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, you know the drill); the primacy of voice; killing your darlings; how to begin a little bit further on because that is where the good stuff actually gets going; and how to earn your end—through the somewhat torturous process of sorting out the middle.
With that said, at InkHouse Public Relations, we were not only invited to help people become better writers — but become the people they were intending to be all along. Over the course of a decade, we were privileged to teach people how (and why) to leave your reader wanting more, but also to help writers describe what their grandfathers meant to them, how to come clean about their addictions and still be able to manage people (in fact, to be able to manage them better), and how to reach back into the past and connect some of the dots of their experiences to discern where things might be 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 co-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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