We’ve left it open for you, so you don’t even need one of those little keys. Because writing is life, and keeping it real means forgoing the line between the personal and the professional.
BA Turns 25: When Corporate Goes Gold
Over the course of the last 25 years, we have done work with a variety of companies and organizations to help their employees become better writers. We teach the basics of structure (scene, series, and theme, come on you, know by now); the primacy of voice; killing your darlings; how to begin a little bit further on because it is where the good stuff actually gets going; and how to earn your end, through the somewhat torturous process of sorting out the middle.
That said, in no corporate environment were we invited to help people not only become better writers — but become the people they were intending to be all along — more than at InkHouse Public Relations, over the course of a decade from the mid-2010’s to the mid-2020’s. There, we were privileged to not only teach people how (and why) to leave your reader wanting more, but to help writers describe what your grandfather meant to you, how to come clean about your addictions and still be able to manage people (in fact, to be able to manage them better), how to reach back into your past and connect some of the dots of your experience so that you could discern where things were heading in the future.
At InkHouse we put together yearly books of essays, or hosted Moth-style readings, bravely sending the work out into the world so that clients would really know who they were working with—fusing the personal with the professional, in a way that benefitted both lenses. Under the auspices of founder and CEO, Beth Monaghan, an excellent writer in her own right, we operated with the understanding that creative non-fiction was neither “unprofessional” nor was it “too personal” — if it was good. Then it could benefit all kinds of relationships, including the one you have with yourself.
We would never want to put words into Beth’s mouth, but it seemed like she realized that some of her employees wouldn’t work for her forever. Hey, it happens. And that means that you have a responsibility to develop not only their resumes and their experience but their hearts and souls. And to help give credence to a human being’s natural creative gifts. And that is why our work at InkHouse is this month’s chosen highlight from the last quarter century.
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