It turns out re-drafting is a more time-consuming activity than writing the first draft; more intensive, at the very least, requiring far more of a view of the whole and how it hangs together. It took me a week to write 600 words which normally would have taken an hour; sections which now fit between two known points have to join them up effectively, which is quite a constraint.

I’m also finding that I have more ideas now about how to tie the whole thing together, and larger themes and ideas are emerging.

One thing I’ve learnt – and this may be of use to other writers – is that I have to let go of word count now. I’ve gone well over 80,000 words, so I can lose 8,000 or so. I’m writing new sections too, and these will replace what I remove. There are large blocks of text being removed from the chapter I’m currently working on and it’s very tempting to try to re-write these when, really, they serve no purpose and – if anything – break the flow. There are long sections of self-indulgence which really need to go, too, and it’s an interesting exercise to see how much my writing has changed over the nine or ten months I’ve spent working on it. The end is far more descriptive, using far more of the “show, don’t tell” principle so many writing teachers recommend.

Right – I will go back to it. More insights to come soon, I hope.

Childhood memories are normally very vivid; although they may be twisted a bit by the passage of time, if anything this enhances the way they can be described. Rose-tinted spectacles bring more colour to your memories. In fiction, of course, your recall doesn’t have to be perfect – just evocative.

The pipes

It’s a cliche – or perhaps a truism – to say that they’d not be allowed today. The pipes.

Once more with the hushed reverence they deserve – the pipes.

Vastly superior to any other climbing frame, playground equipment or landscaping feature, the pipes were nothing more sophisticated than the name implies: five or so large, unused – well, hopefully unused – sewage pipes. Perhaps coated with something protective to make them slightly glossed, but adapted no more than that. Fixed in place with hidden cement or half buried, they formed a climbing frame like no other.

It’s something of a surprise that no-one ever lost teeth falling off them, or into them, or slamming into them after a pell-mell rush across the playground. They provided hours of fun just climbing in and out, clambering on top of the largest rather than just crawling through it, the soft curves radiating second-hand heat from a sun which seems to have lost some of its power over the last 20 years and providing the perfect point to bask, if you could avoid being pulled off them. It was easy to relax just a little too much and slide down into the gap between two of them. They were the perfect summer holiday forbidden pleasure. For six weeks every year they were free of competition for their affections, for the caress of their concrete against the backs of your legs.

Looking back, they were undoubtedly dirty. I’m pretty sure we’d sometimes find cigarette butts scattered around them, and I certainly remember strangely congealed masses, perhaps half-chewed sweets that seemed to us – back then – like alien embryos or the burst remains of vivid, poisonous puffballs. I’m pretty sure I ripped trousers on them several times. But I still remember fondly conforming to the warm curves at the bottom of the largest, avoiding the worst of the sun but enjoying, alone, the best of it too.

OTTER BOTTOMS

Otter bottoms
Wet, wet;
Otter tops
Often plop
In the water too
Rapidly following the otter bottoms
They are invariably connected with
Via otter middles.
Otters
Animals with both bottoms and tops
Like good pyjamas
But with middles as well
Like bad ring donuts.

The lesson leading up to this was about cliche and similies – and as part of that we produced some mixed-up, non-cliched similies. Choosing a favourite, we then wrote a page of… anything, really, around it. This is mine. My simile? “As quiet as a sleeping beatnik”.

The bars

There was a choice he made when he started going to the new bar. He could be one of the cool guys with the confidence or he could be the endearingly shy type. Going to a new bar was reinvention. It was a chance to shake off the rejection of the last – or to drop the commitment expected of the successes. So he always had this choice.

In terms of success, cool and confident was nudging ahead of endearing and shy by five to four. Logic dictated that he should stick with the more successful technique and further refine it, but he felt sorry for Shy. He wanted to give him another chance. He was certainly more likeable; more likeable to other men, because he was less of a threat. And he got more follow-up, received more emails and voicemails than Brash. If I ever stop doing this, he thought, I will be Shy forever. I will find my attractive barmaid and we will settle down and I will get a cat. I will spend my Sundays on sunshine patios, dozing with tea, quiet as a sleeping beatnik.

So this evening he became Shy again, decided to give him a last hurrah and hoped that things would work out OK for him. He packed his challenging books and his pens and notepad into his battered satchel. He tugged on his cordroy jacket and his brogues. He left his tissues and his receipts in his pockets. He took the padded wallet, the one which didn’t show the ring of rubber so brazenly imprinted into the leather. He took a little less care about shaving. He took the bus.

Shy ended the evening laying on his back with a woman standing over him, although the route there was not quite what he’d hoped or planned. Shy, he realised, was a nice bloke. He did have many redeeming features. He probably was the one who would do the retirement from this game. But he certainly wasn’t the one to deal with the barmaids who moved jobs and swapped stories.

Obama’s speech writer is a 27-year-old. He has my dream job. Kind of. I have an overwhelming sense of envy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00fvgj5/Charlie_Brookers_Screenwipe_Series_4_Episode_3/

(UK only, I’m afraid… sorry. And get it quick. It might expire soon).

The same is true of certain books or films – we can often feel they’re talking directly to us as individuals, and there’s a great sense of comfort in that. We like to feel that we’re not alone in a situation – especially a difficult one – and even fiction can help. Whether it’s true or not, we like to think the author has experienced what we have, although you’ll often read interviews with authors expressing surprise about this phenomenon. So how does that have anything to do with writing for commercial audiences? How can you make a dull public sector case study resonate with people?

Know your audience

If you know your audience, you can tailor what you do to them a huge amount. It’s easier with a small audience, of course, and it’s easier still if you have a niche product or service – you can make certain assumptions about what your readers are going to be like. It also works with larger audiences. Although we’d all love to think we’re very different, there are fundamental cultural similarities, morals and values we’ve grown up with and shared experiences we’re all shaped by. French social theorist Émile Durkheim called this the collective conciousness, and it has parallels with Jung’s collective unconsciousness – shared attitudes and behaviours which are basic aspects of being human, innate rather than learned.

The assumption I made in that last paragraph – that we’d all love to think we’re different – is an example of the sorts of assumptions you may be able to make. Assumptions are dangerous, of course, but you should be able to back them up with some facts, especially because – in the most part – your audience will be self-selecting. Only certain types of people will be using your website – because they’re interested in the product or service you offer – and you should target your language towards those people. If you can find out more about your readers – by doing a survey or encouraging feedback – so much the better, but always be aware that surveys are a passive way of finding out information and rely on a certain sort of person – active readers who are willing to engage – who may only form part of your audience. Incentivising data-gathering can help get more people to give you feedback, though, if you can afford it.

The assumptions you’re able to make can feel pretty specific, too; good use of language – which I’ll get on to in a moment – can help with this. We want to feel like we’re being spoken to directly; we want to feel that – although we’re individual – we’re not alone. And because of that we’ll read in to things how we want to.

Just be generic enough

So why do we always feel songs are about us when we’re in love? It’s because we want songs to be about us, and when we’re in an emotionally vulnerable state we want that even more. We look for meanings which aren’t necessarily there because we twist words to our situation. It’s how a lot of psychics “work” – they prey on the emotional state of the people who come to them and say very general things until they gather enough information to make (slightly) more direct points.

Of course, you can’t target your site only at people in love, but you can make your writing open enough in meaning to let people see their own meanings, and you can use shared experiences to make that even more powerful. Going back to the issue of songs with meaning, let’s take an example from Maxïmo Park – Books from Boxes:

You spent the evening unpacking books from boxes
You passed me up so as not to break a promise
Scattered polaroids and sprinkled words around your collar in the long run
Said you knew that this would happen

So who hasn’t unpacked books from boxes? Who hasn’t had a sense of melancholy caused by finding old photos? The sense of melancholia invoked by these particular shared experiences are reinforced by fairly generic – in fact, incredibly open – references to promises. Because I know what it feels like to unpack boxes – and because I’ve been in situations with promises and love and things – I make my own mental ties between the feelings and between unpacking and promises. In my life, these situations haven’t ever come together exactly like this – the emotions I get from this song are from events many years separate. But A big part of me wants to tie them up into one neat package which someone else has experienced.

We also relate songs and books and films back to the emotions going on around us when we first experience them. Visual imagery around an article – or descriptive language – can create these feelings or remind people of past situations and get a strong emotional response. If that’s what you’re after, pick the images you place with an article carefully to reinforce feelings in your writing. They may seem somewhat abstracted from the real focus of your writing, but the subtle cues they trigger will help with the emotional context.

How does this affect what you write? Well, you need to remember the following points:

• Know your audience – this will help you target experiences and context as well as the language and content
• Don’t rely too much on specific examples – the more specific your examples are, the less likely they are to resonate with a cross-section of your audience
• Allow your readers to make emotional connections – use loosely connected feelings invoked by events – leaving out some of the context will allow readers to make the connections they want to, based on their experiences, rather than trying to relate to something specific on your terms.

And to reinforce the lesson, and because it’s a beautiful song, here’s Maxïmo Park – enjoy:

Take, for example, this story about “Microsoft” compensating victims of 419 scams. In case you’re not aware, a 419 scam is one of those “I have £5 million – you can have half if you give me £1000 now” schemes. Where, of course, the £5 million never exists. But the £1000 resolutely does.

Reading through the text of that email it’s a wonder anyone ever gets caught out by the scams – although people (and sometimes even well educated, sensible people) do get stung. The text is falling into quite a familiar trap – that you sound more professional, better educated and a better writer if you use longer words, subclauses all over the place, and words like “nevertheless”:

Nevertheless, note that, this payment will only be implemented based on your presentation/declaration of proven documents

Never mind that there are spelling and gramatical errors all over the place – there’s nothing which is going to reveal that you’re not a confident writer more than trying to look like you’re a confident writer. The best writers keep it simple, use short sentences and don’t over-complicate things. I’ve worked as a technical writer, with scientists, and it’s pretty clear that they’re incredibly well educated. They have great vocabularies. But are they good writers? No – they’re not trained in it, so they try to make out they’re better than they are by over-complicating things. And they try to use writing techniques which are difficult to pull off at the best of times. The end result? Text which loses all its flow, rhythm and humanity.

Dan Brown – author of The Da Vinci Code – does this the other way around. Rather than writing his text particularly badly, he writes his dialogue badly. All his scientists and experts talk like text-books – and dull, badly written text-books at that – and not like real people. In part there’s a feeling in his writing that he’s trying to show off – that his characters know something, and because he’s created the characters he’s obviously superior to them and must know more. But this erodes the credibility of the people he creates.

In essence, the one way to make yourself look stupid as a writer is to try to make yourself look smart. If nothing else, shorter words are easier to spell.

What’s a Lolcat? It’s simply a picture of a cat – usually in an interesting or funny position – with a humorous caption. How funny these captions are is a matter of opinion (personally, I love them). But regardless of the humour, the language used – and how readers interpret it – teaches us some interesting things.

Lolcats depend on the captions being written in the language – as it’s called on I Can Has Cheezburger – Lolcat.

Lolcat depends on child-like misspellings and syntax and grammar to make you wince. What’s interesting about it, though, is that despite this – or perhaps because of it – it’s still very easy to understand. It might take a couple of readings at first, but it’s surprising – for someone as anal about spelling and grammar as me – to see that it’s pretty universally understood.

I can has pichur?

In big part, of course, this is due to the combination of image and text – which gives us lesson 1:

Images put things in context – and context clarifies complicated concepts.

There’s a compromise to be made between images and accessibility, of course, and every image needs appropriate alt text. The image, of course, can help you as a writer to put things in context as well as it will help the reader. Pick something appropriate and think how to write a caption for it which ties everything together.

Plz to bring dikshunry, k thx?

Lolcats transcend international English variations in the most interesting way – they make their own spellings. And this leads us to lesson 2:

When you read, as long as you get the meaning, the spelling doesn’t matter

Controversial, I know. But it’s true. Even putting completely the wrong word (my favourite being the use of pubic instead of public) needn’t be the end of the world if it’s an isolated case. Of course, you completely lose any professional respect you might have if your corporate site is nothing but typos; but for an immediate, dynamic medium like a blog the odd one here and there won’t hurt. Correct them when you see them – but a quick post rapidly responding to something newsworthy can follow the principle of publishing in haste and repenting – or re-typing – at leisure.

Hahahahaha – lols

Finally, the point of Lolcats is that they’re funny, and they’re instantly funny. And as such they’re shared, forwarded, visited time and again, and suckers like me keep going to see if there are any new ones… which gives us our final point, lesson 3:

Entertain, inform, or just plain bribe – but give ‘em what they want, and they’ll keep reading.

A successful website – which gets repeat visits, which gets its users acting as advocates, and which sells a product or spreads information or opinions, or which keeps people reading past the headline – needs to offer the user something. Don’t expect your users to read for hours for little reward. Hit them as soon as they arrive with an easy to see punchline – give them what they want as soon, and as easily, as you can. Gone are the days where site success was measured by length of visit. We live in a more enlightened age, and we know that the measure of a site’s success is entirely dependent on the purpose – and content – of the site.

Invisible summary!

So, is the future writing whole websites in Lolcat? Of course not. The lessons above could be illustrated without “fluffy teim”, but I thougt – for my first proper long article – I’d show I’m at least a little bit down with the kids and up with the zeitgeist.

Next time – buying books on the interweb. What’s that all about then?