Write as if it's going to be read

Someone famously said there are two things no one should see being made: laws and sausages.

I would add a third item to that list—corporate reports: year-end round-ups, annual reports, board reports. Writing expected to embody an enterprise-wide viewpoint can generally be counted on to say too much about everything and not nearly enough about something—any one thing that sums up the organization's purpose or goal. These mega-reports are never written as much as they are extruded like the aforementioned sausages—information mashed together without an overarching message and expelled into the required format.

As an expert advisor to nonprofits, my friend Joan Garry has read (or struggled to read) her fair share of these things. She summed up her advice in this blog post. Joan advises carefully crafting the Executive Director's report as if it's the only part of the tome that will be read.

And if you want to keep your readers turning the pages after they finish the ED's report, I suggest you open each subsequent section with a story that captures the real-world impact of the organization's work. Nonprofits probably have an easier time finding stories that tug at the heartstrings, but every organization can find compelling stories of people who went above and beyond, grateful clients, lives positively impacted.

Tell those stories and your readers will stick around to the very last page.

Telling the truth

And so we go from the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (who had a cameo in my last post) to the modern American philosopher Robert Allen Zimmerman - better known as Bob Dylan.

Receiving a special award at the Grammys this weekend, Dylan delivered a rambling speech. Personally, I would have shortened it - maybe taken out some of the "why me, Lord?" references to other artists who (he claimed) have had an easier critical and popular reception. But, then again, a more concise speech wouldn't have been a Dylan speech. He's the master of the lengthy song: When the label heard his early masterpiece "Like a Rolling Stone," they figured no DJ would play a six-minute song and threw it out. Someone rescued it from the trash and brought it to a New York club, where it became an instant hit. Next thing you know the song was #2 on the charts.

So Dylan gets to break the rules. We don't expect him to write a three-minute song (although he did, and had hits with them), and we don't expect him to give a pithy speech.

Amid all the words he said, though, these were the most important for me:

Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice: He said, "Well that's very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth."

Voices matter only if they convince you they're telling the truth.

It's fashionable today to ornament speeches with fancy graphics or artsy photographs. And that's fine - I understand that everyone processes information differently. But no number of visual bells and whistles can save a you if your audience doesn't believe you're telling the truth. (Click to tweet.)

So it's simple, really: To give a great speech, tell the truth.

"A problem like Maria"

I hate writing promo copy about the speeches I write - especially when they want the blurb three months before I've even started writing the speech. But there I was: My guy was speaking at a conference and the conference wanted to advertise it.

So I was hunkered down at my desk with promo copy due that very day. Fingers hovering over the keyboard. Staring at a blank screen. And this song starts playing in my head: "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" You know - the song the nuns sing in The Sound of Music. (Other people might hear Beyoncé; I'm a musical theatre geek.)

I shook my head, trying to swat the song away. Fingers over keyboard. Deep breath. "How do you solve a problem like Maria?"

"Shut up," I told my brain. "I'm trying to get an idea."

"How do you solve a problem like Maria?"

And then I realized: The song wasn't a distraction. It was my speech.

How do I get unstuck? (That's what the #YourTurnChallenge folks want to know today.) Sometimes it's just a matter of getting out of my own way.

Oh, and the speech? It won an award. 

You can read the opening here. If you'd like to see the full text, shoot me an email - elaine (at) BennettInk.com

Mirror...mirror?

When's the last time you washed your hands in a bathroom sink without looking up to check your appearance in the mirror? I'll tell you when: Never. Don't be ashamed. It's just a reflex.

Well, I was in a friend's powder room washing my hands recently and when I looked up to check my appearance I found myself face-to-face with one of her treasured family photos. Seems the previous owners had taken the bathroom mirror when they left and she hadn't yet gotten around to replacing it yet, but until she did, well, the sepia tones of her grandfather's photograph fit right in with the color scheme. Seemed like an obvious solution.

But this was not just any family photograph. It was a photograph of her grandfather in medical school, circa 1890. Grandpa and his classmates in shirtsleeves, vests, and the occasional jaunty hat, gathered around a long table, earnestly examining a corpse.

Yes, I said a corpse. Look up from my friend's powder room sink and you are eye-level with a late 19th century dead person. That's a horrifying thing to see when all you're trying to do is check for spinach in your teeth. (Appropriately enough, Grandpa became a dentist.)

My close encounter with the Anatomy class got me thinking about the element of surprise, and how it can enliven writing. As in this masterful lede by film critic Anthony Lane in the May 26, 2014 issue of The New Yorker:

"Wrinkled and crinkled, huge in Japan, heroically reluctant to give up, and forever touring the world on a mission to make us scream, Godzilla is the Mick Jagger of giant amphibians."

Whether it's a memento mori instead of a mirror or Mick Jagger bursting into a sentence we expect to be about Godzilla, surprises can startle or amuse - but they always make us think. And an audience that thinks is an audience that will remember.

I'm not likely to forget my visit to my friend's powder room. And I won't forget her upcoming birthday either; I'll be giving her a bathroom mirror.

The Power of a Story

Just finished reading two memoirs - Piper Kerman's account of a year in the grip of the federal prison system, Orange is the New Black, and Tori Murden McClure's story of her two stints in solitary, as she attempted to become the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

Contrary to what you might expect, the rower survived more dangerous encounters than the inmate, but both women endured more deprivation than most of us will ever be capable of. (Today, for example, I abandoned my office and hightailed it to the air-conditioned public library just because the temperature climbed above 90 degrees.)

Ultimately I found the "woman-against-the-elements" narrative more compelling than the "woman-loses-all-power-but-still-survives" story - but the key to both books is that the writer grew as a result of her experiences, and not in the perfunctory "I'm a better person now than I was then" manner that seems de rigeur for memoirists.

And that, I think, is the key to the power of a good story.  Whether it's something that has actually happened to you or a story with a good moral that you've plucked from history or literature, it has to have some real, tangible impact on you - the speaker - if it's going to have an impact on your audience.

Story Time

I'm not a "science person." Haven't touched the stuff since 9th grade Biology. But I love reading about it - if it's written the right way. Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, Jerome Groopman - all of them make science and medicine compelling to read about. (Not surprising, since all of them write for The New Yorker.)

What's their secret? Stories. They tell stories. Too many businesspeople are afraid to tell stories, I think. Afraid that their message will get lost, or they won't seem sophisticated or learned enough to their audiences.

Let's look at that: I mean, The New Yorker is not exactly the magazine of choice for uneducated rubes. I firmly believe that the right story, well integrated into the narrative of whatever you want to convey, is the best way to catch people's interest.