I Think I’ve Always Been a Storyteller

Stories, poems, observations, notebooks, scraps of ideas and years of quietly gathering the pieces.

I've recently added a word to the way I describe what I do.

Storyteller.

Not because I've suddenly decided to become one.

Quite the opposite.

I've realised I've probably been one all along.

I've been writing for most of my life. Stories, poems, observations, journal entries, ideas, characters, bits of conversations, things I've noticed, things I've wondered about and things I haven't quite known what to do with yet.

Some became finished pieces.

Some became artwork.

Some became projects or businesses.

Some are still sitting in notebooks and files waiting patiently for me to work out why I wrote them down in the first place.

And there is a lot of it.

For years, I don't think I really considered all of that writing. I was simply gathering.

Gathering stories.
Gathering observations.
Gathering characters.
Gathering ideas.
Gathering life.

Now I'm beginning to understand what I've been building.

The Collector of Little Things

I've always observed people.

Not in a sinister way, I should probably add.

I just notice things.

The things people say. The things they don't say. Strange coincidences. Little acts of kindness. Ridiculous situations. How people behave in groups. What makes us laugh. What makes us uncomfortable. The peculiar things that happen in communities and families and workplaces.

Sometimes something completely ordinary happens and my brain immediately thinks:

There's a story in that.

So I write it down.

A sentence might sit somewhere for ten years.

A character might appear before I know what their story is.

Something funny someone says can trigger an entirely different imaginary world.

And sometimes an experience doesn't make much sense while you're living through it. Years later, you look back and suddenly understand what the story was really about.

Perhaps that's what I've been collecting all this time.

Not data in the traditional sense.

Human data.

Observations about life.

Some of It Is True. Some of It Definitely Isn't.

This is where things get interesting.

I have journals and observations drawn from real life, but I don't particularly want to become someone who publishes a running commentary about everybody I've ever encountered.

People can relax.

Names will be changed.

Places will move.

Several people might mysteriously become one person.

One person might become three.

Timelines may become completely unreliable.

And occasionally the truth will be so ridiculous that I'll probably have to tone it down to make the fiction believable.

Because I'm interested less in documenting who did what to whom and more in the little truths underneath it.

Friendship.

Ambition.

Kindness.

Jealousy.

Creativity.

Fear.

Love.

Ego.

Resilience.

Community.

Failure.

Starting again.

And the enormous amount of humour involved in simply being human.

Those are the bits worth keeping.

Then There Are the Other Worlds

Of course, some of my stories don't pretend to live in the real world at all.

There are fairies.

There are Vikings.

There are strange creatures.

There are magical stones, hidden places and characters who have been wandering around my imagination for years.

I've been developing fairytales and fables alongside my other creative work, often inspired by places I know and the landscapes around me.

Living on the Isle of Bute gives you plenty of material.

Old buildings, woods, beaches, ruins, weather, history, characters and stories seem to exist everywhere.

Give me all of that and my imagination will inevitably interfere.

And I'm finally beginning to bring some of those stories together into books.

I've Been Building Worlds for Years

The funny thing is that once I started thinking about myself as a storyteller, other parts of my work began making more sense too.

I don't only tell stories with words.

I've spent years doing it through art, photography, multimedia, characters, brands, products and projects.

The Highland Dancer has a story.

Happy Tartan has an entire colourful world of characters and adventures.

And my newest project, Braw Gifts, has already produced Mr Moo Coo, Paddy Baa and Mr Seagull — three characters who very quickly developed personalities of their own.

That's what I love about creating.

One idea rarely stays one idea.

A drawing becomes a character.

The character needs a name.

Then a personality.

Then you start wondering where they live.

What would they say?

Who are their friends?

What happens next?

Before you know it, you've built another world.

Twenty-Five Years of Digital Scraps

There's another part of this story too.

I studied multimedia in Glasgow at a time when the digital world looked very different from the one we inhabit today.

Since then I've accumulated an extraordinary digital trail.

Photographs. Writing. Designs. Old websites. Projects. Documents. Journals. Ideas. Artwork. Half-finished things. Finished things. Things I had completely forgotten I'd made.

Technology has changed repeatedly around me, but I've kept gathering.

And now we have tools capable of helping us search, organise, connect and make sense of enormous personal archives.

I find that fascinating.

Because perhaps the next stage isn't about creating more and more.

Perhaps some of it is about looking at what is already there.

Finding the threads.

Connecting the dots.

And finally finishing some of the things that have been quietly waiting.

Getting Ready to Publish

That's where I am now.

I'm sorting.

Reading.

Editing.

Rewriting.

Protecting some things.

Laughing at others.

Occasionally wondering what on earth I was thinking.

And slowly building the books and collections that have been sitting in pieces for years.

Some of the writing will appear here in my Journal.

There will be articles about creativity, art and technology.

There will be observations of life.

There will be short stories.

There will be fairytales and fables.

There will be stories behind the brands and projects I build.

And some things will remain safely tucked away until they're ready to become books.

I don't know exactly what shape all of it will eventually take.

I'm actually quite happy about that.

Creativity has never worked particularly well for me when I tell it exactly where it has to go.

So, Apparently, I'm a Storyteller

Artist still fits.

Multimedia artist definitely fits.

Creative entrepreneur explains another part of what I do.

But storyteller connects something I hadn't quite connected before.

I've been telling stories through images.

Through characters.

Through places.

Through brands.

Through projects.

Through words.

And through a lifetime of quietly noticing things and writing them down.

So this isn't really the beginning of me becoming a storyteller.

It's just the beginning of me letting you read some of the stories.

— Nicola x