book author

The Writer’s Journey

I remember the first thing I wrote. It was when I was about six years old. I wrote a poem about people slipping on banana peels and oil slicks. It was called “Slick Move” and it launched my writing career.

I’ve written all my life. With everything I was doing throughout my life, I was always a writer first. Throughout middle high and high school, I wrote short stories and poems. I tried writing a book, but it was a short story at best. My attention span couldn’t last long enough to write a complete three hundred page novel.

When I joined the Marine Corps right after high school, I wrote the entire time. I made general observations of different sights I saw. I kept snap shots of my life in the Marine Corps and they’re still lying around somewhere waiting to be put together in some kind of fashion.
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Strunk & White – The Elements of Style

In my quieter moments I surf the internet just like anyone else involved primarily in writing web content. I regularly read CopyBlogger which is a mine of writing tips and resources, but I particularly picked up on a post by Brian Clark
bemoaning the adverse comments scattered about blog posts by English usage Nazi’s. I think he has a fair set of points but they are not the subject of this post here. Brian was posting about common errors and by all means read his post, I thoroughly enjoy his blogging but bear in mind this is American writing and grammatical tips.

I followed through the post and picked up on a couple of names – Strunk & White – and clicking on the hyperlink, there we go through to Wikipedia and the entry for their tome. Reading the Wikipedia entry has motivated me to purchase a copy through eBay not least because of the simple, straight-forward advice that Messrs. Strunk & White appear to be dishing out.
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Cooking for Writers: A Recipe for a Great Paper

Writing for a writer becomes a habitual process where the flow comes and just gets rolling. Pages and pages full of words course from our brains and through our hands in no time at all. It’s like giving a knife to a cook. The meal doesn’t take long at all to be ready.

Staying with the cooking analogy, someone who doesn’t know how to cook stands dumbfounded looking at ingredients and wondering what to do with them all. The same happens with someone who isn’t very familiar with the writing process. Thoughts are streaming through your brain, but you can’t get them out on the page. You can’t get them started.

Writing shouldn’t be as difficult as most people think. If you can talk to your friends, you can write. You’ve learned enough to start what you want to say, say what you want to say and sometimes you even get a chance to wrap up what you want to say. All you have to learn now is how to get it down on paper.

Just Begin

What stops most people from writing is getting started. How to begin is the question. Don’t look for some dramatic way to begin your document whether it’s an essay for college or an article for a magazine. Just begin.

What is the point of your paper? Start with a sentence that pinpoints the answer to that question and then go for it. Write the first paragraph with supporting sentences. Write your paper with supporting paragraphs and then, wrap it up in a nice little conclusion. Now, you can go back to the beginning and go for a more impressive, dramatic introduction if you want.
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5 Tips for Writing with Persuasion

My bread and butter is writing sales copy or at least promotional copy of some description and that accounts for the vast majority of the demand in the market for scribblers today.

It makes sense to pick up on some techniques for writing in a persusive fashion – it makes no sense to write something that will not help sell or promote the product or service of your commissioning client.

#1 – Repetition

Repeating yourself helps get the point home to your audience. My view is to make your point in several different ways in order to avoid the appearance of treating your audience as if they are brainless. To this end I use quotes extensively both from individuals or from trusted reporting sources e.g. I quoted the “BBC” and “Angelina Jolie” when I wrote about Hoodia, a diet pill.

#2 – Consistency

Keep yourself on-message and on-topic. This will help you maintain a consistent approach to generating copy and advancing your message.

I tend to use this by advancing a position that a reader will find hard to disagree with and then following up with supporting evidence that leads to a hopefully, inescapable conclusion e.g. smokers die younger than non-smokers is a hard to disagree with statement.

#3 – Social Proof – Peer Pressure

I was told once upon a time that “The trend is your friend” and though this was in the context of foreign exchange dealing as traders would look for market trends in order to judge when to make trades, it has direct relevance with our writing as well.

I look for testimonials that can be cited and especially valuable are the rich and famous who use a product or service. You only need look at those companies that bear the Royal “By Appointment” signs to understand the significance of this.

The Name’s Bond, James Bond…..

Being Something I’m Not

Cue music, lights, camera and….ACTION !

Actually… errm … not really.

In real life I’m not exactly James Bond material, though I’ve had some moments when On Her Majesty’s Service; however, my days of jumping out of planes and looking like Action Man ended 20 years and 3 stones ago.

What has any of this got to do with writing ?

The answer is simple; when you’re writing you are going to end up with projects requiring sentiments and style that are simply not you, so how can you pull that off?

A case in point has come my way this week with the usual cut and thrust of bidding for projects and winning enough to pay for the roof over our heads. One of the projects that ERH has won is a 10,000 mini eBook on the art of seduction, but in truth, it’s a rerun of the many tones out there on how to get a shag if you’re a sad geezer.

Why should you critique your own writing?

Writing gives a two dimensional structure a three dimensional look. It creates visuals in the mind of your readers. It gives some form to a non-existent structure. Once put down in print, you have actually captured and contained it. Your idea has been made presentable. The more you do it, the more you are able to do it and it thus becomes easier for you to churn out writings and express yourself through words. Use words that you have learned in your mind to express your ideas. You really don’t have to wait until you learn the perfect words. The words that you have right now are enough; one can always refine everything later.

You should allow your writing to be free flowing. You should not stop yourself from putting whatever you are thinking into writing. Just write down whatever thoughts come into your mind about the subject. Make notes. Jot down all your ideas and phrases as they occur to you, and as an open minded writer, you should always keep a pad where you can write down notes where ever you go. It’s much easier to build upon existing material than it is to create it from nothing. Editing can always be done and refined later. You will generally find that you have an abundance of things to write about when you plan things this way.
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