Story Telling

I love reading. I also love telling stories, in person and in writing. This Author section of Holistic Home Office will be telling you stories about telling stories. Whether you’re a professional author or telling stories for the fun of it, or both, reading these stories will help you to improve your style and your productivity.

Perhaps you’re developing your website because you like the whole Internet commerce idea. Maybe you want to tell stories about some other subject that you’re really interested in, such as raising kids, holistic health care, home decorating, gardening or whatever you’re developing your website to tell people about. Reading these stories will give you one reasonably good example of telling stories online, as well as an unusual and valuable perspective of our global home office marketplace.

I think I’m a very professional writer in some ways and very amateur in other ways. I’m a story teller. I’ve made a lot of progress in developing my writing skills and I have a lot of progress to make. I learned to write by reading thousands of books and articles about a very wide variety of subjects. I’ve even read several poetry books to help me improve my writing style.

I do not have a lot of academic education about writing, or any other subject for that matter. So, my writing style is unusual. It is not all that well organized. I tend to erratically wander back and forth, from one subject to another. My stories often improve significantly when I edit and polish them.

Relax. You will be pleasantly surprised by the very advanced entertaining education that’s presented here. My outside of any mainstream perspective, is at least part of my Unique Selling Proposition.

Research

What’s your story? Do you have some valuable ideas to teach us?

I’ll help you!

Study and learn and make yourself an expert about the subject you want to write about. Get comfortable talking and writing about your specialty in our global information age economy.

You can improve yourself, and your circumstances, by writing entertaining and educational stories. Start by reading. A lot! Other than listening, reading is the simplest and most effective way to learn how to communicate. Holistic Home Office is a great place to learn about telling stories.

Read poetry and books about poetry, to learn how to write well. I like my writing style. I’m not sure anyone else will. Keep working on improving your stories.

Self Determination

I’ve heard a lot of excuses about why this story telling, website development project I’m working on, wont work. People don’t like to read online, I don’t have any credentials, I don’t have any record of success. My writing style is unusual.

Well, everyone starts somewhere. I do have a world class education, which comes from book stores and libraries, rather than academia. If you want to improve yourself and thrive in our one, world wide, universal commonwealth, then make the effort to learn, by reading some of these stories.

Get your laptop, your smart phone and your cameras ready. Travel around, taking pictures and writing stories in public. Be ready to describe your network marketing opportunity whenever the opportunity arises.

I can say that this is definitely not a get rich quick scheme. I have worked on this for years and I’m still not rich. I’m doing this because its fun. I like learning and I like telling stories.

Cultivate your habits. Get in the habit of writing a lot. Every day. Build your website and publish your stories yourself. You are the writer, editor and publisher. I publish my stories while they are still pretty rough drafts. Then, I go over them again and again and edit and polish them. This may not be the best workflow for professional writing. It is just the way I’ve been doing it for years. It is comfortable for me. I have thousands of stories, pictures and videos scattered all over my home directory.

You will develop your own workflow. Keep your files well organized. Select the tools you like to use. Get really good at using them. And start producing a lot of content. Start posting your content on your websites.

Be careful about getting your files all tangled, with thousands of stories, pictures and videos. Learn how to use digiKam. See if you can use it in your workflow. I’ve been using Dolphin. It is starting to get cluttered. I am constantly taking pictures and making videos.

Practice using WordPress or whatever publishing system you are using. Be a prolific writer. Get your photo editing process built into your writing process. Photos will make your stories more attractive. You can also use Lulu.com, Bookbaby or IngramSpark to get your stories published as books.

Servant Leadership

Be mindful of what you read. Read about how to serve other people, not how to defeat or manipulate them, or to exalt yourself over anyone. Be a servant leader. Teaching and leadership are important and valuable skills, just do so for the benefit of your readers, your customers and our one universal commonwealth.

Read some poetry, to improve your story telling skills and abilities. Read some books about the art of sales and marketing, in order to improve your ability to influence your audience.

Struggling artists journal, because that’s another good way to learn how to tell good stories. If you don’t have a lot of resources to start with, you can start by using the computers in the library. Even if you’re homeless, you can go to some libraries and use the library’s computers to work with. Use Microsoft One Drive, Google Pages or some other similar service to save your material in the cloud. Get a free account so that you don’t lose your data if you run out of money.

Create your business plan. Make a list of long term and short term goals, on paper and on your computer. You can build a website fairly inexpensively. There are many options. WordPress is a free and open source content management system. You can even post a free website using Jekyll on Github.

Keep practicing. Every chance you get.

Writing Style

When you do get enough financial capital and the right circumstances, invest in a laptop computer. The laptop gives you mobility, to move around and work in a diverse assortment of contexts. Get in the habit of writing in public.

Learn by reading, writing and doing. Start with and focus your stories on your reader’s interests, not your own. Then mix in a little about yourself, in order to develop rapport with your readers. Tell your stories as if you’re writing to a friend.

And focus on the benefits, rather than the features. Mention features in a way that emphasizes the benefits for the reader. In other words, if you’re selling paint and brushes, educate your readers about the pictures they can produce with your products and services.

Learning how to create beautiful and profitable digital art galleries are features of what I’m teaching you. Your financial freedom to move about the planet and your creative freedom to unleash the artist within you, are benefits of what I’m teaching you.

No matter who you are, you have knowledge that you can teach other people. You just have to exercise your innate teaching skills. Everyone has the potential to be a teacher. You just have to practice and refine your teaching style.

Make yourself an attractive teacher, so your audience will want to learn from you. Be kind, friendly and radiant. Take care of yourself. Practice Qigong or Yoga. Eat natural whole food.

Make sure all of your relationships are healthy. You do that by taking responsibility for yourself. Responsibility is your ability to respond. Get really good at responding to all the people and the entire ecosystem around you

Professional Writing

My rambling, distracted and absent minded professor style of writing may not be the most popular style, but it is one of the most effective teaching strategies. Surprise, caused by the unusual writing style, the mixing of unrelated subject matter, contributes to stronger impressions in your audience’s memory.

Of course, you still want to work on improving the organization and flow of your stories. If they are too unorganized, your audience will lose interest. Use your section headings to help you organize your writing, so that your stories will flow smoothly.

Repetition is another valuable teaching and learning tool. Reading the same story over and over again helps it become integrated into your personality. Making the same point over and over again, from a variety of perspectives, throughout your stories, drives the point home, helping your audience learn what you are teaching.

Most likely, you’re not going to attract a lot of attention or make a lot of money when you first start writing. But you will get valuable experience telling stories, learning the computer science of the Internet and the business of home office based free enterprise, etc.

Do not allow your family or friends to talk you out of it.

Be realistic. If you like telling stories, and you practice a lot, and study and get help from other already accomplished authors, then there is no reason why you can not be a very high performance story teller, in our information age economy.

There are 7 billion of us alive on earth right now. We all have to earn a living and many of us are going to earn a living writing stories. The only gate keeper is your global audience. The Internet eliminates the middle man fairly effectively. Write some valuable and entertaining stories and develop a profitable website around your stories.

Practice Writing

Work on your stories and your websites every chance you get. Practice telling stories, instead of watching TV. Watch videos about sales, success and personal development, leadership. Study computer science and artificial intelligence. Investigate network marketing and affiliate marketing.

Practice writing. I’m practice writing right now.

Getting in the habit of focusing on your reader’s agenda, instead of your own, is one of the most difficult habits I’m trying to cultivate, in myself and in you.

Creative freedom is an interesting facet of human nature. Different people like to express their creative freedom in a diverse assortment of ways and means. I like being a writer telling stories and I particularly like this website development format for telling the stories.

Express your creative freedom by telling stories about your favorite subjects. Have fun and be careful. And keep coming back here and keep reading these stories. They’re a very advanced perspective of the topics, even if the style is a little non-academic.

Sources:

Credit: Kadence
Credit: izusek iStock
Credit: izusek iStock