"The flame beneath the pot"

Beautiful language can reach right off the page and startle you into a wide-awake, pleased wonderment, like a sudden kiss from someone you have a huge crush on. I read poetry in the hopes that I'll get that shivery rush.

Yesterday's Writer's Almanac poem, "Lobsters," by Howard Nemerov, did it. Even though the lovely turns of phrase are mostly morbid, I was enchanted with the powerful simplicity of the language.

By GrammarFascist (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

These lines in the second stanza made me want to applaud: "Their velvet colors / Mud red, bruise purple, cadaver green." The perfection of the phrase "mud red": it simultaneously brings to mind "blood red" and also that absolutely correct muddy ochre color of lobsters. "Cadaver green" is a horribly delicious (sorry) irony, describing creatures whose bodies won't last long enough to be called cadavers.

The ending of the poem is very Yeats-ian, very "what rough beast," to me, but maybe that's because I just finished reading The Stand for perhaps the tenth time. (King seems to have turned this poem of 22 lines into a novel of over 1,000 pages). I won't spoil it; go read the poem.

The old-fashioned way

I just wrote an inquiry letter to the creative director of a 118-year-old brand on this:

I bought this at an antique store last week. Surprisingly, ribbons are available on Amazon and, apparently, also at Staples. Guess I'm not the only one.

I wanted to say, "This is not just some email I'm dashing off, or InMail, or a tweet...I really thought about this." I didn't want to say "enough to retype it twice," but that may have come through.) For a brand that cares about quality and heritage, I thought this might be a good approach.

I'll keep you posted.

Do you sell to writers? Maybe consider using good writing.

I heard about a new writing app called Ulysses. (Questionable name, I think. I'd guess the largest percentage of their potential customers would associate this name with pain and boredom; a smaller percentage don't know what it means, and the smallest proportion associate it with utter genius. But that's not my point.)

The point is, I went to the website and was asked a question.

Why, yes. Yes, I do. But this isn't a date; you shouldn't be shutting up about yourself and asking me all about me. In the case of a landing page, it's all about YOU. What the hell are you? From the home page of Ulysses' site, I have no idea what the product is.

More importantly, from a conversion standpoint, what do you want me to do?

Oh, OK, you want me to watch the video. In it, I'm sure, you're going to tell me all about your product.

But wait. You don't. The only words in the whole video are "Do you write?" The video doesn't say anything about what the app does. No benefits, no features, nothing. It doesn't describe the product at all. It shows people using Macs.

The home page also fails in telling me what to do. Users want to know what's going to happen when they click a button; we can help them by providing clear, meaningful CTAs. "Learn more" is everyone's favorite CTA to deprecate, but at least it gives a clear command.

These buttons do not. How about "discover" or "meet" or even "learn about" or "see"—in short, how about a verb here, please?

The app is for writers. From this page, it doesn't appear that Ulysses employs any.

Once I click in, though, it becomes clear that they employ too many—or at least, that their writers employ too many words.

What? Make up your mind. Which is it? What does this even mean? That's a question I asked myself a lot reading through the verbiage on this page.

"Consider yourself a night owl?Ulysses offers a dedicated Dark color mode. It's said to also save energy."

Weak. "Consider yourself" is waffling; this should be "are you." But you haven't made the connection between being a night owl and using Dark color mode, anyway, so your offer of a "dedicated" (what the hell does that even mean here?) Dark color mode is a non sequitur.

And then the last sentence. OK, Yoda: this is your big selling point? "It's said to"? You may as well say "We don't actually believe that it saves energy, and there's no evidence to support this half-assed claim, but we're just putting it out there."

And come on, people. Proofread. You're marketing to writers, who (while we're not all copyeditors) are likely to notice that you forgot a space between the first two sentences.

"When it comes to distraction-free writing, there's still no better way than going full screen. We know. We invented it."

You invented going full screen. Yeah.

It's bad enough that any site should have writing this awful. But a site selling something to writers? Wow.

Gear up to cover more creative ground.

I rode my bike the nine miles to work today. I live in a farming community outside a small city, and take a route comprised entirely of two-lane roads with no stoplights and very little shoulder.

I passed hulking blueberry bushes bursting with fruit and nearly obscuring the hand-painted sign reading "pickers wanted." Unnaturally still cornfields with leaves like a pair of corduroy pants I had hated in the fifth grade. Dusty swaths of potatoes flowering in faded-quilt colors: eggplant, butter, cream. The river a muddy smear, motionless and sullen.

I felt I was barely moving, too. My legs were churning and creating a happy cicada whirr in the gears, but I felt mired, as though I were pedaling through that thick river. Sleepiness was the culprit for my hazy thought process, and after a mile or so I woke up enough to look down and realize I was in the wrong gear.

By George6996 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

At that rate, as the road curved out from the woods into sprawling golden fields, gearing up didn't cost me much more effort, but my speed increased rather dramatically. I finally felt the morning open up around me and my bicycle begin to eat up the road. I passed the Tim's Upholstery sign on the side of a barn and the big, scruffy eagle's nest in the crag by the railroad tracks, and I thought about the day's work ahead of me.

First on my list was revising a web page that had been reviewed the previous day. "Why didn't you include such-and-such new product in the comps?" the client had asked. "Well, we hadn't been told about that product." Minor details.

The week before, my rewriting talents had been strained to the breaking point with a similar issue. "This page is actually for two audiences: the one that knows about our product and the one that doesn't. Can you rewrite to address both?"

Working with limited information is like riding a bike in the wrong gear: you can churn and churn and churn, but you're getting nowhere fast. But knowing all the products, all the audiences, all the strategic imperatives up front lets the team slide into that lovely, purring rhythm of productivity, making time, pounding out the miles of creative work.

My ancient Trek and I flickered past the country market, the ramshackle houses of the edge of town, past the cement factory and the broad, glittering expanse of Puget Sound. I pedaled hard, eager to get to that copy now that I could rewrite it in high gear.

How to Make Words Do More Work

When you only have a few words to communicate a big idea, as in a tagline or a headline, you've got to make them do a lot of work.

In physics, doing work means acting on a body and creating displacement. In thermodynamics, work refers to energy transfer from one system to another. Likewise, when copy does work, it has an effect on the intended audience. Word for word, headlines have to do a lot more work than copy-heavy ads like this one.*

But how to string together a few measly words to make a really big statement? One way is to use double meaning, either with single words or phrases or with the way they're couched.

Netflix uses this device to great effect in their new campaign.

Tagline: "You gotta get it to get it."

The tagline, of course, means that you must be a subscriber to Netflix in order to understand the meaning of the image. (In this case, you really just need to be a child of the 80s, but that's beside the point.) The repetition of the phrase "get it" to capture each meaning creates a nice rhythm and sound, and the double meaning allows the tagline to do a great deal of work.

On their web site, Nike presents a succinct tagline with two meanings of "fit":

"Introducing the Nike Pro Rival Bra, the ultimate fit for the ultimate workout."

The idea of becoming physically fit is overlaid by the concept of a bra that fits well. Again, they've used the same word twice.

Double meaning in this sense is a like a pun, but it's not humorous; nor is it a double entendre, which implies that one of the meanings is, shall we say, indelicate. Whatever it's called, this device is used often in ads, and also in poetry.

Until "Evening Walk," however, I'd never seen an entire line, or series of lines, in a poem serve as a pun. Poet Charles Simic uses non-humorous puns in words and phrases to create uncertainty and double meaning which lead to a deep yin-yang tension. Here's the first stanza:

You give the appearance of listening
To my thoughts, O trees,
Bent over the road I am walking
On a late summer evening
When every one of you is a steep staircase
The night is slowly descending.

In the third line, are the trees bending over the road? Or, in a more Yoda-like construction, maybe the speaker is walking down the road, bent over. Is it late in the evening, or late in the summer--or both? At the end of this stanza, the trees are each a staircase, implying upward movement. (Will the speaker be ascending to heaven?) But this image is immediately reversed in the next line: instead, night is descending those staircases. The reader gets the sense of both upward and downward movement, and of lightness and darkness, at the same time.

Poems are written to be read, but (unfortunately for the word-lovers of this world) ads, brochures, and web sites can't be. They must be written on the assumption that they'll only be skimmed. I'd like to see (or write) a tagline or headline that can use a pun to create as beautiful and delicate a balance, and do as much work, as "Evening Walk."

Photo by Lynne Kirton [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

*By the numbers, each word in the Netflix ad must do approximately 135 times as much work as those in the Lien Foundation ad, although of course that's not how it works at all.

Not Good Enough

Today, in two separate publications, I read about two different writers I admire being given the same advice: "You're not good enough for writer's block."

The first was Pete Hamill, author of Forever (think Highlander, not Judy Blume) and A Drinking Life, among other works. It was actually "You're not important enough for writer's block," and according to today's Writer's Almanac, was told to Hamill by a friend before he wrote his first novel. (I also learned that Hamill was not only friends with Bobby Kennedy but was present at Kennedy's assassination and helped tackle the shooter. I love Writer's Almanac.)

The second was Cal McAllister, founder and executive creative director of Wexley School for Girls, an agency I've had a crush on for ages. In an interview in today's Communication Arts, McAllister talks about his Creative Circus advisor giving him this advice. In a different interview, last year for Seattle Creative Mornings, he says this advice taught him to be "tireless and humble."

I haven't posted for awhile because I haven't thought up anything super smart or creative lately. My husband and I are buying a house and it's my first mortgage experience, so I've been letting myself off the hook as mentally exhausted.

But I'm not good enough to be too exhausted to write. I have to practice and I have to spew words until my fingertips are bruised from banging the keyboard. Practice, hone, be tireless and humble. And write.

Thanks, Pete and Cal. I needed the reminder that I'm not good enough…yet.

Writing into a Headwind

Or: How Bike To Work Day gave meaning to what I learned from Seth Godin.

Holy bicycle commute, Batman! Nine miles to work feels more like 90 when the wind is blowing the tall grass into fingers, all pointing back the way I’ve come.

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the Authority Intensive content marketing conference, hosted by Copyblogger, and felt very lucky to have heard Seth Godin speak for the first time. Seth gave the opening keynote, and the audience was enraptured.

Pushing the pedals down, clicking into a lower gear, wondering if I should turn around and just get my car, I thought about Seth’s talk. One of the things he said was, “If resistance doesn’t show up, you’re not doing it right.”

And while I don’t think he was talking about whipping oneself into shape the hard way, or even about headwinds, specifically, I do think he was saying that anything worth doing isn’t easy, especially if it’s something you’re doing to improve yourself. Bicycling, and laying off the Haagen-Daz bars for awhile, is going to pay off. Finishing my novel, even if it only gathers “dust” on a hard drive for the rest of eternity, is also going to pay off. At least I’ll be a hardbody who can say she’s written a novel…and that means a lot to me.

Now, let’s see if I can make it those nine miles back home.