Archive for the ‘Communication is about relationship’ Category
English: I still believe in you.
Get in that job-machine, mister.
More dire news for university English departments: from the University of Maryland, English majors are bailing like mad. And faster and faster.
The humanities have been getting a bad rap for, oh, half a dozen decades or so, because they don’t lead directly to a slot in a job machine. And, as the thinking goes, without the job machine you fail at life. Or at least paying for life’s good things (like a huge TV and plenty of Lean Cuisine) (Or rent and clothing).
We’ve certainly seen this coming. We’ve wondered: Why go into college debt just to be a philosophy-talking barista? We’ve lamented the pitiful conditions of adjuncts. Colleges in my area cut budgets and then cut more, from fat to bone. And now wholesale amputation to accommodate the demands of producing souls for job machines.
True: English departments that focus solely on esoterics need to undergo change. I’ll argue that any academic program (or any institution, frankly) that promotes the inward-gaze as the end-all, top-function of the human condition is currently being rudely awakened.
Smart English departments are tuning in to this—just like businesses have been realizing people don’t really care about their product all that much. Even churches are starting to realize there is a world of people living and working just outside their doors—people not interested in joining the club but crazy-interested in the meaning of life. Speaking of churches, we used to call it “evangelism” when we invited others in. Business evangelists understand all too well the benefit of going where people are and adapting their product to current conditions.
But reaching out to the rest of humanity—that’s where the action is.
It’s because we’ll always need to reach out, to communicate something to someone else, that I’m optimistic about English, if not exactly English departments. Rather than an either-or approach (deep-thinking/creative expression or assembly line training), we need both-and: deep-thinking and creative expression that leads to more conscious assembly line work. And perhaps that thinking will help us move beyond assembly lines entirely.
As I prepare my next set of writing classes for college English majors, I am beefing up the entrepreneurial end. Because the way out of a soulless slot in a job machine is to invent your own job machine.
That’s something we should train writers to do. And some of those writers will be English majors.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Lift and Separate (Copywriting Tip #12)
An idea is a new combination of old elements
This part comes after.
After the interviews and after reading the transcripts, after absorbing the journal articles and revisiting the notes from discussions with various experts. After taking in as much as you can, there is the sitting-back and ordering of facts and impressions.
Maybe you use an outline. Maybe you use index cards. Maybe you use a mind map or a white-board. Maybe you draw figures or icons on the back of corporate memos. But this is an essential creative exercise: sorting through and lifting up what keeps coming to the top. This creative exercise is about identifying and corralling the really important stuff. The stuff that simply must be transmitted.
Take steps to see more.
A shortcut to this essential phase is a conversation. If a colleague interrupts you with “What’s that project about?” The first three things out of your mouth—those things worth remarking on aloud—those three things need to find their way into the copy. Often they become the main topics.
Sometimes I’ll just start writing to see what I say. Give yourself 10 minutes to answer “What is this about?” and you will come close to producing an outline for the piece.
Or you can write a letter to a smart ten-year-old. Molding an idea into a simplified (but not simplistic) presentation has a clarifying effect.
The point is that your mind needs to find a grapple with myriad facts and figures and impressions and data—to sort minor from major and to begin to find the story that makes sense to you and to your target audience.
I like the wide-open blank page aspect of this exercise. I also like that brand new stuff presents itself during the exercise:
…an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.
–James W. Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas (NY: Thinking Ink Media, 2011)
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Here’s the Story of a Man Named Quady
Who was living with three alloys of his own
Yesterday I met Quady* for coffee. I was impressed all over again by the executive function of his brain: how he seems to effortlessly order complicated systems and businesses and talented people and even his own life. Quady** told me how he was weaving consulting with business acumen with creativity. I could not help but be impressed with the forward motion the guy exuded.
…and here’s the dumb sketch you ordered.
In fact, it was about ten years ago I met Quady at (yet) another Dunn Brothers on another side of Minneapolis to talk about how he grew the business he was running at that time. He was president of a firm that placed creative people in creative positions and his firm was on fire (that is, busy). At the time he gave me some solid advice which I resisted for years until embracing it fully: make a daily/weekly habit of reaching out to make contact with varieties of people.
And listen to them.
These days Quady is weaving together a consulting life that draws on his outsized executive function and his creativity plus a desire to walk alongside people. He’s a kind of CEO-for-hire and he’s currently working some high-level gigs. It’s the melding of these three threads that seems to open doors for him: the organizing gene plus the creative gene plus the people-smarts gene. Because he understands the moving parts of business, he can give solid, real-world advice to people. He gives the kind of advice that encourages from some deep place: the sort of advice like,
“Look. You’ve got this. It’s a stretch, but you can do it.”
And who doesn’t want to hear that?
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Dumb sketch: Kirkistan
*Not his real name.
**His real name was Markothy.
Write Alone And Send To Collect. (Copywriting Tip #11)
Except for Bill Holm
Bill Holm, by Brian Peterson, Star Tribune
The late poet and writer Bill Holm spent his days teaching at Southwest Minnesota State University. In the context of daily teaching, he was too busy to write his own works. But when class finished for the semester, he wrote his poems and stories and memoirs long-hand on the back of the memos he received at school. Interestingly, he was a gregarious soul who often welcomed people into his house but continued to write at the kitchen table even as he engaged in discussions with visitors.
But for many of us, writing is a solitary activity. Oh, sure: ideas pop in conversation. Careful, committed writers take note of the idea on whatever scrap they have handy. And that scrap becomes useful when the writer is, yet again, sitting before blank screen or page.
Unless you are/were Bill Holm, it is the typical writer’s fate to sit alone.
This is not to say writers must be loners or introverts. Those are not necessary conditions, although they do often fit together.
But creating is only one part of writing. Yes, it seems like the biggest part of writing, doesn’t it? Creating and the aura around creating are certainly the most celebrated bits of writing.
But another part of writing is reading. Specifically, getting read. And that requires publishing, in one form or another. At its essence publishing is getting read by someone else. And for all the (quite true) advice about “just sitting down and writing” and “writing = butt-time-in-chair,” it seems to me there is still a missing piece: the reader at the other end of the writing. Written words need to find and land on their audience.
Here is a place where writers might learn something from copywriters. Copywriters have deadlines. They have people who expect copy at a certain time and quite often that copy is delivered verbally—often read aloud by the copywriter to the client.
Something happens when writing is read aloud to an audience. The text itself tends to shape and reshape and the writer hears it differently because of the people listening. The writer cannot help but see things differently when another person is also hearing the copy.
Many will say that some of their best writing happens during revising. I agree. Especially after having read something aloud to someone else and seen their reaction. It can be thrilling. Or depressing.
Butt-in-chair time is essential for writing. But sending your writing out—scary though it might be—is equally essential to hear how the ideas land and to revise with creativity and gusto and possibly increased motivation.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston, Brian Peterson/StarTribune
George Saunders: How do you energize someone?
Sometimes it will be a word.
Bright bits among the ordinary.
George Saunders, on the odd little Zen parables he heard growing up. Told for laughs, they also carried deeper hints about how to live and what is important in life:
My whole childhood we lived next door to this family I’ll call the Smiths. We didn’t know them very well at all. At one point, Mrs. Smith’s mother, who was in her nineties, passed away. My dad went to the wake, where this exchange occurred:
Dad: “So sorry for your loss.”
Mrs. Smith: Yes, it’s very hard.”
Dad: “Well, on the bright side, I suppose you must be grateful that she had such a long and healthy life.”
Mrs. Smith (mournful, dead-serious): “Yeah. This is the sickest she’s ever been.”
My dad came home just energized from this. I loved his reaction.
–Mike Sacks, Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers (NY: Penguin Books, 2014), 241.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
The Talking Part of Writing
Talking Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death
When it comes to brand new, unpaged ideas (that is, not yet written), J.K. Rowling is right:
But at some point every idea needs to make contact with an audience. Writers want their idea fully-formed with beautiful plumage before they exhibit it to anyone (lest someone call my baby ugly). Copywriters know this is not possible when it comes to collaborative writing—writing that serves some mission or purpose for an organization or cause—which needs client eyeballs as a part of the process.
Because Lillian Hellman is also right:
And Nora Roberts is especially right:
There’s the writing. And then there’s the fixing. I often think of the fixing as equally creative as the original writing. Great and wonderful things happen at the fixing/revising stage.
There is a point in every copywriting project where it must be discussed. It must be read aloud. And the key is—especially with new clients—fail faster.
I recently made a category error with a new client and I’m wondering how high a price I’ll pay. Rather than insisting on an early reading and sharing first thoughts when the bar was low, I let my content slide through several holidays until the deadline is an approaching storm and the bar is high for the copy to be right on the first reading.
Which it isn’t: it’s full of questions.
Which is almost always the case with a new client. Especially if the topic has a lot of moving parts.
So lesson learned (again): insist on failing faster and earlier.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Stop On The Way
Ask: “What do you see from there?”
Mostly we hurry from this to that.
In this season we move from party to party. At work we move from meeting to meeting, hardly stopping to breathe, let alone reflect or appreciate the unique spot we’re in.
We do this because we are crazy-busy (always the right response in our culture). And sometimes reflection is uncomfortable, especially between things. No one really wants to dwell in the space between. But the space between has things to say as well. Things you would never hear otherwise.
Always “crazy-busy.”
We all know someone stepping between things. Maybe our friend has left a job or school or some relationship. Maybe we ourselves own some piece of life that has less than secure footing. All of us caught in between want the solid ground of the other side.
But we gain perspective by asking what we see from this liminal space. What does life look like from this uncomfortable, slippery place? What is important here—and should that thing be important when our footing is more secure?
Perhaps we do our friend a favor by asking what they see from that uncomfortable place—could it even be bit of mercy to ask that question?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Please Say More, My Radical Lesbian Feminist Friend
Mary Daly: Voice from the Fringe
Well, “fringe” for me.
I’ll confess: I’ve not been so conversant with feminist theology or philosophy. And this: it had not even occurred to me to think about it.
Sometimes a different perspective helps cut the fog.
But then I read our daughter’s college paper on Kierkegaard and his potential exclusion of women. Our daughter’s reference to the self-described radical lesbian feminist Mary Daly and her Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973) was something like click-bait for me and I had to order the book. I’m glad I did. Mary Daly’s voice has been a playful, combative, eye-opening excursion into seeing things differently. I’m only a chapter in, but already she has named patriarchal theology and turned it on its ear. Ms. Daly has suggested all sorts of thought-exercises that would never occur to anyone living in the usual theological/philosophical grid system:
For example, women who sit in institutional committee meetings without surrendering to the purposes and goals set forth by the male-dominated structure, are literally working on our own time while perhaps appearing to be working “on company time.” The center of our activities is organic, in such a way that events are more significant than clocks. This boundary living is a way of being in and out of “the system.” (43)
You don’t have to be a theologian or philosopher (or even a radical lesbian feminist) to appreciate the different way of seeing things Ms. Daly offered. A quick glance through her Wikipedia entry suggests there was personal a cost to seeing things differently—especially in the male-dominated structures she worked within.
What I like about this particular quote is how it points beyond authority to the organic or self-directed work each of us knows as our own. Much has changed since Ms. Daly wrote this in 1973. We still have male-dominated structures and maybe those are changing, though too slowly for many.
But think about “structures” for a moment.
Reading the quote as a freelancer and entrepreneur, I cannot help but notice how exactly her description fits anyone with a growing sense of their own work or mission—especially where that work or mission differs from the work or mission handed down from authority.
Regardless of gender.
The point is not to agree with everything Ms. Daly said. The point is to begin to hear. And to begin to see—so then we can begin to name the framing system we live within. By noticing and naming, potential solutions may begin to appear.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Who We Are Who We Aren’t.
A lot rides on identity
- We aren’t torturers, that’s for sure. Except for…wait, it looks like we are (read the report here).
- We believe in the rule of law, unless we’ve been violated. Then we stand above the law.
- We believe in the level playing field, where everyone has the same opportunity. Except bankers and corporate boards and Wall Street and race are exposed nearly every week as rigging the game and handing big money and privilege to the rule makers.
- We’re not a police state, except for when we are. And it looks like we are building in that direction.
The personal and local and national conversations we need to have are getting harder and much less comfortable. Maybe that’s because we’ve put them off so long and been in denial for so long. Maybe it is because we remain afraid of talking with people unlike us.
But we need these conversations. These are the conversations that help us figure out who we are. These are the conversations that help us move forward.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
conversation is an engine 