Committing to Print Can Surprisingly Let You Produce Stirring Storytelling

Can 2021 be your shifting point to become an outstanding storytelling mogul?

Before the blogosphere turned into the last sexiest Ferrero Rocher of the Internet, the printing press was the queen. Local newspapers were the visceral bond to its communities- job provider to the most talented and the deep soul of a place.

Today, the newspaper still represents the voice of the people. It’s the real proof of an intermittent democracy.

People want their reliable news sources back. For every news desert out there, that’s another opportunity.- John Cullen, editor of The Storm Lake Time’s

Newspapers and magazines have a familiar atmosphere. Most of the time, the editorial director is a romantic lover of the printing press. The team she or he manages is a group of resilient samurai from the writing world.

If you still buy printing magazines, then you believe print is a powerful way to tell tales. You have that exceptional ingenuity of a true storyteller. You know where the real quality of content is.

People are not inspired to act by reason alone. People need to unite an idea with an emotion, or else it seems you are reading a regurgitated conventional rhetoric.

In his best-selling book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, Robert McKee argues that stories “fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living — not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.”

It seems the printing press has a cozy environment conducive to the emergence of true and exciting stories. This space between pages of paper resembles a room full of books with an armchair in front of the fireplace.

Near that fireplace stands an old man with a white beard who tells a bedtime story to his two grandchildren. Both kids rejoice with their sparkling eyes while his grandfather gesticulates in the face of the story’s intensity.

There‘s an intimate place in a newspaper or magazine.

Behind a well-designed page are anticipation, surprise, awe, anger, joy, sadness, fear, relief, or nostalgia.

Storytelling has a kind of magical power. It drags us into the writer’s head, kidnapping us into worlds never navigated before. It leaves us unarmed, defenseless, at the mercy of the creators.

Yet, it’s in the printing press that you find the great storytellers. And better than that, you can keep them. You can overuse that selfish sense of belonging, which makes you realize that you’re never alone. A book or a magazine is a train of thought. A train always ready to open any carriage doors, to make you enter and travel on the infinite journey.

So, how can we use magazines as our allies to embrace the true philosophical brotherhood of storytelling?

Here are three secrets that can help you transform into a storyteller mogul.

1) Give old stories a twist.

If you’re starting an article or a story and create a character, it built it on contradicting personality. Create dimensionality on the character by finding constant contradictions within the character.

For example, your character is a kind person. But somehow, at some point, she or he makes an incomprehensible contradictory act. This keeps stories alive, and somehow you find the human unbalance that readers so often love to read.

Find something unique about what you’re doing and invert your thinking. Imagine you’re not (yet) a famous writer. And you were starting a piece about the difficulty of starting as a new writer from a well-known magazine. Now, invert your thinking- suddenly, you are a top writer. And you start describing your day-to-day life, meeting famous pop stars, going to tv shows, being recognized in the streets. And somehow, you start to miss being anonymous. So, there you have: in reality, you are a beginner, but your article is about a famous writer that feels the emptiness of the famous.

2) Hook people with questions.

How many times did you felt hooked by a robust question right at the beginning of a piece?

How about an intense description of a murder in a museum? A murder where no one could see the assassin’s face. Leaving the curator of the museum with a strange symbol stuck in his chest totally surrendered to death. Then came the question. The decisive question that makes you fly out of your chair of excitement.

Questions make the reader jump forward, trying to find a reason. Makes every reader insecure and somehow curious.

A question is a fuse that burns as the reader progresses, unrestrained, paragraph after paragraph, until the final sentence. One question is a linguistic cocktail, ready to let the reader float.

Who should care about this?

What did just happened?

Why is this important now?

How took that strange message?

Drew Davis explains the power of a tool he called the “curiosity gap.” Click here to learn more.

3) Paint a picture, but don’t tell your audience how to think.

Give your readers enough information, but let them take their conclusions. It’s harder for you to convince someone what to do or what to think rather than describing an authentic, funny, and enticing story.

If your fans know you well, they already know your opinion. But that’s not what they’re searching for. What they want is your creativity. What they love is your capacity to make them feel alive, leaving them curious, vulnerable, sentimental.

This is the real art of storytelling. Knowing how to write in such a way that your readers feel unstable, but at the same time, they cannot stop reading what you have to say.

The future of writing isn’t just on a server.

I love Ev Williams. What he did with Medium.com was something unique.

A digital platform that opened the door to ordinary people.

Medium is a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories longer than 140 characters and not just for friends. It’s designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world. It’s used by everyone, from professional journalists to amateur cooks. It’s simple, beautiful, collaborative, and it helps you find the right audience for whatever you have to say.- Ev Williams

If you’re a Medium writer, the best honor you can give to the history of writing is to have one foot in the past and the other in the future.

The advantage of feeling the weight of paper in our hands, to smell and feel the texture of the leaves, gives us the humanization that writing will eternally need.

Yet, sharing your dreams, ambitions, thoughts, and hopes on Medium allows you to connect with thousands of people all over the world. And enjoy the infinite potential of the network.

Between the written paper and the bits of a network with infinite possibilities lies the balance.

Writing will always be magical, whichever way we choose.

Content is King.

Final Thought

One of the things I love to do the most is strolling in an unknown city and entering a bookstore.

Having the feeling that I’ll find something that will make me insecure is one of the world’s best sensations. Coming out lower in my pocket but richer in my soul from a stationery store- that’s the sign that I have a cult magazine or a rare book in my hand.

My home is a museum of writing. My bank account can no longer hear about bookshop expenses.

Yet, coming home and knowing that you have Ernest Hemingway waiting for you in the office or next to your sofa is José Saramago if you want to have a quick chat is the most comfortable though I can imagine.

Those who don’t live with writers will always feel more lonely.

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