There’s no magic formula or pill to take, but these (mostly) old-school techniques still work

As the famous line from Alice in Wonderland goes: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

Not to be your high school English teacher, but trying to write something without an outline is like trying to build a house without blueprints. You might be able to throw up a wall or two, but sooner or later you’ll get painted into a corner or the whole structure will come tumbling down on itself. That only leads to wasted time, money and frustration.

Outlines for real-world business people

With all due respect to my superb high school English teach Mr. Hallowell (see Stop Clearing Your Throat When You Write) I hated the academic outline protocol: Roman numeral I., subtheme A. and supporting point 1. That doesn’t work for many people who aren’t in academia and I won’t subject you to it. Instead think about how you’re going to “sell” your content to your target audience. I know you know how to sell!

1. Identifying the problem. Start out be clearly stating the problem you’re trying to solve for the reader. Even better, assure them they’re not the only one facing this problem. Sharing stats from a reliable source, quotes from a recent article/broadcast clip or a client example are great ways to draw readers in and convince them why they need to read your words right now! 
2. Explain what happens to the reader if they continue to ignore the problem. Life gets worse, they lose money, the leave big opportunities on the table, they have a less than satisfying life. Maybe explain why skeptics don’t want you to address this problem. You get the picture.
3. Briefly explain the solution, i.e. “there’s got to be a better way.” 
4. Show the reader how much better their life will be by following you the solution. Include compelling stats or anonymous examples of clients who followed the advice and are much happier for it.

VERY IMPORTANT! Don’t give away the whole solution here. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a short post or a feature-length book. Just give them a taste….not the whole meal. Show readers you know what you’re talking about, but if they want the full solution, they must book a discovery meeting with you to learn more. Make sure your Contact Me link is working on all of your digital points of presence and make sure it’s not too salesy.

5. Conclusion. Summarize the argument you just made and inviting them to contact you for a more detailed conversation about the topic. Share links to related resources on your website if possible.

Your finished outline should look something like this:
1. Intro: Identify the problem
2. Find common ground. Show readers they are not alone with this problem.
3. Explain dangers of ignoring the problem.
4. Introduce the solution.
5. Show reader how much better life is with solution in place.
6. Conclusion (with calls to action).

Outline complete: Now sell the Content
Now that you’ve completed the outline, don’t start fleshing out your piece yet. First think about how you’re going to sell it. You need to think about your headline (or book title) and Key Takeaways.

Headline
Start noodling around with some catchy headlines to hook in your busy readers. I’m not suggesting you engage in click bait or search engine optimization. Just ask yourself what will make a super-busy person you’re targeting take time out of their busy day to read what you have to say.

TIP: See what the headlines you’re considering look like in the subject line of an email. Do a few test-emails to yourself or better yet, send to unsuspecting colleagues and see which one gets the most (or quickest) reaction.

Key Takeaways
What are the three key things that you’d like the reader to take away from your article, post, white paper or e-book? Many of you follow our Key Takeaways protocol at the top of your writing. Trust me, in this attention-starved mobile age, there’s no better way to make your content skim-able and worth reading (and saving).

Now that you’ve got the outline and sales pitch for your content, you’re almost ready to start fleshing it out. But first, think about how this content will fit into your overall content schedule for the weeks and months ahead. Will it be duplicative or overkill? Should it be standalone or part of a series? Should it be the intro 101 version of your expertise, or is it more of your “advanced course”?

Map out your content schedule

Just as we never recommend writing anything without an outline, we don’t recommend writing anything in a vacuum, i.e. without thinking about how it fits into your overall content cycle. Think of yourself as sharing a body of work—not a series of random one-off takes about a subject. We recommend laying out your planned topics 12 to 24 weeks in advance. You don’t have to stick to the schedule as real-world conditions make certain topics more urgent than others. But following these tips will ensure you have solid “blueprints” in place and you’ll never be up late at night staring at a blank screen wondering: “What should do I have to write about next?”

Even better, once you have your content calendar laid out in advance, it’s amazing how many nuggets of great information you’ll start accumulating weeks, if not months, before you have to write your piece. It’s like having a “rainy day fund” for your content ideas.

Conclusion

You wouldn’t have clients invest their money without a plan. You wouldn’t hire an architect to build your dream house if he or she didn’t use blue prints. So, why would you start pushing out content to your universe of followers without a plan? Familiarize yourself with the 1-7-30-4-2-1 principle. My post The Power of Content Calendars has more.

#betterwriting, #outline, #writersblock, #productivity

Forget apps, hacks and shortcuts. Writing takes practice, practice, practice

Last week’s post about The Key to Writing Faster provoked a lot of feedback. In fact, Jeffrey Wyant, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Coast to Coast Fulfillment, Inc. in West Greenwich, Rhode Island submitted a great guest post that I wanted to share with you.

Guest post: JEFFREY WYANT — Writing is all about putting one’s thinking and imagination down in a form that can be passed on to other people over time. Without writing, we’d still be living in caves. You need the thought first, but the exercise of writing your thoughts down forces you to develop the thought first and then work out the details so others can understand.

As the old saying goes: “Your thoughts are only as good as your ability to express them.” Here are two more corollaries to that rule:

1. If you want to learn something, teach something.
2. If you want to know about a subject, write a book about it.

Following these corollaries forces you to clarify your thoughts, to fill in the blanks and to communicate what you know in a form that can be absorbed and acted upon by others.

Einstein’s greatest achievements did not occur in physical laboratories, but in laboratories of the mind. Did you know his renowned theory of relatively came from a “thought experiment,” (a what-if scenario) he conducted in his mind?  Then Einstein had to write it down in order to remember it and to enable others to reflect and act upon it.

Many Eureka moments happen when previously-muddled, but nagging, thoughts coalesce into a new idea, a cogent breakthrough. Some of us experience these moments in the shower. Biochemist Kary Mullins got the idea for the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) while driving through a California forest at late at night. As soon as he could, Mullins wrote down what came to him during that late-night drive so he could test and refine his theory.

Mullins’ “ideation” process led to a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for what became a crucial part of the method enabling the development of the Covid-19 vaccines and many other DNA/RNA-based medical treatments. But none of that would have happened if Mullins didn’t take the time to write down his initial thoughts.

Writer Gabriel García Márquez was struggling for years to convey what he regarded as powerful psychological and philosophical truths in a nascent novel. As with Mullins, inspiration took place in the car for Marquez while he was driving his family to a vacation destination. During the long drive, Marquez finally figured out in his mind how to portray the fictional town of Macondo and the multi-generational lives of the Buendía family. He immediately cancelled the vacation, returned home, and wrote “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which has sold over 50 million copies in 46 languages. Márquez won the Nobel Prize in literature 1982 But that never would have happened if he hadn’t freed up his mind on a long drive and immediately written down his early thoughts!

Writing as a tool for innovation

I’m not worried about winning Nobel Prizes, but I can’t tell you how empowering it is to get all the random thoughts in my brain, written down and loosely organized and codified. Somehow writing things down make them real. I have taken some writing classes to improve the process, but the big lesson I keep getting is JUST KEEP WRITING…Write…anything. The eye-hand-mind coordination itself helps develop more neural pathways, which become stronger, faster and more resilient over time. Over time, you learn to string the disparate “monkey-mind” thoughts together into a compelling story.

I spend a lot of time in entrepreneurial circles. It’s often said that that business plans are simply dreams put forth for others to read and buy into. One of Elon Musk’s dreams is to colonize Mars. His company, SpaceX, is the path to that dream. But to go on that path Musk had to learn to read Russian books and papers on rockets. Then he had to articulate in writing how his dream could become a reality.

We all have dreams and great ideas. But the only way to make those dreams and ideas actionable for others is to capture them in writing and then describe for others to take to make them a reality.

Conclusion

I am a firm believer in practice, practice, practice — which is why I am writing this to you. It’s good practice for me, but I hope it contains some nuggets that can add a bright spot to your day.

What’s your take? Jeff and I’d like to hear from you.

#practicemanagement, #betterwriting, #ElonMusk, #SpaceX, #innovation

My college track coach was not the nicest guy in the world, but he had a unique ability to distill complex concepts into the simplest terms. On our first day of practice, he gathered all the nervous freshmen together and barked: “Gentlemen: The key to running faster is to practice running faster. Hopefully it won’t take you four F’n years to figure that out.”

The rest of Coach’s speech had too many profanities to recite in this forum, but his bluntness and world-class motivational skills got him into the Track & Field Hall of Fame. So, we sprinted down the longest, steepest cow pastures we could find near campus. We did dozens of 100 meters sprints—AFTER “warming up” with 10 mile runs in the heat. We allowed Coach to chase us in his pickup truck (at 10-12 mph) as we sprinted up abandoned fire trails—with no shoulder to turn out on if you got tired.

The idea was to get our legs (and minds) used to turning over faster than they ever had before. That, or get run over. We thought Coach was out of his mind, but as our times began dropping and the wins piles up – 150 straight meets at one point – his approach didn’t seem so insane.

Busting through summer doldrums

As we head full steam into the summer doldrums, many of you are struggling to get your blog posts, articles, presentations, podcasts, videos and eBooks to the finish line. It’s natural to hit the mental wall during the Dog Days of summer. A week doesn’t go without someone asking me for a secret formula or quick “hack” to help them bust through writer’s block or get off the procrastination treadmill.

As far as I know, there’s no secret. You just have to practice writing faster.

Whether you use a PC, tablet, phone or legal pad to compose your thoughts, most of you can write plenty fast—and cogently. You got through years of schooling and advanced certifications. Didn’t you? You just tend to get hung up on perfection. Blogger Hannah Heath explains why you should let your first draft suck and Vaibhav Vardhan explains why your first draft is supposed to suck.

Our advice: Just listen to your inner voice. Get your thoughts on paper and then revise, revise, revise. To paraphrase Voltaire: “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.”

Here are some tips that have helped many of our clients:

1. Frame it. We’ve never been big on formal outlines since they conjure bad memories of school term papers. But you still need some kind of framework for the wisdom you’re planning to share with your audience:
   — Start with a 1-2 sentence intro about why you’re taking on this topic today.
   — Then come up with 3-4 bullets about what the reader will learn.
   — Conclude with one big thing the reader will learn after reading what you have to say.2. Time It. Set the timer on your phone for 30 minutes. Don’t answer any calls or emails and just write away. At the 30-minute mark, stop typing and see what you’ve got. Don’t worry about grammatical errors or typos. Just ask yourself, does it flow? Does it make a point? Does it sound like me? If not, give yourself 5 more minutes max.
   
   3. Sell it. Now can you write a provocative headline and subhead around what you’ve got? Why should a busy reader take time out of their day to stop what they’re doing and read your words? What can you share that they haven’t already heard a dozen times before?

   4. Summarize It. Summarize what you’re trying to tell your readers/clients/followers in 3-4 bullet points. Those are the “Key Takeaways” that go at the top of your piece to make it easier to scan on a phone, tablet or computer screen.

   5. Step away from it.  Take a break from your writing for at least an hour. Chances are, the words you thought were so brilliant before your break suddenly stink like a garbage dump I August upon your return. Don’t despair, that’s part of the process. You can give up, or you can dust yourself off and make it better.

   6. Read it back to yourself aloud. Better yet, dictate it into your smartphone voice recorder and play it back. You may not like what you sound like, but this technique will prevent from straying too far from your point and from falling into the run-on-sentence rabbit hole.

   7. Revise it. E.B. White said, “writing is hard work and bad for the health.” Perhaps it is, but it’s an essential part of communicating with your clients, prospects, employees and stakeholders. Set a deadline. Go with your best effort, and then revise, revise and reviseeven after it’s been published. That’s one thing that’s great about publishing in today’s electronic age. It’s never been easier to fix things and make them better in v2.0 (or v3.0).
   
   Conclusion
   
   Writing is like a muscle—the more you exercise this skill, the stronger, leaner, and more efficient it will be.  To become a faster writer, you simply have to practice writing faster. But it’s less painful than getting run over by a pickup truck.Like it or not, you need to be a writer. You might even enjoy the process of seeing your writing times and wordsmithing stamina set new personal bests.

What’s your take? I’d like to hear from you.

#practicemanagement, #betterwriting