Tag: Writing

Writing: Finding my tone

Support me (or one of the other 250 Write-a-thon participants) as we “write it forward” to make it possible for other writers to attend Clarion West.

I started writing this post six years ago; amusingly, it’s just as true today as it was then. Including the part about the person asking me if I’d written the book. I’ll be spending the next six weeks rewriting a novella as part of the Clarion West Write-a-thon. Please stop by the Write-a-thon website to support me (or one of the other 250 writers) as we “write it forward” to make it possible for other writers to attend Clarion West.

BooksYesterday someone asked me “So, did you write your book?”

The answer is yes…and no.

In the past 20 years, I’ve written one novella and several short stories. I’ve also started several book projects.

For many aspiring fiction writers, the problem is story, or plot, or simply putting words on the blank page or screen.

For me, the problem is tone. Each of my fiction projects has a different tone, but (until after I studied at Viable Paradise last fall) none of them seemed to be my tone. I’ve seen this in the work of other writers who achieve a distinctive tone when working in a particular sub-genre but somehow “gray out” into blandness when they tackle a different type of story. I think that I’m only just now finding my sub-genre.

Meanwhile, people telling me to “write what people will want to buy” isn’t helpful.

It makes me think of a New Yorker “About Town” piece from many years back about novelist Larry McMurtry. His mother once attended a public reading he was giving and rose from audience to ask McMurtry why he wrote such “depressing” stories. His reply:

“I’m writing for me, Mom, not for you.”

Amen.

Terry Pratchett’s “Shaking Hands with Death”

Whatever your views on death, if you are a writer, you can’t help but admire the speech by Sir Terry Pratchett. It was read Feb. 1 on BBC1 by Tony Robinson.

Imagine a very, very slow-motion car crash. Nothing much seems to be happening. There’s an occasional little bang, a crunch, a screw pops out and spins across the dashboard as if we’re in Apollo 13. But the radio is still playing, the heater is on and it doesn’t seem all that bad, except for the certain knowledge that sooner or later you will definitely be going headfirst through the windscreen.

Whatever your views on death, if you are a writer, you can’t help but admire this speech by Sir Terry Pratchett, given as a Richard Dimbleby lecture. It was read Feb. 1 on BBC1 by Tony Robinson.

Er, do I know you?

The irony here is that adding a little bit of actual identifying information to their email wouldn’t have cost them a cent.

<rant mode on>

I received email today from a company whose software product I apparently downloaded at some unspecified time in the past. Here are the first four paragraphs of today’s email, with the product name changed to Prod and the Company acronym changed to COM (but typos included):

Subjectline: Prod & COM
Hi!
Lots is happening in Prod Land these days. We have 3 important things to tell you:
*Prod Version 2.0.2 Released:*
We’ve just released an update to Prod, version 2.0.2, which has lots of new translations and bug fixes. As always, download it here: http://getProd.com
Overall, the release of Prod 2 has received lots of great coverage and more users that ever. Take a look at some of the recent reviews: [URLhere]

I download three or four pieces of software a week (that would be more than 150 apps a year), a few of which I use regularly and the rest of which I soon forget. Might I want to take a look at this one again? Perhaps, but this email gives me no clue whatsoever. Is Prod for calendars? Audio? Backups? Font management? No idea.

What I do know is that as a piece of marketing communication, this email gets an “F.” Oh, wait, they don’t give those sorts of grades any more, do they? Well then, it gets a “B – – – – – – -”  (with the number of minuses being significant as placeholders for letters which could complete a appropriate word).

Would it have killed these people to have included in the subject line of the email or the first paragraph, a clue as to who they are and what their product does? Might they want to give me the teeniest little hint about why I might like to download the update they’re hyping?

From a marketing communications viewpoint, the irony here is that adding a little bit of actual identifying information to their email wouldn’t have cost them a cent. Going to their website (which I would never have done if I weren’t writing this blog post) I discovered that the product has an excellent tagline that explains exactly what it is, what it does, and why someone would want to acquire it.

This company is halfway there in terms of MarCom. Now all they have to do is get their tagline into their “marketing” email.

<rant mode off>

Speed, transparency, and the long tail

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about PR and social media to another communications class at the University of Washington. This time, it’s an undergraduate class. I’m going to hit many of the points I did in my earlier presentation to students already in the business world, but this time I’m going to attempt to give more context.

So much has changed in the PR world in the past 10 years, it’s hard to know where to begin!

The model of PR in which corporate communicators developed carefully reviewed press releases and distributed them to known contacts in print and broadcast media by mail or fax, is over. Five minutes after a company announces a new product, it’s been Twitter and blogged about. (Example — Amazon released Kindle software for the iPhone last night, and that rocketed to a top spot on Twitter in about two hours. Interestingly, it was being discussed on Twitter even before it had registered on Google News searches.)

Any hope PR folks once had of controlling public perception of the announcement — via their carefully chosen words, or via the sedate reviewing of a friendly news reporter — is a quaint delusion. People are raving and ranting about it on blogs — or pointedly ignoring it — within 24 hours. And good luck to the PR person who tries to spin or puff a product. Her or she risks being reviled right along with the product itself.

Clearly, old-school PR doesn’t work in the current online environment. As anyone who follows Twitter has seen, a new school of PR is emerging to meet the new challenges. It can be successful, if it’s mindful of three characteristics of the social media world:

Speed. If PR wants to be part of the discussion, it needs to get out there, fast. A good PR operation, representing an organization that genuinely has something to contribute to the conversation, can make a splash. That may mean twittering about the city’s inept response to the snowstorm at 4 a.m. (Does your PR person work at 4 a.m.? Let’s hope so.)

Transparency. Successful PR folks have to come to grips with the transparency created by online social media. Many companies tried to hop on the social media bandwagon by making community commenting, or video contests, a part of their marketing campaigns. Often they forgot that they could no longer control the distribution of the resulting comments or videos. In 2006, General Motors’ attempt to harness “viral marketing” for their Chevy Tahoe SUV inspired hundreds of people critical of SUVs to create and then post anti-Tahoe videos. To its credit, General Motors remained cool and the flap eventually died down.

The Long Tail. The days when nearly everyone read the newspaper and families gathered around the TV after dinner to watch the network news are long, long over. Instead, household members are more likely to be getting information individually, from a variety of sources (such as watching a NetFlix video, playing World of Warcraft, reading their favorite blogs, or talking to friends on Facebook). To be successful, PR campaigns will need to focus on these narrower audiences, often with savvier members.

The professor of the class asked me to emphasize the continuing need for strong writing skills in PR. That will be no problem. Sure, you see sloppy writing all over the web. But you don’t see it on highly ranked blogs. If PR people want to draw traffic to their blogs and followers to their Tweets, clear, polished writing is a must.

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