Didn’t you just hate those people in school, who, when given a paper assignment, knew exactly what to do and created sparkling prose well ahead of the deadline? Leaving you and everyone else you knew to fight and struggle to the bitter end, pulling all-nighters until it was all done?
Sorry to say, I’ve always been one of those guys who looked forward to any writing assignment, and never had a problem with them. Writing and all the associated tasks (like audience analysis and research) always came naturally to me.
Even today, I’m still working at a blistering pace. I’ve been known to write a 25-page chapter for a book in one day. Granted, some of those pages contained screen shots or code samples, but you’re still talking about 2500 or 3000 words–well above the magic “1000 word level” that most professional writers aspire to.
The reason I’m able to write like this is because I follow four easy steps every time I start a project. These steps are easy to learn and can be resized to fit any writing effort at hand–from a simple memo all the way up to a book.
Here are the steps:
1. Figure out who you’re writing for.
2. Immerse yourself in the subject matter and the objective.
3. Let it all out in one burst.
4. Walk away, then revise with hot buttons in mind.
The first step is the most obvious step for any professional writer, but it’s something that non-writers never ever think about. You MUST know who the audience is, because that one piece of information will make or break you. For example, does your audience consist of newbies or veterans? Do they hate your product? Know anything about your product? Have they just been injured in some way by your company? Does the audience consist of your super-boosters? Total strangers?
Once you know who the audience is in a general way, try to find out as much as you can about them specifically. Sometimes you can find out very specific things if you’re writing to a small group of people (like the board of directors of a corporation). If you can’t zero in that much, you can still learn a great deal by doing basic demographic and psychographic research. You want to get inside the head of the reader.
The second step also comes naturally to professional writers. Once you know who you’re writing for, immerse yourself in the subject matter. Figure out what the objective is and stick to it. Pull out all the stops when you do your research: read web sites, brochures, technical manuals, articles, whatever. Read the stuff put out by the competition. Read the scientific journals. Dig through all the newspaper stories and blog entries. Take lots of notes, and let it percolate in your brain. If you’re like me, create a mind map that shows the relationships between the parts.
The percolation is the key, and it leads to step 3. I do all my writing in my head. By the time I sit down in front of the word processor, my fingers are just taking orders from my brain. Some writers do their writing the old fashioned way, composing as they go, but I’ve found that this leads to madness. The writing becomes a performance, one that you’ve rehearsed in your head. If you’re composing right at the keyboard, forget about it, you’ll have too much of your critical brain turned on. Instead, you want to have all that stuff sorted out before you set words to paper or word processor.
Step 4 is also critical. Once you’ve bolted it all out, walk away for a while. Go catch some lunch, or pack up for the day. Let it rest. Then come back and revise it without mercy. How do you know if you’re on the right track? Easy–just go back to what you learned about the audience. Remember, the first step in all this is to learn about them–their likes/dislikes/vices/wants/needs/hot buttons. You want to read what you’ve written through that prism.
Always go through this final step with WIIFM in mind–What’s In It For Me! Take out anything that doesn’t bolster the case you’re making. Rip out the confusing parts. Excise the blithering blather. Make sure that every sentence supports your objective and speaks to the audience.
What you should be left with is something worth sending out.
It’s really easy to scale these four steps to just about any project. For example, let’s say you’ve been tasked with sending out a promotional email. Don’t panic! Simply go through the four steps.
Audience first. You find out that the audience consists of customers who have already purchased a product from your company. The objective is to get them to buy a new product. Unfortunately the email has to go out within 24 hours, so you only have a little bit of time to immerse yourself in the audience and the new product. So you interview the product manager to learn more about the product, and learn there’s a wiki for the product that the engineers put together. You spend a bit of time there, gathering up information and more questions to ask.
You then call the sales team and the support guys to learn as much as you can about your customers–what has their experience been like in the past? What objections have they thrown in the way of sales? What kinds of things do they want to see (testimonials, case studies, resources) to help convince them they should buy?
By the time you get back to your desk, your head is bursting with ideas, and you already know how to frame a basic five paragraph email. You know how to start it (the new product is better than product X because of Y and Z) and you know how it will end (with a link to a web landing page where they can download a free trial). You bolt it out and then take an hour-long break.
When you come back to the email, you revise by taking what you know about your audience and reading the piece through their eyes. You figure out that you’ve spent too much time with marketing puffery and not enough on data that will make them want to buy. So you rework the piece. By the time you’re ready to go with the email, you have something that is infinitely better than anything you could have done with another process.
