CEO speaks: Content economy: The creative conundrum
Content is king! It’s the blood of everything — from algorithms to brands, from newspaper articles, stories, blogs to books, journals and digital media.
This is a phrase that became embedded in our culture way back in the 1990s when Bill Gates included it in an essay with the phrase as the title. The idea of the phrase is that of being omnipresent and pervasive content on a multitude of platforms so as to be seen everywhere that will make a difference. Gates predicted that there would eventually be an enormous breadth of information, and as such, it would take a high volume of content to stand out. And, that is the reality today.
Capturing the attention of the fleeting eyes of the masses, with only seconds to use, you better have some captivating content. Bad content is quickly flushed to the very bottom of obscurity, considering the percentage of your time you spend scrolling back up the feed.
It is also important to know how to present the content. A good first line is not always necessary because who stops reading after one sentence? But it can be extremely useful in building expectations for the style and characterisation that will follow. While book jackets can indicate a broad genre, that one particular line can actually define the subgenre.
So precisely, how relevant is creative writing? To begin with, if you want to delve deep into the art of presentation, like many anguished teens, you have to make diary writing your best friend. Slowly but steadily, you will notice that as the sentences take shape on the page, all your troubles will stop feeling like catastrophes and sooner or later, you will definitely feel a lot calmer.
Can creative writing be taught? To be the next on as many devices and eyeballs as possible, it is important to produce content that helps groom youngsters to become leaders and visionaries of the future.
Good writing is a mixture of the calculated and the instinctual. Speaking at an event, British playwright Hanif Kureishi cast some doubt on the existence of transferable, teachable craft in writing by witheringly classifying 99.9% of his students as “untalented” and saying that writing a story is “a difficult thing to do and it’s a great skill to have. Can you teach that? I don’t think you can.”
Perspective and presentation should go hand-in-hand. While it is a regular to allow the opening to establish the tone, character, location, era or season, it can also pull a reader into the realm of the story that follows, and often into the head of the protagonist or into an alternate reality.
A great opening may also raise questions that need to be answered — who or why or how?
Writers can’t be ranked merely by their quotability, but Rabindranath Tagore is extraordinary. Talk of legacies and it is worth mentioning that no other language group reveres a writer as 284.3 million Bengali-speakers do Tagore. No translation is up to the job.
Today’s content economy is diverse, crisp and business-driven, attuned to advertising, marketing, fundraising or social media.
Creative writing requires a lot of focus, great communication, better understanding of the interior and exterior of the mind along with an eye for detail.
If nurtured from early years, this field can not only present several job opportunities but also generate a handsome income. And what better way to process thought than to take inspiration from our mundane, humdrum existence, which can provide us with a host of ideas and solutions, imbibing change and natural metamorphosis that in today’s time and age is not only relevant but also integral to the new world order.
Dr Sanku Bose, Group CEO (Techno India Group)
