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Why You Need to Write Your Memoir

A story.

In 1943, when my grandmother, Margarita, was 34, she was living in Bandung, Indonesia with her husband, 12-year-old daughter, and newborn son. At the time, Indonesia was a Dutch colony, but the Indonesian government agreed to let the Japanese army use their islands as a base if they would get rid of the colonizers. So the Japanese started putting all the Dutch women into internment camps and all the Dutch men into work camps.

Margarita’s husband, Wilhelmus, was also taken into one of the men’s camps where they were put to work building infrastructure for the Japanese. Do you know the movie, “The Bridge On The River Kwai“? According to family history, Wilhelmus was one of the prisoners who was forced to build that.

My grandmother, Margarita Blankevoort Binning. I wish I could have written her memoir.
One night, Japanese soldiers showed up to take my grandmother into the women’s camp. In a panic, she grabbed a set of coffee spoons, two left shoes, and a bassinet holding her 3-week-old son.

There were 108,000 Dutch women and children put into internment camps on Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and Timor. My grandmother was one of them; fortunately, her son was not.

She was taken to a way station camp, a clearinghouse, where she would be sorted and sent to a different camp in the area.

Internees were held in more than 350 camps across the Far East. In the internment camps conditions were severe. Food and clothing were generally in short supply and facilities were basic. Conditions varied according to the location of the camps. Those on mainland China fared relatively well, but conditions in the Netherlands East Indies were among the worst and casualties from disease and malnutrition were high.

— A Short History Of Civilian Internment Camps In The Far East

She had been there for two days when she stopped producing the milk her son needed, which meant he had nothing to eat. She said, “He never cried. He just opened his mouth to try to nurse, but there was nothing for him.”

So Margarita went to the camp commander and said, “You need to send my son away. There’s nothing for him to eat.”

“Where do you want me to send him?” the commander asked.

“I don’t care,” said Margarita. “He’ll die if he stays here. Please send him away and save his life. At least if he’s not here, he can survive.” She decided she would rather give up her son so he could live than to keep him with her until he died.

That night, more soldiers showed up at the house where her daughter was staying and said, “Come with us.” No explanation, no details. Just, “come with us.”

Her daughter, who was also named Margarita, had a German father, so she had not been taken into the camp with her mother. Instead, she was living with a German woman. And since Japan and Germany were allies, the Japanese soldiers left German citizens alone.

The soldiers escorted young Margarita to the camp, where she was taken to a fence where my grandmother met her. They didn’t speak, neither of them said a word. She just handed her son — my father — over the fence to her daughter and then turned and walked away, still never saying a word. She spent the night shattered and sobbing, refusing to forgive herself for what she had done, frantic about what would become of her son.

Two years later, when the camps were liberated, she was reunited with her two children and her husband, and they left Indonesia and returned to the Netherlands. She later moved to the United States, and my father was 9 years old when he moved to the U.S.

My grandmother, Margarita Blankevoort, at age 36.
My grandmother told me that story, and several others, as I was growing up.

Stories about how thieves blew sleeping powder under the door of their house and then stole all of their furniture in the night. Stories about how Indonesian militia massacred a convoy of Dutch women and children on their way to a Dutch harbor. She and her family were supposed to be in that convoy, but went a day later.

She told me stories about growing up in Chile, her life in The Netherlands, her life in Indonesia, and her time in the United States as a young mother.

She’s gone now, passed away at 101, so I can’t ask her questions or learn more of her stories. It’s something I wish I could have spent more time doing, learning stories I could pass on to my kids and grandkids. They never met her, and now they’ll never know her stories.

I can tell them the stories that I know. I could even write them down, but they would be vague generalities and broad sweeps culled from memories of half-heard tales, not rich details.

We have forgotten our great-grandparents. Our great-grandchildren will forget us.

What are your stories? What are the cool, dramatic, exciting, or emotional things that happened to you in your past? What are the life lessons you want to pass on to your kids and grandkids? Would you like your great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to know who you are?

We have forgotten the fourth generation before us. Many of us — nearly all of us — have never met our great-grandparents. I’ll bet you don’t even know their names.

And our great-grandchildren will never know us. They won’t know our names, what we did, what lessons we taught our own kids. Any stories they hear about us will be mostly forgotten, half-heard, and lacking the rich detail of the original storyteller.

This is why writing your memoir is critical to preserving your life story and leaving a legacy for the people who come after you.

A memoir is more than just your autobiography. More than “This is my life and what happened to me.”

A memoir is your story of “these are the lessons I learned in my life.”

You can pass your memoir on to your family and friends so they know what you stood for and what you accomplished in your life. They’ll know your history, both good and bad, and they’ll remember you for generations to come.

I’m now working on a book about how to write your own memoir, so if you’re interested in hearing more about it, leave a comment or email me, and I’ll let you know when it’s finished.

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Stop Leaning on These Five Copywriting Crutches

Even the best copywriters use clichés and rely on copywriting crutches. It’s inevitable, but it’s preventable. We’re trying to spit out a lot of copy on tight deadlines, and while our fingers may work faster than our brains, our brains will pop out any old stuff just to keep our fingers moving.

And that’s how clichés appear in our work. We don’t mean to do it, it just sort of happens.

But if you keep a few of the worst offenders in mind as you’re working, you may catch them just as they spill out onto your keyboard. And if you missed them the first time around, you’ll catch them on the edits.

Here are the five copywriting crutches and clichés we need to avoid.

1. Let’s face it

There’s nothing wrong with this, per se.

It fits where it’s used, no one is using it incorrectly, and it conveys a feeling of resigned acceptance of the problem at hand.

But it’s just so overused that it has been rendered completely useless. It’s like the Spin Doctors’ “Two Princes,” which got played over and over and over and over and over to the point that I hate it so much, I will drive my car off a bridge to escape it.

“Let’s face it” is the “Two Princes” of writing. It should be struck from your lexicon, burned to ashes, which you then jump up and down on, before putting them in a lead-lined box and dropping it into the Mariana Trench.

(I really hate this phrase almost as much as I hate “Two Princes.”)

Just pick something else. Anything else. In point of fact. In truth. You gotta admit. What are we even doing here?

In truth, it makes you sound like you’re not trying very hard. Pick something better.

Needs

Probably the most overused word in all copywriting.

You gotta admit — see what I did there? — it’s a versatile word. It’s both a verb and a noun. We have needs. We need things.

Except saying “needs” is like saying “stuff” or things.”

Every customer needs something or wants something. Or they desire it. Wish for it. Demand it. Prefer it. Delight in it. Obsesses over it. Yearns. Craves. Hungers.

There are so many different options available, but the best we can come up with is “needs?”

What you need is a thesaurus. (Let me recommend OneLook.com.)

Being “passionate about” something

How many LinkedIn profiles have you seen where someone is “passionate about” web analytics? Or email marketing? Or tax law? Or artificial intelligence? I saw a job posting that required applicants to “be passionate about short-form copy.”

Seriously? You’re passionate about that? Your passionate about gazing deeply into the limpid pools of Google Analytics reports? I should yearn for the delicate touch of a 280-character tweet?

This thing smolders within your heart like burning coals? You can’t stop thinking about email marketing and it consumes your every waking moment? Whenever the wind blows, you hear its name in the trees — Tax law! Tax law! — and feel its caress on your face, like the touch of a lover?

Either you’re the most boring person on Earth, or you’re overinflating your dedication to this particular job function.

You should be passionate about your family or your partner. You should be passionate about a sports team or an art form. You should be passionate about something so much that you dress up in funny clothes and scream like a maniac whenever you get to do it. That’s passion. Do you do that when you get to send out an email newsletter?

(If you do, please share a video of that.)

If you feel that way about email marketing, or whatever, more power to you. It takes all types to make the world go ’round. But I tend to just roll my eyes and assume you’re exaggerating.

Making history/is historic

Things do not make history. Events are not historic, especially if that event hasn’t happened yet.

Whose history? Who decided it was historic? There were two Black quarterbacks in the Super Bowl this year. So many sportswriters relied on the clichéd crutch of calling it historic, but it wasn’t.

Was it notable? Absolutely. Was it important? You bet. Was it long overdue and a wrong that should have been righted years ago, ever since Doug Williams became the first Black QB and the first Black Super Bowl MVP in 1988? You’d better believe it.

But was it a thing that historians are going to be writing books about and discussing at length in 100 years? No. That’s the historic stuff.

What’s the difference between HISTORIC and HISTORICAL?

A quick note on the difference between these two terms. Historic refers to things that are important that everyone should be aware of: the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War, the first Black president.

Historical is anything that’s from a prior period in time. A book published in 1776, a letter from a Union soldier, the first football game between Harvard and Yale.

While we’re on the subject, please GOD stop saying “an historic.” It’s not AN historic, it’s A historic. Sure, I know you heard the news people say it, but they’re bandwagon-jumping idiots who try to sound sophisticated and miss the mark. There’s absolutely no reason ever that you should say “an historic,” unless it’s to mock someone else who does it.

We use “an” before any word that starts with a vowel sound, and “a” before any word that starts with a consonant sound.

  • An umbrella, an MBA, an hour.
  • A unicorn, a university, a European.

Historic — unless you’re from Boston or are a 19th-century chimney sweep — is pronounced with the H sound very much intact.

Using adverbs and adjectives for EVERYTHING

There’s a very good chance you’ve sung the praises of a colleague, collaborator, or frenemy and you do so in the most glowing terms possible.

“I had an amazing, mind-blowing lunch at this delightfully cozy little bistro with my wonderful, delightful, mind-bogglingly creative friend, Churlington Beescoat.”

We gush, extol, glorify, and heap exaltations on our dear friend, Churlington, and we can’t say enough nice things about him because he is simply the Best Person Ever.

At least until next week, when we have lunch with our dear friend, Powderkeg Malone.

There’s a reason we don’t use a lot of adverbs and adjectives in writing. They’re a tool that new writers overuse, but they keep us from writing our best work. (Adverbs do, not new writers.)

If you have to describe a verb, then you’re using the wrong verb. Too many young writers try to wring out as much emotion as possible to tell you that their goldfish’s death made them cry really, really, really terribly loudly.

That’s not very sad at all. Maybe if you added another “really?”

What’s wrong with adjectives though?

They’re less problematic than adverbs, but there are times when you need to describe a noun. However, that’s not always necessary.

“A nutritious lunch” tells us what kind of lunch it is, but it’s not very interesting. “A lunch that would make my nutritionist nod in quiet approval” paints a more vivid picture. We get the sense that the lunch is sensible, solid, and even a little boring.

Instead of using adverbs and adjectives, come up with better verbs and nouns. You’re writers, for God’s sake! Expand your vocabulary. Come up with new words or use old words in new ways. (Just no business jargon, please.)

Recently, I saw Garrison Keillor talk about “purpling one’s thumb with a hammer,” and I thought that was the very best way to describe whacking your thumb with a hammer, because the word not only contains the action, but the result. You didn’t just hit your thumb, you hit it so hard that it bruised and bled underneath the nail. But those previous 12 words are contained within the single word “purpling.”

As content marketers, we need to use powerful language like that. We want to write powerful, persuasive copy that causes people to reach for their credit cards and purchase orders. And they don’t do that for really amazing, terrific, stupendous products.

As a writer, no matter what you write, you need to focus on the mechanics of your writing. Your word choice, your sentence structure, and your tone are just as important as your story, your narrative, and your characters. Maybe more so.

So avoid these copywriting crutches. Find a new way to say things and to be more interesting.

Let’s face it, your writing is going to flop otherwise.

Photo credit: Stocksnap (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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How to Find Your Client’s Voice as a Writer

If you’re a ghostwriter or freelance writer, it can be difficult to find your client’s voice. It’s not as important if you’re only doing a small one-off project like an email, but it’s critical if you’re ghostwriting a book, a speech, or a series of blog articles for a corporation.

Here are a few ways you can find your client’s voice, and one secret to finding it when the client doesn’t even know what their voice should be.

1. Listen to how they talk

You should not — absolutely never — just start writing without talking to your client. You’ll want to do a discovery call at least, to find out what the client wants and to identify your scope of work.

More importantly, you want to talk with the person whose name is going to go on the work. That means if you’re writing for a CEO, make sure you talk with the CEO. Not their staff, not their go-betweens. Your client may have a certain turn of phrase or favorite word they use, and you want to know what they are; the go-betweens will not.

Several years ago, I helped the CEO of a Fortune 500 insurance company ghostwrite his book on CEOs and social media. We met in his (gorgeous!) office to talk about the project, and he said a few words and phrases that I came to learn were his way of talking. He used, not bigger words per se, but unusual words — like “per se.”

I wrote those in my handy-dandy Moleskine notebook to refer to later. They actually never came up again, but it helped me understand that he chose his words carefully and had a particular speech pattern, so I needed to remember to follow it when I turned his words into text. We also spoke by phone every two weeks, so I was exposed to his speaking style more and more.

Also, he and his social media director noticed my note-taking and commented on it. They said they felt good about their choice because I was clearly conscientious. I had never thought of it that way, but who am I to turn down accidental recognition?

So, always take note of the little speech patterns your client has. Whether they know it or not, they have them and will feel good that you recognized it.

Plus, even if you never refer to it again, it makes you look like you know what you’re doing.

2. Read your client’s past work

This is what they think they sound like. It may be conversational, or it may be instructional. It may be light and airy or it may be serious and business-like. It may have a lot of second-person references — “what would you do?” — or it may be cold and impersonal — “Apply the lotion liberally to one’s epidermis and return it to the basket.”

Make sure you read a lot of your client’s work, because their regular ghostwriters may have changed over time. Or they use a lot of different writers all at once, which may allow for a little more flexibility. Still, all those writers may have a similar voice as well, so follow the crowd.

3. Ask them what they think their voice is

Make sure you can match up what they think their voice is and what you’ve read and heard. Maybe they say they want to be friendly and approachable, but their past work reads like it was written by a child-hating robot.

Or they want to have a tone and voice that conveys seriousness and stability, but they can’t stop sounding conversational.

Ultimately, what they tell you what they want is what you should strive for, but you should also feel confident enough to point out the inconsistency. Just say, “I understand you want X, but your past work sounds more like Y. Are you changing from your past voice?”

If they don’t agree with your assessment and they think their written work sounds like their desired voice, and that you don’t know what you’re talking about, do two things:

1) Try to match their past work rather than what they tell you. They think the past work sounds like their desired voice, so they’re looking for that. Let them tell you otherwise.
2) Make sure you get paid upfront.

4. The secret to finding a client’s voice when they don’t know what it is

What do you do when your client doesn’t have a voice, or when they’re not really good?

Years ago, I was an aspiring speechwriter and was asked to write a speech for a candidate for the U.S. Congress in my home district.

The candidate was running unopposed in our party’s primary because no one wanted to run against the opposition incumbent as he always won. Still, she needed the backing of all our party’s county chairmen, 12 in all, and she was in danger of not getting it.

She had given a speech at a district dinner that was a 45-minute vomit of anything she could think of; she was supposed to speak for 10 minutes on healthcare.

I got a call from my own county chair telling me that this woman needed major help, and could I help her with her speech? If she blew it again, the party wasn’t going to back her at all. They would rather run nobody that year than endorse her. So my speech was going to make or break her candidacy.

No pressure.

I called the candidate and we chatted on the phone for nearly an hour. She was really nice and fun to talk to, and she told me about her views. I took notes, but she rambled and I wasn’t sure what she actually wanted to cover or how she was supposed to say it. She didn’t have a voice in particular unless it was just one long, rambling sentence.

But I knew about this trick, and I thought I’d better use it.

I knew her speech had to be under 10 minutes, which equaled 1,000 words. That’s because the average person speaks between 100 – 150 words per minute. And she spoke a little fast, but I wanted to make sure she didn’t go over. So, 100 words x 10 minutes = 1,000 words.

I hit the three major points she wanted to hit, and stuck only to the important information without all the little tangents and tidbits she had shared during our call.

And, most importantly — and this is the big secret! — I wrote in short, punchy sentences, like a newspaper writer. Why? Because we all like to think we speak that way, at least when giving speeches. We all like to think we give speeches that are easy to hear, easy to read, and use lofty, soaring language about big ideas.

So I wrote short, punchy sentences about the big ideas.

When the dinner came, she gave the speech, and everyone loved her. Best speech of the night, very inspiring, blah blah blah, and the county chairmen all agreed unanimously to support her candidacy for the Congressional race.

(Narrator: She got 33% of the vote, just like every other candidate had ever done in that district.)

After she got home, she called me and gushed about the speech. “It was great. Everyone loved it, and you captured my voice perfectly!”

Well, no, I captured my voice perfectly. That was already my writing style, so I just wrote to my strength. It just happened to be the style that most people prefer to speak in.

I didn’t tell her this, of course, because that would be dumb.

Instead, I wrote several more speeches for her throughout her campaign, all using the same short, punchy style. And she rocked it. People loved her speeches and she was able to make her points without confusion or droning on.

All because I wrote in “her” voice.

Final thoughts

When writing for a client, you absolutely need to do everything you can to find their voice. Record them talking, have conversations with them, take notes in a notebook, and read their past works.

But if all else fails, write short, punchy sentences in the same way a newspaper writer would do it. If you don’t know what that sounds like, read Ernest Hemingway’s Big, Two-Hearted River.

It’s a short story, about 7,00 words, written at a 3.4-grade reading level, and has 17 adverbs in it. It’s my favorite Hemingway story and one that I model my own writing style after.

Write in that manner because it’s what people think they sound like when they give speeches. And it’s the way they think they write.

If you can capture your client’s voice, they’ll be happy, and they’ll keep you coming back for more.

And if they piss you off, just make them sound like a drunk pirate instead.

Photo credit: Caleb Oquendo (Pexels, Creative Commons 0)

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Writers Don’t Get to Collaborate Like Musicians

I envy musicians. Not just because they play music and entertain millions of people. Not just because they can spend hours and hours doing something they love, breaking silence with something that’s beautiful or joyful. Not because they can create magic with their instruments. (OK, yes, that. I learned bass guitar for a year during the pandemic, but haven’t touched it for several months.)

I envy them for their collaboration and support. I am jealous of the way that just a few talented musicians can get together, play for a couple hours, and make something that no one has ever heard. I’m jealous of the way they can swap out people and make something even differenter than the thing they did before. (Yes, I know that’s not a word. That’s something I can do that musicians can’t.)

This week, I listened to Justin Richmond interview Johnny Mathis on the Broken Record podcast. My mom loved Johnny Mathis, and we listened to his Christmas albums every year when I was a kid, so I didn’t want to miss this one.

In the interview, Johnny — Mr. Mathis — talked about how when he first went to New York, he visited jazz clubs to watch musician friends perform and that they would often ask him to go up on stage and sing with them. Or how he worked with other musician friends on different projects, singing on their records, or inviting them to sing on his.

Mathis was able to perform with whomever and wherever he had the opportunity. And he was able to choose who he wanted to work with, and the result was something unique and beautiful and was enjoyed by people all around the world, like my mom. It was this collaboration and cooperation that made him one of the most popular singers and artists of the 20th century.

Raspberry Pie (That’s my son on the right).
A little closer to home, I watch my son play bass guitar in a few different bands around Central Florida. He gets asked to play fairly frequently because there’s a shortage of good bass players, and because they know he’ll do a good job for them.

At some of his performances, the band leader will sometimes ask a musician friend to join them on stage for a song or two. Or he’ll participate in an improv jazz session with some friends, and the performance will be so seamless, it’s as if they had practiced together for hours and hours.

I envy musicians for their collaboration and ability to just slip into someone else’s ensemble. As long as they know what they’re doing, it’s seamless, and you wouldn’t know they hadn’t always been there.

Music is all about relationships. Not just the notes between rhythm and melody, but in finding people you can mesh with and trust. As long as they’ve got the skills and you can depend on them, you can make some excellent music together. You can even record that and share it with the entire world, or play it in front of a live audience of one person or 50,000 people all at once.

Writers don’t get to collaborate

Writers don’t get to collaborate, not in that way. Writing is a solitary event. You do it alone, and no one is there to help. It’s hours and hours of writing and editing, but no one is looking over your shoulder to give advice. No one is typing on one half of the keyboard while you type on the other. No one is laying down a funky verb line while you dance around a noun melody with a staccato punctuation drum beat keeping the rhythm.

Right now, I’m sitting in a local coffee shop writing this, and no one is helping me. They’re off in their own little solo performances, tapping away at a laptop, looking at their phone, or reading a book. One guy next to me is writing in a small notebook. (God bless the pen-and-notebook people.)

Oh, sure, you can have editors or fellow writers pore over your work and make it better. But they pore over it alone, give it back to you, and then you go off by yourself and fix it. Then you can share it with the world, where it’s read by one person or 50,000 people all at once.

But you don’t receive real-time feedback as people read your book. You’ll never experience a room full of people all reading your book at the same time, cheering at the good parts or applauding at the end of each chapter.

Working together isn’t really collaboration. Not like musicians do.

There are three ways writers can work together on a project, but I wouldn’t call it true collaboration.

  • Split the project in half and work on it. Like, dividing up chapters of a book and writing them individually — like Kyle Lacy and I or Jason Falls and I did on our books. You may be working together, but it’s not an ensemble, it’s a group of individuals all working at different times.
  • Share a Google Doc and write in the same document at the same time. Jason and I did that in the first chapter of No Bullshit Social Media. We decided we hated it and never did it again. I would hate to try to do this with several writers at once.
  • Sit in a room full of other writers and shout out ideas while one person writes them all down. This is how writers rooms work, especially for comedies, and I would dearly love to be in one of those for a day. This is the closest to real collaboration, but even then, each line comes from a single person and is improved on by other individuals. Sure, they piggyback off each other, but they’re not making music.

But those opportunities are rare. Or, in the case of the Google Docs thing, terrible.

So writers are left to their own devices and can’t collaborate to make beautiful work in the same way musicians do. And for that, I envy them.

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Marketers, Put Analogies, Similes, and Metaphors to Work for You

What’s the difference between metaphors, similes, and analogies? Not a lot, unless you’re a word nerd like me.

Short answer: Metaphors describe an idea; similes do the same, but use “like” or “as.” Analogies are that mystery comparison that we all pretend to know what it means, but we really think it’s a simile.

Ann Handley recently wrote in her Total Annarchy newsletter about the importance of analogies.

In Marketing, analogies pack a lot in a tiny overhead bin space.

They can help us explain convoluted ideas or applications more simply. They can help our audiences understand what we do or what we sell.

And (important!) analogies can help us be more memorable.

When it comes to writing, there are three types of analogies we can use. And they’re so similar, they’re easy to get confused. Hell, I wrote this article, and I’m still not entirely clear on what they mean!

Metaphors:

A metaphor compares two things, one to the other, but doesn’t use the words “like” or “as.” They’re more powerful and almost make a strong commitment to the comparison.

As George Savile once said, “Men’s words are bullets that their enemies take up and make use of against them.”

Or William Shakespeare in As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”

Did you see it? Men’s words are bullets. They’re not like bullets, they ARE bullets. And all the men and women (are) merely players. Not like, are.

Metaphors tend to be more poetic and you can create greater imagery with them.

They’re also morally superior to similes. (More on that in a minute.)

Similes:

The weasel word of the comparison game! I’m not a fan of similes because they are weaker than metaphors. The big difference between a simile and a metaphor is the words “like” or “as.”

“Life is like a box of chocolates,” Forrest Gump famously said. He didn’t want to commit to the image, so he said it’s only like a box of chocolates.

Weasel!

Similes compare two unlike items in order to create meaning at a deeper level. “My love is like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June,” said Robert Burns.

If I were Mrs. Burns (Jean Armour), I’d be worried about that relationship: He can’t commit to a metaphor, but he’s going to commit to you?

(Burns was also a noted philanderer, so this should have been a clue to Armour.)

Other similes include “as blind as a bat,” “as clumsy as an ox,” and “like watching paint dry.”

Analogies:

Part metaphor, part simile, all argument. That is, an analogy is a type of argument or explanation that compares two items but in relation to each other as a way to explain one of the items.

“Our latest company reorganization is about as useful as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” or “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.” (E.B. White)

But They All Look the Same.

Of course, when you really look at it, it’s hard to make a distinction between analogies and similes. Are similes the shorter aphorisms? “As blind as a bat” and “clumsy as an ox?” And are phrases like “Watching the play was like watching paint dry” analogies because they’re longer?

As I was researching this piece, I found article after article that mixed up the use of these three terms. But I found one explanation that seemed to explain the difference. As Robert Lee Brewer, senior editor of Writer’s Digest, said,

A metaphor is something, a simile is like something, and an analogy explains how one thing being like another helps explain them both.

See? Clear as mud.

Basically, the three terms can be used almost interchangeably and you could argue for days about whether “Life is like a box of chocolates” is a simile or an analogy.

<One of my favorite albums of all time is Tom Waits’ Nighthawks At The Diner, and I especially love the song, “Putnam County”. In it, Waits says the following verse.

And the impending squint of first light
And it lurked behind a weepin’ marquee in downtown Putnam
Yeah, and it’d be pullin’ up any minute now
Just like a bastard amber Velveeta yellow cab on a rainy corner
And be blowin’ its horn in every window in town

There, Waits uses a combination of metaphors and similes as a way to describe the morning sunlight banging on your windows after a hard night’s drinking. And you can see how he uses the devices for a most-powerful effect.

Regardless, the easy thing to remember is that similes (and analogies) use “like” or “as” and metaphors do not.

That makes metaphors more powerful and morally superior, but we’ll argue about that later.

Photo credit: CarbonNYC (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 2.0)

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Writers Don’t Need Special Fancy Writing Apps

I’m a bit jealous of all the cool apps that other creative professionals get to use to do their job. Graphic designers get Photoshop and InDesign, or they can go low budget and use GIMP and Sketch.

Photographers get to use all this cool technology to take great pictures. Even podcasters and music producers can have these great big studios, digital recorders, soundboards, and editing software.

All I get is a word processor program on my laptop.

To be fair, all those other pieces of technology that the designers, photographers, and producers use are pretty expensive.

My photographer friends need a pricey camera, expensive lenses, and all kinds of lighting. My graphic designer friends need a beefed-up computer and a monthly software subscription. Meanwhile, I can do my job with a golf pencil and the back of an envelope.

But at the same time, all I get is a lousy word processor? Why don’t I get any cool tools?

It’s not like I can upgrade as I get better, switching to a better word processor. A beginning writer can sit down with a copy of Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, or OpenOffice, or they can even go online and use Google Docs. And the pros use the exact same programs.

I started writing with Apple’s MacWrite program, sticking with it as it spun off to ClarisWorks, and stayed with it when it became AppleWorks. Then Apple switched to Pages, and I went right along with it. So I’m vastly familiar with Apple’s offerings for word processing. I can tell you that not much has changed over the years. There are new functions and capabilities, but at its heart, it’s still just a writing program — the new functions don’t help people write better.

I sometimes wish we had cool writing apps that made the same technological leaps and bounds as Photoshop and Illustrator, but the ability to create written words hasn’t really progressed much beyond a keyboard and a screen. That’s a major change from a typewriter and paper, but other than that, we don’t get the cool tools.

Of course, we don’t need them. I see plenty of “distraction-free writing apps” that promise to elevate our writing and help us create a better writing environment. Except we don’t need it.

Yes, a simplified word processor would be nice, but if that’s all you really needed, just use the Text program that came free with your Mac or Windows’ free Notepad program.

You don’t need some fancy app that makes writing sound like a mysterious, mystical process that can only be improved with the right kind of technology.

That’s like saying I’ll be a better writer if I just switched pens. Or that Agatha Christie could have been a better writer if she had switched from her Remington Home Portable No. 2 typewriter.

Writing apps do not improve writing skills.

Writing tools do not improve writing skills.

There are only two things that improve writing: Reading and writing.

If you want to be a better writer, then write. Practice your writing skills every day, even when you’re just writing an email. Work to make it the best email you can. Don’t just poke around and half-ass that email — that’s your practice right there, and if you don’t practice like you want to perform, you won’t be able to perform when it counts.

And when you’re not writing, you should be reading books. But don’t read blog articles and don’t read business books. Read widely and from a variety of authors and a variety of subjects.

An app won’t make you better. It may simplify the screen you’re looking at, it may cut out your distractions, but you’re still using the one skill that isn’t affected by the tools.

That’s why writers are different from other creative professionals. If someone wanted to be a professional graphic designer, their tools will make a big difference. A powerful computer makes a bigger difference to a robust graphic design program; a little Chromebook won’t cut it.

But a writer can use a Chromebook and Google Docs and function just fine. They can produce the same quality work as a $7,000 Mac Pro and 4K 40″ curved monitor. It won’t make a difference to your work, not in the same way it will to a graphic designer.

And it won’t be any better than what you can do with a $1.29 Pilot G2 pen and a Moleskine notebook.

So don’t get sucked into the hype of needing special writing apps to improve your work. Just focus on reading and the quality of your writing, even during regular work time.