by James Dowd
Dumb Writing Tip #37: Say what you mean, mean what you say.
Don’t use words that lessen your impact. Weasel words like “very,” “just,” “mostly,” “slightly,” “seems,” “sort of,” “pretty,” and “somewhat” signal to the reader you mean what you say…but not really. You become a weak, unreliable narrator, so never pull your punches, unless it’s part of your plan. Eesh, lots of alliteration there, apologies.
Dumb Writing Tip #38: Write like a human.
Good writing sounds like a conversation, not a lecture. If your reader doesn’t like the conversation, they’ll stop reading. So, don’t make it sound like writing, make it sound like a human voice. Then, the reader will feel you reaching out through the page with your words. That’s how someone truly connects with your efforts.
This is a challenge you see most often coming through with brands. Behind them are business, which inherently do not have emotion. However, the people behind it, operating it, do. That’s why natural, conversational, non-robotic language ensures the reader can connect, understand, take what they need, and act appropriately — engaging with the brand to help drive the business.
To be more human in your writing, be yourself and have empathy. Be warm, inviting, and personable. Use contractions. Use humor. Use puns, sparingly, please. Hell, use emojis. Use simple words, words people know. Don’t make them have to go look up the words you use. You wouldn’t want to talk with that person at a party, just as people don’t want to read what they write, because it’s a chore and it creates more work for them. So, always aim to not only be human, but just a little bit dumber than your reader. Not only do people rarely enjoy having to go look up words but more often than not, they’re all-around pressed for time. They turn to quick blog reads or, god forbid, just read the headlines. Be dumber than them. Offer words they know, simply, and don’t try to sound clever. Give them what they’re looking for, but do so in a fun, engaging way. Don’t try to impress anyone, just express yourself.
Often, when people hear that I am a Writer, they automatically assume I use big, fancy words. But, the truth is, I’m usually the first to admit that I have no idea what words mean. I don’t know any of those fancy words because I never use them, and I never read the Writers that make me go look them up. I’m lazy, and a bit dumb, and even sometimes surprise myself that I do in-fact know how to read. I only try to express my point as simply as possible. If you have to look up a word I use, then my work is not effective. It’s only taking you out of the moment. Mark Twain said it best: “Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”
So, be human, be dumb, and don't try to write something profound and fancy. Just write what you're trying to say. Make it clear, make it personal, make it something someone can connect with.
Dumb Writing Tip #39: Stay in your 4-foot world.
Like in climbing, nothing matters but what’s next on the rock (or desk), that which you can reach — your 4-foot world. Work doesn’t matter. The guy at the base watching you doesn’t matter. Looking stupid doesn’t matter. Because, no one can help you but yourself. You are here, and all that matters is your next move. If you start becoming fearful, doubtful, or distracted, you fall. If you start thinking ahead to feedback or failure, you’ve already fallen. All that matters is your next move on the screen. Just like climbing a rock face, writing takes focus and courage, so stay in your world.
Dumb Writing Tip #40: Write for the read.
As it’s important for you to write like a human, you must also remember the human on the other side of your words — you must write with empathy. This is more than how they may misunderstand or perceive your words, but also what they want from them.
You might assume they want a hero when they really want a friend, or a teacher, or a rebel. What your writing serves a purpose, so make sure it’s fulfilling that purpose.
To help bucket these for yourself and the reader, look at Carl Jung’s 12 archetypes. By breaking down these basic models of humans, we can see how they create thoughts, emotions, and actions in others, better enabling us to connect and deliver with our words.
Dumb Writing Tip #41: Design your writing.
The greatest sin you can commit is to create a confusing read. That’s why you must design your writing for easy reading at every stage of the reader’s journey, regardless of the medium. If there’s an easier way to say it, or a cleaner, or more poetic structure, use it. If you can cut words, cut. If you feel you’re overusing punctuation but it helps make the sentence more clear, get over it and drop in that damn comma. Like it or not, writing is a visual game. How it appears to a human’s looking balls is important.
Dumb Writing Tip #42: Get eyes on it.
An obvious one, yet so often it’s not done. Why? Because we’re too scared, whether we admit it or not. Ask people to proof what you’ve written and start a dialogue about it. Let them challenge you and your words, but defend them, as well. Having other people read what you’ve written is key to ensuring that your writing is as readable as possible. Even if you’re not done, tell them it’s coming to give yourself a deadline driven by peer pressure.
Dumb Writing Tip #43: Let it suck.
Remember to avoid perfection at all costs, and just accept that it will suck to some. That is a great secret of professionals. They’ve done the work enough to know that perfection is a myth, and criticism is inevitable. The perfect piece of writing is simply unattainable, so they don’t even try to achieve it. They seek other goals instead, ones that can actually be reached. Meanwhile, the amateurs seek perfection, and fail endlessly. They overthink it, constantly. I know many “writers” who dream of selling their big screenplay before even finishing it, or novelists or have 100 ideas but are still fiddling with all of them. They write, and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, forever. It’s easy to fine-tune something for years, and if that fulfills you, fine. But, if you want to make a career of this, if you want it to last, and you want to pay your bills with it, you need to finish, and you need to accept that it is not and will not ever be perfect. No matter what it is, someone will hate it, but at least it’s done.
Dumb Writing Tip #44: Solve problems one at a time.
Your writing is just a long series of problems and challenges for you to solve — each aspect a puzzle unlike the last. Don’t let that overwhelm you. Focus on one problem at a time. Ask yourself what the next problem is and solve that one only. If this sentence doesn’t flow, you can’t be thinking about what’s next, or if it ends correctly, or if you should use a contraction. You’re thinking about all of those challenges, which means you’re not fixing the first one. The more you worry about, or try to solve simultaneously, the more time you waste. Simplify, streamline, and don’t overthink.
Dumb Writing Tip #45: Make this your aircraft.
You’re the Writer here, the pilot, and this is your plane. This is on you now. You’re in control, no one else. Do not wait for anyone else to inspire you, or to give you the answers. Stop reading blogs. The words aren’t out there on the internet, they’re in your brain, so go ahead, put them on the page. Do it now. Take control. Just write.
To make the situation “your aircraft” comes from the famous plane crash into the Hudson River, where pilot “Sully” Sullenberger is reported to have taken control of the cockpit, plane, and situation by firmly stating to the panicked crew, “My aircraft.” But, for me it came not from a disaster but from a success. A designer I’ve worked with named Matt Pringle delivered an overwhelmingly successful creative presentation. Now, Matt is a quiet riot of a designer, meaning he crushes pixels, but isn’t the first to jump up and deliver a whole spiel to try to sway a room. Instead, he prefers to focus on the work, and let it speak for him. But, not this time. This time, he performed confidently and precisely. He delivered a happy client, a sold idea, and the assurance that we would get out of the situation “alive.” Afterwards, I asked him what got him there, what fueled him and empowered him. He answered, “I told mysel
f that this was my cockpit.” He went on to explain that he told himself that, out loud, to remind himself that he owned the room, that people would listen to him, because he was the expert and no one else could fly that plane but him.
So, he as you write, tell yourself that you are in control. You are the Writer, the creator, no one else. You are in control. You have to fly this thing, so make sure people feel like you know where you are going. Make sure they can sit comfortably and enjoy the ride. For Sully, lives depended on him. For you, every word, every character, every idea dies if allow it. This is your aircraft, your cockpit. So fly the goddamn thing.
Dumb Writing Tip #46: Don’t worry about your audience.
I’ve already told you to consider the audience, and while certainly true, it’s also entirely untrue. Before you can write for other people, you have to be able to write for yourself. That means trusting in your decisions and abilities, and finding a simpler path for putting words on the page without putting too much pressure and worry into what you write and how it will exist to others. Is this a contradiction to other things I’ve offered? Absolutely, but writing dumb has layers; it contains multitudes.
Being overly self-conscious and being overly conscious of others are both ways of overthinking. At a certain point, you simply have to shut up, stop thinking so much about everything and if it makes sense, follow your instincts, and just write. As Ray Bradbury said, "Anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things." And that guy was an okay Writer.
Dumb Writing Tip #47: Stay in your time zone.
At any moment, every day, and even on a grander scale in your work and career, each of us in our own time zones. There are those who are ahead of you, those who are alongside you, and those who are behind you, and it will always be this way. Only worry about what goes on in your time zone. Never compare yourself to anyone else, and never compare your writing. Never look back into history, and never take your age into consideration. All you can do is focus on your own path, and work in your own time.
Dumb Writing Tip #48: Know, love, & believe.
When it comes to anything creative communications, you must engage with the work. That is true in writing, as it is in music, singing, design, and even public speaking. To fully engage with the work is to fully engage with your audience. To do this, you must always do these 3 things:
Know the work: Do your research, use your brain, don’t start until you’re ready. Look at it from all angles, and spend time with it. If you don’t know what you’re doing or talking about, it will become clear very quickly.
Love the work: Use your Heart and feel a connection to what you’re doing. If you do this, people will feel it too. They will see the humanity on the other side, and they’ll feel what you felt. If you don’t, they will see that it is heartless, and they will move on.
Believe in the work: Believe that this is worth doing, and that this is a conversation worth having, or else why waste your time doing it? I’ve read too many damn articles that are listicle garbage meant only to have me click and scroll past ads. They wanted me to give me nothing, and they didn’t care if I receive anything. They only wanted my time, were reluctant to even chase after that, and it showed in the sad writing that will never be referenced again. They are dead pixels floating around somewhere. That writer did not believe that this time together, me and their words, was valuable. Why not believe that the thoughts, ideas, and feelings existing inside your brain, when captured in written form, can bring you together with someone in another part of the world, in another time? This work we do is magic; this time we have together is precious. Believe in it, and in yourself, and in this connection you have created, and your words will carry more meaning.
Dumb Writing Tip #49: Be a Writer.
This one seems obvious, yet more often than not, it’s not done. If you want to be a Writer, there are two very easy and very specific things you must do. There are no exceptions to this. Absolutely none. Hold on to your fucking seats because this is the secret behind every single professional Writer. You MUST:
Read. Read everything. Read often. Study the craft. Find new ways to do write by seeing what others have already discovered. Find out what you hate by reading shitty writing. Can you imagine a musician that never listens to music?
Write. I always ask interviewees what they wrote this week. Most of the time, they didn’t write a thing. They’re always taking a break. That’s how I know not to hire them. They don’t actually like writing, apparently, or else they’d write. Some deeply, passionately want to be a Writer, while others feel it’s a path to a paycheck. Either way, if you want to do it well, you have to practice. You have to put energy into something as small as an email. Being a Writer is not something you declare, or a title bestowed upon you, it’s something you earn through writing. You might feel the Writer inside you, but you’re not one until you actually write. Then you have to get better at it, and share with people. If you work hard enough, someday someone will either pay you or call you a Writer. I know this is a profession for me because at the end of the day I go back and read the emails I sent. I get little bits of joy from the way I structured them, or added little comedic twists. I notice my sentence lengths or how I flowed between paragraphs. I find my mistakes and cringe. I feel proud of something as small as a damn email, and it makes me happy to remind myself that, because I’m a Writer, doing what I love. So, you want to write or have to write, write, and find the writing that lights you up so at the end of the day you can say you did it, you did it well, and you damn well know it.
Dumb Writing Tip #50: Break all the rules.
"I found that total creativity involves
a certain intellectual rebellion --
not to become a criminal, but somehow,
to be totally creating, you have to do things
that are a little bit forbidden."
- Philippe Petit
“I aim to misbehave.” It’s both a nerdy pop culture reference from the movie Serenity as well as a nod to the Oscar Wilde quote, “A writer is someone who has taught their mind to misbehave.”
That’s why I found it fitting, as a nerdy writer, to not only breath it into my work but to put it right on the top of my business card. The company I work for encourages the team to put quotes onto their cards that reflect them and their work. They are always professional, and clever, and respectable. But, that didn’t feel very me. So, while others were putting clear work-focused lines, like “I take the lead,” I felt the need to rebel, to actually misbehave, and do something completely different. After-all, I’m in the creativity business, and doing things differently is in our nature.
As creatives, we’ve always felt compelled to fight against what is expected of us. In school, we cracked jokes and were said to be “disruptive.” We kept our heads down and silently sketched in our notebooks, and were labeled “disobedient.” We skipped class and went out to see the world, and were called “deviant.” We embraced being different, and made it our life’s work.
Now, as professional rebels, we strive to be the outsider with the big, shocking idea or the game-changing innovation. We find our worth in seeing things differently and making a show out of any moment. We find our power in embracing experimentation, challenging conventions, and searching the great unknown.
Tell a creative it’s already been done, and they’ll gladly find a different way to do it. Because, where we see disorder, we wish to create order. Where we see harmony, we wish to create chaos. It’s up to us creatives to break the rules, to ask what’s next, and to find connections between strange, unexpected things. It’s what they pay us for.
But, our biggest hurdle is the place where we get it all done; our schools and workplaces. It’s where rigid structures, processes, and rules are made to guide us, but inadvertently pose the risk of crushing our creative spirit. The more restrictions placed upon us, the more we fall in line and find a comfortable routine, and the less we explore. So here we are,
in this crisis of creativity, where the rules and guidelines are stifling; where imagination has been sucked out in place of streamlined progress; where short-term deliverables supersede long-term happiness, thought, and success.
And so, we must remember that rarely were rules we abide by actually made with us in mind. We must become accountable for ourselves, our work, and our words. We must consider what we do when the rules, processes, and dictated approaches conflict with what’s right in our writing — what we feel to be right. We must stop thinking and just follow our Hearts. Because, when the rules are such that we can’t achieve our individual and collective goals, we simply must rewrite the rules, or break them altogether.
Without taking these risks every day, we risk dissatisfaction and a numbing of our skills, so fight against groupthink and conformity, embrace your inner rebel, and go break some goddamn rules already.
Choose what you want to use and accept from this book. Use all of it, use none of it. Just fucking write. Break all the rules and write. At the heart of creativity and writing is rebellion. So don’t just write, misbehave. To write is to misbehave, it’s to block out all the crap in your head. It’s to confidently, definitely, and foolishly give the world a middle finger, to say, “I got this, I can do this better, I am not ashamed or worried what you think of me. I will bleed. I will lay it all out for you to trample on if you so wish. I will spread my dreams under your feet. Do your worst.”