Hello, my American idol

Author Richard Russo made me believe I had worthy stories to tell. His novels set in small, rusted-out towns are loosely based on his hometown of Gloversville, N.Y., a Thruway stop about 50 miles west of Albany. His settings are the kinds of places that outsiders think are saturated with unkempt children, drug dealers, and middle-aged people with unattained dreams. 

Russo knows differently. He has an innate understanding of his characters and their yearning to be seen. He knows that the small-town lives of teachers, police officers, and diner owners are as complicated, rich, and dramatic as anyone's. He champions these societal underdogs who are routinely overlooked by the urban-suburban majority. Actually, he seems to love them. 

Russo's work never fails to resonate with everything I know about my tiny hometown in New York's North Country and the people I grew up with. He realizes that a mere hundred miles north of Manhattan, a different world starts to emerge. His perspective on upstate characters has always been empowering to me; it's the world I know best too. Growing up in New York State, I knew it looked more like the Rust Belt than Central Park. Russo's New York State (and mine) stretches from Buffalo to the Thousand Islands and is defined by the Erie Canal, Adirondack Park, Watkins Glen, Syracuse Orange basketball, and all of Lake Ontario. It pivots on home-baked mac-and-cheese, dairy farms on rolling hills, middle-class union jobs that aren't ever coming back, and a fair amount of alcoholism.

Like Russo's characters, I grew up feeling somewhat marginalized by a city skyline I couldn't even see. New York City loomed over the state like a Goliath, dampening the identity of the rest of us, the uncounted. The thing was, I loved everything I could see: the part-time fishing guides/snowplow drivers, the plumbers and carpenters who shot game for their meals, the blinding lake-effect snows, the taskmaster school teachers, the endless stream of soldiers at Fort Drum. I even loved the scary two-lane, arched suspension bridge in Alexandria Bay that swayed in the wind on our occasional trips to Canada. 

When I heard Russo would be in Concord, N.H., giving a book talk to promote his latest novel, Everybody's Fool, I jumped at the chance to see him in person. I wanted to meet the man who nearly singlehandedly made me see my small-town life as filled with dramatic possibilities. Russo's work influenced me in the same way that seeing Dr. Zhivago on the big screen changed my life at nine, when I realized that poets and revolutionaries and passionate lovers could thrive in the iciest, least habitable of places. Like the place I called home.

The Empire Falls or North Baths of Russo-land were where I lived too, with people who looked an awful lot like Sully or Miles Roby or Miss Beryl. Their smarts were hard earned, not studied. These characters did not angle to get their children into the best colleges, much less the best preschools. They fixed their own furniture, canned vegetables, and repaired clothes. They bought a lot of items at Wal-Mart. They sometimes struggled to fit into a modern world of instant texts and broken things that were never made to last. They were frequently angry and bewildered while doing their damn best to survive.

These are my characters too, and Russo's writing made me love them more. Which is why when it was my turn in the book line to say hello to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, I decided to share with him how much his work had meant to my writing life. Turns out, he'd never heard of my small hometown outside of Watertown. In fact, he quickly admitted that he didn't know anything about the Watertown area at all. 

"It doesn't matter," I said a little shocked, thinking naively that he would be as intimately aware of my main characters as I was of his. "My people are your people." 

As he signed my books and brought our short encounter to a close, I hesitated. I'd come to tell him something more. So I blurted it out, probably inarticulately, saying something like: "You made me believe that I had stories to tell about the people I knew. Thank you so much for that."

"That is high praise," he replied. A generous, gregarious man, he probably pulls those chestnuts out for every well-meaning, would-be novelist who is desperate to tell him a story that makes him smile. Still, I'd said what I'd come to say. It felt good.

So Russo may not have known exactly where my inciting incidents take place. But I know, now, that is of little importance. The communion of place is not tied to a physical location. His plain truths and wrenchingly poignant story lines are the same ones that feed my imagination. I've always recognized myself in his characters. And I'm indebted to him for helping me find mine.

New year, new blog: Four simple steps

Are you tired of writing about the same topic you've been working on for a few years? The politics of Obamacare may have felt like a good topic to blog about in 2011, but by now you may have run out of things to say or that interest you about the topic.

If this sounds familiar, it may be time to revisit your blog's focus:

• Find a new topic that you are passionate about exploring and is elastic enough to stand the test of time. 
• Don't stray too far from your current focus. You want to keep your current subscribers while attracting new readers.

Try these four tips to make the transition to a new blog topic in 2016.

Zig or zag: Use a small shift, a "zig," to build on your current topic while keeping it precisely and narrowly defined. For example, the politics of Obamacare could be expanded to include the politics of social programs in the U.S. Or you could take a bolder approach, a "zag," to connect your blog to currently trending topics throughout the year. For example, Google shows that the Ebola virus is a trending topic. Can you mesh a discussion of the Ebola virus with the politics of Obamacare? It may take more time to tie in to trending topics, but it is often worth the effort. You'll have a newsy, relevant blog that is a fun challenge to write, engaging for your readers, and likely to get more clicks from searches.

Don't lose your voice: The way you write is as important as what you write about. People subscribe to your blog because they like your tone of voice. In essence, your tone of voice is your brand. Keep the elements of your writing style intact and your current subscribers are likely to follow you to a new topic, unless you take them to a new subject area that is wildly off course.

Keep the old, announce the new: Unless your URL is extremely focused on your current subject matter (e.g., politicsofobamacare.com), there is no reason to change the URL and website design you have. Simply announce your new approach in a blog post that describes the reasons for making the change, then start writing. This helps readers make the transition with you. It's also a great way to invite comments on the new blog.

Tag it and forget it: If you haven't already been using categories for easy scanning and tags for keyword searches, now is the time. Label all your existing content with categories that serve as topic dividers for your blog. Last year's categories may include "Obamacare by State" while categories in 2016 might include "Social Programs by State". You want people to find your old posts easily, as well as your new ones. Also be sure to use tags for your old and new content. Tags are gifts that keep on giving; they help search engines find your content, regardless of when you posted it.

Your blog is a living, changeable creature by nature. If you maintain an honest connection with your audience, you should be able to switch your blog's focus with relative ease. With a few simple steps, you can satisfy your own evolving interests and keep visitors coming back for more.

Share don't tell: Can you crowdsource storytelling?

I've recently become protective of the word "story." For me, story is a narrative. It engages you at the beginning and takes you on a journey of learning or emotional discovery straight through to a satisfying end. A story is crafted carefully, one word or one frame at a time, and is designed to surprise, delight, frighten, enlighten—whatever the storyteller intends.

"Story" isn't limited to fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or film. Companies "tell their story" to present their face to the world; journalists develop news stories, expanding on them as more information becomes available. Heck, your uncle probably tells a good story at the Thanksgiving dinner table. 

Storytellers use a specific point of view to control how their stories flow and build. Corporate communicators craft their public relations outreach; editors corral the narrative of their reporters' news stories. Even your uncle knows how he wants to spin a tale.

At the INBOUND 2015 marketing conference in Boston last month, I attended an intriguing session titled "Revenge of the Storymakers," presented by David Berkowitz of agency MRY. Berkowitz focused on how brands are using user-generated content to tell their story. The idea is that companies are "backtracking" from crafting tightly controlled narratives to describe their mission, products, and services. Instead, they are letting users tell their stories for them by teeing up a framework for collecting user stories and letting it unspool, primarily through social media. 

In his talk, Berkowitz made the distinction between story "telling" and story "making." Storytelling is the conventional, highly controlled approach to creating press releases, corporate background statements, and other brand communications. It relies on carefully written language and slickly produced videos, approved by corporate marketers. 

In contrast, storymaking is participatory. These stories can be made by customers or prospects, often by submitting a photo, short video or tweet in response to a specific theme put out by a company (e.g., how do you wear a Burberry coat?). The responses, in aggregate, create a story that is more real and current than any canned narrative that a public relations firm could create through "storytelling." 

I have to admit I bristled at the use of the term "storymaking" in this context. Don't get me wrong. I take Berkowitz's point. User input can offer a fresh vision of a brand, helping to engage other customers and prospects. As he points out, today's brands can no longer simply dictate their views to customers; they need to invite, listen to, and accept their users' input to create buzz and develop advocates. (Still, there is skepticism about how well user-generated content works from an advertising standpoint. See Stephen L. Carter's BloombergView article for details.)

It was the "storymaking" term that struck me as inaccurate. It seems to imply that you can take any content from any user and make a good story, like creating a souffle from the ingredients in your cupboard on any given day. 

So, some alternatives: "Story sourcing" or simply "story sharing" may come closer to describing this "share don't tell" method of communication. There is little story craft involved in a simple aggregation of user stories, other than in curating the tiny puzzle pieces of raw material that users provide. That's fine; it's advertising. But this process should not be confused with truly collaborative art forms, such as filmmaking, in which storytellers work together to create and build stories with intentional themes and narratives.

Stories sourced from users are unpredictable and unlikely to produce a deep, meaningful or cohesive story in the traditional sense of the word. This is best left to professional storytellers; the ones who live by the tried-and-true writers' maxim, "show don't tell." Anton Chekhov may sum this up best in his quote: "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." Now that is storymaking.

Corporate story sharing (dare I say story baiting?) is no doubt here to stay. But it doesn't replace the need for skilled corporate communicators and it shouldn't be confused with true storytelling craft. For the real story, I'm sticking with Chekhov.