Write it

I had found my way to the City Lights basement. It was gloomy, and I was surrounded by books. They crowded the walls; they pressed upon me. And I stood before them, numb.

Then I heard it—a small whisper, a growing whisper, louder, louder, louder still. Another joined it, and another. A swelling tide of whispers rose up and roiled around me, words rubbing against words, pages chanting stickily to one another, ideas floating on the air, sliding down the walls, piling up in drifts on the concrete floor.

I felt a welling in my ribcage at the same time. Something was rising up in me, as if called, seduced, given breath by all those words, all those ideas that slipped and slithered around the room. Up it came, up, up, until it reached my chest—the place just below my collar bone.

There it lodged, flattening and spreading and nestling into the thin space above my lungs. Between head and heart. Right beneath my larynx, my voicebox.

This idea wanted control. It wanted to be told. It would not capitulate.

There was only one way out: write it.

Bookish wins

Today, I strolled right into a normal bookstore on Haight Street and picked up a copy of Other Voices, Other Rooms right off the shelf. I've been looking for this in Melbourne since, oh, December, when my cousin finished VCE. Now four months have passed and it's her 18th. Capote is the goods. And where can you get him at the drop of a hat? Only in America, people.

Also, Peter Glorious Cameron has a new book out that's certain to kill me: Coral Glynn. It launched earlier this month and, despite my promising myself I wouldn't buy any more books (purely for the safety of other passengers on tomorrow's flight—don't wanna overload the plane etc.), I obviously will need to get back to City Lights tomorrow to see if they have a copy.

If I get it, I promise I won't read it on the plane, because if I do, I'll probably wind up a homicidal wreck.

Update: Started reading, and am now convinced this is the only thing that will prevent me becoming a homicidal wreck on the plane. There's no way I'm not reading this on the way home. No way.

The (old) new branding

Back in the day, Razorfish was what we wide-eyed n00bs used to reverently refer to as a "cutting-edge digital agency."

So this piece, published on the Razorfish Australia blog last week, which considers the application of storytelling in the online space, surprised me (even though it was written by a staff member who's on a graduate program with the company). This, in particular:

"I suppose this means furthering a campaign or brand story at each consumer touch-point. Which leads to one of the main takeaways from Tim’s talk: story is the new branding."

Woah. This is news? If you're not furthering the brand story every time you communicate with your audience, then what are you doing? (Also, if you think you're not furthering the brand story every time you communicate with your audience, then your audience has news for you. Story isn't new to them. Stories are how humans make sense of their experiences.)

In an interview I did last year, Seth Godin said, "In a world where there’s not a lot of scarcity of ideas ... ubiquity is a better strategy [than exclusivity]."

If you're going to be ubiquitous, you need a coherent storyline, otherwise you're just talking. A few tools that can help with online storytelling:

• a brand persona
• brand vocabulary/language
• audience profiles/personas
• a creative strategy
• content and community strategies
• an engaging, compelling social media presence
• an interactive* blog or other rich public content presence
• out-of-brand-context appearances (e.g. community or event sponsorship)
• creative collaborative alliances (e.g. coauthor an article/cocreate a video with an authority or character your audience loves/respects)
• informational/entertaining subscription products (e.g. email, video, webinar, or other content series)

The problem with this list, from a digital-agency-account-management viewpoint, is that none of these items mentions sales. None of them is sales-campaign-focused.

They can be, but, better than that, these tools create a conversation or context for selling. They can be used to create a storyline in which sales are an inevitable feature—along with loyalty, advocacy, and so on.

The question is how agencies sell that argument to sales-focused, besuited clients who don't really believe in social media, let alone things like content marketing, and have no idea how their target customers actually live.

*By which I mean proactive engagement, not "interactive" in the traditional, functional sense.

"Salty, tasty pig parts"

What's amazing about this New Scientist article is that it explains our understanding of language as a filtering process. 

According to the research, understanding words requires us to split them into composite sounds, based on auditory frequency, which are understood in separate parts of the brain. Also, the article comments that "mental imagery activates very similar networks."

That's pretty complicated. This means language isn't just about learned knowledge (meanings) and physical capabilities (ears and mouths). It also suggests, to me, anyway, that language and visualisation could be variations of the same thing. That thing being thinking-understanding. And emoting.

Is that why we consider good, clear, communicative writing to be that which is evocative and vivid?

In San Francisco's Ferry Building there's a smallgoods shop whose tagline reads "Salty, tasty pig parts". When I've been there (on different occasions), I've noticed that many passersby say this phrase when they see it.

Sure, it's a delightfully unpretentious phrase. But what is it that compels people to say "Salty, tasty pig parts"? The rhythm? The vivid sensations evoked by those words? Both? And once we've actually said the words, rather than simply "heard" them in our heads as we've read the sign, does that make them more sensual and evocative—visually, at least? Does it lodge them deeper in our minds?

I think so. I think verbage that compels a physical response (smiling, exclaiming, reading aloud, etc.) is ideal for lasting communicative impact. Maybe you're thinking, "Well duh—jingles. Old news." But I think the question here is, can that be achieved with written text only, and can it be done in a non-intrusive way that doesn't annoy the audience?

The answer? Salty, tasty pig parts!

[unremarkable]

[surrendered wholly to the luxurious indulgence of others. He wasn't in the habit of letting go like this—he liked his guard high—but these were strangers. They couldn't hurt him. He didn't have time to get attached, and he wouldn't miss them when he left.

All he'd miss would be the kindness. 

At home, he was not an extraordinary man. He was the kind of person who stood back and blended in. He was unremarkable. But here, they treated him like a rare creature, magically captured. They wanted as much of him as they could get before the time came to release him back into the wild.

That time drew closer, but he ignored it. They kept asking when he was leaving, as if there were countless excitements they wanted to show him before they had to let him go. This made him feel warm, like sunlight through a window on a cold morning. What he didn't want to think about was going home, and how grey the mornings were there.]

CNFQ

The first published work of creative nonfiction was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

Today's CNF writers are told they must involve themselves in the story—that they must have a presence.

Why? Capote's not a voice in In Cold Blood. Where did this author-must-be-present notion come from?

While it can work if it's done well, usually I want to read CNF because of the facts, not the author. And too frequently an opening that talks in the first person, I think, puts the reader off. After all, don't we come to nonfiction wanting something approaching objectivity? I don't really want the story filtered first through the author's lens, and while—yes—any written item is inevitably filtered through the author's lens, I think putting the author into CNF vindicates the personalisation of what should be an attempt at objectivity.

No?

Light the lights. The City Lights

As you may have guessed from that title, I don't mind City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.

Last time I went there I remember feeling intimidated, probably because of all the highbrow arts-PhD-style literature. And the impenetrable beatnik thing which, despite repeated tries, I just can't seem to crack.

But this time, I found an entire subterranean floor of nonfiction. And it was good.

Whatever section you choose to pore over, multiple takes—multiple titles—on that subject are offered. So you can compare before you buy, and find something that really piques your specific interest, rather than making do with something you'll be bored with by page 15. Forget ordering in: it's all here.*

Having written that, I can't believe I just wrote that.

I live near what is supposedly the most "cultural" and "intellectual" city in a first-world country, yet the nonfiction sections in most of the bookstore comprise bestsellers and a few not-actually-bestsellers-but-still-wildly-popular nonfiction titles only. Slim pickings.

Good nonfiction lights the lights of curiosity, and fuels the fires of learning. I posit that Melbourne needs a bookshop that sells nonfiction exclusively. Too much to ask?

*For the record, today's nonfiction purchases included this and this. Excited? Me too!