Posts Tagged ‘conversation’
Gadamer: A Tormented Relationship to Writing
The Best Writing Sounds Nothing Like Writing
Good writing is where you remember nothing about grappling with words but are instead transported with images and ideas that appeared in your brainpan. Effortlessly—or so it seems.
This kind of effortless reading is exceptionally rare with philosophers, who are well-known for obfuscation in their pursuit of parsing detail and cleaving difference from sameness. And yet Donatella Di Cesare, the biographer of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, claims Gadamer’s writing style is “lucid” with “striking prose.”
We’ll see about that.
The lucid philosopher is the exceeding rare philosopher.
I’ve just picked up Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait by Donatella Di Cesare (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007). In the introduction Di Cesare shared about her process:
There is a further difficulty that a monograph on Gadamer should not avoid, and that is his tormented relationship to writing. In order to get around his Socratic resistance to writing, he preferred the form of the lecture, the talk, or the debate. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost everything he wrote is based in dialogue.
She goes on to say Gadamer is “always careful to interrogate everyday language and to avoid rigid terminology,” so I am eager to see how his prose ends up as lucid and striking rather than simply tedious.
What piqued my curiosity was Gadamer’s alleged privileging of oral over written. It seems his inquiry was largely based in discussion, between people, rather than one man alone with a sheet of 20# bond and a pen. Again: I’m just at the beginning of reading Gadamer. I’ve got his big Truth and Method on order, but I know from my own writing that dialogue and conversation have a pull that abstract philosophizing rarely reaches.
The best writing sounds like a conversation with an interesting friend. I’m eager to see if Gadamer achieves that.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
How to Anticipate a Thaw
Sometimes life mirrors fiction
My client needs a strategy for their online presence.
They know their presence appears text-heavy and pedantic, making them less attractive to the new audience they seek. My client’s online presence must quickly inform the querying audience why they should care, but this message needs to be packaged with a color palette and intuitive organization that say “Come in!” long before the audience gets to the headlines, let alone body copy.
All sorts of off-the-shelf tools can make that happen these days. WordPress has a number of themes that can invigorate tired old websites.
But what I’m interested in is the engagement-promises my client can make that are deeply true. The organization itself is on the cusp of change and their online presence is a first new thing to present a refreshed vision. As such, their presence needs to be aspirational (“Here’s who we want to be”) but also rooted in long-held values. Their new presence needs to reflect the hard-won, chiseled facets they have come to love—facets that may just present new ways forward.
When I get stuck writing a piece of fiction, I go back and see what my characters have already been saying and doing. And then I retrace their steps along a new trajectory. And that is exactly what my client needs.
This is a team effort situated in real life. And this team effort will retrace and map and begin to outline a new trajectory. This team hopes to generate a conversation that precipitates a thaw after a long winter. We hope this conversation will pull in those who have long been hibernating.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
In Praise of Doing Things Badly
Rough draft as collaboration tool
I keep talking about rough drafts and dumb sketches. That’s because providing something when expectations are low is such a great way to share ideas. It’s a way to tell ourselves what we are thinking. It also a way to tell others what we might think together. But with the pressure off.
It’s also a great way to learn.
Some may say, “What? That guy needs a rough draft? What a chump!”
While it is true I am a chump, it is also true that presenting a rough draft—sometimes just the stub of an idea—can have an electrical, clarifying, vivifying power to move you forward. This idea, laid bare in all its clumsy, awkward glory, may just be the beginning of something important. Something even that holds your imagination for a year or five.
The rough draft laying there—all vulnerable and wrong—brings out the best in those who look on. Often evoking pity rather than harsh, fluorescent critique. And that makes for a great conversation.
What will you do badly today and share as a rough draft with a colleague?
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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
“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.
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
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
conversation is an engine 