Alpha Mind Blog

Grant McCracken is Gaga over Geico, and tells us why. I’ll add something:

There’s a serious problem with using “real customers, not celebrities” to speak for a product, and it’s more acute in audio than in print, and worse yet in video. Problem? These people are boring. Boooooooring.

Check out the ad Grant is writing about. This woman is pleasant, even good-looking, but dull as dishwater. She hasn’t been trained to have any “presence” on camera, and she can’t raise a trace of emotion in me.

Solution: as Gerald Weinberg wrote, “If you can’t fix it, feature it.” Put her next to Little Richard, and two things happen.

1. As psychologists put it, he “bears her affect” for her, expressing the emotion (at least the excitement) she’s not good at expressing. This engages me in a way she couldn’t on her own.
2. She sits with perfect aplomb in the presence of a man howling like a lunatic. By the contrast with Little Richard, her plainness becomes ever more apparent, and the sense that she’s incapable of guile is driven home.

The setting is wonderfully clever at heightening the second effect. To all appearances, she has just fed Little Richard a wholesome home-cooked meal (vice-versa is unthinkable, and we tend not to think in terms of a studio set.) This makes her even more the “regular gal” she is. The very qualities in her that could have made us decide this is a good time for a bathroom break have now increased our regard for her. Although we stayed for Richard’s antics, after it’s over we’re glad we stayed for her. Richard kept us there so that her very plainness could win us over.

BTW, I’m glad to be posting about McCracken’s blog. It’s superb. After reading it for quite some time, I’ve added it to my blogroll. I hope my readers will subscribe and check it out regularly.

Here follow the last five points I made in my email to the RSD:

6. Own books. Libraries are great, but… It’s important to have a collection of good books right at your fingertips. That way when you find yourself having a teachable moment, that moment when you remember what so-and-so did especially well that’s like what you need to do in your own writing, you can reach for so-and-so’s book on your shelf and see how it was done, just when you’re fully motivated to learn and use it.

7. Read old books. By knowing how English has worked over a period of more than three centuries, you gain an understanding of how language changes and adapts. This will help you you understand how *you* can adapt language, making it your servant and not your master. Even books too old to have been written in English can be great helps. Sometimes story and image matter more than the precise language in which they are conveyed, so check out Herodotus and the Old Testament (esp Genesis, I&II Sam., I & II Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah) and Attic tragedy. Also the less old greats of other languages, like Tolstoy, Hugo, Goethe.

8. Because language does and must adapt, learn when to throw the rules out the window. A major turning point in my writing was when I realized that the second line of the Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” is such a communications masterpiece as to utterly nullify its being a grammatical abomination. (In case you forget or don’t know: Line 1: “Well she got her daddy’s car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now.” Line 2: “Seems she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now.” Brilliant.)

9. Read for wisdom. The best writers have been those driven to try to make sense of the world. They do so with varying success, but it is their thirst for wisdom, not just knowledge, that also makes many of them dig deep for an understanding of how to communicate what they learn. So: Francis Bacon, Erasmus, Penn, Gibbon, Drucker. (Note that Penn’s writing is as bad as it is good, so you need some discernment if you’re to learn from it. Good and bad often live in shocking cohabitation; as Randall Jarrell admiringly wrote, “… only a man with the most extraordinary feel for language—or none whatsoever—could have cooked up Whitman’s worst messes.” In a less dramatic way, this is true of Penn.)

10. Take risks. One of the great advantages of writing for editors is that they’ll tell you when your experiments fail, and as long as you don’t waste too much of their time, they don’t mind your taking risks. Thus you can try the less straightforward way of saying something. What most editors won’t do is tell you, if you give them plodding, no-risk writing, how it can be made more interesting. If they were that creative, they’d be writing not editing. Pruning excesses is their business, supplying the excesses is yours.

The RSD wrote me an email a few weeks back, stating how much she enjoys my writing (aw shucks) and asking for writing tips. I gave her some. I now offer them to you, somewhat altered from the personal manner in which I addressed her. There are ten of them, and I’ll post them in two parts.

1. Read a lot. Composition classes don’t teach us nearly as much about writing as writers do by example.

2. Read good literature. Read the best. Try MFK Fisher, a superior writer. Read Abraham Lincoln, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Dickens, Conrad, and especially C.S. Lewis. Find ones *you* think are good; your judgment is likely to be right.

3. Write for publication, in actual magazines and newspapers, where they employ actual editors. These people will teach you lots of lessons.

4. Write for the best publications you can get your work into. The better the pub, the better its editors, and the better the feedback and lessons they’ll give you. Make a targets list and work patiently to get your writing into every publication on your list. Unfortunately, some of the best-written and best-edited publications are all-staff-written (like The Economist) or peer-reviewed journals by folks with very special qualifications (like the New England Journal of Medicine), so you can’t work on them without being on staff. (BTW I know two people who have edited at NEJM, and both found it a great experience.)

5. Read books about writing. Yes, there are too many of them out there, but the good ones are truly helpful. I especially like A Writer’s Time, by Kenneth Atchity; Style: Towards Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams (gets my very highest recommendation); On Writing Well, by Wm. Zinsser; and Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brand.
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That’s the first half of what I told the RSD. I have one more note to add. I did not mean to suggest that composition classes are of low value. I merely meant that they cannot capture all the lessons that are contained in the work of fine writers. Coursework and the vast literature on how to write are very valuable, because none of us learns everything we might learn from example. Sometimes the example needs to be made explicit to us, in a teacherly way, before we can appreciate and use it. One reason I recommend Williams’s Style is how he makes explicit the brilliant choices Lincoln made in the Gettysburg Address.

[coming in part 2: On Reading and Rules. Tune in tomorrow.]