Happy Unplugged Thursday! I will be trying to make it to Panera Bread tonight. The weather is turning Mid South nasty though, and storms are predicted. Cross your fingers I make it. It isn’t far from home, and I COULD scurry back if I had to. Those tornado sirens sure can make me run. But I really want to write tonight, pen in hand and notebook on the table with a cup of coffee at my elbow.

But I digress….

As I watched the NCAA basketball championship game last Monday night, it occurred to me that to be an effective coach, you’d better be a true sports fan. You had better love b-ball and love it hard.

Then it occurred to me that in order to be effective as a storyteller, you’d better love stories. You’d better be a reader and read a lot. Is this starting to sound familiar? Yeah, to me too, and viola! A blog post is born.

The thing is, most writers start out writing because they really feel the need to tell a story. It might be their own story, a memoir, something that is filled with recollections from their own life. Or, as in my case, it might be completely utterly made up. Whatever it was that sent us off on the writing tangent, we have to tell a story.

Stories are us!

And usually it stems from a true love of stories. We listened to them as we grew up, we may have even invented a few of our own to entertain a younger sibling. But those stories, listened to and told, and even retold–they molded us into the writing person we are today.

It’s terrible to say that telling stories is ingrained, but it is. Everything we see just about is a story. Don’t believe me? Watch commercials for a few minutes. They tell all sorts of stories. They motivate us to buy. And have you been in a business meeting or watched a seminar lately? They are full of stories. Those that edify and educate us.

What does your story do? Does it have a purpose? Is it simply to entertain? Do you have oodles of research in them that you want to share so that someone else may develop the same love for something that you have? No matter what, we are still telling stories.

And so…when you sit down at your writing place today, I hope you will smile at the way the story unfolds for you. It may come from some dark inner place that you didn’t know existed or it may be a reflection of the life you are living right now, but this is your story. Don’t quit.

And if you are a reader, I hope our stories entertain you. I hope you become so involved with the story that you forget where you are. And God bless you for being a reader. You are our lifeblood.