Month: October 2020

What Do Readers Want (And How To Deliver It With Pizzazz)

Neera 1 Comment

When Microsoft released Windows 10, they did an experiment. Instead of a boring blue screen with the Microsoft logo at the start-up, they introduced a lock screen. The lock screen is a display setting that shows breathtaking high-resolution pictures of places or natural phenomenon and some words to entice the readers to click the link. It was one of Microsoft’s strategies to get more traffic on its search engine.

Their strategy worked. Millions of people kept lock screen as a default screen saver and started clicking the link to learn more about the beautiful places introduced through a humble screen saver. 

Microsoft had figured out what their readers wanted.

What do readers want?

Today’s readers are savvy. They read a lot. That means they know a lot. They get frustrated with the poor quality writing. 

They want to consume a lot. But they are time-poor. An article needs to be worthy of their time and written in a way so that they can consume quickly and still get impacted by it.

When they select an article to read they want the article to do three things simultaneously. To entertain them, to educate them, and to inspire them.

It is no easy feat but we writers need to rise to the challenge. 

When they start writing online, many writers (including me) have no idea what readers are looking for. 

When I started writing, I was primarily writing for myself. The writing was a way to clear my thoughts and to become better at expressing myself. Since no one was reading my work, I didn’t have to think about entertaining, educating, or inspiring with my words. But as I grew as a writer and wanted to share my writing, I just embarked on it without much consideration whether my writing is suitable for consumption. 

It took me a lot of observation and an article writing course to bring my article useful and entertaining for my readers.

How can you do that too?

Here are three ways:

  1. Entertain them with stories
  2. Educate them with information
  3. Inspire them with examples.

1. Entertain Them with Stories

Stories are a great way to entertain the readers and get the point across in a light way. Stories give a break from heavy reading. Readers might forget the advice you might give them through your article, but they rarely forget the stories. Stories get itched on their psyche. It is not an accident that all religious teaching happens through stories.

Have a read of the following story that explains the difference between an imposter and a beginner so beautifully in an article written by Sean D’Souza.

My father ran a secretarial college. And one of his students was a conman.

Back in Mumbai, where I grew up, the majority of secretaries were women and Catholic. Steve, the conman, was from another religion. Like most conmen, he had different aliases, and when he joined my father’s college, he wasn’t Steve. Instead, he called himself Sadashiv.

As we learned later, this conman was very thorough. He would go through a complete transformation where he’d fall in love with a girl, then convert to her religion. And even change his name to a more suitable “Catholic name”. They’d then get married, start up a joint bank account and all would be well for about a year.

One day his new wife and her family would wake up to find “Steve” had disappeared.

During that first year of marriage, Steve would create an enormous level of trust, and then once he had his plan in order, he’d decamp with money, jewellery and all sorts of valuables. The only reason my father found out his modus operandi was because he called my father from jail, saying that he’d been framed.

When my father went to post bail, he was informed that Steve or Sadashiv had many aliases. He always used the letter S, when coming up with names. And he’d been in jail many times before. The story was always the same. He was an impostor and certainly no beginner.

2. Educate them with Information

There is a reason “How To” articles and books are doing so well for decades now. Readers need to learn to do things and articles are a great way to start. A time-poor reader will start with articles to get some basic understanding of a topic and then move on to books to build a deep understanding.

Educational articles are written in form of listicles just like this one. They could be long (I have seen listicles with thirty points or more) or short (like this article which has just three points).

I believe three to seven is a good number. 

My personal favorite is three points. Three points give you enough space to include substance and are not too long for the readers to consume in one read. Seven is my upper limit. I wrote an article Seven Tips To Write With Style which got curated. Anything above that and we start losing the readers.

When writing educational articles, write it as if you are explaining to a single reader. That will make your writing personal and understandable. If you write for masses, you don’t connect with anyone.

You don’t have to be an authority on the topic. You can provide beginner level information. But whatever you write you need to understand it well so that you come across as someone who knows her topic well. 

3. Inspire them with examples

Examples bring the point home. They also make it easy for the readers to understand what you are saying. 

In the article, The Expert Generalist: Why the Future Belongs to Polymaths Zat Rana gives the examples of Aristotle, Galileo, and Da Vinci to make a case for gaining breath of knowledge as compared to the depth of knowledge.

Learning itself is a skill, and when you exercise that skill across domains, you get specialized as a learner in a way that someone who goes deep doesn’t. You learn how to learn by continuously challenging yourself to grasp concepts of a broad variety. This ironically then allows you to specialize in something else faster if you so choose. This is an incredibly valuable advantage.

…

Aristotle practically invented half a dozen fields of study across philosophy. Galileo was as much a physicist as he was an engineer when he helped kick-start the scientific revolution. Da Vinci might have been even more famous as an inventor than an artist if his notebooks were ever published.

Ryan Holiday quotes examples from both ancient and contemporary text in his article Why Everyone Should Watch Less News.

Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, “Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good, and stop bouncing around.”

…

A reader of Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage would find that between 1971 and 1972, there were some 2500 politically motivated bombings in the United States. 

In the pages of Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War, they’d find an eerily modern jockeying between an ascendant power and a dominant power and the mistakes made by both. 

Reading Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days, his first-hand account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, would reveal the life and death calculations of nuclear powers, each looking to save face and neither looking to actually blow up the world. 

In Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, a reader might relate to the rather ageless angst of the next generation trying to find its meaning and purpose in the world.

In Anne Frank’s diary we hear of the timeless plight of the refugee, we are reminded of the humanity of every individual (and how societies lose sight of this) and we are inspired — even shamed — to see the cheerful perseverance of a child amidst far worse circumstances than ours.

In Stefan Zweig’s biography of Montaigne we get the unique perspective of a man turning away from the chaos of the world to examine the life of a man who turned inward, away from the chaos of the world some 400 years earlier.

Although it is not easy to come up with these examples, as a writer, it is our job to research before sitting down and writing the article. Many writers have swipe files where they collect information that interest them. This way, they have already done their research before they sit down to write.

There you go, you now have three basic ingredients the readers want in an article. 

Combine all three and you will have a winning recipe.

Writing is like cooking. We have a lot of ingredients to work with. But with time we learn that each recipe has basic ingredients (without which the recipe can’t work) and the secondary ingredients (nice for variation, to change the flavor, taste, texture, etc.). Just like a cake recipe can’t work without eggs, butter, and self-rising flour, an article doesn’t work without stories, information, and examples.

It might sound hard initially but with practice, it becomes second nature just like baking a cake.

Remember when you first time baked a cake, how long it took you and how much mess you made. And it still fell flat in the middle. But with the time you got better. 

Dabble. Play around with the ingredients. Repeat the process.

Every writer on the planet has learned it this way. J K Rowling, Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, or any good writer were not born with writing genes. They learned with constant practice.

Keep in mind, talent is nothing more than reducing the errors and eventually eliminating them. 

Many writers are already doing it. Read the work of your favorite writers and learn from them.

Find what you love and let it kill you

Neera

Two things happened this week. One, I got up at 3:45 AM on Thursday to listen to Jane Friedman’s seminar on blogging, and second, I got into a very interesting discussion with a group of friends on Whatsapp.

More than two years of blogging, and I am still learning about the craft. Blogging has changed so much in the past five to seven years. No longer it is a web diary to write about one’s hobbies and passions but a strategic tool to develop a brand and build a following.

“Blogging is not critical for every author and you don’t have to do it,” said Jane, “so if you’re eager to be let off the hook, you have permission to ignore blogging altogether.”

But then she goes on to add:

But blogging does remain one of the most straightforward paths to build and engage a readership over the long term, at least for writers. Blogging, at its core, is a special genre of writing and can be a wonderful creative outlet that doubles as one of your marketing superpowers.

But for blogging to have a real payoff for your career or author business, it has to be done with a particular strategy in mind and executed with some discipline.

In the two years, I have spent thousands of dollars, attended countless courses, and invested an insane number of hours to build my little turf on the internet. Yet I am nowhere near the nirvana.

As I was contemplating the countless mistakes I have made in my short blogging career, a friend of mine, Sean D’Souza, posted a list of products (mostly ebooks and courses) he had created and sold through his website in the past twenty years. It was an impressive list.

I probably would have delivered a similar number of projects in twenty years of my corporate and public career but they are nowhere to be seen. They certainly are not generating income the way Sean’s products still are. I could have written twenty books in twenty years and they would have amounted much more than the work I did working for others.

We have a tendency to look at things that didn’t work in our lives.

But “things that didn’t work” are the stepping stones to “things that did work.”

Sean told a story about going through his cartoon diaries because people kept telling him that he needed to make a book out of those. He was having a hard time finding what to include and what not.

Then he remembered, once, one of his clients was so happy looking at the blank and unfinished pages in his diary. He couldn’t figure out why. But he does now. It is that kind of stuff we don’t see. All the unfinished work, the sketches, the crumpled paper. They are the stepping stones to the finished work.

If we don’t have a decent amount of bad work, we’ll never have good work. If we don’t attend bad webinars and courses and workshops, we don’t know what good ones are like. If we don’t make mistakes we will never achieve anything.

Our passions become obsessions. We spend an insane amount of energy doing things we love to do. We may never get the rewards for our labor but we do get the satisfaction of action. Then Kinky Friedman’s words say it all.

My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.
Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

Falsely yours

Kinky Friedman

This week I wrote two articles, How to make your writing memorable, poetic, and persuasive, and How to Structure Your Novel both I have been wanting to write for some times. Hope they are helpful.

That is it from me this week.

Talk to you next week.

Take care.

Photo by Reza Hasannia on Unsplash

How To Structure Your Novel

Neera 1 Comment

About five years ago, I joined a writing workshop to convert an idea bubbling in my head into a novel. The workshop was going to last for one year, and we met once a month. In the first session, I made the mistake of asking whether I could discuss the idea with the group to determine whether it was good enough to be developed into a novel. I was volunteered to bring the first chapter to critique the very next month.

I had no idea how to write a chapter, let alone develop the characters and write a scene. We were yet to cover those elements in the subsequent months. I did my best, and to my amazement, everyone liked the opening chapter.

But that was all I had. I lacked the skills to develop it further. My characters were one-dimensional; I didn’t know how to end the story and, most importantly, how to beef up the middle.

As the year passed, we learned a bit about the unique elements of novel writing; each month, one participant presented a chapter for critique.

At the end of the workshop, five of us continued meeting and working on our novels. Six years have passed since the workshop, and none of us have been able to finish. We all have attributed our failure to the lack of a structure.

The mistake we made was that we started writing our novels without working out the structure of them. We hadn’t even worked out the entire story. We were practically writing from the seat of our pants.

For years we were convinced that it was the best way to write a novel. We were exploring; we were having fun, and we were making progress until we were not.

There came the point when we were realizing that the story was not going anywhere. One of my friends realized she had written 100,000 words, but she was not halfway through the story. The other one had all the inciting incidents that happened initially, leaving nothing for the middle. I figured out the end but did not know what to put in the middle. I also realized I had two stories running in parallel, making the book too long and complicated.

Your novel’s structure should be the first thing to be nailed down if you want to finish your novel. Without the structure, you will write and rewrite your novel nth number of times and still won’t finish it.

Why we need a structure?

If you look at anything, it has a structure. A building has a structure; a house has a structure; a tree has a structure; the human body has a structure.

The structure differs from the plot. A novel plot is about elements that go into mixing to make a story even better.

The structure is the backbone. It is about where the plot elements should go to make the story stand.

Without a structure, a story is just a series of anecdotes.

Twenty-three hundred years ago, Aristotle’s figured out how drama worked. His work was based on the thriving Greek theater and the surrounding mythology, rich in story and plot.

He wrote in Poetics that a story has a beginning, middle, and end. But more importantly, he explained how those sections play distinct roles in successful storytelling.

The universality of the Three-Act-Structure structure makes it easy to accept. Our life is a three-act structure — we are born, we live, and we die. Our day is a three-act structure — we get up in the morning, we go to work, and we sleep.

In the simplest form, Aristotle’s “beginning, middle, and end” has been translated into the Three-Act-Structure comprising Act I, Act II, and Act III.

Many authors have described Three-Act-Structure in different ways. They are all fine. You can pick up any and model your novel on that. However, I have amalgamated a few to make a structure that works for me. This article will explain the eight elements I define before embarking on plotting and writing literary novels.

ACT I

Act I occupy 10% to 20% of the novel but incorporates three important elements — Setup, Inciting Incident, and Plot Point 1.

Setup: This is where the readers are introduced to the setting and the characters. Everything is fine here. The main character is happily living her “normal” life.

Inciting Incident: Something happens and disrupts the “normal” life of the main character. It is the first turning point, the point from where the protagonist’s life is about to change. The protagonist resists, the inner conflict begins.

Plot Point 1: Something throws everything off balance. It usually comes as a surprise. The main character is forced to decide. She sets on a new direction in her life.

Many good novels begin at Plot Point 1., thrusting the main character right into the thick of things. It is where the protagonist acquires her goal.

ACT II

Act II has rising action and occupies 60% to 70% of the novel.

The main characters face a series of complications and obstacles, each leading to a mini-crisis. The protagonist keeps deciding to resolve the crisis until she reaches the second turning point — Plot Point 2.

The key to Act II is conflict. Without it, the story can’t move forward. Thus, the stakes are continually raised. The protagonist faces both inner and outer conflicts, alternating up and down internally between hope and disappointment and externally between solving crises and facing bigger crises.

Plot Point 2 is the second major turning point where the protagonist’s actions caused the disaster. Usually, Plot Point 2 leads to mid-point.

MidPoint: As the name explains, it is the middle of Act II and the novel. It is also known as Plot Point 3 or Mirror Moment, where the protagonist looks inwards and faces the moment of truth. A subtle but big change happens here. Instead of reacting to the crises, the protagonist goes through a fundamental change using her newly gained skills and knowledge.

Plot Point 3 shows the protagonist at her lowest, taking a profound misstep among her newfound actions, which drives her directly into the Climax and Resolution.

The story turns towards the climax in Act III, often involving a crucial decision.

ACT III

In the third Act, the climax is reached. All the loose ends are tied, and the resolution is reached. The third Act shows how the character can succeed or has become a better person.

Climax: Theis the last turning point of the novel, and it is the point of highest tension and drama. But it resolved quickly as well. It is the point at which the action starts, during which the solution is also found.

Resolution: Also known as the denouement, the resolution is when all the conflicts are resolved, and the story concludes. Tension rapidly dissipates because it’s nearly impossible to sustain a reader’s interest long after the climax.

The three-act structure is not the only way to structure a novel. Many others (and I will write about them in another post), but it is the simplest and can apply to any genre.

Benefits of a Three-Act-Structure

  1. It is the fastest way to work out where your story is going as you identify the eight elements of the structure. Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, 2, and 3, and MidPoint, you figure out whether your story is proportionate or stretched disproportionately.
  2. It helps identify the major turning points in the story ( Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, Plot Point 2, MidPoint, Plot Point 3, Climax). Absence or week turning points make your story bland.
  3. It helps you meet the expectations of the readers. Readers are used to resolutions at the end of the story. They also want the end to be surprising as well as satisfying. In fact, the entire story has a rhythm to it, which can’t be achieved without a structure.

Aristotle codified still plays itself out in story after story and novel after the novel is written in our time.

A structure is only a sketch of how you think the story might go. Your story will inevitably change as you write it. By determining a structure beforehand, you are not tying yourself down to a plan you might not want to follow later.

A structure is just a guideline.

The structure is not a prison rather a map with trails. Finding the road is the most pleasurable part of writing.

Great stories existed long before there were books on story structure. The pattern of an enchanting yarn has been recreated again and again through time and around the world in myths and tales. The rhythm of these stories that so captures our imaginations reflects not marketing trends but our collective struggle through life. Things that deeply resonate do so because they tug at our inner workings.

Does your novel have to adhere to the Three-Act-Structure? No. But you probably find that it does because this is the structure of most stories in Western civilization. We are used to thinking about stories this way, even if we aren’t aware of it.

Some approaches differ slightly from the way I have described them here. Some books include all plot points in Act II, others don’t have Mid Point and Plot Point III, yet others have five or six plot points. The best approach is:

Perhaps the easiest way to decide exactly where your Plot Points fall and their importance is — not as what happens — but what the character decides to do about the thing that happens. It is the decision which drives the story — readers stay involved because they want to understand character motivation and the outcomes of the decisions the characters make. Do be careful to ensure that the scenes which relate to the turning points in your novel have enough resonance — don’t rush these scenes.

Next Step

Now get a pen and paper and start describing your story idea in terms of the eight elements of the Three-Act-Structure.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

How to make your writing memorable, poetic, and persuasive.

Neera

For some time, I have been fascinated with the rhetoric devices. The rhetoric devices are the writing techniques that Greeks invented, Romans perfected, and Shakespeare put to real use.

According to Mark Forsyth, the writer of The Elements of Eloquence at the time Shakespeare was writing, the classical works on rhetoric were being dug out, translated, and adapted for use in English. Shakespeare learned them and learned them well. His prose and his one-liners become more striking because of the mastery he gained in these their use.

Figures of rhetoric (as they were known in Greek and Roman times) were formulas. The formula that you can learn from a book. Ancient Greeks went around, noting down the best and most memorable phrases they heard and worked out what the structures were, in much the same way we ask for a recipe when we eat a delicious meal.

But then they were abandoned. 

Why? 

Because they got a bad reputation. Rhetoric devices were related to persuasive writing, and people didn’t want to be persuaded.

But today, language is considered the most humane way of persuasion. We don’t need weapons to persuade. We rather need well-crafted arguments, essays, and articles.

A little while ago, I wrote an article The things they should have taught us in school on rhetoric devices ever since I wanted to write a series of articles on them, reviving them from the dead so that you can start using them in your everyday writing.

In today’s article, I am going to introduce three easy ones.

1. Alliteration

2. Anaphora and

3. Epistrophe

1. Want to make a name or a phrase memorable, use alliteration.

Alliteration is when a series of words begin with the same consonant sound such as busy as a bee, good as gold, and dead as a doornail.

Alliteration is meant to be more than a tongue twister. It’s used to emphasize something important and to make it memorable.

Alliterations have been around for a long time. Nobody knows why we love to hear words that begin with the same letter, but we do, and we don’t forget them easily.

An alliterative name can help you stand out in the crowd. Fictional characters or public figures with alliteration in their names stick to our memory more than other names. Remember Donald Duck, Fred Flintstone, Mickey Mouse, Kim Kardashian, Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan, William Wordsworth?

Companies use the alliterative effect all the time to make their brand name memorable. American Airlines, Bed Bath & Beyond, Coca-Cola, Krispy Kreme, Lulu Lemon, Park Place, PayPal are a few examples.

Alliteration in phrases and quotes is also very effective — the last laugh, leave in the lurch, making a mountain out of a molehill, neck to neck, method to the madness, out of order, pleased as punch, pooh-pooh, not on your nelly.

It is not hard to make alliteration, and they are used extensively by good writers and poets. Shakespeare was a master if alliteration. When he wanted to describe the moment Antony saw Cleopatra on the barge and fell in love with her, he needed something to make the words memorable. He chose alliteration.

The barge she sat in like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails and so perfumed that.
 The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver, 
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
 The water which they beat to follow faster,
 As amorous of their strokes.

Milton to Tennyson, Edgar Allan to Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway to Maya Angelou, they have all used it.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, –
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.

Edgar Allan Poe in The Raven

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.

Robert Frost in Birches

For some reason, people love a string of words that start with the same sound. No body knows why. But they do. You can spend all day trying to write a great memorable sentence, bang your head against the wall to put some universal truth on paper, but it is much easier to string together some words that begin with the same letter.

Yes, you can ban the bomb, burn your bra, and push power to the people.

2. Want to emphasize or persuade, use anaphora

Anaphora is used to emphasize a phrase while adding rhythm to a passage. This technique consists of repeating a specific word or phrase at the beginning of a line or passage.

The repetition of a word can intensify the overall meaning of the piece.

Poets use it as an artistic element. Have a look at Shakespeare’s sonnet below.

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac’d,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac’d,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly — doctor-like — controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill

And Joe Brainard’s “I Remember.”

I remember a piece of old wood with termites running around all over it the termite men found under our front porch.
I remember when one year in Tulsa by some freak of nature we were invaded by millions of grasshoppers for about three or four days.
I remember, downtown, whole sidewalk areas of solid grasshoppers.
I remember a shoe store with a big brown x-ray machine that showed up the bones in your feet bright green.

Politicians and public speakers use anaphora as a form of persuasion, as a method to emphasize a specific idea. Remember Winston Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons in June 1940:

“We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.”

And Martin Luther King Jr’s address at the March on Washington in 1963:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state, sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

However, if anaphora is overused, the repetition ends up being boring rather than inspiring. Be aware of the number of times that a phrase or word is used and how your writing flows, so you get the most out of using anaphora.

3. Want to drive the point home, use epistrophe

Epistrophe is the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences. It is a counterpart of anaphora.

Since the emphasis is on the last words of a series of sentences or phrases, epistrophe can be very dramatic.

Politicians use epistrophe all the time. President Barack Obama’s repetition of “Yes, we can” at the end of the sentence after sentence is an example.

Abraham Lincoln’s words, “And the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” are forever etched in our memory.

So are the words of J F Kenndey’s.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Literature draws some of its dramatic appeal from epistrophes. Poetry, in particular, lends itself well to the rhythmic flow of an epistrophe. Here is an example from the Master.

If you had known the virtue of the ring,
Or half her worthiness that gave the ring,
Or your own honour to contain the ring,
You would not then have parted with the ring. 

– The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare

Here are a couple of examples from prose. 

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now, we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

– Corinthians 13:11

Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid, each cycle of the wave is valid, each cycle of a relationship is valid.

–Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Just like catchy speeches, catchy lines delivered in movies, TV shows, or songs have repetition as the key. Here is one from The Lord of the Rings

A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of woes and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight!

Summary

Okay, there is a lot here to remember, so let me summarise.

Rhetoric devices are formulas, just like mathematics. The formula that you can learn from a book (I recommend Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence). They are based on what works rather than what might work.

1. Using a string of words with the same consonant sound is an easy and foolproof way to create memorable titles and lines.

Nobody knows the reason why but people are suckers for alliteration. If you want to make the title of your book, name of your character, or a phrase memorable, use alliteration. 

Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility will always make good titles than Dignity and Prejudice and Prudence and Sensibility.

Curiosity didn’t kill any cat, nobody has thrown a baby out with the bathwater, it takes two to tango but it also takes two to waltz.

2. Repetition of a specific word or phrase at the beginning of each line or passage is a simple technique to emphasize or persuade. 

Politicians and public speakers use it all the time. 

It’s preposterously easy to do. It’s so preposterously easy to pick some words. and it’s so preposterously easy to repeat them.

3. Want to make a dramatic impact like leaders, use the same word or a string of words repeatedly.

Remember the oath we take in the court:

I solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that the evidence I shall give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Your Task

See if you can introduce some of these in your writing.

Photo by Nils on Unsplash

Can Lockdown Enhanced Creativity

Neera

The world has been in various phases of lockdown from the past seven months. No one has any idea of how long we will be living in this manner. It is not just weeks or months; we are talking years. Working from home is going to become a norm pretty soon if it hasn’t already.

While there are plenty of reports saying that productivity has gone up with lockdown, but what about creativity. Are we feeling more creative working from the confinement of our homes? Are we coming up with more ideas in isolation?

Isolation is beginning to get on people’s nerves. Office workers are missing their workplace (which not so long ago was they hated the most). Lack of socializing is driving people crazy. The common complaint is boredom.

But there is one thing that blossom in boredom- creativity.

How can one be creative when one is bored?

Agatha Christie made an explicit link between her writing and childhood boredom:

People often ask me what made me take up writing. Many of them, I fancy, wonder whether to take my answer seriously, although it’s a strictly truthful one. You see, I put it all down to the fact that I never had any education. Perhaps I’d better qualify that — by admitting that I did eventually go to school in Paris when I was 16 or thereabouts. But until then, apart from being taught a little arithmetic, I’d had no lessons to speak of at all. Although I was gloriously idle, in those days children had to do a good many things for themselves. They made their own doll’s furniture, and they made Christmas presents to give to their friends. (Nowadays, they’re just given money and told to buy their presents in a big store.) I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts and there’s nothing like boredom to make you write. So by the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I’d written quite a number of short stories and one long dreary novel.

Austin Kleon has been saying for a while that to be creative you need to be boring. You are more creative working in a mundane routine than from exciting, socially-active days.

Neil Gaiman’s advice for writers is, “Get bored.”

[Ideas] come from daydreaming, from drifting, that moment when you’re just sitting there… The trouble with these days is that it’s really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment…it’s really hard to get bored. I’m much better at putting my phone away, going for boring walks, actually trying to find the space to get bored in. That’s what I’ve started saying to people who say ‘I want to be a writer,” I say ‘great, get bored.’

Even Einstein was in favor of idleness: “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

So if isolation is getting to your nerves, find something creative to do. You can – start a veggie patch, learn to draw, write a book, make a collage, do some embroidery.

I do not know about others, but I am taking more ideas to completion. I am sticking with them longer, exploring them more, and finishing more articles and sketches than before. Not being able to go out means I can plan my days better and get more work done.

This week I wrote two articles, Seven Tips To Write With Style and Kindness Starts At Home.

I was really heartened by the fact that Seven Tips To Write With Style was picked up by the Medium curators (team of people at Medium who look for good articles and recommend them to subscribers). This is my second article in three months that got curated, which means the article will go to a wider audience.

In my cartoon drawing course, I have commenced drawing cartoons for Ms. Jolly’s Rule Book For Writers that will be published at the end of the course. Those of you who don’t know, Ms. Jolly is the cartoon character I have created who is more or less my alter ego.

That’s it from me this week.

Take care.