I discovered Jon Buscall when one of the search alerts I have set up began informing me that he had written on his blog about storytelling. I was especially intrigued that he is a Brit who hasn’t lived In England for 20 years and currently lives in Stockholm. I believe he is the third of my Q&A subjects who hails from beyond North America.
This Q&A with him will appear over the next days.
Bio in his own words (Buscall’s Web site): Since I quit my job as a university lecturer back in 2004, I’ve been scribbling away from my base in Stockholm, Sweden.
I juggle copywriting, journalism, translation and (whisper it) creative writing, and have come to view myself as a bit of a hackwriter providing a variety of text services for Swedish and Norwegian companies selling to English-speaking markets.
A keen blogger, I’ve moved increasingly into digital marketing and copywriting as I’m passionate about the way first class writing online is essential to connect businesses, people, information and knowledge.
Q&A with Jon Buscall, Question 1
Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?
A: As an undergraduate I was drawn to fiction and writing. In the late 90s I managed to publish College.com, a novel about campus life in the UK. Although British newspaper The Times declared it was “essential reading,” it didn’t become the best seller that I hoped and I didn’t get to retire to the south of France. Nevertheless, on the back of this and a PhD in imaginative writing, I ended up teaching fiction and writing at universities in the Nordic region for the best part of eight years.
I found it incredibly powerful to help other fledgling writers get started, but increasingly I grew weary of juggling teaching and my own attempts at writing. A second novel, Being Helle, almost finished me for good, but I made a drastic jump one day and walked out of academe to go it alone and start a basset hound kennel.
Faced with having to feed myself and my dogs, I kept writing: I turned to journalism initially but also corporate blogging. I found that the skills I’d learned as a fiction writer helped me craft stories for corporations who were struggling to get their message across.
I got a kick helping to transform the ideas and notions people had about their business into a narrative form that helped build their brand, but also clarified for employees what journey they were on. If everyone in the organisation understands the story of who they collectively are, it can help employees pull together, market, and build your brand.
So the long answer to a short question is ultimately that I stumbled into corporate storytelling out of necessity, armed with a hotch-potch of writing skills garnered from teaching and writing and surfing the web.
What I love most about storytelling away from publishing houses is that stories tells us who we are and what we think we’re doing. Applied to a business, this can be incredibly powerful.