There is usually a point between having an idea and sharing it when doubt arrives. The story feels too ordinary. Someone else has probably said it better. The observation seems too small to build anything around. You wonder whether anyone beyond your immediate circle would care.

Meanwhile, people are already finding audiences by telling stories in whatever form suits them. Njugush has built an entire comedy career from the details of ordinary Kenyan life, while Crazy Kennar turns familiar experiences around transport, relationships, work and politics into sketches people recognise immediately. Julia Gaitho built So This Is Love around intimate relationship stories, while podcasts such as The Messy Inbetween, Mic Cheque and The Mkurugenzi Podcast have found large audiences through conversations about friendship, identity, work and culture. On Substack, writers such as Nicole Nyamweru, Ongalo Glenn and Felgonah Oyuga are writing directly about dating, loneliness, friendship and contemporary African life.

This is what storytelling looks like now. While the forms are different, the reason people return to them is similar: they recognise something of their own lives in the stories being told.

We tend to overlook the stories closest to us because familiarity makes them feel unremarkable, yet this is often where great stories begin. Our everyday lives contain this material: the family rituals everyone in your house understands, the peculiar rules of an estate you grew up in, the way people behaved in a shop your parents owned, the things customers say, the things mothers say, the things landlords do, the experience of trying to build something with too little money. All of it can become something larger once somebody pays close enough attention.

Music has understood this for a long time. Some of the songs that travel furthest begin inside intensely specific experiences: a relationship, a particular phrase, an argument, a longing that belonged first to one person. Once the song enters the world, listeners begin attaching their own lives to it because the details that make the story personal are often the same details that make it believable.

The same thing happens in other forms. A joke about one grandmother can unlock memories of many grandmothers. A Facebook post about running a shop can become a story about ambition, money, work or failure. An Instagram post written because something amused you on Tuesday afternoon can travel much further than you expected because somebody reading it knows exactly the person you are describing.

The internet has made this exchange possible on a scale that would have been difficult to imagine a generation ago. A person with something to say can begin with a Facebook account, a Substack newsletter, a microphone, a phone camera or a song uploaded online. The route between storyteller and audience is now wider, faster and far less formal than it once was.

But what if nobody ever reads your Facebook post? What if your YouTube channel stagnates at ten followers, all of whom are family members? What if the podcast never gets beyond a handful of listeners?

Consider the Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob. According to the account preserved in the Hatäta, he spent two years hiding in a cave during Ethiopia’s religious conflicts of the seventeenth century, using that isolation to think through questions about religion, morality, reason and how human beings should live. Centuries later, the work is studied as one of the most remarkable texts in the history of African philosophy.

Whatever audience Zera Yacob could have imagined for those ideas at the time, he could hardly have imagined us discussing them nearly four hundred years later.

That is part of the reason to record what you know, what you have seen and what you have lived through. Once it exists outside your own head, it can outlive the moment that produced it and reach people you could never have imagined.

Africa is far too large, complicated, funny, contradictory and alive to be represented by a small number of people. A fuller picture emerges when many people describe what they see from where they stand: the person growing up in Kisumu alongside the person building a career in Nairobi, the person raising children in Accra alongside the person dating in Lagos, the grandmother whose stories belong to another generation and the teenager documenting a world that older people barely understand.

Imagine trying to understand Nairobi twenty or thirty years from now using only newspaper archives. You would learn a great deal about politics, infrastructure and business. You would learn much less about what dating felt like, what people argued about online, which phrases everybody suddenly started using, what made them laugh or how people were trying to make a life in the middle of everything else that was happening.

The podcasts, essays, music, comedy and social posts being created now fill in those spaces. Taken together, they tell us how people actually lived.

So if you have been thinking about an experience for months, begin shaping it. Write in the language that allows the experience to breathe and give the reader enough specificity to enter the world you are describing. If you know a story that disappears a little every time it is retold, record it while the details are still there.

Someone may recognise themselves in it. Someone may learn something from it. Years from now, somebody may simply be grateful that a person who was there bothered to leave a record.

Write it anyway.