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A Sure Cure For Writer’s Block

So I’m bugging the bejeezus out of this poor woman at a coffee shop, asking to look at one of her books when she’s obviously working hard writing something very scholarly. The name of the book? Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing.

Writer's Block

Having been in higher education for a number of years, and having written a number of scholarly works (and being the son of a professor myself), I was naturally curious what those Ivory Tower residents are talking about writing. I open it up to the first chapter and see:

Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a hernia. . . He thinks the article must be of a certain length or it won’t seem important. He thinks how august it will look in print. He thinks of the people who will read it. He thinks that it must have the solid weight of authority. He thinks that its style must dazzle. No wonder he tightens. — W. Zinsser, On Writing Well

Wow, I didn’t know writing had to be that hard. I’ve just sort of, well, done it. I never had writer’s block, because I’ve never worried about what other people thought of my writing, except for a few people. I quit worrying about what it would look like in print after the second time it was printed. I never worried about whether it made other people laugh, only if it made me laugh. (Coincidentally, the stuff I think is hilarious never gets that many compliments, but the stuff I think is just throwaway crap I needed to fill a word count is the stuff that gets rave reviews from readers.)

So quit worrying already and start writing. You’re not writing for posterity, for future generations, or for tens of thousands of readers. You’re writing for yourself. You’re writing what makes you happy, what pleases you, what brings you joy. If you like writing mystery novels, then write mystery novels. If you like writing blog posts, then write blog posts. But write your mystery novels, write your blog posts.

They’re not for someone else, they’re for you.

Writers loosen up once they start writing for themselves and stop thinking about the reader. Quit thinking about The Reader.

We all have a mythical buildup in our mind about The Reader. Our writing teachers always tell us to “think of The Reader, don’t forget The Reader.” But you’re not writing for The Reader. Once you start thinking about The Reader — that genderless, faceless judgmental bureauratic-minded nerd who’s all set to jump on your writing with a shrill “a-ha!” — you’re stuck, because you’re always trying to please him*. The only person you have to please is yourself. Pleasing everyone else is just gravy. (*I know that in a more accepting society, I should say “him or her,” but I’m not. It takes away from the rhythm of the language, and your own The Reader is going to be whatever you call it. Mine is a him.)

So, smack The Reader in the face, and write something you know he’ll hate. Do it on purpose. Make it suck. Make it really nasty, something that should be wrapped in newspaper. And then print it out, and put it somewhere where you can see it. Then, point your finger at it, and shout, “You see that, Reader? Choke on it!” (No, I’m not kidding. Ten cool points if you publish your sucky piece to your blog. Let me know you did, and I’ll even link to it out of moral support.)

Once you loosen up and start writing what you want, the ideas will come faster and more easily, your fingers will fly, and the words will come easily, and your writer’s block will be broken. You’ll be writing again. So, kick The Reader in the ass and tell him to go away and leave you alone. You’ve got better things to do than to pander to him.

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Who Would You Hire, the Rookie or the Veteran?

I’m occasionally asked by clients whether we have a writer with a specific background. Are/were they in IT, in finance, in animal husbandry?

I can usually find someone with a skill set that matches what the client is looking for, but it’s not always possible. But, it’s not always necessary either. We have two things going for us that make it unnecessary to have a solid background in the client’s industry:

    1. The client provides us with all the information first, and then they approve the final post. If anything is incorrect, they find it before it gets published.
    2. Our writers are smart enough and spend enough time working with a client that they get pretty good at the client’s issues, their value to the client’s, and the features that make the client’s business so awesome. They become marketing copywriters for that company.

So this presents an interesting problem for us. Do we hire a good writer who is smart and can learn the product, or do we hire someone from the industry and fix their writing?

Think of it this way: You’re a baseball coach, and you need to sign a hitter to your team. You have a choice between a rookie who can run from home to 1st in 3.5 seconds, and a veteran who run the same distance in the same time. Who do you pick?

Most people will pick the veteran, because he knows the game and is a proven talent. But the best pick is going to be the rookie. If he can run to 1st in 3.5 seconds right now, think of how great he’ll be if you can hone his technique and teach him a couple tricks to make him run faster.

That’s how we choose our writers. I prefer to work with writers who don’t have the industry skills, because I can teach them about the industry, and help them become better “runners.” But hiring the industry veterans who have reached their writing peak is problematic. I can’t teach them anything new. They’ve gone as far as they’re going to go as writers, unless they dedicate themselves to becoming better writers. (That’s not to say that these adults can’t become writers. It’s just that they have to make a major commitment to improving and becoming better, but I don’t have time to wait for that.)

Who would you choose? Would you go for the industry rookie and teach him or her the ropes, or would you get the industry veteran who has a wealth of knowledge on the topic? Leave a comment and let me hear from you.

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The Difference Between Content Curation and Content Creation

A few weeks ago, I was participating on the #prwebchat when someone posed the question, “what’s the difference between content creation and content curation.”

I responded, “Creators write, curators collect & aggregate. Anyone can curate, not everyone can create.” Apparently this struck a chord, because a lot of people were responding and retweeting to what was just a throwaway line which made me realize there’s a lot more to this idea than I originally thought.

That's my friend Tania (R). She's a curator at the Ball State Museum of Art. She's the only curator I know.

Thanks to the blog tools and plug-ins (like Zemanta, which lets you link to related articles), Twitter lists, and RSS readers, anyone can compile a list of the interesting stuff. It’s a matter of identifying the most interesting articles from very popular or esoteric sources, and sharing them with your network.

But I don’t think content curation is that valuable. It’s important, to be sure. With a semi-decent RSS reader, anyone can be a content curator. But it’s not that valuable. Think of what the curators are actually collecting: content that someone else created.

Truman Capote once said of Jack Kerouac’s literary efforts, “That’s not writing. That’s typing.”

A stinging rebuttal to be sure, but it’s one that explains the difference between creation and curation.

Think of the effort that goes into creating a single blog post. There’s research to be read, surveys to be compiled, and opinions to be formed. And then you have to be able to present it in a way that not only flows logically, but is compelling to readers.

Still, curators cannot exist without creators to provide them with material to share; creators rely on curators to make sure their stuff is shared. So I can’t entirely bag on the curators, since 1) I rely on them, and 2) I’m trying to be one myself too.

Occasionally you’ll get creators who can handle their own curation — and that’s what social media has done for us — but we always get a boost when other people do some curation for us. For example, I always see a huge traffic spike whenever Jason Falls shares my blog posts with his readers. And Jason is a great example of someone who both curates and creates in order to provide value to his network.

So which are you? Are you creating, curating, or doing both? Is one more important than the other, or are they equally necessary? Can content creation actually live without curation? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

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315 Million Reasons Why Writers Shouldn’t Write For Free

The online newsies of the world all pointed and shouted with excitement, “See?! SEE?!” when AOL bought the Huffington Post new blog for $315 million. Newspapers and journalists all hunched over and typed a little faster when they heard the news, hoping they too could be the next major acquisition by the online giant-emeritus.

But it’s only recently that people began realizing that Huffington Post built its success on the backs of unpaid writers — writers who want to be compensated, even just a little, by the news source they built. (Simon Dumenco has a good wrapup of how Huffington Post is screwing their writers.)

I understand the appeal. The writers were promised the one thing every startup publication offers plenty of (but usually has none): exposure.

“We can’t pay you, but we’ll put you in front of all of our readers,” they promise. “Once we start to get money from ad revenues, then we’ll start paying you for future articles.”

But Huffington Post aside, those 9 million other magazines and newspaper startups never see enough revenue to pay for the celebratory kickoff party, let alone paying the bankruptcy attorney when they fold three months later. Besides, it doesn’t sound like HuffPo ever offered money. Ever.

It’s real simple, writers shouldn’t write for free. In that link, scifi writer Harlan Ellison rants about how writers are constantly getting the short end of the payment stick, thanks to the mistaken idea that what we do is somehow easy.

What we do is not easy. We’ve only done it for so long, we make it look easy. It still takes work to string together 500+ words, make sure they’re spelled correctly, are coherent thoughts, and are assembled into something that’s both easy and enjoyable to consume. (If you think it’s easy, take a whack at 500 words on any topic, and send it to me for an “honest but thorough” critique. I dare you.)

Look, if you want exposure for your writing, and you want to write for free for Huffington Post. Go ahead. But don’t do it in the hopes that they’re going to come up with a little thank you gift for all your hard work. You knew it was free going in, and that was the deal you made with them.

I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, because I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been screwed by an editor or potential client. I fervently believe that Huffington Post should do the nice thing and show a little love and gratitude to the people who made them worth $315 million, but I don’t think it’s something they have to do. Not because it’s their party, and they made the rules, but because the writers never had the expectation of getting paid, and went into the relationship fully expecting to never receive money.

(Update: One friend who runs a very popular community blog said if he gets a front page placement on Huffington Post, his site get 10,000 – 50,000 extra visits from the story. Otherwise, he runs around 2,000 extra visits. For a site that makes money from selling advertising, writing for free for Huffington Post is worth it, because it helps him serve up more ads, which makes him more money.)

If you want fame and exposure, write your own blog. Work your ass off in that niche, become famous, and work on your personal branding to find new readers. Then leverage that into paid bylines in real print publications, public speaking gigs, and even a book, like say, one on personal branding (affiliate link).

While that strategy is much, much harder than knocking out a few blog posts for Huffington Post, it also protects you from being totally screwed when the website is sold to a giant conglomerate and you don’t get anything. At least when you’re writing your own little blog, you’re getting nothing anyway, but without the painful screwing that the Huffington Post writers just experienced.

There’s no reason you have to write for someone else, especially when all you get is a byline. Thanks to all the different free blogging platforms that are available — Blogger, WordPress, Posterous — you can have your own blog and write for free to your heart’s content. And when someone makes an overture to buy you for $315 million, you don’t have to share it with anyone at all.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Daniel Borman (Flickr)

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Random Thoughts on Writing a Book

I’ve finished my second book, Branding Yourself, with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, and am working on a third book on networking with Jeremy Dearringer, CEO of Slingshot SEO, an SEO company here in Indianapolis. I also have a couple other writing projects in the works, although those are still under wraps. I hope to have some news about those by Springtime.

But I’ve learned a few things about becoming a book author, things that I thought were easy, and things that I learned are hard.

  • Copies of the book Branding Yourself by Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy
    In all my years, this is the 5th most beautiful sight I have ever seen.

    Writing a book isn’t really that hard, if you write on a regular basis. I used to think the advice “write every day” was stupid. “Who has time for that?” I thought. “I have work to do.” Turns out the work I was doing was writing anyway, and when I decided to write intentionally — to focus on new aspects of writing and become better at them — my writing improved.

  • Have a good editor. I learned a long time ago that while I’m a stickler about grammar and punctuation, I make a crapload of mistakes. Even though I catch them on second and third edits, I still usually find one or two that has to be fixed. Pearson just sent Kyle and me the “gathers” of the book. Individual chapters that we need to read over and mark any errors before the second printing. Believe it or not, with two writers and four editors, I found a couple errors. (What’s worse, they were mine!)
  • The hard part isn’t writing the book, it’s marketing it. In order to support the book, and sell copies, I’m starting to travel more to promote it during talks. Next week, I’ll be in Northern Indiana one night and Lexington, Kentucky the next day. I’m trying to do some paid speaking gigs, but am thinking about adopting Scott Stratten’s idea when he was promoting UnMarketing (affiliate link). Scott made an offer to any group: buy 100 of my books, and I’ll travel out to you. I’m thinking about doing that for anyone who buys 50 of my books, as long as you’re within driving distance. But compare that to writing. I could write at home, spend three hours, and knock out about 6,000 words, or almost an entire chapter. It’ll take me that long to drive to most of my speaking gigs.
  • Know your subject matter. Writing teachers love to say “write what you know” (which presents a problem for science fiction or fantasy writers). But this makes life so much easier when you’re writing a book. I remember struggling with a couple of chapters on Twitter Marketing for Dummies because I didn’t use some of the tools we were writing about. I had to spend a lot of time using them before I could write about them, which threw a huge monkey wrench into my writing schedule.
  • Have a writing schedule, and stick with it. John Grisham’s writing schedule, when he first started out, was to write from 7 am to 8 am, before he opened his law office. Christopher Moore’s schedule involves a lot of screwing around all day before he settles down after lunch and writes for 4 or 5 hours. Mine is to write at night, after the kids are in bed, and go for about 4 hours. Ignore the people who tell you to wake up early because mornings are more productive, or the people who tell you to stay up late because no one is awake then. Do what’s best for your body and your schedule. If you’re a night owl, stay up late. If you’re an early bird, get up and get that worm. But create a schedule and stick to it.
  • Shut off distractions. I love my Twitter network, and love chatting. But they are also the biggest interruption of my day, because they’re always more interesting than whatever I’m doing (even as I’ve written this post, I’ve sent 4 tweets). So when I’m writing, and have the willpower to do so, I shut off TweetDeck, close my Gmail, turn off the notifiers, and get to work. I can save myself 30 minutes of writing when I do that. My wife once asked me why I didn’t do that more, and I told her to “rephrase your question in the form of a tweet.”

Writing styles and processes are different for everyone. What are yours? Do you do anything special to get your writing done, to be more efficient and effective, or even to avoid distractions? Leave a comment and let me know.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

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3 Secrets of Creating Effective and SAFE Humor for Your Writing

I’ve been writing newspaper humor columns for over 17 years.

And I can tell you one of the hardest things to do is to be funny week after week. So hard that I can’t always do it. In fact, I slacked off for six months in 1998, but apparently no one noticed.

Sarah Schaefer at 92Y Tribeca Comedy Festival

But I have learned a few secrets about writing humor over the years, based on how humor itself works. These aren’t just the “rule of three” or “end words in a hard K” tricks, but the psychological motivation of humor. If you can learn how to write jokes using these secrets, you can start safely adding humor to your blogs, your articles, or your presentations.

(I have to give special thanks to my dad, Dr. Lambert Deckers, a psychology professor who studied the motivation of humor for a number of years, and Dick Wolfsie, fellow humor writer and features reporter for WISH-TV, for teaching me all of this. I totally stole all of this information from them.)

Humor Rule #1: All Humor is Based on a Surprise

The Purdue University linguist Victor Raskin wrote that all humor is based on a surprise, or a lie. That is, comedians lie to us by setting us up with one premise, and then lie to us (or surprise us) with the punchline. The laugh comes from the surprise.

Here’s an example: writer Dorothy Parker once famously said, “If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

Did you see it? As you started reading Parker’s line, by the time you got to “laid end to end,” your mind already started thinking about what was going to come next, like a measurement of distance: “they would stretch across campus” or something similar. But she surprised us by instead questioning the moral virtue of the girls who attended the Yale prom. And that’s where the laugh came from.

This type of sentence is called a paraprosdokian, which is from the Greek meaning “expectation.”

However, not all surprises are paraprosdokian in nature. There are times when endings are just unexpected, but didn’t require a single sentence to get there. Most punchlines to jokes are surprises, which is what makes them humorous.

If you want to add a joke to your posts, throw in a surprise thought or two, almost as a parenthetical statement, at the end of a paragraph where a punchline would typically sit.

Humor Rule #2: Good Humor is Based on Recognition

Writing a punchline that requires previous knowledge of the source material is a great way to get a laugh. If the audience is already familiar with the source of a punchline, the reason behind it, the source it references, or if it’s something they’ve experienced before, you’ll get a laugh. For example, telling computer jokes to a bunch of IT geeks will get a laugh, but telling the same joke to a bunch of fashion models won’t. The way Dick Wolfsie explained it, the reader feels like they’re in on the joke, which makes them feel good, and they laugh.

I can't help it, I was REALLY proud of this one.

Here’s an example: As I was writing this post, my friend Rhett Cochran started the #LessIconicMovieLines meme on Twitter. Several of us threw out suggestions based on memorable movie lines. The movie lines that did the best were fairly popular ones — you couldn’t use lines from a movie no one had seen, like Ishtar — and they were surprising enough to be funny.

This is also why “callbacks” work so well: they “call back” to something that was said earlier. A lot of standup comics use callbacks during their act. When the audience recognizes the joke, and remembers where it came from, they feel like they were in on it, and the joke scores.

A lot of character-driven sitcoms rely on recognition for their humor. You get to know their characters, their foibles, their tendencies, their likes and dislikes. Then, whenever they’re placed in a particular situation that draws on one of those facets, it’s funny. But when a different character is placed into the same situation, it won’t be funny.

Recognition is also why jokes often fall flat, especially when you tell inside jokes to someone who wasn’t there. If you have to say “I guess you had to be there,” that’s a good indication the joke won’t be funny.

Humor Rule #3: Humor is Based on Making the Reader Feeling Superior. Good Humor is Self-Deprecating

Making a reader feel superior is another key to humor. Basically, if I feel smarter, better, prettier, richer, or more successful than the subject of the joke, the joke scores. It can often piggy-back off Recognition. That is, if I understand the inside joke or the callback, then I feel smarter, like I’m in on something special, and I’ll laugh.

However, this is where a lot of humor can be dangerous, and I urge you to use it carefully. It’s why people are told to avoid using humor at all. People love to make jokes at someone else’s expense, and end up offending somebody (or a whole lot of somebodies). It’s one thing to make a joke about a single person, but then it becomes tempting to make a joke about a group of people — computer geeks, people from a neighboring state — which can then turn into jokes about race, disability, size, etc., which then creates all kinds of problems.

To safely follow this rule, never, ever make a joke at someone else’s expense, because it will promptly backfire. Don’t think it won’t happen? Think back carefully to that one awful cringe moment in your life where you made a joke about a friend, only to discover that the punchline was related to some childhood condition, sensitive subject they’re in counseling about, or the tragic death of a loved one. (Congratulations if you only have one of those.)

In essence, if your humor has to rely on someone else feeling bad, then don’t do it.

There is one exception where it’s okay to violate this rule: if you make fun of yourself, you are completely safe. By making fun of yourself, the authority, you’re making the audience feel superior to you. I used this in the last sentence of the first paragraph, “In fact, I slacked off for six months in 1998, but apparently no one noticed.”

This is a great trick used by public speakers. By being up on stage, speaking to the audience from a position of authority, they are in the power position. So good speakers will make fun of themselves, which makes the audience feel like they’re superior to the speaker, and the joke scores.

There are several other humor secrets you can use, like exaggeration, being outrageous, or absurd, that can also make your writing or speaking funny.

In a future post, I’ll discuss how to string a few small jokes together to make your next presentation or blog post rock.

At least from a humor perspective. If you suck at speaking, I can’t help you.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Sarah Schaefer, 92YTribeca (Flickr)
Twitter screenshot: Erik Deckers