Archive for the ‘curiosities’ Category
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
For Some, The Past is Still Present
One Wall in North America’s Only Walled City
This art wall reminds me of Wendell Berry’s The Memory of Old Jack.
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
“6 things I learned after drawing 319 drawings in 4 months and 13 days”
Especially #6. Buy Why Does #2 Work?
I follow One Drawing Daily in my attempts to produce my own Dumb Sketch Daily. But whether you’ve made it a point to draw or paint or sketch or shoot photos (or write essays or verse or reflections) there are some curious things about developing and sharing daily habits.
Read One Drawing Daily’s whole post (please!) but I’m particularly interested in #6: “Draw whatever you feel like.” Much of art—like much of life—seems to be about absorbing the sensibilities of the taste-makers among us. Critics, media, famous artists. Famous people who are famous for being famous. There is a subtle pressure to like what they like and do what they do. But uniformity is not the great thing about the human condition. One of the great things about the human condition is that we all have a slightly different take on things. I love seeing different people’s perspectives. And developing your own perspective takes time and attention. But out of the habit of time and attention come a point of view.
And #2 still enthralls me: “Share everything you do!” How is it that the simple act of sharing something can have so much impact? It’s true with writing, true with making dumb sketches. It’s true with our ordinary conversations and when we confess some secret to someone else. It’s true with my clients: as they come to understand the power of sharing expertise and passion, all sorts of things start to happen in their business. It’s still shrouded in mystery for me, this sharing thing, but I’m pretty sure it triggers something in us that simultaneously wakes us up and fine-tunes consciousness.
What habits are you building?
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Image credit: One Drawing Daily
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.
What hope looks like.
Maybe something like this.
Minnesota friends–think back–can you recall “Spring”?
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
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
Tom Scharpling: “A problem never comes without a gift in its hand.”
On creating for love not profit
Everything has worked to my benefit, even the things that felt, at the time, like they were working against me. A problem never comes without a gift in its hand. You may not even be aware of it until five years later.
–Mike Sacks, Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers.(NY: Penguin Books, 2014) 277
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
How to Focus. And Why.
Sometimes it’s hard to see past the niggly imperfections of the day.
Fie on the dirty windscreen.
What glories have we missed?
And sometimes we use other tools and attitudes and conversations to get clarity.
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Start at the Top. Again. (Copywriting Tip #10)
Tell Yourself the Story
Imagine holding a long piece of tangled fabric. You hold it high above your head because you want gravity to gradually unravel the twists and tangles. Maybe you shake it. Probably you smooth it out: starting at the top again and again and work your way down the length to get the fabric straight or flat.
Many threads to unravel.
What works for fabric also works for a complicated idea. Sometimes the only way to unravel a complicated topic is go back again and again to the beginning, flattening and shaking out the twists and turns as you retell the story.
I’ve recently finished up a complicated article about our changing health care system. The article had lots of moving parts. It was not a long article, just dense and in need of translation: from jargon-filled, industry-speak to human.
Time and again I found myself stuck in the middle and staring at the screen: so many bits and pieces to fit. Absolutely stuck and wondering how to line these parts up so they make sense (and so they are sorta interesting for the target audience). Because in the end we read one word after another. We read in a linear way, even though the story may compose itself in our brainpan in non-linear chunks.
The only way I could get myself unstuck was to start at the beginning again. Back to that very first paragraph, and work my way through. Sometimes I would modify that paragraph to fit what was next. Sometimes I would modify what was next to fit the lede. But the only way forward was through the beginning.
During National Novel Writing Month I found myself doing this, mostly as a way to find out where the story was going and how it could possibly move forward. It was a way of telling myself the story hidden in the words already written. There are one thousand ways to write the story and some will present as we retell it to ourselves. And so we pick one.
Sometimes retelling the story again and again is the only way forward, because it leads to understanding:
By the way, a wonderful book about locating the story of your own life is Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. Check it out.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
conversation is an engine 