Recently, following a successful corporate event, a client posted an appreciative email thanking everyone who had contributed to putting it all together. In thanking me personally, he admitted that he didn’t really know what it was that I actually did, but he thanked me all the same.

The question ‘what do you do’ is one that I’ve struggled to answer throughout my professional life. That’s partly because – to my great good fortune – most of my jobs have been rich and multi-faceted, difficult to compress into a simple, known title. It’s also due to my time; before the internet’s great democratization, working in ‘the media’ was always a somewhat shadowy endeavour, its obscure workings zealously guarded by we who toiled within it. Saying ‘I’m in the media’ was kind of like saying ‘I’m in the mafia’; it kindled curiousity, but discouraged further enquiry.

Nowadays, I take a broader view of my myriad activities, and have come to believe that I am, at heart, a simple storyteller.

I have spent my working life crafting messages for all sorts of audiences in all manner of media. Whatever the specifics of the assignment, the essence of a successful piece lay in finding the story within it. Because whether a radio spot or a corporate brochure or a blog post, there is always a story. No matter how small or modest or technically-challenged the platform, there is always a story.

Human beings have a natural affinity for stories; we’ve been sharing them for millennia. If you want to communicate with your fellow humans, what better avenue than through storytelling?  Stories, of course, come in all shapes and sizes.  What makes a good story – what makes a story ‘a story’ even – is a hard thing to define.

For me, a story is that which, whatever the subject matter, connects at some primal level with its audience, affecting them or involving them in a way that feels intimate and personal.  Storytelling mines our natural empathy. Communication through the prism of storytelling means finding the human element, and sharing that.

Stories are not just strings of words. They can be images, sounds, or any number of sensory experiences. The media does not matter; the message is all.  (And while in our media saturated society every selfie can tell a story, I prefer the simpler medium of the written word.  Hence, this is a text heavy site.) What does matter, however, is the voice of the storyteller.

As a hired hand, I’ve always told other peoples’ stories, and have worked to find the distinctive voice that suits each. That’s my job, and I’m pretty good at it. Here at joesays, though, I am free to tell my own stories, in my own voice.

These are my stories. This is my voice.

Welcome to joesays.