graham stewart

After The High Of Writing, The Low Of Doubt

June 2, 2015 By graham stewart

See if this rings a bell.

After a few false starts — or a regular bout of procrastination — you finally get down to work. Whether it’s for a day or a week or a month, at the end of this you finally have a first draft of something. Finished. Ready for revision.

During the work, your enthusiasm and passion have been on the increase. You feel you’re tapping into something you always hoped was there but secretly doubted you possessed. The feeling of achievement is enormous. For want of a better term, you feel high.

You set the piece aside to steep and simmer. You give yourself some space and time, knowing that you’ll return to it and start making it even better.

But then comes the crash.

As soon as you step back from the work, the passion fizzles out. The excitement drains. Your enthusiasm dispels like dew on the grass as the sun rises. You wonder what you were thinking. Writing is not for you: the thought of picking up and reading through hundreds of pages of talentless dross is the last thing you want to do.

In Pema Chödrön’s “The Wisdom Of No Escape” she talks of how to deal with these feelings. In her case — in a chapter called ‘Not too tight, not too loose’ — she is referring specifically to the practice of meditation but I think it works perfectly well in relation to the doubts writers feel when confronted with their shitty first drafts. (And remember, all our first drafts are shitty.)

Chödrön writes:

… when we’ve really committed ourselves to practice, when we have some passion for practice and we put our whole self into it, a very curious thing always happens: we get fed up, we lose heart, and we get discouraged.

For ‘practice’, read regular writing.

I’ve experienced this big time in the last couple of months. I finished a draft of a novel and set it aside — for a couple of weeks, I thought. But it has taken me almost three months to work on it again because of all those crazy voices and fears and doubts. Those three phrases — fed up, lose heart, get discouraged — describe perfectly how I felt about my writing.

After the high of finishing the first draft — and the excitement I felt at the story I was building — this was hard to deal with. It has taken a long time for me to get back to the draft. Of course, now that I’ve started working on it again, the excitement builds because writing is what I love doing.

I wish I read this Chödrön chapter sooner. Although she has no particular plan for overcoming the discouragement itself, she recommends simply accepting that this is a by-product of the excitement and success of good practice. Appreciate, too, that this is common to many people.

So I’m not special and different. Damn.

That makes sense: being compassionate to yourself as much as to others is a typically Buddhist approach to an issue. I’m trying.

Tell me how you get through that period of doubt that hits from time to time. Share your recipe for overcoming negativity in the comments. Please — I want to know!

(Balloon photo courtesy of Ryan McGuire at Gratisography)

Give Names To Your People, Places, And Things

June 1, 2015 By graham stewart

For the best part of a year in the early 1980s I lived with my then girlfriend in the wee village of Crail in the East Neuk of Fife. Meg was in her final year of university — studying French at nearby St Andrews — and I was doing what I often did when given the opportunity; I was acting the writer.

The only heating in our small dwelling was from a coal fire in the living room. This also served to heat the hot water. During the worst of the winter, we ended up putting on more clothes to go to bed, the bedroom being so cold. The flat itself was like a raised bungalow attached to the back of a much older house on Crail’s high street. It was a modern build with thin walls but the fact that it was raised above a large cellar meant there were decent views from the back door — approached from a steep climb of steps from the narrow wynd between the houses — and the bedroom window to the shore behind the house.

And it was to the shore that we went every morning to scour the beach for wood for the fire. Stormy nights always presaged a good haul. Often, after such a night, the sky was clear and the water calm, as if everything was resting, either gathering strength for future exertions or having boiled the anger from its system.

It was fun to walk the shore with Meg because she knew the names of birds and plants. Although she was the product of the city, like me, she had had a father passionate about nature, with whom she had walked the hills around Edinburgh. Where I could point and say ‘gull’, Meg could identify Skuas and Fulmars and Herring Gulls. She could even tell me that Skuas and Fulmars were not really gulls.

The shore at Crail was also rich in sea anemones, their compact fleshy purple so obviously phallic in the clear water as they clung to the side of ricks. I identified them immediately as fellow Hearts fans because of the colour and was happy to discover a like-minded group so close to where I lived.

I was thinking of Crail and the way Meg identified plants and birds when reading a chapter from “Writing Down The Bones” this morning. In the chapter ‘Be Specific’, Natalie Goldberg talks about being precise with description. Name a flower; name a tree. It works with people, too. I could have written the whole piece above talking only of ‘my girlfriend’. And although I haven’t seen Meg in almost thirty years, I think using her name makes this whole piece stronger than it would have been, had I left her unidentified.

I was sad to leave Crail and its beach and its wild weather and its harbour where a few boats still landed with a daily catch. A few months later I was living by the sea again but in Crete, where new birds and new plants — and new food and drink — added to my vocabulary. I acted the writer on Crete, too; this time for a whole year.

When I next returned to Crail, it was with my wife — Laura — and our first daughter, Isla. It was winter, then, too, and Isla was wrapped in many layers in a small buggy that we pushed up the hill from the harbour and passed the house I had shivered in for many months more than a dozen years before.

There is a wee promontory above the harbour at Crail and if you stand on it and brace yourself against the wind you can watch in wonder as the gulls — or Skuas and Fulmars and Herring Gulls — dance on the currents of air and threaten and cajole each other and swoop to their cliff-side nests or dive heroically, their wings tucked back against their sides, into the white-tipped waves.

(Image of Sea Anemone by Gwen and James Anderson [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons)

Rudy Rucker In Reigate (Sort Of)

May 19, 2015 By graham stewart

This is my copy of Rudy Rucker’s Journals. It arrived last Friday. Strictly speaking, it arrived on the Wednesday but I wasn’t at home and the postman couldn’t get it through the letter box so took it back to the sorting office, from where I finally collected it on Friday morning.

The picture on the cover is from a painting by Rucker called Jellyfish Lake from 2005.

Rucker launched a Kickstarter to get his Journals published and I was happy to contribute. In addition to the thick and lovingly crafted paperback, I also got access to a huge range of digital goodies from Rucker’s back list. From essays and stories to novels and paintings, I now have a pretty wide selection of Ruckernalia to peruse at my leisure. And because I don’t have that much leisure these days, I’ll have to set aside Rucker-time especially.

You can see the inside cover of my copy on the right. Rudy Rucker has attached a label showing the copy number. I’m also pleased to see that his signature makes mine look almost legible.

Stuck inside the paperback, by the way, was a draft story with all the corrections and annotations marked on the draft. Again, it’s refreshing to see in the scrawled edits evidence of handwriting that is as spidery and alien as my own. On the recommendation of Euan Semple, I got hold of “Teach Yourself: Improve Your Handwriting” but my hand, arm, and brain are conspiring to refuse to improve.

The Journals are now beside my bed and I look forward to dipping into them judiciously at the end of every day. I have 25 years of Ruckerness to read through.

Copywriters? We don’t need no stinking copywriters!

February 27, 2014 By graham stewart

You have a new product or service ready to go and a new website to market it.

Perhaps this product is going to be the very foundation of your new business.

Budgets are tight, of course. You’ve already shelled out for site design, the build, the hosting, the payment gateway, and the t-shirts. However much you believe the copy for your site is crucial, you’ve convinced yourself there’s no budget left for a copywriter.

Don’t panic. The steps you need to take to make a successful first impression with your writing are few.

Six, in fact.

Six straightforward steps. Here they are:

Grab
Convince
Get to the point
Convince again
Tell them what to do next
Don’t blow it

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Grab

This is the headline. (You probably worked that out for yourself.)

I call it grab to distinguish it from holler. Many people think the purpose of a headline is to attract as many people as possible. They look at a headline as a way of shouting in a crowd.

Nope.

The purpose of a headline is simply to tell people who are already interested that they’ll find more information below. Don’t waste time trying to attract an audience of big game hunters for mouse traps.

In other words, don’t be ambiguous, don’t be clever, and don’t be funny. (Unless you’re selling jokes, of course, but even then, it had better be a good one.) If you’re going to shout in a crowd, you need to know the name of the person whose attention you’re trying to attract.

Claude C. Hopkins – the patron saint of advertising copy – puts it as succinctly as this:

Address the people you seek, and them only.

Your headline serves the simple purpose of telling interested customers that what they’re looking for is about to be revealed.

Convince

You’ve promised something with your headline. Now you need to convince your eager audience that you can deliver.

The trick here is to exude authority. And, for most visitors to your site, this will be about the structure of your copy as much as the words. They want to be able to scan the page and be reassured that they’re going to learn what they need to.

This may sound like a design decision but it’s also to do with the way you use sub-headings and paragraph sizes.

If you can embed a testimonial or two in this section, that is a great way to back up your credentials.

Words are important, too, of course. And it’s crucial that you use the right words. Too technical, too “selly sell” (as Chris Brogan might say), too pompous, too simple – all carry their own dangers.

The tone of voice and the vocabulary and the way the words march down and across your page all combine to convince – or otherwise – that you and your product are the real deal and that you understand your target audience.

Get to the point

There’s a time and a place for telling your life story, explaining the reasons for that year spent trekking across Central Asia, and how and why you got the idea for the wonderful product you’re now presenting to a lucky audience.

This, however, is not the time nor the place.

You’ve grabbed your potential customers with a great headline and convinced them that you can deliver what they’re looking for. So, now is the time to follow through, to push your advantage, and to reinforce their sense they’re in the right place.

That means, tell them what they need to know. Now. Quickly.

Explain who the product is for and who it is not for. Tell them how quickly they can have it and what happens if they want more.

If there are caveats to share, share them now. Nobody will be grateful to you for making them stay longer than they need to.

By the end of this section your prospects should be desperate to know exactly how their lives will improve when they buy what you are offering. And that’s what you do next.

Convince again

Time to convince again. This time, however, the convincing is on behalf of the product and not you or your company.

This is where you explain how your product or service will meet or exceed the expectations of your customer. (This is not where you talk about you and your company and how smart you are and how the way you do things is better than the competition.)

Avoid the word ‘we’ as much as possible. For each ‘we’, make sure there are at least ten instances of ‘you’. Seriously. Your customer wants to know how the product helps them, not how it makes you feel.

You know the prospect is interested because they have come this far. Now is the time to drill home the benefits. Will it save them money? Will it make their lives easier? Will it make them more attractive (even in their own imagination)?

Tell them what to do next

Get the previous steps right and your call to action (“CTA”, as we marketing copywriters say when we hang out at those wild, marketing copywriter get-togethers) should be almost unnecessary. Almost.

Although your prospects should already be itching to take action, they need to know exactly what that action is.

You need to tell them.

Unless you tell them explicitly what you want them to do next – call, email, click the ‘buy now’ button, juggle with small animals – they will spend one or two moments wondering how to continue and, if the answer is not obvious, move on.

However well you’ve written the preceding sections, if your CTA is missing, you’re losing business. Period.

Don’t blow it

You’ve done all this work and your product/sales page is looking good.

You’ve grabbed your prospects, you’ve given them all the reasons they need to buy from you, and you’ve told them what to do next. Surely, that’s all that’s required? Is there really a final step?

Yes. But this final step is not a section you need to write. Instead, it’s a form of review – or editing. This is where you pick up the crusty food remnant on the silver service cutlery, the dodgy stain on the crisp white sheets in your luxury hotel room, the dubious hair on the fluffy towel, the…. you get the picture.

In short, this is where you make sure your readers don’t find out that you don’t know the difference between “their” and “there” and “they’re”, “its” and “it’s”, “your” and “you’re”, or even “discreet” and “discrete”.

Spellcheckers don’t help here, as you will discover.

Evidence of poor grammar or poor spelling may not affect the quality of your product or service but it can suddenly put a doubt in the mind of your potential customer. For the first time, they may wonder whether the lack of care taken on the page may reflect a lack of care elsewhere.

This is not worth the risk. Check and double-check what you’ve written. Read it aloud and get someone else to go over it, too.

Congratulations

That’s it. You’ve written a page that works. Visitors are staying, they’re signing up, and your product is selling well.

Time to start on your next page.

This Post’s Title

One of my favourite films is Treasure Of The Sierra Nevada, directed by John Huston and starring – among others – Humphrey Bogart. The image at the top is from the film. At one point in the film a group of bandits claiming to be lawmen accosts the main characters. They main characters demand to see badges. The lead bandit responds with a burst of righteous indignation, laced with invective. His response has, over time, been reduced to the much shorter misquotation of “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!”

The picture itself comes from an interview extract with John Huston.

So there you go.

Talking In One Direction Is Not A Conversation

October 7, 2013 By graham stewart

(That’s ‘in’ One Direction, not ‘about’ One Direction.)

A conversation is the best way to discover how to help someone.

In Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do (see my review of the book), Euan Semple gives over a whole chapter to the notion of conversations only being possible between equals – an insight he attributes to David Weinberger.

If you currently work in a traditional hierarchical workplace, this notion might strike you as patently wrong. However, that would reflect a misunderstanding of what is meant by ‘conversation’, especially in the era of the social web. Conversation is not a simple exchange of words. For instance, the following are not conversations:

Asking your bank manager for a loan
Responding to the inquiries of a police officer
Telling your doctor where the pain is
Explaining to your boss how you sent the customer the wrong order

You may have conversations at some time with each of those people but it won’t be when they are assuming their ‘superior’ position and you your nominally ‘inferior’ one.

Much business writing – and marketing material and the content found in customer support channels, especially – defaults to a position of superiority. The business takes on an almost paternalistic role of talking down. We know our products and we know best how to use them and what they can do to make your life better. You can see how that approach would lead to messaging that is distant, pompous, and aloof. There’s little chance of any information flowing back up that channel of talking down.

Like one of those letters you get from your credit card company, for instance.

Empathy is a good place to start. And add a dose of humility. Carry those into your writing and your engagement with colleagues, customers, and your social networks and there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself getting more than you give. For open thing, empathy and humility tend to help you listen more. Then you learn more and find better ways to help others, whether that’s with advice, a product, or a service. And when you listen and help, you’re heard and helped in turn.

It sounds like magic. But you know it’s not.

When I used to read stories to my children at bed time, the stories always worked best when I read them as if I were as excited and interested and surprised by what happened as my son or daughters. If I read the stories as an ‘adult’, as someone who felt the stories slightly beneath my intellectual or emotional intelligence, the children grew bored. As bored as I was.

This withdrawal from genuine connection is what happens with a lot of business writing; huge swathes of company Facebook pages are a great example of this, where ‘conversation’ is limited to pressing the Like button and the marketing department think they’ve truly engaged with their customer base because they had extra ‘likes’ on that last passionless and redundant post.

It’s often fear, I believe, that prevents us from engaging people with our real voices. Fear and the habits ingrained in us. Too often, we feel we need permission to be genuine. That might be the permission of our boss, of the legal department, of the marketing department. As soon as those considerations tiptoe into the edges of our consciousness, we’re doomed to look for a one-sided interchange: to glean information or to dispense it. It’s a one-shot interaction and no conversation is possible.

This fear often stems from the very fact that true business conversations are rare. That’s one of the habits we internalise. We expect to adopt the superior or inferior position, depending on whether we’re buying or selling or advising or seeking help. Social tools are starting to break this habit. Powerfully and, I’m pleased to say, quite quickly. This is one of the reasons that large companies have been slow to adopt their widespread use, especially across the boundaries of the organisation.

If you’re in such an organisation, preempt the adoption of the tools and reach out yourself. Find like minds within the company and set up conversations with your peers. (Check out the ideas that Anne Marie McEwan of The Smart Work Company is developing for the workplace.)

And if it’s a conversation, that’s because everyone involved is your peer.