Anne H. Janzer's Blog, page 42

The Writer’s Process: Just Released

Is writing part of your job? Your dream? Do you struggle to find subjects to write about, or time to do the work?

The Writer’s Process is about the inner game of writing. It applies lessons from cognitive science, together with hard-earned knowledge from the trenches.

Here are just a few of the people whose writings or research have influenced the content:

Dan Ariely

Roy Baumeister

David Burkus

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Carol Dweck

Daniel Kahneman

Stephen King

Steven Pinker

Daniel Goleman (so many Daniels!)

Ann Handley (had to get an Ann in there)

Daniel Levitin

Walter Mischel

Sherry Turkle

Check out the book, let me know what you think!

 

 

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A Guide to the Writing Process

When we summon a mental image of a writer, we envision the act of drafting: putting the words down on paper. But the writing process extends far beyond the time drafting. Authors also assemble research, think deeply about topics, and create outlines before they draft. Many drafts require numerous revision cycles.

The act of writing the draft is like the tip of the iceberg. It may loom large on the horizon, but if you neglect what lies below the obvious surface, you risk sinking your endeavor.

The other, often-neglected phases of the writing process, like research and revision, can make all the difference when it comes to the quality of our output. And each step uses different mental systems – requiring distinct approaches, attitudes, and even surroundings.

When you understand how the different mental processes map to the stages of writing, you can set yourself up for success at each stage along the way.

This is the subject of my new book, The Writer’s Process: Getting Your Brain in Gear. It looks at the mental tasks of writing, from confronting procrastination to encouraging creativity. It offers strategies for mastering the inner game by combining lessons from cognitive science with  field-tested practices of writers.

 

The book is available on Amazon today. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Iceberg image: Jay Ruzesky on Unsplash

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Published and Profitable Interview

Hold the phone!  Tuesday, June 14 at 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern, I’ll be chatting live with Roger C. Parker about writing and publishing. I’m sure the conversation will be fun and informative.

The occasion of this call is the imminent publication of the book The Writer’s Process. Roger’s ongoing series of interviews with authors served as background research for the book.

Roger leaves time for questions with the listeners at the end of his calls, so stay on the line if you want to chat.

Get the dial-in information on Roger’s blog: Find Out Why It’s Time to Rearrange Your Writing Bookshelf.

 

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Why Writing is Like Baking Bread

Have you ever baked a loaf of bread, or witnessed a masterful baker at work? Through a mysterious process of beating, kneading, waiting, and baking, an unappealing, gluey mass of dough transforms into fragrant and delectable food. Freshly baked bread is one of the wonders of the civilized world.

Baking bread is eerily similar to the process of writing.

Bread making is a mystical combination of recipe and technique, mastery and luck. The result depends on factors you cannot see, such as microbial yeast organisms that coax the dough into rising and unseen protein molecules that create structure and “crumb.” The temperature of the room, conditions of the oven, gluten content of the flour, and the elevation above sea level all affect the results.

Despite these uncertainties, bakers manage to replicate their successes. They follow other bakers’ recipes or develop their own and master techniques for kneading, shaping, and baking the loaves they love best.

Bread recipes vary widely based on the flour used, the amount of time available, and the type of loaf you’re trying to create. Most share a basic structure, which looks like this:

Assemble the ingredients
Activate the yeast (or feed a sourdough starter)
Beat and knead the dough
Let it rise in the right conditions so the yeast does its magic
Knead it a second time and shape it into loaves
Let it rise yet again (the final proof)
Bake, figuring out exactly when to remove the bread from the oven

(There’s another step—cooling—but who does that when there’s homemade bread in the kitchen?)

The process is rather long and ambiguous. From time to time, you go about your life, letting the bread work without you. Then you come back to punch and knead it, working hard. Then walk away again. And you hope it all turns out well in the end.

That sounds a bit like writing.

A Writing Recipe

Writing is much more than simply putting words on paper. The work begins when you start thinking about the project, and ends when you’re done revising and ready to publish. If you were to create a recipe for writing, from start to finish, it might look like this:

Research. Gather the ingredients. For nonfiction works, you may delve deeply into external research. Fiction may require more introspection and exploration. The research phase often continues even as you are drafting, but at some point you have enough material to move on.
Let the ideas incubate.  Your brain is like the yeast organisms in bread dough, breathing life into the raw materials you’ve accumulated. Give it a chance to work.
Structure the piece. Read through your notes and assemble a rough outline or other structure for your draft.
Assemble the first draft. Dig in and create the first draft. You may have an unattractive mess when you’re done, but you’ll be on the path to something better.
Rest before revision. Just as you would leave the bread dough alone to rise, let the first draft sit so you can get distance. “Not-writing” is an important stage of the process. Thoughts, phrases, different perspectives, and inspiration often strike as the draft rests.
Revise and proofread. Revision is like the second kneading phase in bread making—vital to the quality of the result. You’ll wrestle with the piece from different angles, shaping it into its final form. A final proofreading is the finishing touch.
Publish. Decide when it’s time to publish. Impatient as you may be for the final product, you don’t want to put your work out in the world half baked.

Why Bother with a Recipe?

Separating out the distinct steps of the process like this has significant benefits.

Time management: It’s easier to set reasonable deadlines and juggle concurrent projects when you understand and identify the different phases of the process.

Picking the right environment: Most of us need quiet surroundings, without interruption, to write the first draft. Research or revision can take place in open office environments or while riding on a train. And incubation often happens away from the desk altogether, while our minds can wander. When you isolate the steps of the writing process, you can align your surroundings with the work at hand.

Creativity: You’ll notice that the recipe outlined above has at least two periods of rest or incubation. Creative insight arrives on its own time, often when your brain isn’t completely focused on the task at hand. Schedule time for your inner Muse to process your thoughts, and you may be surprised by the insights that appear.

[This recipe is part of the book The Writer’s Process: Getting Your Brain in Gear]

Kneading image: Dreamy Pixel on Stocksnap.io.

Bread image: Mike Keanneally on Stocksnap.io

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Shut Your Monkey: A Book to Keep You Writing

Have you ever told yourself that you weren’t good enough to try something new or difficult? Do you put off writing that book because you doubt that you do anything worth reading? And even if you managed to complete something major, have you felt like an imposter?

Often our biggest barriers are internal, and finding a path around them can be freeing. That’s why I love Danny Gregory’s newest book, Shut Your Monkey: How to Control Your Inner Critic and Get More Done.

In this short, entertaining, and inspiring tome, Gregory suggests that our primitive or “monkey brains” are responsible for protecting us from taking risks. He attributes the thoughts of fear, insufficiency and doubt to an inner monkey, resident within each of us.

This inner monkey is responsible for inhibiting creativity and risk-taking, using techniques such as procrastination, self-doubt, and the imposter syndrome. (See my earlier post on writing and the imposter syndrome.)

Gregory unmasks the monkey’s many tricks, using colorful analogies as well as individual stories. Reading this book, you come to realize that self-doubt is normal, and overcoming it is a common part of the creative process. In fact, a little worry can be a good thing, if it doesn’t stop you from creating:

When you stop worrying, you become a pompous windbag with an over-inflated ego. Then your standards slip, and you slide down the slick slope to suckdom.”

The book offers strategies for quieting the monkey.

This is one of those inspiring books that you may pick up time and again, alongside works like Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and Seth Godin’s What to Do When it’s Your Turn (and it’s Always Your Turn). Add it to your bookshelf of virtual support for the days your courage wanes.

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Writing in the Brand Voice

Marketers often stress the importance of a consistent brand voice. Customers want to feel that they are interacting with a coherent entity, even though they understand that many people participate in the business. So we work to develop a distinctive “voice” and style for the brand that carries through all communications.

When you work for the same business long enough, you may learn to write easily in the brand’s tone and style.  Doing so helps your productivity. But getting too comfortable with the brand voice carries risks, for both the writer and the business.

The Risks of Emotional Distance

Despite the Citizens United ruling, corporations are not “persons” but collections of people with a shared purpose. No matter how “personal” the brand sounds, it’s a fictional entity.

When you write in the voice of the brand, you are not writing as yourself; you can keep some emotional distance from the words. You’re not really speaking as yourself, but as someone else.

Readers might feel that distance. Over time, the writing can become more “pat” and automatic, less genuinely human. Its effectiveness diminishes, and opportunities for real connections are lost.

Business writing should never feel trivial. All writing is a social act, a form of human communication. When you commit seriously to the work, it shows.

If you regularly write in the brand voice for your business, take steps to keep the approach and content fresh.

Apply the brand voice in revision, not in the first draft. Don’t worry about getting the right tone and style when drafting. Focus on looking for fresh images and turns of phrase, or mining new ideas. Use the revision process to adopt the brand tone and style.
Focus on the reader. Before you set out to write, put yourself in the reader’s perspective. If you’ve developed customer personas, put yourself in their shoes and ask questions. When you have empathy for the reader, it will come through no matter what your tone and style.

Losing Your Own Voice

The second risk is more personal: The more proficient you become with the brand voice, the harder it can be to find your own.

This problem sneaks up on you gradually. You may discover it only when you attempt to write something for yourself, and it comes out sounding like anyone in your business could have written it. You’ve got writing laryngitis!

Writing reflects thinking. Writing long enough in a specific tone and style will start to shape the way you think – at least when writing.

When I sat down to author my first book, Subscription Marketing, I had spent years writing in the tone and styles of various companies and executives. I was a chameleon. That was great for my freelance consulting work, but I’d mislaid my own voice and had to rediscover it through trial and error.

It’s taken work to rediscover a writing voice that fits my personality.

Tone and style may shift over time. Perhaps yours is a work in progress. But if you never work on it, you’ll never make progress.

The best defense against this problem is to maintain a personal writing practice alongside your professional work. If you write consistently in a brand voice and harbor dreams of writing for yourself, continue to explore your own work.

Use freewriting exercises regularly. Set aside time to write as quickly and fluidly as possible, writing things that no one else need ever see. Commit to a certain number of words every day, and fill them with whatever is in our mind.  You might write your way through a problem, contemplate stillness of the morning air, or imagine a witty conversation with Jane Austen. Use the time to explore different ways of crafting sentences, finding words, and thinking.
Find regular opportunities to write in your personal voice for work. If you write blog posts for your business, get permission to write as yourself rather than the brand name and use your own tone and style. Perhaps you can become known as the person who sends humorous summaries of your weekly team meetings, or poetic descriptions of industry events. Do something to stretch your writing style and put it out in the world in small doses.

Image: Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

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When Marketing Adds Value: The Case for Content

Creative marketing organizations go beyond simply communicating the value they provide. They add value outside the product or service, through content, community, partnerships, and data.”

These words seemed almost revolutionary when I wrote them in the book  Subscription Marketing. But look around and you can find numerous examples of businesses demonstrating that, when done with a clear focus on the customer needs, marketing itself adds value to the solution.

That’s right, marketing is not all about driving the initial sale. When marketing adds value beyond the solution being pitched, it gives customers a reason to keep coming back (renewing). They might even refer your business to others, driving new sales. These strategies belong to a larger category of value nurturing activities that belong in the marketing domain and beyond.

How can marketers add value beyond the service or thing being sold?

Create and share valuable content after the sale as well as before
Share data with customers
Create and nurture customer communities

This is the first in an occasional series of blog posts sharing examples of value nurturing plucked from the headlines and my email inbox. We’ll start with the practice of adding value through content. For a brilliant example of value nurturing with video, watch Adobe’s “Bob Ross” videos.

Videos that Teach, Inspire, and Entertain

If you’re of a certain age, you may remember “The Joy of Painting” series on PBS. The host, Bob Ross, was an unrelentingly cheerful guide to painting, chatting with the viewer as he dabbled paint onto canvas. (Bob Ross himself has been gone for decades, but his impact lives on; see BobRoss.com.)

Ross made painting look fun, easy, and low-risk. “There are no mistakes, only happy accidents,” he’d say, transforming an unintentional blotch into a majestic pine. His landscapes appeared miraculously from blank canvas, populated with “happy little trees” and towering mountains.

The show inspired many people to find their inner artists, including some who work at Adobe today. Many more Bob Ross fans no doubt use Adobe’s Photoshop software.

Adobe created a video series with someone acting the role of Bob Ross demonstrating the Adobe Photoshop Sketch application, creating landscapes on a tablet instead of a canvas. The videos are filled with things that Bob Ross might have said: for example, the software comes from “the happy little cloud.”



The videos feel like an affectionate tribute; Adobe calls them an educational homage. From the faux Bob Ross to the producers, everyone involved loved the original show. Read this article from Adobe on the background of the series.

As a tactic for nurturing the sense of value in current customers, this is a triple-winner, enhancing the customer’s experience of value in multiple ways ways:

Helping customers find success with the solution. Watching the video gives customers a better idea of how to use the Sketch application, so that they can derive more value from it.
Adding value through content. The content is entertaining to watch – extra value for Sketch customers.
Nurturing a sense of community. The videos reinforce a sense of shared interests and community for Adobe’s customer and prospects that watched “The Joy of Painting.” The sense of community strengthens the customer’s connection to the software, and the value of being a customer.

For a quick tour of strategies from the Subscription Marketing book, download the value nurturing checklist. For more detailed examples, read the book. And if you see great examples in the wild, please send them on.

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Another Book for Writers: A Sense of Style

Does thinking about grammar rules make your eyes glaze over? Here’s a book to unglazed those eyes: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker.

Despite having a formal education in English literature from a fine academic institution, grammar terminology gives me the creeps. Pluperfect, prepositional objects, predictive nominative … ack!

It’s like the saying about art: I know good grammar when I hear it, but defining it is another thing altogether.

So encountering The Sense of Style was an unexpected delight. As a psychologist as well as writer and linguist, Pinker approaches tone, style, and grammar as issues of human connection and understanding.

Pinker describes the “writerly ear,” which is developed by reverse-engineering good prose. Then he offers the best explanations of grammar that I have ever encountered. You don’t have to rely on your ear alone.

The book applies a cognitive science slant to the subject. For example, our brains handle large amounts of information by packaging it into “chunks.” Complex sentences with multiple clauses take advantage of this chunking; the writer must help the reader juggle these chunks. Effective writing works with the reader’s brain to aid comprehension.

Good grammar is an act of empathy.

I also love the chapter on the Curse of Knowledge, or the difficulty of taking the perspective of those who don’t have the same perspective and understanding you have. Says Pinker, “The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.” We cannot get out of our own heads to understand the perspective of others.

If you’re serious about writing, read The Sense of Style for its explanation the classic style, for insight into the cognitive processes behind grammar, and for terrific explanations of common problems and issues. The book deserves a spot on your bookshelf.

 

 

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The Revision Process in the Workplace

Many people know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. You may not realize that other members of Congress edited it.

Imagine sending your carefully crafted draft to the United States Congress for revision.

When comparing Jefferson’s first draft to the final, it’s clear that many changes led to substantive improvements. That’s what happens when Benjamin Franklin and John Adams are on your team. Never undervalue a great editor.

(You can compare the rough draft and the edited version online at www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/compare.html.)

But what happens when you have multiple people involved in reviews, including people who are not editors in their day jobs? I’m referring to the corporate writing environment, in which colleagues, managers, partner organizations, and legal teams can weigh in on your text.

I once wrote a press release about a technology partnership for a company I worked with. As it was to be a “joint” press release, the partner company’s legal department had to sign off. Instead, the legal team rewrote the release entirely, changing not only the content but the descriptions of the technology. That turned out well…

A more common scenario is this: you get conflicting revision comments, or someone new joins the review and questions the overall direction and purpose of the piece. These situations can drive a writer batty. Worse, they can lead to delays of weeks or even months in getting something published.

A little advanced planning can limit the risks of reviews run amok.

Plan Ahead to Deflect Conflict in the Review

Bypass problems by planning ahead of time.

Get agreement early on the audience, purpose, and style of the piece. Add this information to the outline of the piece, and ask people to sign off on it before you start writing.

When everyone has agreed up front about what you’re trying to do, the revision process entails determining whether or not you have achieved those objectives. People who have agreed to the approach are less likely to derail a project during reviews.

Plan for conflicts. Decide upfront who gets the final editorial say regarding tone and style, and who has the final approval on subject matter.

Clearly define the scope of each review. If you give the piece to a subject-matter expert, explicitly describe the input you need. For example:

Can you look at the second section and let me know if it’s accurate?
Have I missed anything that should be included?

Review cycles can spin out of control when software engineers start debating the use of the serial comma. (No one has solved that debate yet.)  Make sure people understand what level of response you expect from them.

Deal with Conflict Gracefully When It Happens

Sometimes, despite advanced planning, you end up with conflicts and headaches during reviews. If that happens, you may have to be the one who bends.

Let go of your ego attachment. The people in your workplace may lack the literary skills of Franklin and Adams, but they often bring valuable, relevant perspectives. The author’s role is to care about the work enough to accept edits that make sense, recognize other opinions, and make the writing better.

Become the reader’s advocate. What happens if you get conflicting instructions or disagree strongly with comments coming back at you? Consider the ideal reader and argue for their needs. If people suggest changes that serve readers in the target audience, then respect the work and the readers enough to accept the changes.

Channel your inner Thomas Jefferson, as he sat through a committee editing his lovingly chosen words. If he survived extensive reviews and revisions to what was arguably his most important creation, you can as well.

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