Have you ever thought that you could create a miracle?
Every child born is a miracle and acknowledged as such. Aside from that most people would deny that they could create anything else described as a miracle.
What if your words could touch people all over the world?
What if you could start a conversation that led to people you didn’t know creating positive change in their lives?
At a recent networking event I was talking to someone in business about writing books. Now I’ve known this businesswoman for several years and she’s always struck me as confident and capable and very talented in her field.
But… she seemed to lack that confidence to write her experience down in the form of a book.
Think about the books you’ve read in your life. I’m sure that some of them have had an impact on you. Maybe they helped you pass exams, open a door into a new career, dulled the pain of unhappiness.
When you write your book, you will have no idea what ripples it will cause in your own and others’ lives. But is that any reason not to do it?
And if you’re worried about the experience of writing a book, then I’ve a downloadable pdf on Writing A Book: 5 Strategies to reduce the stress. You can find it at my other site, www.writerslittlebook.co.uk
It’s an ethical bribe to tempt you to join the Writer’s Little Book Club. It’s FREE to join the Club and that way you’ll find out what we’re up to first.
And think about it – what do you know that can help someone change their life?
I had three fantastic groups at the recent workshops. Some of them came from a technical background, some from sales and some from customer services.
It might seem that there wasn’t too much of a theme between the different backgrounds especially as some of the delegates’ only writing contribution is about noting things down in a CRM system.
However the approach that I use for all my work is the one is based on a core belief that whatever you need writing for, it has to be carried out with one person in mind.
And that’s not you the writer. It’s your reader.
I’ve had discussions with many clients about this since their logic is that they have to talk about what they can do or the reader won’t understand.
To me that’s the wrong way round.
Let’s take the simple example of taking notes. What’s the purpose of notes?
If you’re taking notes of a conversation with a customer, then you need them to be:
1. A true record of your conversation.
2. Full enough to understand what took place if you don’t look at the note for six months.
3. Clear enough for someone else to read and understand if they have to take over your work for any reason.
In each of those cases, you the writer need to consider you or someone else as the reader and what their needs are.
The same information can be phrased in different ways that would totally confuse someone else, or even yourself if not clear. That’s why no matter what you’re writing, you need to start in the same place.
What does the reader need to understand from the notes, or the report or the ad, of whatever the piece is?
And in case you’re misreading the question, it isn’t what do I want them to understand, but what they need to understand.
Part of the group discussion in the workshops was about training manuals. I’m happy to admit that I’m not technical. Which means that if I buy some software, or a piece of equipment I want to be able to use it without any pain. Or at least as little pain as possible.
As I explained in the workshop, manuals are often written in what for me appears to be double dutch or another incomprehensible language. When you examine why that happens, it’s usually because, regardless of the language, the manuals are written by people who understand the product or system.
One way a company can avoid purchasers throwing the manual out of the window is to supply a short – very short introduction.
A “this is where you start”. And you divide it up into this is where you start if you know absolutely nothing, then this is where you start if you can do this, and this is where you start if this is a new version of what you already have.
That approach at least gives the customer the feeling you care about their problems and they’re likely to give you more time before they throw the manual out the window.
…reader of books. But particularly self help books. I guess over the years I’ve spent thousands of pounds on books, tapes and programmes of one sort or another.
And even when I’ve hit difficult times I’ve tried to maintain a positive attitude.
Sometimes especially with American programmes it seems like they’re all Pollyannas in the face of terrible things happening. But I firmly believe that we can affect what happens to us far more than we realise.
So this month instead of my opinions I’d like to tell you about some authors who’ve helped me.
M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled:
I found this book at a very stressful time of my life, started to read bits of it in the bookshop at the corner of the street where I worked and eventually had to buy it. The quote I loved from the book was at the beginning.
“Life is difficult. But when you accept that life is difficult it becomes easy.”
This idea that we should all have an easy life is an illusion. We will always face challenges. Having as much money as we want, living in the house of our dreams with the love of our life doesn’t exclude us from facing challenges. It may alter the type of challenges we face but they will still exist.
Even if the challenge is which Ferrari shall I use today!
Maxwell Maltz Psychocybernetics:
Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon who worked with many cases of facial disfigurement. He found that merely making people look better from the outside didn’t help with their internal self image. His researches into this led him to create PsychoCybernetics at the age of 61. His wife Anne and business partner Dan Kennedy have worked in recent years to keep his ideas flowing. www.psychocybernetics.com
Michael Masterson:
Micahel Masterson is not your typical self help guru. He doesn’t believe too much in abundance theories, but he’s proved over and over that his practical wealth creation ideas work. He was the founder of the American Writers and Artists Institute which was set up specifically to train direct response writers for the American market.
You may not like his style which can be abrasive but his ideas are grounded in reality. I’ve heard him speak a couple of times and he takes no prisoners. He’s obsessive and determined and you can bet that anything he takes on he’ll make a success of.
And if you want tips on how to structure a book note carefully how he does it with any of his. (Automatic Wealth and Ready Fire Aim).
Video this month is the Chinese pianist Lang Lang. Watched his 2 hour concert at the Proms last week. He’s credited with encouraging 40 million Chinese children to play the piano…as well as performing at the Olympics where he looked like Liberace with his white piano. Don’t ask you’re probably too young to remember Liberace.
In a completely different way from Oscar Peterson last month, he lives his music.
With writing the first draft of the book of inspiration, I was thinking a lot about how we deal with setbacks in relation to people writing in particular.
When I was in the sixth form at school, I took a very unpopular subject at ‘A’ level. Latin. Why did I take it? Well the teachers wouldn’t let me take English because they said my grades hadn’t been good enough so it was History which I adored and Latin which I was quite good at.
Or had been. Of course when you step up a notch to ‘A’ level it all suddenly seems harder.
And there was no doubt that I was the weakest person in the small group who took it. We had three different teachers for the separate parts of the syllabus and for two years they made it plain to me that they thought my chances of passing the exam were equivalent to the snowball and hell combination.
I was allocated extra tuition and even then I struggled. Felt bad didn’t I? Some days I hated the lessons but this was in the days when pupil choice was not to the fore in schools.
Even if they’d allowed me to drop it my mother wouldn’t have agreed. You have to understand that my mother was fair. But firm! On the rare occasions when I allowed myself a grumble about Latin her advice was blunt. “Try your best. You can do no more.”
So I did. Hating a lot of it but I tried.
Came the exam and I remember finishing and thinking that wasn’t so bad. Then immediately covering myself by thinking I probably had blown it.
You know in Roman times they had many different gods. For all sorts of causes. I like to think that there was a god for those who persist even when it doesn’t seem sensible.
If there was then the god had looked after me. Because I passed. Yippee!
Not a distinction but a definite pass.
And you know what? Two of the other members of the group failed. I didn’t gloat did I? Course I did. I’m only human not a divine Roman after all.
It wasn’t until many years later that I came across the Thomas Edison quote:
“Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.”
I know that the high flyers sometimes seem to look down on those of us who just keep going. But if you don’t keep going you don’t reach your goal, or your heart’s desires.
Went to a lovely book launch this week for New Writers UK, a Nottingham writers group. They were celebrating that six of their group had published books.
The more I write and the more I talk to people who want to write, the more I realise how much it can achieve for the writer. Not just money, though of course everyone wants to make money from it. But for each of the writers featured at the launch there was a story behind the book and why they’d written it.
So come on all you writers out there. You can do it. Take your pencils out or power up your computers and get going.
Remember, till you start you can’t finish. And if you keep going and finish, you too can pay homage to the god of those who persist.
But it’s true because you could transpose one company name for another and still be reading the same things. Quality guaranteed, personal service, bespoke service.
All very fine in their way but what do they mean?
Is it the personal service that has me thinking about my clients when I walk around W H Smith’s looking at magazine headlines and wondering if I can use a similar approach for one of them?
Is the type of service that includes watching soaps to think how I can use the way they construct the drama to keep watchers on the edges of their seats and start the gossip next day in the office.
That’s the passion that drives me to read what I do, listen to all kinds of things looking for approaches that will bring out the true individuality of my clients. Because I know that all my clients have a passion for what they do. And I want to transmit that because that’s what we buy as consumers. We want someone who cares about us, about our businesses, about our results. As a writer I have to feel that enthusiasm for my clients or what I write will end up boring, standard and won’t transmit any joy to the reader.
I wrote some time back in the blog about the power of mastermind groups and this year I feel my biggest steps forward have come in the company of like minded colleagues along with the plodding, well that’s how my steps feel to me sometimes, I do by myself.
I’ll let you into a small secret, since I’m feeling generous on my birthday. With two of my colleagues, Tracy who sends out my newsletter for me, and Kirsty who’s been helping me with a site for my book writing courses, we’re planning a new service we feel passionate about to start later in the year.
It’s the combination of all our talents and we believe that our individual and combined energy makes this a project we know will succeed. And the most important part of the foundation we’re building is that what we do together has to be fun and passionate.
It’s difficult to enjoy your work if you don’t like it. It becomes a chore. Which is stupid given we spend so much of our time doing it. So for our new venture, our primary criteria for working with anyone will be, can all of us enjoy it with the clients. If not, we’re not the right fit. If we are and can create that passion together, the results will be spectacular.
And the other power of the mastermind group is that it helps you take action. Without action all the wonderful ideas in the world aren’t worth a row of beans.
So passion plus action equals results.
I’ve had a great year as far as my work is concerned – to be honest I shouldn’t call it work because I enjoy it so much. It’s a privilege to build a partnership with my clients; they value what I do and it makes the difference to me.
I may not say this often enough to them but I’ll go public and say thank you to them all and I look forward to helping you be passionate about your businesses in the next twelve months.
Music often plays a part in creating an effective atmosphere for writing.
In the How to Write a Book Workshop we looked at different types of music that people might use to create the right mindset for starting to write.
But there’s another way that you can use music. Think about some of your favourite songs. What is it about them that you like?
Maybe you like the beat, the rhythm or the fact that you can dance to it.
Or maybe it is that you like the story the songs tell. Have you ever thought about the skill it takes to tell a whole story, create a mood and leave the listener feeling satisfied… all in about three minutes?
As writers, we can learn from this skill because songwriters are achieving what we need to do especially if we write for the web.
Within seconds they’ve hooked you in and told you a story and you want to listen until you hear the end. Yes of course the music is important. But the songs you like often you relate them to what’s happening in your own life.
For example, if you hear a song on the radio that talks about the breakup of a relationship at a time when that’s happening to you, you’ll connect to it. And the same is true if you’re just starting a relationship.
So constructing a song has a lot to do with direct response marketing:
Know your target market.
Make an immediate connection.
Satisfy a need.
In the case of songs the need often is emotional comfort. The sense that someone out there has been through a similar pain and while it can’t be exactly like your pain you still feel that you’re not quite so alone as you thought.
How about Ode to Billy Joe by Bobby Gentry. Or the Boxer by Paul Simon.
Another by Paul Simon Homeward Bound. That always takes me straight back to travelling around as a student.
And to get away from our British summers – there’s California Girls – a whole lifestyle in a few words: California Girls
Isn’t it just teenagers huddled over computers and mobiles?
I’ve spent some time this month updating my very scanty knowledge about social media. While it’s been taken up by many people as a personal technique, it seems to be the coming thing for businesses. According to John Reese of Traffic Secrets 2.0, the top two ways to guide traffic to your website are e-mail marketing to your list, and Twitter. I have no personal experience one way or the other. If any of you are using any of the social media for your business and like to e-mail me with your experience I’ve love to hear from you.
Certainly having all your marketing communication methods linked up to reduce your time in promoting your business makes sense to me. You can spend hours in front of a computer if you don’t have some kind of social media marketing strategy.
I’m working with a web designer and an email marketing specialist at the moment to co-ordinate our efforts and we’ll be offering strategies for businesses in the near future. Look for more details of that service next month.
What stops you from writing? Is it the fact that you actually have to write?
I love words. I’m a word junkie. I can’t remember learning to read and seem to have fallen into it without any problem at all. And I was brought up on radio not TV and they say the pictures are better on radio.
So though I’m much stronger on words I do like pictures and like most children I probably started off with picture books. And that’s fine for children when there aren’t many words in their books.
But what happens when you grow up and the world seems to have so many words in it that they overwhelm you? Even with adult comics there are still acres of words out there.
Now with most word processing programs these days you have sophisticated forms of grammar and spell checking tools. And I know more than one person who manages to hide their fear of words, by using the tools.
I had a boss once who was dyslexic and used to run his letters past me before he sent them out. It was a bit of challenge sometimes because he had a very individual way of putting things and I never was quite sure if he meant to use a word that looked odd to me.
He developed his own strategies for not having to deal with the words too much and I’ve met other word phobics who have their ways of dealing with the challenge. It’s said that’s why dyslexics are often innovative because they have to find new solutions that work for them.
What happens though if you know you should write a book? Maybe people keep saying “oh that’s so good you need to put it in a book”. Telling them you’re too busy at the moment to tackle it is one way. Or saying it’s not quite ready to be in a book yet. Or even better is “I’m working on it”.
“I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.”
Stephen Wright
Well you know there’s a lot of computer technology out there that can make life much easier for you. I’m about to launch out into using voice recognition software. For me it’s more about saving myself from RSI than anything else. But as a tool for avoiding the problems of too much typing it could work for you.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you want to write a book enough, we can find a solution for you whatever your challenges.
…reader of books. But particularly self help books. I guess over the years I’ve spent thousands of pounds on books, tapes and programmes of one sort or another.