How to write if you're not a writer

Writing doesn't come naturally for everyone, but we all need to write well in our daily routines. Technology has made written communication all the more important. And for some, it adds pressure and anxiety.

No-one cooks at the same time as they assemble their ingredients, yet that's how many people expect to be able to write. They sit down at the keyboard, and expect to get the message right in one go.

But writing is made up of three distinct parts, a bit like preparing a meal.

Here's how to take the pressure off yourself, and create better writing at the same time:

1. Gather your ingredients.
Who are you talking to? What do you want to say to them? Identify the key parts of your message, not in sentences but in ideas.

For example, you need to invite someone to a collaboration website you're setting up, and you want to give them some context around why you're inviting them.

The key parts of your message - your ingredients - could be:

* I'm inviting you to this collaboration website
* The collaboration website does these things...
* The team who will be collaborating on the website are...
* The purpose of us doing this is...

Notice how there's no numbers, just bullet points. We don't put things in order until step 2.

Even better than bullet points is a mind-map, or post-it notes. You're gathering all the ingredients, make sure you have everything you need, and not any more.

2. Sort the ingredients.
What part of the message needs to come first? If you're using post-its or index cards, you can physically re-sort them. Try to find the logical flow of your message.

How do you find the logical flow? it's a bit of an art, but this may help. Think of the key parts that would make more sense if you had the information from previous key points.

For example, telling me who's on the team makes more sense if I know what the purpose of the team is. Telling me what the collaboration website does makes more sense if I know I'm invited to the website.

As you do this, you may find that some of your cards are actually saying the same message. That's good! We're making sure we're saying everything we need to say in as few words as possible. Both parts are important, "everything we need to say", AND, "as few words as possible".

3. Write the message.
You now have your ingredients and are ready to start cooking. You have the skeleton and can put some flesh on the bones. This is where you can think about all that fun stuff like grammar and spelling.

The good thing is, you don't have to think about the other stuff, like what part of the message goes where, or whether you've included everything you need to include. You've already done all that stuff.

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I'm not a great cook, but when I do cook people are generally pretty happy with what I prepare.

It helps if I have a recipe. But as I practice, I also start to see beyond the recipe, to the principles of the recipe. I start to experiment, to discover my own way of cooking.

Writing is the same. We all can write; some of us need a bit more structure than others. And like any skill, you will get better and faster as you go.

What I tweet about (in the last year)

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Testing a mobile blog

... from my phone. And all of a sudden I can't think what to say!

Caution: L&P's promo is awesome

Caught up with me old mate Brendan Boughen (not pictured here!) the other day.

Brendan's working for Ogilvy PR, and he told me about L&P's latest web promotion, Paeroa Tourism, which he described as a cross between Flight of the Chonchords and Borat.

He was right. This is hilarious.



The media kit was... awesome too. A typewritten cover letter from Maurice Morrison, badly photocopied fliers touting the seven wonders of Paeroa (that's two more than Thames, in your face Thames!), a bright yellow t-shirt like Colin's wearing in the pic above, and a six pack of L&P. Thanks Brendan! Good humour and bribery will get you everywhere. Check out the Facebook page.

On a slightly more serious note, it brings up two thoughts for me:

• Yes it's the age of authenticity, but you can still carry off fictional characters in an online campaign if you do it very well, and if it's very funny. (Easy as that, eh!)
• New Zealand's small towns have a great opportunity to use social media to differentiate themselves. We have some really neat, quirky towns around the place like Bulls, Taihape (where iJump clients Gravity Canyon are based) and Tirau. (By the way, those photos are from another iJump client, EyeballNZ.com). Could they (should they) do a Coos Bay? And what on earth is it with Ngaruawahia? Looks deserted every time we go through (which admittedly isn't that often).
  

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

I'd heard that The Life and Death of Peter Sellers was not for the fainthearted, but the cheerful opening titles lulled me into a forgetful sense of security.

It is full on. His life is a train wreck in slow motion. It is a tragedy. It is hard to like Sellers, which is a gutsy move for a film (you're supposed to like the protagonist).

I love most of Sellers' work. The Goon Show played a huge part in developing my off-beat sense of humour (made even more off-beat by the fact I was listening 30 years out of context).

But the life behind the laughs was a nightmare. Sellers was a boy who never grew up, who became entrapped in an industry that encourages emotional immaturity.

It's a very well-told movie, if you know Sellers and his work.

It makes me wonder: will the future enable the kind of big, but dysfunctional superstars like Sellers?

Or will the disruption that's happening in media and entertainment mean that vulnerable but gifted people like Sellers (and Michael Jackson, and many others) won't be able to insulate themselves from reality?

That's a long question. I bet the answer is even longer.

We all make policy happen

I've just read the NZ Institute's report (PDF) on this country's competitiveness, based on World Economic Forum data.

Some good recommendations, as far as I can tell. Key areas for improvement are innovation, and we as a nation need to enable this.

However, the language of the report, particularly the all-important last slide (Policy implications for New Zealand) is just not accessible.

Perhaps the argument is that policymakers are used to dealing with dry, abstract language. That may be so. But...

Isn't it better, if you're painting a goal, to paint that goal and vision in as vivid terms as possible? When you're making recommendations, if you show me what the outcomes of those recommendations are, and why those recommendations are needed?

I also suggest this because policy ultimately needs us all to deliver it. Government may propose, but the people dispose. Public servants, local governments, business people and ordinary citizens all make policy happen. Let's embrace that.

Language and Relationships

(This is a long post, my apologies. If I'd had more time, I would've made it shorter)

At the Art of Hosting workshop I realised that relationships are infrastructure. They're the roads, the power lines and the plumbing that allow things to happen.

And they're more important now than they ever were.

In the 20th century and the industrial age, everything was about automation and efficiency. Even as we turned the corner into the Knowledge Era and the 21st century, our focus was still on automation. And automation can do us a lot of good, but it needs to be balanced with relationships. Real relationships.

Why are relationships important? Because together, we face concepts we have never come across before. We're all discovering them from different directions and background, and that affects the words we use to name these new things.

Take the phrase social media. To me, with my freelance journalist background, social media suggests that the media is not just the companies I write for, it's an opportunity for me to make my own media. For anyone to make their own media. Media to me means getting your word out there.

Joseph Jaffe doesn't like the term social media, he prefers conversational marketing. Why doesn't he like "social media"? Because he comes from an advertising background, where media is a property you buy in order to put your message on it. And to him, you can't buy social media (he's right!).

A closer example, The Pond announced New Zealand's "first social media and network creative consultants". This kicked up a stink among NZ's social media consultants, but Leighton from the Pond was quick to point out to me the "creative" part of the description - a phrase that makes sense if you're in the ad industry. They come up with creative ideas (as designers and copywriters do) specifically for social media.

The problem in both cases? Same words with different meanings. Sometimes there's no short way to explain something. You have to talk it through with people so they understand. Then you can start using jargon, but use it with care, knowing that people are prone to interpret things differently from you.