Playing with Words
This weekend, the fields will be full of people playing, kicking balls of various shapes and sizes. Writers like to play too, but their playthings are words. It goes without saying that if you’re a writer, you love words. And you’re always kicking them around in your head, pulling them apart and putting them back together.
Playing with words isn’t just nonsense. It can be a way into your story. That’s because playing with words frees up your mind and gives you access to the cave of wonders that is your imagination. As your inhibitions go, the ideas flow.
Here are a few ways you can turn words into your playthings.
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Alphabet Soup
Write the 26 letters of the alphabet down one side of a page. Then write 26 words to match. See if you can break up those 26 words into sentences. Each word will begin with the next letter of the alphabet. For example.
A Black Cat Drifted Eastwards
Keep going until you’ve reached the end. The sentences can be as daft as you like, as long as they’re recognisable as sentences. And you can give yourself a bit of leeway with X and Z.
2. Play with the Dictionary
The dictionary contains many wonderfully obscure words. Open a random page, look for the weirdest word you can find and see if you can them in a sentence. Or, to really challenge yourself, pick three words and see if you can weave them into a one-paragraph story.
3. Word Deconstruction
Worried that your writing is cluttered with clichés? All you have to do is play around with your sentences. Change the order of the words, drop a word, turn a noun into an adjective or a verb and you have a completely original image.
For example.
He charged through the crowd like a battering ram
Becomes
He battering-rammed through the crowd.
Or the classic ‘he was as white as snow,’ becomes
He was white snow
Or even
He was snow.
4. The Laughing Tree
They say writing comes from the subconscious. The best way to tap into your subconscious is to just let the words flow onto the page, without stopping them or worrying about their order. Doing that helps you come up with wild and wacky images, like a tree laughing in the wood. It’s known as free writing and it gets you past that little voice that tells you your work is crap.
Feel free to suggest your own ways of playing with words.
Content Plans – Your Secret Weapon in Selling Your Business
In a case of life imitating art, the owners of baby-gift website Baby Elephant became parents. Keeping their business afloat and in the public eye was no small challenge. Yet they managed to keep growing and marketing the business, even getting an interview slot on The Sunday Business Post. How did they do it? With a content plan.
A content plan is similar to a marketing plan, but it focuses exclusively on how you can sell your business through words. Before you can market your business, you need to define your core message and what makes it different. A content plan helps you to do that.
The ingredients for your content plan include:
- Angle – the hook that draws people to your business.
- Goals – what your business hopes to achieve for your customers.
- Services – define precisely what your services offer, the common thread between them and what they achieve for your customers.
- Customer benefits – how your business solves their problems, how they will feel after they have bought from you, how it enhances their lives.
- Tagline – a catchy slogan that captures the essence of your business in one line. Don’t worry if you can’t think of one; some businesses lend themselves more to taglines than others.
- Types of content – identify the types of content that are most likely to capture your customers. If it’s your website that’s most popular, concentrate your efforts there. Or it may be a brochure or email.
- Media plan – Identify the publications and programmes that are relevant to your business and that your customers subscribe to.
- Social media plan – Similar to the media plan, identify the social media platforms where your customers are most present and plan the content that’s likely to engage them.
And most importantly of all:
- Deadlines. Commit yourself to a plan of action which will help you release your content consistently and regularly to your customers, whether it’s a press release once a month, or a newsletter every Thursday.
There’s no denying that a good content plan takes time. So why should you create one?
- It actually saves you time. It speeds up the process of creating content, because you already have a basic framework for generating ideas.
- Because you’ve already gathered your thoughts, it’s easier to produce content even when you’re busy.
- If you’re asked about your business at a networking event, you’ll be able to do your business justice because you’ll have put thought into what makes it stand out.
- You are the best person to market your business. And the content plan gives you the power to do that.
Finally.
- It gives the edge to your business. Not many businesses have tapped into the power of selling themselves through words. Your content plan will help you stand out from the crowd.
What the Hell is Wrong with Hellfire
This week, the Irish Book Awards shortlist was announced. I love lists. I particularly love book-award lists. But in the last couple of years, I’ve been finding them slightly depressing, because of a glaring omission. Earlier this year, I read Hellfire by Mia Gallagher and I consider it to be one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read, raw, gritty, powerful and original in its narrative structure. It’s also that rare thing in this day and age – a rattling good yarn that continues an ancient Irish storytelling tradition. But even though the cover is plastered with plaudits from critics, it has escaped the attention of awards panels. And it has appeared on no lists for Irish Book of the Decade.
Earlier this year, critics were railing against the fact that none of the heavy-hitting Irish authors were dealing with contemporary Ireland. If they were doing their jobs, they would have known that Hellfire does just that. It’s about Lucy Dolan, who grows up in the Dublin badlands and becomes sucked into an underworld of crime and drugs. The action centres on a night at the Hellfire Club in the Dublin mountains, which ends in tragedy. Haunted by this tragedy, Lucy spends most of the novel attempting to redeem herself.
This is a character growing up in 80s, 90s and noughties Ireland, at the coalface of all that is wrong withour society and she is not getting the recognition she deserves.
So what the hell is wrong with Hellfire
- It’s a gangland novel that isn’t a crime novel. It doesn’t fit neatly into any genre, in a world where eveyr book has to have a label. That makes it harder to market to the audience who read crime novels and who read literary fiction.
- Spiky language. It’s written in Dublin-speak. To me, this rings true and authentic; Lucy grew up in Dublin’s inner city and never left. But some people may find this a barrier to engaging with the story.
- It pulls no punches. This book gets down and dirty. It doesn’t shy away from the depravity and evil that the rest of us would prefer to ignore. The descriptions of drug use are pretty hairy. But this is part of the book’s raw power.
I believe the overlooking of Hellfire symbolises the failings within the book publishing and critiquing world, a world that ignores books that don’t fit into the neat boxes assigned by marketing departments and advertisers. It’s about time the book world embraced books that don’t fit the mould.
Asking the Write Questions
People ask me how I gather the content that I create for my clients. The answer is simple. I ask the right questions. I have developed a question template which helps me pinpoint what is unique about my clients’ business. Most of the time, the unique angle isn’t immediately obvious, but careful questions winkle it out. People love nothing more than to discuss their passions and I give them the opportunity to do that.
This week, I was approached by the bookings coordinator of a wedding band to write their website content. She wanted the content to be punchy and to reflect the unique attributes of a wedding band. The trouble is that wedding music, by its very nature, is formulaic. If a wedding band wants to succeed, it has to adhere to that formula. We both admitted that this was a problem, but I pointed out that it wasn’t what they did that was unique, but how they did it. I could hear a lightbulb switching on in her head as I spoke.
I then came up with a list of questions designed to help her and the band members figure out what made them stand out from the crowd. The questions fell into four rough categories. Goals, Trends, Passions and Experience.
Goals: Why does the band even exist in the first place and what does tha band want to achieve.
Trends: What has the band noticed about the types of music people ask for and what criteria do they use to compile their sets.
Passions: What attracted the band to a career in music and what sort of music do they like to play?
Experience: What experience do they hope to create for their customers? How do they go the extra mile to deliver that experience?
To speed up the process of creating content for yourself, learn to ask yourself questions about your business. Ask yourself about your passions, about the trends that affect your business, about the reasons for your existence. And ask yourself what experience you hope to deliver to your customers. The answers are at your fingertips. You are the magic ingredient. You are what makes your business unique. And if you recognise that, your content will be unique.
Cystic Fibrosis Campaigners, Reluctant Media Heroes
Yesterday, the new cystic fibrosis unit at St Vincent’s Hospital was given the green light after more than a decade of delays and bureaucratic bungling. Thanks to the tireless media campaigning of people with cystic fibrosis, we are all aware of the fallout of these delays. Of course, there is the fallout on their health. But what about the fallout on the campaigners themselves?
In order to achieve their goal of a dedicated unit, people with cystic fibrosis have had to perform an uneasy dance with the media. Their dignity and eloquence touches the heart and gives them a compelling media presence. Yet when they speak, you can hear an undercurrent of unease that they have to speak in the first place. In order to achieve their goals, they have to sacrifice some of that dignity and pride and expose parts of their lives that ought to remain hidden. And they have had to allow themselves to be defined by their illness.
No doubt, they feel that the end justifies the means. But they shouldn’t have had to do this. They shouldn’t have to be describing the colour of their mucus to Joe Duffy on Liveline. This is another way that they have been let down by the Government and the Health system. Where are the HSE spokespeople? As usual, they are hiding behind a wall of paper. No fear that they’ll put themselves on the line the way people with cystic fibrosis have.
The media has done great work in highlighting the issue. But it also bears a responsibility to these campaigners. The media can’t resist heroising people (see my previous blog post, http://bit.ly/9gsod9), because it’s more newsworthy. Even the language they use ‘cystic fibrosis sufferers,’ is problematic. Cystic fibrosis does cause a lot of suffering, but people who have it have learned to adapt and live full, ordinary lives.
It’s about time media coverage reflected the reality of life with cystic fibrosis. Hopefully with the announcement of the new unit, the media will let people with cystic fibrosis get on with the business of breathing, If they do have to give the Government the nudge, that the media will give a more rounded portrait of the cystic fibrosis campaigners.
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