On Text Messaging, My Greatest Creative Inspiration
How text conversations with my friends have helped develop my most popular pieces
My text messages have inspired my best work over the past decade-plus that I’ve worked as a professional freelance journalist. Yes, roughly 90% of my best stories are birthed from my friends messaging me about how they perceive that I’m going to think about the news. How my daily, off-the-cuff conversations turn into a completed post is a process that requires harnessing raw emotion into carefully selected words. Then I use a combination of logic and research to refine those rash opinions into poignant editorial copy.
If I hadn’t published 10 features a month for the past decade as a full-time freelancer, I’d be arrogant to believe that how I conceptualized facets of daily life worldwide is that important. However, I’m always searching for and discovering news, inventions, social movements, and industrial evolutions everywhere because of this audacious schedule.
Thus, my friends who know of my creative process frame comments in the form of leading questions that allow my responses to frame the editorial's narrative that’s likely to evolve from the conversation. Here’s a prime example, taken from my Facebook Messenger list, regarding what eventually became my in memoriam to…
