Open with a key point

I am guilty sometimes of being so taken away by telling a story that I forget to tell my readers what they are going to get out of it. You need to give your readers something to look forward to. It is basic human instinct to think “what’s in this for me?” and that’s a question you should look to answer from the get go. Readers need to know if a post is worth their time or not, and altering your posts to make sure that it does measure up to this test is the first of a few editing techniques you can use. The temptation is to make your point further into a post. Don’t. Hit early, hit hard and go home. Even if you are looking to tell a story, moving the key point up the order will not harm a story telling style. But it will affect the way your readers see the post, and that makes a big difference.

Mirror the content in the title

If I were to write a post that says “5 tips to get ready of that crazy girlfriend” (not that I am, sweetheart…I love you…really), then I’d number the sub-topics one through five. If it’s a list of positives and negatives, I’d make sure those are clearly mentioned. Make the content mirror the title and it will be a better fit in readers minds. The title is a promise, and the content should be its fulfillment. Failing to do so could leave your readers feeling dissatisfied.

Link back to a theme

Many posts, especially if elaborate, end up seeming disjointed. Don’t make a point in a paragraph or sub-heading and simply move on. End each paragraph with a concise point that sums everything up. Think of it as a takeaway, and it’s something for the reader to mull over, your entire argument in one sentence. It aids comprehension. And helps readers understand you better. If needed, add links or references as needed to support your argument and build credibility.

This is something that very many writers know fully well. It’s a crippling, debilitating, terrible fear to have, that you will never be good enough. It can be inspiring and intimidating to want to write as well as your favorites. It’s something to aspire to, or something that can really be your personal Everest, something you might never really surmount or that you feel will never surmount. But with time, I have learned something; the more you try to be someone, you are not being true to yourself. When you do that, your writing can never be of the quality you want it to be. What’s worse, it will never get the audience you want to since you’re simply an imitation of someone else, sometimes in a painfully obvious manner.

You must do everything in your power to avoid the paralysis that besets any writer when they think of trying to live up to the stature of their favorite wordsmith. But stop comparing yourself, you’re never going to sound like them just like they can’t naturally sound like you. Be comfortable in your own skin, and you will taste a lot more success once you start doing that. It doesn’t matter that everyone else has been at it for much longer, or even that they have more listening to their every word. Do you believe that there will never be a new face on the scene ever? If you do, allow me to tell you are wrong. No, I’m right, you’re wrong. Let’s run with that. A new star will always emerge, and it could be you. Start now, blog away and you could get noticed.

Every one of us (and yes, that includes you) has something about them that is fantastic and unique, your own calling card, your own secret weapon in the fight to win minds and eyeballs. Tap into that which makes you uniquely you and you will prevail. No other blogger can present your experiences, your memories and your perspective quite like you, and this is a fact. Pick a topic that you find interesting and are passionate about and write about it as well as you can. Just follow your own writing styles and watch the hits keep on coming.

Peggy, Don, heck even Roger; they just sit around and wait for the perfect idea to hit them, but it is Donald Draper that convinces them to spend the big bucks on ad campaigns in the Emmy Award winning series. Millions fawn over his carefully constructed campaigns and consumer culture and his character spawns industries and helps them become a household name like no other. And all he needs is the power of words. Nothing less, nothing more. Now that is very cool. You think it, you write it, you get it out there, and it changes the world. There is no way that cannot be construed as cool.It seems so far away, just like the generation portrayed in Mad Men seems so far away, but it really isn’t. Let me pick out a few select quotes from the hit show and I’ll explain how they apply to blogging and even life just as much as they do to advertising.

“I’ll never get used to the fact that most of the time it looks like you’re doing nothing.” ~ Roger Sterling

A writer’s blessing and curse is that he can be just looking out the window and still working, or sitting at a pool side and still having the gears churning. It’s relaxing. It’s enjoyable. It’s all part of the workday. Sometimes, just doing nothing is the best thing you can do, for if you don’t it’ll make your creativity dry up. So just stop and think on occasion. If anyone asks what’s on your mind, just say you’re working. It’s true.

“Fear stimulates my imagination.” ~ Donald Draper

Fear is a terrific thing, whether you believe it or not. If you’re afraid or anxious, it means you will be on edge and churning out some of your best ideas if you just let it flow unfettered. If you’re afraid, you have a cause to work towards, a reason to act. How many entrepreneurial stories have you heard of where the individual in question was broke and had to make things work lest he starve? It’s not just good luck that saw them prevail. Put a gun to your head and see the upturn in results, you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve when you will it to be so. I personally pledge to donate $100 each day to a political party I despise if I don’t hit my target of 1500 words a day. It’s a painful thought, but it works and it’s a powerful motivation. Find yours.

“A slogan’s nothing when you have a good idea.” ~ Peggy Olsen

The best of writers are a cornucopia of ideas. They will assiduously assimilate information at all time, listening, watching and reading away until they get that “Eureka!” moment. Finding the right idea is tricky, putting it across not so much for the skilled writer. Amateurs work the opposite way, writing the article and trying to stumble upon the idea while doing so. Take one idea, but make it a great one, and build your entire article around that one premise. Ideas are everything, and it takes care of everything else.

Once the ball is set in motion, it’s easier to just get things done and write away as much as you want to or need to. But starting can be absolutely killer. I can’t tell you the number of times I have started to write something before pondering over it, letting minutes pass by before I wipe it all away because I’m displeased at something or the other. It’s all about finding that elusive groove while writing, and once you hit it the words just flow like water from a dam that has just burst. To just sit down and write would be perfect, too perfect maybe. But perhaps there is a way to expedite the process of finding that groove.

Perhaps the single most important thing you can do is to just be wholly devoted to writing. All too often a distraction sets in; your kid hollers at you, a phone rings, hunger pangs set in and those are just a few of the possibilities. It’s imperative that you don’t disturb that rhythm of yours, that you don’t derail that train of thought. Because once you snap out of that rhythm, it’s very hard to get back on that horse. It’s as good as gone with the wind, just kiss it good bye. Adios amigos and all that. Cut out the distractions, it will hamper your creativity like nothing else. Get some quiet time, a window of opportunity within which to write and stick with it.

Get yourself your own space in order to do so. As an amateur snooker player, I’ve played in some little cubby holes where I would line up a shot and draw my arm backwards, ready to bring it forward in one fluid motion when I find my elbow bumping against a wall and my space being cramped. Now that sort of thing obviously distracts you too and takes away from the moment. There’s no way you can write quality when your style is being cramped. You need your own room, you need to clear things out and you need to de-clutter the space around you. That translates into using an ergonomic chair, using a comfortable keyboard and using a well lit room so you don’t squint around in an effort to make out what is what. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is no fun and it’s no way to get serious work in. Get serious about your space.

Writing should be comfortable, a pleasure, so try and derive as much satisfaction as you can from it. There’s no point in being a mindless drone about it. Only finely tuned Olympians and athletes can derive pleasure from routine that is singularly compulsive. Enjoy yourself and the rest will follow. You will a topic that inspires you, an angle that sparks your mind and the words will just flow magically. Try it, you’d be amazed to see how it works. You’ll be reeling off the articles and posts in no time.

Go crazy, edit later

Okay, so this is a bit sensationalist as advice goes, I must admit. You don’t literally need to go apeshit while writing a post, an article, a letter or just about anything else you can think of. What I do mean is that you need to simply cut loose and write whatever it is that you like writing about in your own, distinctive style. As my good friend Mr. Hemingway once said (okay, you got me; he isn’t really my friend), be real; it is the best way to produce compelling prose or copy that reels people in. Trust and persuasion is vital for the written word, so don’t ever write like some robot spitting out text heartlessly. Don’t write, tell; your copy needs life.

Patience is a virtue

Being patient is a very vital virtue when it comes to writing well. Sometimes, you just have to write whatever it is you want to and then walk away from it in order to gain some perspective. Anything looks better in hindsight (especially beautiful women walking away, but that’s not the point), so let that text simmer overnight instead of being in a tearing hurry to just get it done rapidly. Okay, so you have to be in a hurry at some times, but don’t get so excited about whatever it is you’re writing that you end up losing perspective. You don’t need to send it out straight away; give it some time and take a second look at it. You’d be surprised by how much you missed first time out.

Get a little help from your friends

If you’ve followed the previous piece of advice I mentioned in this post, read it out aloud. Not you, silly; get a friend to do it for you. This way you can pick up on little errors that you might have missed earlier. Problems with flow and continuity that just skipped by you earlier become clear as day all of a sudden. I’ll be honest; I rarely every do this myself and everyone says it’s the way to go and I do agree with the idea behind it all even if I rarely ever get around to doing it myself.

No, you did not misread that at all. Yes, I do mean it. Twitter can help you become a much better writer than you are, and I’ll tell you exactly how it does that.

Twitter makes conciseness really matter

If you have used Twitter, you will have doubtlessly noticed that you have just 140 characters to say whatever it is you have to. Not 140 words, 140 characters. There’s no more room for rambling diatribes and pointless foreshadowing in your prose. You don’t have the luxury of space to work with, brevity is where it’s at. Letters, symbols, punctuations, spaces…they all count as characters and force you to alter the way you write. Twitter is, in its own way, a very pure form of writing. You need to know exactly what it is that you want to say and you have say it without wasting an extra word or character unless you can help it. Many writers (including your truly) love to write long winding, overly wordy messages and it is impossible to be wordy and pack it into 140 characters. Again, how do you go about chopping that message down to size? We thought you’d never ask.

Expand your vocabulary just for Twitter

All that you have at your disposal are 140 characters, so you best make sure that you make full use of it. Blow the dust off of that thesaurus and dictionary and start to look up words that you can use, words that aren’t quite as complex as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. The key is to use shorter words, words that are more descriptive than those you might have other used and words that will help you fully utilize those 140 characters while at the same time getting your message across.

Pick those adverbs and adjectives by the scruff of the neck and replace them verbs. In the process, you will discover better clarity when trying to get your point across to a discerning audience. Now if you’re a newbie to the site, you’ll notice the character counter at the bottom and most people will hit somewhere around 145-160 characters to begin with. And so you need to chop back on some words and make things more concise. And this is also how Twitter helps you become a better writer.

Twitter brushes up your editing skills

Every writer has to have the ability to proofread and edit his own work and Twitter helps you constantly sharpen this one skill and keep your editing skills always running at full tilt. It’s like a little mini game; the clock is ticking down on that 140 character limit and you have to get a message across, make followers click on a link, retweet, reply or take action. And you have to get it all done with 140 characters. It’s a mind game like no other, forcing you to dig deep to come up with the perfect message. That should give you enough reason to use Twitter, but did you really need one?

Everyone talks about differentiating yourself and the value it holds for you, but it is very hard to capture their value in a nutshell and say “here, this is what you need to capture best”. Nor can I take your hand, open the palm and say “here’s your differentiation, now go and make something of it”. Because of this inherent intangibility, it’s very hard to discover exactly what someone means when they goad you to be more interesting. Here’s some ways to be interesting, at least to some people.

Be contrarian

Everyone’s trying to be right or honest or correct in some way or the other. Why go with the madding crowd when you can swim against the stream and make a lot more traffic hit your blog? Commonality is a boring thing, the wrong thing. Take a surprising stance, be a bit outlandish just be contrary to popular logic and people will stop and smell the roses.

Inject a bit of humor into it

Bloggers are a very serious breed, maybe too serious for my liking. It’s like we’re on this mission to teach the world something, and somewhere along the way we forgot exactly how to go about enjoying ourselves and entertaining people. It’s no good being a blogger if you end up putting your readers to sleep! So how do you break the reverie? Inject a bit of humor, that’s how. The best of orators use a bit of always, some more effectively than others. Just remember to be appropriate.

Irreverence is good

Stir the pot a bit, or shake the honeycomb if that’s a metaphor that more suits your tastes. Make fun of the things most people wouldn’t touch with a twenty foot barge pole. South Park is shockingly gross at times, but it is their irreverence that has won them so many fans. Laugh at religion, politics, diseases, anything that people hold dear. Yes, it will offend some but some people love it, and Maddox is a classic example of this.

Have a good story to tell

People just don’t get this one somehow. Stories support your arguments and whatever point it is that you have to make and make for a terrific opening line or paragraph, and it does all of this while entertaining readers. Forget the little anecdotes floating around the internet, everyone has those. What you have is a story to tell, so allow it to unfurl.

Craft it with love

Everyone cranks out blog posts the way China spits out cheap goods or the way Britney Spears used to create babies (but she has since stopped being a baby factory, to her credit). Honestly, do you want to craft a blog that is mechanical and absolutely devoid of any passion or love? I know I wouldn’t, some of those articles are just words regurgitated on a page (yes, I’m guilty of having done that when I’m busy or tired). Pour some effort into that blog and you’ll be surprised by how much more memorable and interesting it becomes.

Web Roulette

It’s like Russian Roulette minus a gun, and you’ve just got to spin the wheel (no, seriously) to get a random site across a number of categories (such as humor, tech, comics, opinion, science and so on). Web Roulette is a great way to snap that writers block of yours and get out of the rut you might find yourself in.

23,000 Great Quotes HD

“I have a mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it.” – Groucho Marx.

Has it ever happened with you that you read a great sentence or quote and find your creative spark just brought to life? That does happen to me a fair bit, and you most likely won’t browse through all 23,000 of these quotes, but it doesn’t hurt spending at least a few minutes reading through them.

Popplet

The name is absurd, the app itself is not. Sometimes all you need is someone to get in touch with someone who gets that inspiration flowing, opens up the floodgates as it were. Popplet is great for some idea generation, and it’s a brainstorming app that allows you to explore ideas and get inspired.

MovieVault

Sometimes, being inspired means simply taking a break from everything, just escaping from it all. That’s where this app and your iPad comes into the picture. MovieVault connects you to an archive of movies that you can watch. All you have to pay is the price of the app and you have access to a list of great movies to watch. Run away to a great story, and you can then pen your own stories with your creative spark plugs cleaned.

Zinio

Several traditional print magazines have gone digital and your iPad is a fantastic platform on which to view them. This app itself is free and it’s more of a digital newsstand for you to use with you paying for the publications themselves. Explore, dive in and get inspired.

It was the summer of 2006 when a book hit the New York Times Bestseller list. The title was a bit odd, but it promised to entertain and be provocative while talking about Economics. I never quite liked Economics as a subject, mind you, but the reviews were astounding. They couldn’t stop raving about the book, and so I forked out the money for it and walked off, wondering if my money would have been better spent on a couple of lattes instead.

Those delicious, delicious lattes.

But from first page to last, I didn’t miss those lattes. And you know why? Freakonomics was a wild, wild ride with stories that tickled the mind and made me laugh and think at the same time. It was light-ish reading and it was intellectual all at once. I read about the Ku Klux Klan and promiscuity and sumo wrestlers and drug dealers and it was such engaging reading.

Why didn’t anyone teach Economics like this back when I was studying? Every story made me want to read more and more about Economics, and I was fully immersed in a subject I never liked before. And in a way, I realized what Freakonomics really was; it was a bible for transforming blog posts into something sexy no matter what the topic. The writing style was crisp, intuitive and at times counter-intuitive (like the story about day care centers and disincentives that backfired) but the book was never boring in the slightest.

And each of those stories was attractive because of the name ‘Freakonomics’. It’s kind of hard to miss a book with a name like that, and it’s even harder to not read at least a few pages of that book with a title like that. And then that what is it, you’re hooked on stories like that. That title was like a giant neon sign that just captured your attention one way or another, and you can learn a lot from the easy and engaging writings in Freakonomics when it comes to making your own blog posts.

Keep it short

Hemingway was minimalist before anyone deemed it fashionable. He looked down upon the complex writing style of others and cut out everything flowery and unnecessary. To Hemingway, it was all about penning short, powerful prose that caught the eye and captured the mind. Challenge yourself to write less and less about something until you can distil it its essence into nothing more than a sentence. Hemingway demonstrated this when challenged to tell a story in six words and he came up with “For sale: Baby shoes, never used.”

That in itself is a subtle, brilliant and sublime use of terse prose.

Use a crisp opening paragraph

Refer to the first paragraph of this post and note how it is short in length. Hemingway used to concentrate the power of his prose into a short burst right at the beginning. This acted as a prelude to the main course for Hemingway who would then continue to build on the simplicity of the storyline and wrap an entire plot and sub-contexts around it. But the key always was to use a crisp opening paragraph that got the reader on the same page as Hemingway.

Be passionate

Hemingway had a way of infusing vigor and passion into his prose. Sample this verse from ‘Old man and the Sea.’

“He was a very big Mako shark, built to swim as fast as the fastest fish in the sea and everything about him was beautiful except his jaws. His back was as blue as a sword fish’s and his belly was silver and his hide was smooth and handsome. He was built as a swordfish except for his huge jaws, which were tight shut now as he swam fast, just under the surface with his high dorsal fin knifing through the water without wavering.”

The focus and intention of Hemingway’s mind is unwavering and unambiguous and what shines through is his vision and passion for prose.

Stay positive

This is all a bit ironic as Hemingway himself had a blackness in him, but we are not talking about negativity versus positivity in a human sense. We merely refer to saying something positively versus saying something negatively. If your dentist were to tell you “this will be painless” what remains with you is the word pain, not painless. So use positive words, such as economical for inexpensive or stable instead of error-free.