When a Root Canal is Easier Than Writing - By Zoe Gemelli
When photographers find out that I am also a professional writer, they usually ask, “Can you give me tips on how to blog?” They explain how they suck at blogging and are sometimes years behind. How they would rather have a root canal than have to blog. How they are horrible writers. Some of them want to throw money at me to save them from this dreaded task. (Which I’m not mad about.)
What if I told you that the big secret to blogging isn’t about writing at all? It’s not about getting a Ph.D. in Shakespeare. I won’t even recommend books to read (unless you want me to, and in that case, there are many great ones, of course).
Instead, I offer these three simple recommendations:
Buy a digital voice recorder
Record everything about the shoot before driving home
Transcribe the voice recordings
I get a lot of puzzled looks from photographers expecting lessons in how to write better prose. After explaining that the key to better blogging starts with how they set up their information gathering, they are often awe-struck by these simple steps.
The most important step in this process is recording everything you can think of about the shoot — the people, the details, the feelings, the spaces, everything you can.
It is essential that this information dump happen as soon as you stop shooting. The reality is, our memory isn’t as capable as we think it is. Relying on it being at our fingertips six to ten weeks later is where the blogging process fails before it even begins.
Transcribing everything you said in the voice recording gives you a solid foundation of the story in the format you need it in for writing: Written words. The hardest part of blogging is done for you in those two simple steps.
You are already a storyteller. You’re already seeing stories and capturing them with your camera. As a visual storyteller, you record what is unfolding with your camera. Writing about those stories is as simple as recording those same memories while they are still fresh in your mind. Be the same attentive information gatherer.
Note from DFP: Be sure to check out Zoe’s copywriting Intensive in the DFP Learning Library, “I'm a Photographer, Not a Writer: Storytelling with Images and Words!”
And check out her social media and website, here:
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