After all, you being in the world means that the world always leaves an imprint on you. This might sound strange, given that the previous point literally told you to just be you, but it makes sense if we think about it. You need to take in all the things that surround us and then use them to craft your story. You need to understand the context your story will end up in, and let it inspire you. □ Be Curious: To create your great story, you need to be curious of the world around you. If you need some tips, an earlier article of mine can help. You need to look within to find what your story really is. It would be someone else's, and would have lost its life force before it was finished (not that fan fiction doesn't have a place (my first writing was fan fiction for the movie The Replacements), but that place is not in an important story that you write for your brand or yourself). Case in point: the reason why my Vonnegut fan fiction wouldn't be as good as the real thing is not just that it wouldn't be creative, or that Vonnegut was a genius with a pen while I'm a dabbler with a keyboard, but also that it wouldn't be my story. This applies here, too: you need a story that is creative and cool and captivating, but it still needs to be your story. □ Be Characteristic: I've talked about the importance of not trying to be unique, and instead finding the story that is you. In other words, the story you craft needs to pay attention to where it will be consumed - and how. If you're publishing your story on social it needs to be different from the story published on your web and so on. If your audience is B2B companies producing industrial machines, your story need to be framed and phrased in a way that gets through to them. If your audience is a group of nice people who like wristwatches, a story like this might make sense. How your story is packaged matters, too, and so does the intended audience. Point being, where your story ends up matters. It made sense for that context, but outside of the so-called watchfam it probably wouldn't fly. It was full of pop-culture references and names of more or less obscure timepieces. ⌚ Be Contexual: I've been into wristwatches for quite some time, and once wrote a kind of fantasy wrist-watch draft that the good folks at Worn & Wound were kind enough to publish. Your story really needs to come from you, whether that's you as a person or a brand. I could write fan fiction for the greatest writer ever (Vonnegut), but that wouldn't make the story great etc. I mean, I could replicate Moonrise Kingdom shot for shot, and no one would want to hang in my kingdom. It can't simply copy something else and use slightly different terminology. In short, the story can't be a duplicate. □ Be Creative: This is kind of self explanatory, but with all the auto-generated content going around it's worth mentioning. So, what I'm thinking is that a solid story needs to: I've been thinking about what actually goes into that kind of amazing story, and boiled it down to 4 Cs that can help you create yours. It's basically what separates the stories in all the ads we can't even wait 5 seconds to skip, and a movie from someone like Wes Anderson (I mean, who doesn't want to live in Steve Zissou's submarine?) Telling an awesome story means that this someone really wants to be part of it. Telling your story means inviting someone else into your world.
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