The Idea Mill
Insights + Observations About the Power of Content
Tight and concise. Shorter sentences. Less is more. Limited attention spans, and all of that.
Yet movies keep getting longer. Three-hour stage plays have become the norm. People will binge their favorite TV programs for hours on end in single sittings.
We don't crave short. We demand great.
Here’s how you get to great…
This is accomplished (or not) in the headline, in the opening sentence, and in the first three paragraphs. (I call this “The Why Section.”)
Failure to do this renders the rest of the piece irrelevant—no matter how good the content may be.
Here, skim for yourself…
If I told you my life story, would you care?
What if I asked you tell me your life story?
Eugene M. Schwartz’s The Brilliance Breakthrough: How to Talk and Write So That People Will Never Forget You should be (and often is) considered to be the “bible” of effective copywriting and storytelling. One of the many tenets Schwartz embraces is the notion of making the reader (or the customer) the hero of the story you’re trying to tell.
Too often, we put the capes on our own backs. And that’s where the writing falls short.
The following originally appeared in the Further newsletter, which I highly endorse and what remains one of few things I read each and every week. Do yourself a favor and subscribe.
Written by the outstanding Trudi Roth, this piece captures my own thinking about the future and purpose of writing better than I ever could. With her permission, I reprint it in its entirety here.
As someone who makes her living by writing, you might think I’m petrified that AI will decimate my career.
Honestly, machines don’t scare me. It’s the foolish humans who are okay with completely abdicating their ability to think, communicate, and solve problems that I find alarming.
Maybe. But I’ve always found that to come off as a bit hokey. It’s easy to say if you’re one of the 0.1% of people who hit it big, strike it rich, or achieve fame and fortune. “Follow your passion. That’s what I did, and now look at me!”
But you know who else followed their passions? The 99.9% of people who you’ve never heard of. Following a passion wasn’t enough for them. Most who pursue stardom fail, then move on to something else as Plan B.
That something else is known as “the real world” by many. Myself included.
Here’s what Kenny Loggins suggests…
