writing | Peter Fletcher

Stop writing for an audience, write for yourself

April 14, 2014 by Peter Fletcher

Today, after more that 600 attempts, I finally saw one of my blog posts perform like the content marketers tell you will happen. Until today I’ve been writing posts about social media and email marketing and Michel Foucault with little to no reaction. Sure, some of my close friends have said about a few of my posts “That’s an amazing story Pete. You should write these more often.”

But aside from that, nothing.

Then, last night, I penned a rant about the Town of Victoria Park’s parking policy. I’d tried to write that story before. I tried to write it on rational grounds, as a cogent, thoughtful argument, but it came up bland – so bland that it was never published.

Then I met with my writing coach. John told me to put myself into the story. What mistake did you make on your journey? What strongly held belief did you have to give up? What obstacle did you have to overcome to achieve your goal?

So that’s what I threw into the story. I told about my efforts to get something as simple as storage for a bag of soccer balls at the local soccer club. I told about my disgust at being charged for parking when all I wanted was a simple cup of coffee. I got angry and I let that anger be known.

Then I hit the go button. Before I went to bed the post had already achieved hundreds of views, and when I woke this morning the views were still climbing. (As I write this it’s been viewed over over 2000 times, a record for my site.) Along with the views came the reactions on social media. Hundreds of Facebook likes, comments and shares (as of writing this story it was 557) showed that I’d struck a nerve. Even the local Mayor got involved adding a comment defending his Council’s management of the local playing field and claiming to be listening to his constituents.

Am I pleased all of this happened because of something I wrote? You bet I am. I hope it happens again. And I hope that one day I’ll look back on this post and be a little embarrassed I was proud of ‘only’ 2000 views.

But more importantly I’m proud that I had the insight to know my mind and the courage to speak my truth. In writing the post I didn’t give a rats arse what people thought. I wrote for me. I wrote to express where I was at and I wrote to improve my craft as a writer.

And that’s something I’ll continue doing.

How I pack more into my day and increase my tempo

April 8, 2014 by Peter Fletcher

After a full day of presenting, writing is the last thing I feel like doing right now. All I want to do is relax and wind down.

Instead, I’m writing.

I’m writing, not because I want to write but because I want to go to sleep. If I don’t keep tapping away on these little black squares I’ll still be here at midnight.

And as much as that sounds like some sort of self-flagellation, it’s not. Instead, it’s how I pack more into my day and increase my tempo.

I want to do more, not less.

I use deadlines as the motivation to do more and work faster. That sense of urgency gets me out of my head and into production mode. It denies me the time in which I’d mull things over and feel sorry for myself.

With a deadline approaching there’s no choice but to do that which is important and to get things done.

This does not end here

March 18, 2014 by Peter Fletcher

Giving up is not an option. Image: Daniel O’Neil http://www.flickr.com/photos/juggernautco/8313368411/

Is this the night my blogging challenge comes to an end? Is this the moment when the words dry up and I say it’s all too hard?

No, because I’m writing.

And what counts is that I’m writing something, anything. What counts is the number of times I hit the publish button. What counts is that I don’t give up.

Would I like to be writing a gripping story or a witty opinion piece? Sure. But that wasn’t the challenge.

The challenge was to publish a blog post every day.

I’ve done that.

And I’ll do it tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. I’ll do it every day until the last day of this year.

Then I’ll look back and say a quiet well done. I’ll look back on virtue developed through personal discipline. I’ll look back to look forward once again.

For this challenge is helping me to be both a better writer and a better thinker. I’m sharper and more focussed. My words have become the steel honing the knife of my mind.

No, this challenge is far from over. It’s only just begun.

If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think nearly as well as you think you do. —Kurt Vonnegut

How George Orwell would write a real estate ad – Part 2

March 4, 2014 by Peter Fletcher

In the Part 1, I took an ad from a real estate magazine and applied George Orwell’s 6 part test for choosing the best words. The ad went from

Situated well away from the hustle and bustle of Marmion Avenue lies a superb value air-conditioned 3 bedroom modern bathroom home featuring separate lounge, dining opening out into an open plan family, contemporary kitchen and meals area. The large alfresco includes garden plus all weather pergola. Do not delay! Act now! Before it’s too late.

This air-conditioned home is set well away from the traffic noise from Marmion Avenue. It has a lounge, a dining room that opens onto a family room, and a kitchen and meals area. The alfresco includes a garden and an all-weather pergola.

Although the rewritten ad is more efficient it isn’t compelling. What’s missing?

For a start, there’s no protagonist, no hero of the story. So let’s introduce one.

Real estate agents are often tempted to make themselves the protagonist. They become the hero who’s “just listed this magnificent 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom…” You get the idea. But as the hero the ad becomes all about them and their needs. It ignores the needs of the reader – the buyer – and that makes the ad less compelling.

So let’s go ahead and make the buyer the protagonist. To do that, we’ll need to know a few things about them.

What’s happening in their life right now? What big goal do they want to achieve? What obstacles will they face as they try to achieve that goal? How will life look when they’ve overcome those obstacles and conquered their fears?

Because the house was advertised at a price “In the high $500’s” I’m going to take a few educated guesses about the potential buyer – our new protagonist. I’m going to call her Debbie.

Debbie is 25 and has been living with Bob for 3 years. Debbie wants kids. At 25 she knows there’s plenty of time but she wants her first before she’s 30. As a commercial lawyer Debbie works long hours. She’s happy to do this to do her bit to save for their first home.

Debbie and Bob have been renting since they moved in together. John works as a theatre nurse at Joondalup Health Campus. He too works long hours. Although they’d like to buy closer to the city they also want a block with enough room for their yet-to-be born family to play. Living away from the city centre will allow them to have a bigger home on more land and still be within their budget.

Debbie imagines that one day her children will go to university just like her and she worries that, even with the amount they’re saving, they’ll struggle to save enough deposit to buy their first home. She worries about being in so much debt that they won’t be able to afford to go out with their friends.

Debbie and Bob have only recently begun to save seriously. Previously they’ve partied hard, spending large chunks of their now substantial incomes on fine wine, expensive Scotch, and a new Subaru Impreza. They love their car but don’t love that it’s losing value fast.

There’s a lot more I could say about Debbie but this is a good start. We now have a hero – Debbie – who has a goal of buying a home, raising a family and sending her kids to university. She must do all of this knowing that she’ll have stiff competition from other first-time buyers.

Now that we have a protagonist we need a plot.

I’ll develop the plot in tomorrow’s post.

How George Orwell would write a real estate ad.

March 3, 2014 by Peter Fletcher

In Why I Write, George Orwell outlines 6 rules to help writers choose words that add impact to prose. These rules are:

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

How can Orwell’s rules apply to writing a real estate ad?

The following is an ad selected from the December 2013 edition of Primo Life magazine.

Situated well away from the hustle and bustle of Marmion Avenue lies a superb value air-conditioned 3 bedroom modern bathroom home featuring separate lounge, dining opening out into an open plan family, contemporary kitchen and meals area. The large alfresco includes garden plus all weather pergola. Do not delay! Act now! Before it’s too late.

I’ll start with the edit applying each of Orwell’s rules in turn.

First, I’ll remove all of the overused figures of speech.

Situated well away from the ~~hustle and bustle~~ of Marmion Avenue lies a ~~superb value~~ air-conditioned 3 bedroom modern bathroom home featuring separate lounge, dining opening out into an open plan family, contemporary kitchen and meals area. The large alfresco includes garden plus all weather pergola. ~~Do not delay! Act now! Before it’s too late.~~

The ad becomes:

Situated well away from the traffic noise from Marmion Avenue lies a air-conditioned 3 bedroom modern bathroom home featuring separate lounge, dining opening out into an open plan family, contemporary kitchen and meals area. The large alfresco includes garden plus all weather pergola.

Next, I’ll replace long words with short words.

~~Situated~~ Set well away from the traffic noise from Marmion Avenue lies a air-conditioned 3 bedroom modern bathroom home ~~featuring~~ separate lounge, dining opening out into an open plan family, ~~contemporary~~ modern kitchen and meals area. The large alfresco includes garden plus all weather pergola.

The ad now reads:

Set well away from the traffic noise from Marmion Avenue lies a air-conditioned 3 bedroom modern bathroom home that has a separate lounge, dining opening out into an open plan family, modern kitchen and meals area. The large alfresco includes garden plus all weather pergola.

I’ll now cut out all unneeded words.

Set well away from the traffic noise from Marmion Avenue lies a air-conditioned ~~3 bedroom~~ (Already stated in the ad sidebar.) ~~modern~~ (Conveys no meaning.) ~~bathroom~~ (Stated in the sidebar.) home that has a ~~separate~~ (Separate from what?) lounge, dining opening ~~out into~~ onto an ~~open plan~~ (An overused figure of speech. Contains no meaning.) a family, ~~modern~~ (conveys no meaning) kitchen and meals area. The ~~large~~ alfresco includes garden plus all weather pergola.

The ad now contains less words.

Set well away from the traffic noise from Marmion Avenue lies a air-conditioned home that has a lounge, dining opening onto an a family, kitchen and meals area. The alfresco includes garden plus all weather pergola.

Before removing the passive voice, I’ll tidy up a few typos.

Set well away from the traffic noise from Marmion Avenue lies an air-conditioned home that has a lounge, dining room opening onto a family room, kitchen and meals area. The alfresco includes a garden plus an all-weather pergola.

After removing the passive voice the ad becomes:

This air-conditioned home is set well away from the traffic noise from Marmion Avenue. It has a lounge, a dining room that opens onto a family room, and a kitchen and meals area. The alfresco includes a garden and an all-weather pergola.

But even re-written the ad is a bland collection of nouns.

Strip it down further and you end up with a bullet point list:

Airconditioned;
Lounge;
Dining room
Family room;
Kitchen/meals area;
Garden; and
All-weather pergola.

My writing time is up for this evening. I’m going to publish this post without providing a rewrite of the ad. I’ll do that in another post.

Reflections on today

March 1, 2014 by Peter Fletcher

Today I made no discernible progress towards achieving my 2014 goals. That is unless you count writing this blog post.

Now why is it that the blog post goal has stayed on track and the others haven’t?

The answer is simple.

If I miss one day of writing the goal is over for the year – I’ll come back to that later – but if I miss a run or some chin-ups there’s always the next day. That’s precisely what happened this past week. I didn’t run once and I didn’t do a single chin-up.

Still, I turned up at Frontline this morning and did my thing. It felt great to be hard at it again. And that will probably give me the motivation to get the running and the chin-ups started again.

The reality is, this week has been very busy. I presented to the Professionals marketing group on Monday. It was the first time I’d done that presentation so I had to prepare it from the ground up. Although I used a lot of stories I’ve used in other presentations the re-organising took most of last weekend. By the time I made it to the end of Monday I was already buggered.

I then had an early start Wednesday and I’ve had tomorrow’s keynote (embedded below) to prepare from scratch.

Then I’ve had the brutal feedback about my writing. I think that knocked me a bit. It’s not that the feedback wasn’t valuable – it was – but it took a lot of my mental bandwidth trying to think about what it is that I want to write in a book. I still don’t know the answer to that question but I know that writing a book WASN’T part of the plan for 2014 so I’m dropping it.

Instead, I’m writing – stuff. As Henry Day said this morning, “Your writing is a bit all over the place. But it’s interesting and it gives your readers an insight into your mind.” That’s good enough.

It was never my intention to write blog posts with any sort of narrative theme so I’m happy just to write something.

This post is a nod of the head to Marcus Aurelius who wrote a regular journal as a way to remind himself of the things he ought to be doing. If it’s good enough for an emperor, it’s good enough for me.

Now back to the statement above about the goal being over for the year. That’s bullshit. Yes, if I miss a day I’ll have missed a day but that doesn’t mean that I can’t get back on the writing horse and keep writing.

Thinking of a setback as a complete failure effaces all the good that I’ve done to the point of the setback. And that’s disempowering and it’s what’s happening with my chin-up challenge. I miss a a day or two and I start to think “Of fuck it, you’re not built for chin-ups anyway.”

So, I’m going to get back on the chin-up band wagon and I’ll be running again tomorrow, even if it is just a quick 5 ks.

And on a positive note to wrap things up, I’m excited to see my friend Belinda Dufall starting to blog. Belinda is a passionate advocate for people receiving a fair go and a fine agent. I’m looking forward to reading more of her work.

Led electrical contractors presentation the vines march 2 2014 copy from Peter Fletcher

Some tough love that’s stoked the fire inside me

February 24, 2014 by Peter Fletcher

Sometimes feedback can seem harsh but it turns out to be what’s needed to stir up the fire within. Image: Ben Watts http://www.flickr.com/photos/benwatts/4087289013/

If you’ve read this blog at all this year you’ll know that I’ve set myself a challenge to write a blog post every day for 2014. It’s the end of February and I’m already tired from the effort. Instead of curling up on the couch with a good book, I tap away at this keyboard forcing out words that feel as dry as the Gibson Desert.

But I’m nothing if not an optimist.

So I get to thinking, if I’m going to write something every day, why not write a book!?

In round terms I’m writing 500 words each day so by the end of the year I’ll have written over 180,ooo words. That’s enough words for a couple of books and have a third in the pipeline.

But I kind of get the impression that my writing really isn’t up to scratch to get published.

I’m especially aware that my posts have no theme. One day I’ll write about goal setting, the next about dealing with negative people, and then I’ll write something introspective…like this post.

I decide I need some help so I decide to employ a writing coach.

I make a call and explain my idea. He says that he usually assesses manuscripts and helps writers make their work better. Helping someone write a daily blog post isn’t really his thing.

But, he says, he’ll give it a go. I give him the address and wait about a week.

An email arrives. It goes as follows.

From reading some of your blogs it’s obvious that you are both adventurous and a very successful entrepreneur.

Nice, I like this guy…so far.

But at first glance, it is difficult to know what this blog is really about. What is its soul centre?

Yes, I know that. That’s why I called. I can’t work out what it’s about myself.

You like to share enthusiastically about yourself — your favourite music, books etc. And you write very well in the blog format (never a paragraph of more than three lines). But there’s very little depth to anything you share: why do you like something … what does it mean to you, what effect has it had on you?

Now we’re starting to get–well, not personal but–serious. He’s right though, I don’t let on about what stuff means to me. I don’t tell people what effect it has on me. He’s onto something here.

Frankly, there is nothing new or unique or truly insightful about anything I have read so far. There are no meaningful insights that an assiduous reader of blogs could not read somewhere else. This does not make for prime material for a book; not unless you take fifty thousand words of blog copy you have already written and construct it into an ebook for selling on Kindle/Amazon.

So what is your objective in publishing a book? To further which business? Real estate or business coaching or to tell your story? Do you have a good story to tell?

Bear in mind that, though your blog is interesting and eminently readable, the fundamental question in this business is… would people be prepared to pay to read this? That is the bottom line of all writing.

It’s nice to know that it’s “eminently readable” but the hard truth is that no-one would pay for it. Still, I’m not sure about his definition of the bottom line. My best writing was the book I wrote for Rita for our 20th wedding anniversary. The bottom line there was to shed tears of joy together as she ‘discovered’ it in a shop window. You couldn’t write me a cheque big enough to replace that moment.

That said, I take his point–if you’re going to write a book for commercial purposes then it better be good enough for the punters to want to fork out the dough.

So what, if anything, would you like me to do exactly? I cannot choose what you should write; only you can do that and that choice comes out of the heart far more than it comes out of the head.

And there’s the problem, right there. He can’t choose what I should write and neither can I. It’s as though I’ve got something inside me that wants to burst free but when I open my mouth there’s nothing. No sound, no words. Just blankness.

To get me through the blogging challenge I write that which catches my eye, something that makes me curious.

The best books are those about the writer’s journey: a story about yourself—your life, how you got to where you are now – the hard lessons you learned along the way.

So I respond via email.

“Identifying a theme is precisely why I’d like to work with you. I struggle with deciding what it is that I want to write until I’ve actually written it. In many ways the writing helps me clarify my views.

“A prime example is this post about the ethics of shark culling. It wasn’t until I’d written this post that I’d formed the view that it was a political stunt.

“My goal is to self-publish a book for two reasons: self-satisfaction and self-promotion. A book would give me a body of work I’m proud of and it would also give me the opportunity to promote myself as an author.”

It struck me as a reasonable proposition. If I’m a published author I’ll get more speaking gigs. Speaking gigs pay well. Happy days.

Then the response came back.

This time around I got into The Ethics of Shark Culling which was okay but pretty bland and much the same as other articles on the general topic of the preservation of species. From there I went to Tell Me: What do You Stand For? which didn’t really say anything fresh or new and then to Five Ordinary People who Inspire Me which was much better and had some bite and more of a unique point of view (POV). That’s the area in my view you should be pursuing rather than (frankly ) Mickey Mouse philosophy. Your background may be a fertile area for recounting stories which can develop the moralities to which you aspire. Most great lessons are imparted through story — called parables in the holy books. [Hyperlinks added]

Well, it’s nice to know at least one of the three were on the right track. Mickey Mouse philosophies? Ouch. I’m not sure what that term means exactly, but I think it means a philosophy that’s pretty close to worthless.

He continues.

Turning to your last paragraph. As you are a guy who clearly espouses ethical standards, I’ll tell you the truth. Your reasons for wanting to publish a book are pretty shallow. No writer is ever fully satisfied with what they have written: there are no ‘good’ writers – there are lots of bad ones while the rest of us are trying to get better. And as for self-promotion – that’s a ‘How To’ Manual.

And double ouch. Not only are my philosophies close to worthless, I’m now shallow. On the self-promotion thing, I suspect he’s right. And that’s what I was thinking of writing – a ‘How To’ Manual – something that someone could read and learn something from.

But, being proud of a book is something all together different, he claims.

In order to be proud of a book it has to be a good book and no writer ever produced a good book easily. A good book is analogous to raising a child of whom you are genuinely proud: you don’t do it over night; it takes a lot of effort and you suffer a lot in the process. And one book is not a ‘body of work’; an oeuvre is three or more.

OK, so I’ve never raised a kid so I don’t know how hard that is…but I get the idea. It’s hard work. Still, this guy isn’t finished.

The self-promotion angle is, frankly, the kind of thing that hustlers and corner-creepers indulge in. You have plenty of people like that in your business… and so do we. You write a book because you have something to say; something burning inside and you want as many people as possible to read it. That’s what drives you to rewrite it four or maybe five times.

And there it is – same problem, different words. And can I say it again. I don’t know what it is I want to write. Yep, I get the whole burning thing, I really do, but no amount of fire in my guts is going to make words come out. Maybe some black, acrid smoke, but no words.

If you are going to write a book, Peter, I would exhort you to do it for the right reason. If it’s good enough it will get past the gatekeepers in publishing (of which there are many) and be published by a publishing house. Then you can genuinely call yourself an author and be proud.

Yep, I’d love to be proud, I’d love to write a book but I’d also love to pass the first step–knowing what it is I want to say.

And if you’ve read this far, please don’t leave a comment about how nasty the guy was. If there’s a fire inside I’ve just had someone stoke the embers. Sure, he used a pitch fork to do it but it had the right effect.

Now, to bed.