As we approached the lip of the falls, one of the people in the front of the raft asked me if we should turn the boat to the left or to the right.
“I don’t know!” I shouted.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Aren’t you steering?!”
“Yes, but I close my eyes during the scary parts.”
. . . . .
Before I started creating content for digital marketing, I was a raft guide. I worked on whitewater rivers 140 days a year, and I met a lot of great, great people.
Now, I know that, for some, my former vocation put me somewhere below carnival worker on the social respectability scale. But that never mattered to me. I loved being a guide.
There are a lot of reasons guiding was great- beautiful places, exciting work, and on and on. But the #1 reason I loved it was the stories I collected over the years.
I have enough to fill a book (and will be doing just that, sometime in the future).
But it’s not the stories themselves that are important. It’s the experiences that those stories came from. They shape the way I think, and feel, and write.
I can and have done some promotional writing on the technical side of things. It’s not my strong suit. I’m much better at thinking up creative ways to tell stories. That’s my training.
What about you? Is who you are shaping the way you write?
