Improving your writing skills and becoming an author takes practice and access to useful resources and communities. While many might believe writing is a solitary act, the opposite is true. We bounce ideas off of our friends, we share helpful websites, and tips and tricks.

One of the biggest obstacles many new writers and authors face is knowing how long their book should be. How long is too long? How short is too short? What if my book isn’t anywhere close to the genre’s average?

Write what you know. It’s the first piece of writing advice you’ll ever hear, and you will hear it often. But, to write what you know can box you in, put its four walls around you and cap your imagination. The truth is you can learn anything you put your mind to and then that knowledge can only add to your writing.

Writing and publishing a book for your business comes with a plethora of advantages. It provides plenty of ROI (return on investment), creates new leads, provides content in a new format for your clients, and more. Imagine what publishing multiple books could do for your business?

The Literary Elements Series: Part 5 of 5. The language we use when we communicate with our audience conveys and creates many different facets of our brand story. I’m a big fan of fabric and fibre arts, so I like to think of our content stories as unique tapestries we can design and weave into a picture that authentically represents our brand.

The Literary Elements Series: Part 4 of 5. Plot is the action, movement and/or growth in the story. The character is just going about their daily life when something happens - the introduction of conflict, a change in circumstances, an interruption in their regular pattern of life.

The Literary Elements Series: Part 3 of 5. Themes are the patterns we see running through a story. It is not the main action but more of a recurring idea or message - an underlying meaning. If your story focuses on a character working to start up their own business and quit their day job, the theme would be hard work and perseverance, maybe even happiness in the pursuit of a passion.

The Literary Elements Series: Part 2 of 5. Setting is where the story takes place. But there are several different levels to setting. First there is your overall setting. This may be a city, country, or continent - the general area of the world where your ideal client is located and/or where you work. Then your local setting may be a street, a room, a park, a party, an office, or a landmark. For example, you might be in a restaurant with a view out the window of a familiar city skyline.

The Literary Elements Series: Part 1 of 5. Characters are the people or personalities in the story. In fiction, they might be anything from a talking dog to a space alien. For the purposes of this series, we’re going to deal with human characters. In business and brand storytelling, the characters are your prospects, your current clients, your past clients, your team, and most of all you!

After creating clarity and doing the work, I started to notice there was a disconnect between how I was showing up as my authentic self and how people were seeing me. In my house analogy, I’ve got the foundation, the four walls up, and I’ve spent lots of time working on the rooms inside. But I realised I had to find ways to communicate my authentic self to my audience - I needed to put the siding and roof on to present myself to the outside world.

In the first part of this series we covered the five steps to creating clarity. Now, it’s time to figure out how to bring that authenticity into your business and the services you offer. Think about it like building a house; we’ve established a strong foundation, but now it’s time to start building the walls.

“Become your own client.” If you’ve ever taken a business course, you know the phrase “you are not your target audience,” which makes the previous advice somewhat counterintuitive. However, if you want your clients to be well informed about business strategies, you need to be just as informed. If you want your clients to invest in improving themselves and their business, you need to invest as well. And if you want…

We’ve learned about the power of storytelling and about including conflict, decision, and discovery in our stories. Now it’s time for you to bring each of these elements together and learn how to write your very own brand story that is engaging, memorable, and effective.

Why do you do what you do? It’s a challenging question, isn’t it? Along the same lines as: why do you love your partner? Your family or friends? What is your life’s purpose?

The Storytelling Series: Part 3 of 5. Now comes the hard part: guiding our prospect to make a decision while also gearing them towards choosing our business and our solution. We can achieve this by using the character or characters in our story. They make the “right” decision, and that will, in turn, influence our prospect’s decision.

The Storytelling Series: Part 2 of 5. Conflict. Conflict. Conflict. This element is crucial for any story you want to tell. Conflict is what will drive it forward and keep up the suspense and momentum. Without opposing forces, a story often falls flat, and this goes for fiction and non-fiction.

Storytelling. It dates back centuries - millennia even. From cave drawings, to stories told orally and passed down from generation to generation, to the stories we know today that are printed in novels, condensed into memes, or strung together into the 280-character limit of Twitter posts.