The Notebook
Writing on the craft, the work, and the future of it.
Notes on brand storytelling, the craft of voice, the state of the industry, and what I'm learning by doing the work. New pieces most weeks.
Notes on brand storytelling, the craft of voice, the state of the industry, and what I'm learning by doing the work. New pieces most weeks.
A half-pressed piano key makes no sound at all. I keep finding the same thing in my own sentences, the hedge words and the jokes with an escape hatch built in, and slowly learning to hear the felt stop short.
Read the essay →I spent months hunting for the sentence that made a company different, before I admitted the difference wasn't there yet. A writer can sharpen a real difference. No writer can invent one.
Read the essay →For most of my twenties I was drifting and did not know it. A Christmas notebook I almost left in a drawer, and a nightly habit of writing it all down, is how I slowly turned the whole thing around.
Read the essay →I can still sing a pizza jingle from when I was a kid, but the slick brand manifesto I read last quarter is already gone. A brand doesn't need a clever idea. It needs one plain one, repeated until it sticks.
Read the essay →I lost most of a Tuesday to three sentences about a water filter before I admitted the truth: a blank page almost never means an empty head. It means I'm avoiding the plain thing.
Read the essay →I reread an email I sent five years ago and wanted to climb under my desk. Then I noticed I was smiling, because the wince turned out to be the clearest receipt of growth I have.
Read the essay →The machine has read more than I ever will. It still hasn't been anywhere, and a year of dead pitches in a folder nobody will read taught me why that gap is the whole job.
Read the essay →The most talented writer I ever worked with could pitch with nothing and win the room. I couldn't. So the night before every pitch, I wrote twenty ideas nobody would ever see.
Read the essay →A creative director I respected said it in a hallway, and it rewired how I read every brief since: the assignment is almost never the problem, the posture I bring to it usually is.
Read the essay →I give the machine more of my workday than I'd have admitted a year ago — the transcripts, the variations, the freight. There's still one task I keep, and the keeping of it is the whole job.
Read the essay →Every client says "premium but approachable." None of them mean it. The voice you're looking for is already in the room — you just have to stop asking for adjectives.
Read the essay →I never wrote for SNL — I was on Broadway Video's digital production team, working with NBCU and Turner. The building still taught me everything: the clock, the ego, the ear.
Read the essay →Every brand wants to be authentic. The moment you reach for the word, you've already confessed you don't have the thing — and what you actually mean is hiding underneath it.
Read the essay →The longer the brief, the worse the work. Why a single constraint produces braver writing than forty-one pages of strategy.
Read the essay →Anyone can now generate a thousand words in a second. That is exactly why the craft of brand storytelling is about to matter more, not less.
Read the essay →