Activist Guide: The Power of Writing and Storytelling

By: Amber French, Senior Advisor, International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.

Original presentation prepared for a skills-sharing webinar for Beautiful Trouble, June 3, 2025

This short guide addresses all activists interested in using the tool of writing to further democracy, justice and peace. Any kind of organizing experience is valuable, whether it’s funded or not, and writing carries enormous value and power for our movements, whether in the form of storytelling or something else.

Writing is our expressed humanity

We are stronger than we think. Authoritarians, corrupt elites and other power abusers dehumanize activists, reducing them to advocates for a cause. Yet grassroots actors are also strong conduits of agency, action, intellect, ideas, imagination, creativity, experience, valuable learnings, emotions…

Writing rehumanizes and vehicles solidarity to grassroots leaders engaged in nonviolent struggle for democracy and peace. Activists and their expressed humanity are an under-recognized force to counter violence and injustice in our societies.

The term “storytelling”

Storytelling can be defined as tracing our histories back to the very seed of our activism, in a way that logically reconstructs our trajectory so a target readership can understand, make sense of, and learn from it.

What are we really talking about when we say storytelling? What kinds of actions and activities? They include:

investigative journalism and movement-centered news outlets like Waging Nonviolence and ICNC’s blog;
engaged publishing (like Daraja Press);
documenting human rights violations at the grassroots level;
publishing zines, underground publishing
fiction writing and poetry;
activist blogging and podcasting;
a whole array of multimedia formats: plays, movies, art and so on, which require telling a story;
writing and translating activist resources (like Beautiful Trouble and the ICNC Resource Library);
collective applied research reports like the Fatshimetrie campaign in the DRC (discover this fascinating campaign here);
not to mention the more classic stuff like advocacy campaigns on social media.

Activist blogging played a crucial role in many Arab Spring revolutions, drawing considerable international attention to nonviolent revolutions in countries like Tunisia and Egypt (Aya Chebbi wrote a very influential activist blog, for example). Writing itself carries the very seed of resistance in it—but also much more.

Storytelling helps humanize people—activists—who oppressors do everything in their power to dehumanize. Telling their own ‘stories’ to an international readership helps activists build bridges with the outside and make external support more activist-centered. In my experience, many human rights defenders want to tell their stories… not everyone, but many.

But the narrow frame of storytelling distracts us from an important point. It makes us gloss over the real tool for change, which is the fundamental skill used in storytelling: WRITING, which underpins many multimedia formats beyond just text. You need to engage in writing in order to produce videos, movies, podcasts, art exhibits and so on. Activist writing has been my topic of work for the past 17 years as editor of three online journals—I’ve commissioned 300+ articles from 150+ authors, at least half of whom identify primarily as activists. So in the first part of this guide, I’ll be referring to the writing frame, while the last half will be more specifically focused on storytelling tactics as nonviolent resistance.

The activist writing frame

Engaging in activism often requires dedication, strength, resilience, pain and loss. Writing can sometimes be a long, difficult, time-consuming and painful process for activists. It can bring back trauma. It’s intensely personal. I always tell my authors that writing is a physical extension of their hands, their fingertips; it is part of who they are. The stakes of activist writing are high, both personally for activists and their close circles, and politically for their movements. Importantly, activist writing is very much a function of building self-confidence and developing a sense of entitlement, in a positive sense—the belief or the REALIZATION that we are entitled to a readership, that our experiences and our voices are worth being heard. A sense of entitlement is essential in our activism more broadly: every human is entitled to their human rights, but we don’t all fight for or seize/exercise our rights, because we must first realize we are entitled to them.

When we focus on activist writing, we more fully capture the human agency that activists carry as people who accomplish complex, brave, outstanding, smartly calculated tasks at their own peril.

The writing frame is also important because the nature of activist writing is very different from the nature of non-activist writing. That is to say, activists sometimes relate differently to writing than non-activists do. They have unique needs as writers. Activist writing is done in real time, in real life, with real human consequences and impacts. It has a normative and political nature. Activist writing is both a process and a product. It is simultaneously an expression of, and catalyst of, truth and human agency. More than just performance, activist writing is performative—which means it has the capacity to remember, to legitimize, to remind, to instruct, to spur action. In short, writing makes our activism whole, and storytelling is only one very small piece of this. But again, don’t worry, this guide will also shed some light on storytelling as resistance.

A quick step back

But before we go further into writing or “storytelling” tactics, I want to take a big step back and return to the point of departure of this presentation: That writing is hard when you’re an activist. There are different starting points and categories of activist-writers:

Category 1: “I don’t have anything worthy to write about. I don’t have anything to say.”
Category 2: “I have something to write but don’t know how to write it, or I don’t know what to write, what parts of my experience to bring out.”

The majority of my activist-authors are in this phase, and I commonly have to coach them to identify their successes. Importantly, successes include both outcomes you’d typically view as a success—achieving a movement objective—and what some might consider “failures” and lessons learned.

Category 3: “I have many things to write. I’m ready to write them or already am. I am looking for specific tools for specific goals, because I want to make a change with my writing.”

Some of my activist-authors fall into this category, and that’s great, but many of them have a very narrow view of the usefulness of writing, seeing it only as resistance itself (social media campaigns, hashtag activism, etc.). I usually have to coach this kind of activist-author to see their own worth, beyond simply as someone with a grievance that they want to talk about and calls for action they want to advertise. Like I said at the beginning, our oppressors want to reduce activists to that, when in reality, activists have so much to offer to the study and practice of strategic nonviolent struggle.

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Take a moment to think about which phase you are in. Are you in phase 1, “I don’t have anything to write about, I don’t have a story to tell”; phase 2, “sure I guess I’d be down to write something, why not, but I don’t know what to uplift and need some guidance”, or phase 3, “I am ready to put pen to paper, I already do a lot of writing and I want to make more of a difference with it”? You might be between two categories.

Below are some tools and daily practices that can help activist-writers tap into the full spectrum of human agency that writing offers us, beyond simple advocacy.

Put on your journalist hat

Think of a confident activist you know. Ask if you can informally interview them. Ask them PURPOSE questions like:

What was the seed of your activism?
When did you first start identifying as an activist? Was it spurred by a personal injustice you suffered, or a collective injustice going on around you that at some point you realized was happening?
How did you come to realize that the personal suffering was in fact an injustice? Or if observed, how did you find out it was happening, a news report, a conversation with someone, some group interaction?
How did it make you feel? Why didn’t you ignore it?
Why do you identify as an activist today?

And so on. If the person doesn’t give you a straight answer that truly speaks to PURPOSE (this is very common), then probe until you get an answer that is clear and explicit enough. Ask your questions a couple of times, in different ways. Look for holes in their logic. What is missing from their answers in order to really understand why they are an activist? Follow up with questions about specific facts: who, what, when, where, why, how.

Take notes and review your notes later to ask yourself what they placed emphasis on. Can you relate? If so, how exactly? Why?

Find a “mirror buddy”, a non-judgmental listener

Ask the shy neighbor who is a decade younger than you, or your mother, or a brother or sister, or the shop cashier you see every week, if they could lend you an ear for 15 minutes (SET A TIMER FOR YOURSELF! Don’t waste their time) so you can tell them more about your work and why you are an activist. Use those informal interview notes you took to guide you.

Then, ask this “mirror buddy” (I’ll explain this title) to summarize what you said, and see if they have any questions for you. What did you need to clarify for them? If you don’t want to or can’t find a non-judgmental listener, record yourself. Video is great, but even just audio is scary enough. 🙂

The underlying concept of this exercise is that editors and readers force you to be face to face with yourself. They put a mirror in front of you, and that’s what is scary. Find a friendly person to be your mirror to practice in before putting yourself out there.

Use informal writing methods

If you would typically write in a blank word processing document, go ahead and do so. Then, open a chat conversation or email (ideally on your mobile phone) and explain to a trusted friend or family member what you wrote and why you wrote it. Then… use THAT text as your written product. When you type in a blank document, it’s hard to imagine your readership, so you tend to fall into platitudes and you’re not really saying what you mean. But when you’re addressing an actual physical listener, you make more of an effort to be understood on that person’s level, and this is good for writing. If you don’t have someone in mind, you can also come up with a couple of specific reader profiles to keep in mind while writing, and their biodata—a South African activist for women’s rights who is 50 years old; a young male Colombian researcher who studies peace communities during the civil war, etc.

I always tell my writers: If you want your writing to make a difference, then say what you mean, and mean what you say. This means dropping platitudes, “sacking the teacher in your head” to use the words of a colleague Laurence Cox (you’re not in school anymore, write from your heart!!! Here’s a great example of a blog that was written from the heart, by Mariam Azeem.) Mean what you say means assuming responsibility for your words, owning up to them. They are an extension of you.

Go audio: record your voice into a message to yourself or to someone else on WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram if it’s safe to use technology (don’t share personal data). You can playback your message and type and edit the text it renders. It isn’t cheating, it’s being smart and efficient!!! Many years ago, I worked with a French researcher who was visually impaired. This was before apps for the visually impaired became widely available. He was the author of dozens of books—mostly academic studies but also some non-fiction. He wrote his books entirely through diction, instead of typing, because he had not learned to type efficiently, having lost his sight in the early 1980s. I read much of his work and had always noticed how conversational his tone was. When he revealed his writing method to me, it became clear that the speaking element not only made him more efficient and even prolific, it also improved his written voice.

Brainstorm your successes

…which necessarily include your failures and lessons learned

Brainstorm with your fellow activists if you have achieved something together, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Prompt them with ideas: Did we successfully train people? Did we pull off a nonviolent campaign that had some sort of impact? Ask trusted family or friends: Have I told you something that made you feel proud of me, with regard to my activism? What was it, why were you proud? What difference did it make in your opinion?

>Check out this related Beautiful Trouble tool.

Learn about all the ways that writing is power

Below are the 38 ways writing is power, which will hopefully spark some ideas on how you can leverage your writing and storytelling to shift power dynamics in small ways and/or flex your agency in bigger ways.

A little background about this list, because I didn’t make them up, I just observed and compiled them. So let’s give credit where credit is due. Activists are already doing them; they just perhaps don’t recognize the value of them (they have not developed the confidence or positive sense of entitlement required to recognize the value of them).

I’ll also set the scene, since this is also a guide about storytelling 🙂 I attended a gathering of east African activists last winter, who were all leveraging writing in some creative or expository way: as podcasters, TV and film producers, independent journalists, filmmakers, poets, singers, social media influencers, as well as classic “writers.” They wrote scripts. They created videos and wrote posts for their Instagram followers. They read to us their poems from published anthologies. They wrote song lyrics. They managed parody news sites and wrote political satire. They managed local NGO communication strategies. Yet what they all had in common was that their writing was normative: it was to nonviolently struggle for human rights and social justice (and this takes many forms beyond simple advocacy—which is a central argument of my presentation).

As I listened to the conversations over the course of the four-day gathering, including during a session I co-hosted with Rosie Motene to this effect, I scribbled down mad-scientist looking notes to capture all the ways writing is power. So without further ado, here they are.

Writing is…

((check out the Beautiful Trouble tools I’ve embedded into this list – they guide activists on how to operationalize writing as nonviolent resistance!)

…a vehicle for advocacy, raising awareness, movement communications < Beautiful Trouble tool to check out
…a vehicle for sense-making, personal reflection as an activist
…a vehicle for sense-making, collective reflection as a movement
…a source of revenue for activists
…a source of revenue for movements
…a way to officialize information and events (related to truth-telling) < Beautiful Trouble tool to check out
…a way for inter-movement and intra-movement activist learning, education, training and edification to happen
…documentary resistance, a way to set the record straight, truth-telling < Beautiful Trouble tool to check out
…a way to share information (journalism)
…a way to let information get out safely (smoke-writing)
…a way to take a step back and see your activism more clearly, to find your way back to your unique, original “why”, to know ourselves better, to know the truth about ourselves in a world where lies our told about us
…used to influence or control the narrative about your struggle, to not leave silence about ourselves for others to fill (it’s less about what you say, it’s more about who you are)
…a way to generate external support (funding for trainings, international solidarity, unarmed accompaniment for nonviolent movements in conflict zones, etc.)
…a way to build trust with external supporters
…a way to humanize ourselves, in the face of vociferous dehumanization campaigns led by our oppressors
…a way to own up to our activism
…a way to resist suffering and let joy reign (humor, satire, parody…)
…a way to dramatize injustice (humor, satire, parody…) < Beautiful Trouble tool to check out
…a way to keep searching for answers
…a way to find connections and common ground with others, to build community
…a way to build self-confidence and find your voice
…a teambuilding exercise for movements
…a way to learn about how others see you (when you write for international outlets and work with editors)
…a way to give a voice to the less vocal participants of a movement
…a relatively low-risk, low-threshold nonviolent action for those activists who do not wish to be on the frontlines (scrupulous digital security measures must be taken if that writing is to be released publicly, but there are other writing formats and methods that do not require this, like gathering written activist testimonies)
…something that can be leveraged to improve gender and minority inclusion in a movement
…leaving a trace and thus is noncooperation, because our oppressors want to erase our traces
…a way to contribute to the democratization of knowledge
…a human right
…our duty as activists. By sharing our voices, our insights, our experiences, our successes and failures, we are accountable to all other activists in the world fighting for human rights, freedom, peace and social justice
…a way to appropriate power (access to editorial production and publishing)
…something that less-trusted movement participants can be entrusted with (you don’t have to do anything with what they write, and you didn’t raise suspicion by trying to exclude them from your movement which could cause panic and make a movement implode)
…a way to quickly seize trigger events and shed light on injustice that is happening right now < Beautiful Trouble tool to check out
…a tool or strategy, not an action; it promises more when approached with the long term in mind (proactively like building an archive of written activist testimonies, or documenting war crimes) and not as delivering some quick solution (reactively, like launching a hashtag campaign on Twitter)
…does not happen in a vacuum. It is normative, it is politically charged, it gives rise to action.
…not just performance, it is also performative. It connects words with action. It consummates our activism or makes our activism whole. And it makes us whole as activists.
…a way to embrace our humanity
…a way to demystify.

What I really like about this list is that it is about how writing IS power, not how writing CAN be power. It’s already happening; activists are already leveraging writing in these ways—they are already deriving power from this tool.

Take some time to digest this list. Read a few of our REACT activist-authored posts. Come back to the list in a few days. Print it out and show it to your fellow activists. Lead a brainstorming session and solicit some reactions: In our work, have we observed activists using writing for these purposes? If not, why not? What are we missing, what can we do better?

The greater human project

I am a firm believer that as difficult, time-consuming and painful as writing can be for some activists, it is really worth it, at the very least on a personal level, for its reflective value. Writing with or without a readership is a transformative experience and a way we can each individually play a role in the greater human project of defending rights, justice and freedom.