and marketing.
Storytelling and Marketing
Storytelling helps readers be inquisitive throughout the story and want to read more after it ends. Marketing, on the other hand, enables you to attract eyeballs in this attention-deficit economy. Can you notice a chicken-and-egg type of situation here?
The problem is that without efficiently marketing yourself, there’s no use in crafting a beautiful story because no one’s coming to read it. And if you market well, but your story doesn’t stand up to the promise, the reader won’t read it till the end — like I left reading that travel story in between.
So it all boils down to understanding the basics of how the current environment is playing out: Catch eyeballs, deliver value. People want to read human stories, and not the work of some LLM or chatbot. They don’t want to read perfection; they want to read humanity’s uniqueness. And people have communicated uniqueness through stories since time immemorial.
As Fei-Fei Li, co-director at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence likes to put it: “Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for human intelligence; it is a tool to amplify human creativity and ingenuity.”
Closing thoughts
Storytelling is not just for fiction writers, and marketing is not just for marketers. Once you get into this mindset and start incorporating best practices from around the fields, you will shine as a writer.
The basics never change. AI’s advent and rise to popularity have definitely made many writers question their very existence, but at the same time, we need to understand where our forte lies: in being HUMAN. We tell stories. We market ourselves in a creative, engaging yet valuable way.
Going into the depths of thinking, we find that storytelling and marketing solve all the problems we encounter throughout the article. From not getting readers to AI making writers obsolete. From not getting readers to read until the end of the story to how to stand out in the intense competition for attention.
The answer lies in narrating an engaging story and marketing it in a human, value-oriented way.
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