I arrived to the office the other day—at around 7:30, my usual time—and found our fancy coffee maker already prepped and waiting for me. All I had to do was push the “start” button, which put in motion a series of sonic and olfactory events that set the mood for what is eventually a fantastic cup of coffee. The quick click as the channel between the bean container opened, allowing 10 cups worth to flow into the grinder, the revving of the motor, the 30 second grind, then a second click before the soft purr began. Yes, our coffee maker purrs. No one knows why. But you see, normally this process is preceded by about 5-7 minutes of breaking down the machine from the day before, rinsing it out, piece by piece, and refilling the water tank. But a kindly colleague, knowing this to be my daily routine, set it all up the night before and gave me the gift of just receiving the coffee that morning. A very simple thing, but it’s the simple things that delight. (That’s exactly what I said to Katie Jamison, my coffee benefactor that morning, via Twitter.)
Simple things delight.
I believe that. One of the simpler delights I know, besides being saved a few minutes of labor first thing in the morning, is reading. My love of reading began as the way in which my insatiable curiosity and hunger for knowledge was satisfied—through the written word. I had to read to learn. That was before the web, before podcasts, before YouTube. But over time, I’ve come to love reading for reading’s sake. For the sake of enjoying the craft of how others express ideasthrough words.
It’s a good thing I enjoy it. Because reading is the first of what I call the non-written disciplines of writing. There is no writing without reading. Or, maybe better said, there is no good writing without reading. If you want to write, or need to write (and the two don’t have to be in agreement), you’ve got to read. Now, if you’re thinking to yourself, “I don’t like to read,” I’m going to promise you right now that’s not true; you just haven’t yet found what you like to read. So that’s job #1: figure out what you like. Find books, magazines, blogs, or other written sources that cover the topics you’re interested in, even if those are not the topics you need to write about. The discipline of reading is purely about exposure to ideas and the craft of writing. You could be a great sports writer and only read poetry.
Now, about ideas. You probably don’t have any new ones. Neither do I. Maybe you’ve heard the saying, attributed to Solomon, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Reading is about exposing yourself to ideas that are new to you so that the ideas you have, which need not be novel to merit you writing about them, can be enriched by the insights of others. Reading will teach you how to reveal ideas through the written word, and how there is an art to that. Good writers exercise restraint with their knowledge, using the majority of it as an unwritten foundation for what they actually put to words—the tip of the iceberg.
Finally, about words. There is a right word for everything, and it’s probably not one you just learned. Some of the great writers in history had incredible, expansive vocabularies, but the scope of their lexicon was often in proportion with their output, such that when that one fancy word was used, it was right for the phrase, for the sentence, for the work at large. This is an area where I struggle: finding the best, most simple way to express an idea. Without that extra editorial attention, I will tend toward long, ornate sentences that are overloaded far beyond capacity with ideas. See, like that one. You get the idea.
Put simply, if you are going use words, you need to experience how others use words. I wish I could offer a simple ratio, something like “for every page you write, you should read five,” but I’m sure that whatever I came up with would be a gross underestimation. So try this: make reading part of your lifestyle. Work at it until it becomes natural. It will probably take a lot of reading, and that should at least get you part of the way there. Then read some more.
If you’d like to hear more about writing, check out my slideshare presentation (with audio) onprofessional writing for the unprofessional writer.
Posted at 9:28pm and tagged with: two column, writing, longreads,.
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows… If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of all those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them… [But] if a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.![The “Mad Scientist” Blogger
Many of our agency friends have been blogging for a few years now, but it’s been about as effective a strategy as attending a networking mixer; most companies know instinctively that they need to be there, but they just don’t know exactly why, what they will bring to the conversation, or what they’ll do with the experience. As a result, many agency blogs are pretty unfocused. Some are mostly “neat stuff” aggregators, while others are “innovationspeak” engines running on the Taco Bell model—you know, same words, different combinations. Few actually know what they’re about.
This month’s upcoming newsletter is going to be about how to improve your blog—make it accurately represent your firm, educate your prospects, and generate new interest in what you offer. In the meantime though, I’ve been thinking about a way that some agencies have used their blog that I call the “mad scientist” strategy. Let me explain…
The Iceberg Theory
This image comes from my presentation on writing for business called Professional Writingfor the Unprofessional Writer.
First, I need to apply the iceberg theory—the idea that good writing should only reveal about one eighth of a writer’s knowledge of the subject—to your blogging strategy. Peter Turchi, in his book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, quotes Hemingway on the concept of the “literary” iceberg:
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows… If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of all those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them… [But] if a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.- ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A corporate blog should reinforce this idea. I believe that the value of a blog is in the long-term relationship that is built between it’s author and readers. Blogs take a cumulative approach to tell an ongoing story with many short posts. They are relational. When someone subscribes to a blog, they are making a commitment to getting to know you—one they can break at any point (and are likely to) when a blog loses or never develops focus. The story that is told by a blog, though, is one that, when looked at in retrospect, leaves an impression of the writer’s interest and expertise on the reader. At any point in time, I can look at some of the blogs I read regularly and have a sense for who the authors are and what they’re about. The seven eighths of the “iceberg” are in that impression, while the one eighth is in each individual post. This is why a blog that is focused tightly by a firm’s positioning will be more effective that a “generalist” blog. It will slowly describe that positioning through posts that cover thoughts about practice, new ideas, application of expertise, and the like.
But What About…?
There is an exception to this; you may already be thinking of one. What about those bloggers that write so often that their blog is more of a written document of their thinking—as expansive of or peripheral to their core discipline as it may be—than a deliberately considered marketing tool? There are many, many bloggers like this; you might describe their blogs as “unfocused.” In fact, the blogs I look forward to reading most are blogs of this kind. But that’s because they arefocused, just not in an immediately discernible way. I call the authors of these blogs “mad scientists” because their creative license, freedom to experiment and ask “dumb” questions, latitude, and diversity of content reinforce my perception of them as profound thinkers, which in turn reinforces my trust in the quality of their firm’s work. They probably don’t talk about work they’ve done as much as work they want to do. They probably talk about tomorrow more than yesterday. They don’t use much marketing language. And they never try to sell “innovation.”
Design is one of those disciplines that must aggregate knowledge from a wide range of other disciplines in order to properly inform its execution. In turn, good designers are deep thinkers and lifelong students of other areas of knowledge. So it tends to be the case that every good firm has a “mad scientist” on staff, either in a particular person or personified by a stated and supported core value of practice. This person’s thinking influence the kind of client a firm attracts, the kind of work it does, and the kind of people that come there to work. A person who fits this description should probably be one of your active bloggers because the ongoing story they tell will be an extremely valuable one to the perception of your firm as a thoughtful, cutting edge practice with a vision to guide its clients into the future.
Examples
Here are a few people I read that fit in with the “mad scientist” description (in no particular order other than how they come up in my feed reader): David Sherwin, Jack Cheng, Paul Isakson,Russell Davies, Jonathan Harris, Michael Babwahsingh, Steven Frank, and Craig Mod.](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kz2rl4804N1qzw5oyo1_500.jpg)
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