It’s a rough time to be a paragraph. How often do you see a blurb setting up a video on a link your friend sends you and immediately scroll past it to hit play on Cute Kittens Wake Up Owners – Epic Compilation – New2014? Often words seem to be just getting in the way. People are reading less than ever, newspaper sales continue to drop, word-dominated outlets are pushing more video (The Onion, NYT) and I can’t think of one popular website that would be as successful without multimedia embedded in it (Grantland comes close).

The decline of words would seemingly lead to the decline of writers. But that’s not the case.

A writer is a storyteller. The first would-be writers were speakers before print gave them an audience on a larger scale, and the attention span people have for storytellers has been on the decline ever since. At first we gave someone all night to weave a story around the fire, then it had to fit in a book, then a newspaper, then a tweet. Now you have six seconds on a Vine to establish, climax and conclude the entire narrative.

If you’re a writer at your core – you love this. Because you’re a storyteller and writing is one tool of the many you have on your belt.

Nowadays words are not always the best way to tell a story. The bad writers will stay attached to their words, as many as they can carry, holding on to them like life rafts as they slowly sink. The good writers will become more visual, putting their entire story into one image. Words will still be used in the storyteller’s arsenal, but serve more as quick, tight jabs, rather than long, drawn-out spars. Each word will carry more weight, more importance, making their selection ever-more vital.

The decline in written copy doesn’t mean the decline in messaging, or people’s primal urge for stories. It means the artists formerly known as writers must learn to adapt – to tell stories – to communicate better. Less words doesn’t mean less of a story – it means a tighter, more impactful one. The selection of words matters more than ever.

As Abraham Lincoln famously penned to his friend, “I am sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have time to write a short one.”

Writing may be phased out, but storytelling will always be needed.

This image tells a heartwarming story about imagination without using a single word. A graphic artist didn’t create this – a storyteller did.