Mission Driven Writing
To shape and share the stories of legends, legacy and justice by producing content that provokes change and inspires action. That’s the mission that has emerged with clarity regarding my writing. I could write just to write, but that isn’t how my life has been set up. I’ve always written to give voice to the unheard and overlooked, even if imaginative. I began weaving stories and scripts as a kid hiding in my room from the harshness that was my home at that time. It was my way of escape. I was writing to be in another world, even if the worlds that I was creating were just as dysfunctional as the one that I was living in. I was giving myself a voice when I didn’t feel as though I truly had one in my environment. I could have declared myself a writer then. But I was talked out of it for lack of evidence that writing careers showed any real promise. Get out of your head and into the books.Success comes through going to school, getting good grades, and landing a 9 to 5 somewhere respectable. (I still wrestle with those thoughts today.) I abandoned the dream in exchange for the “American Dream”. It hasn’t turned out how I thought it would.
When I returned to writing for the outside it came by accident. I was working for a few arts and nonprofit organizations helping them craft their stories to get more volunteers, more funding, more, more, more… Maybe the starving artist narrative was being fed by my writing. Now decades later, these stories are being told with an actual name - origin stories, brand narratives, nonprofit storytelling. Companies are hiring advertising agencies to help craft these stories by the thousands of dollars. Organizations are finally adding line items to their budgets. Their justification? Someone has got to tell the story of how all of this came to be.
From the offices of executives to the living rooms of trailblazers, I have sat with the purpose of capturing stories. I take the ideas and harness them into something that others can grab hold of and run with. We talk about purpose. We dig into desired outcomes. We press into the uncomfortable conversations that we hope inspire others to do something. We tell our stories so that no one else gets the details wrong after we are gone.
Mission driven writing. This is the dream. This is also my reality.