Today, I’ll give you the first in a 18-pack of simple, short, and useful tips to help you write more gooder immediately. These eighteen principles have helped me design and deliver more than 4000 advertising messages across the United States and Canada. They aren’t magic bullets, but they should help you power through writing sessions more productively.
They will help you quickly create more powerful advertising and/or write a better letter to your mom (which you really need to do, btw).
Tool One: Listen
“ Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valv`ed voice.”
– Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself
That’s all I get? You promise me all these tools to help immediately, and you lead off with some goober-thing like ‘listen?’
Yep. Chances are you talk way too much and listen way too little, or at the very least, you’re far too consumed with filling in the little blanks on your c.n.a. or brief or whatever you call it.
Sales, remember, is nothing more than a transference of confidence. Confidence that, at the end of the day, you can’t fake in front of a client. For your client to really open up and tell you stuff that really matters, you can’t be prattling on about yourself or your station, and you certainly can’t have your head buried in a notebook or stack of paperwork.
Does your client trust you enough to allow you to tape the conversations? Do you have the guts to tell your client, ‘you know what, I’m interested in hearing your story, and I don’t like to take a bunch of notes with your permission, I’d like to record this so I may listen back to it later when I write. It’s between you and me, and if you like, I’ll even make you a copy, because I think you’ll be surprised at the new stuff that’ll come out of your mouth.’
Watch the great interviewers of our time. Do you ever see them with their heads buried in notebooks?
Nope. Each one actively listens to their subject.
You must, too.
The second benefit of great listening allows you to sprinkle your writing with the tiny, little “click” moments and mental images that comprise real life. That is to say, by listening to the world around you, you fill your pages with the tiny Seinfeld-ian nothingness that inexorably binds us to one another. Eavesdrop on the world. More on this in an upcoming tip.
Maybe Livescribe would send us all Pulse Smartpens to test the audio and note taking features. I don’t know anything about them yet but saw a display at Best Buy.