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Right state and comfortable position

Usually, every coaching session starts with the words: “Hello, nice to see you, and now sit comfortably, please”. Most people change their position, despite the fact that they have already sat on their chairs.

– Why were you sitting uncomfortably before I asked? You didn’t even notice it. Why didn’t you sit comfortably in the first place?

Why do you not write easily from the very beginning? It is important to remember: if it is hard it means you are doing something wrong. It should not be hard. Imagine: you want to shake out the bag of a vacuum cleaner and you are trying to pull the container out. Is it hard? Perhaps you are pushing something the wrong way. You will break the plastic if you do not understand the design.

What could be wrong when you are writing? Three things:

– lack of interest and waiting for inspiration;

– state and position;

– lack of information and wrong meaning.

Right place

I decided to create my writing lessons when my friend asked me how I wrote. He was a coach and he started to explore my writing approach. Modeling in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is not only copying something but obtaining a certain skill through the gathering of criteria: internal (beliefs and values) and external (specific rules and actions/behavior). So, he watched everything I did while I was writing.

We noticed that I sat fixedly. My legs and body did not move; only my hands and eyes were doing the work. It might be obvious to you, but my friend was surprised. Normally, when he was writing, he constantly changed his position; his hands were on his face, lips, keyboard; he was bending his legs or sitting with his feet on the floor. He fidgeted.

The beginners’ mistake is that they do not pay attention to the right place, position and condition (state). That is why they think they need ‘patience to work’. When the body is resting, the head is working, productivity is higher, and attention is more focused. The body does not ask for comfort, food, convenience – it is fine. It is in a trance. A trance is achieved when you can fully concentrate on writing, excluding everything else. It is a state of focusing completely on one thing – in our case on writing. It is the only way to love it. But how can you find this state?

Look for a comfortable body position while you are working. Think about your favorite place: the chair, the sofa, the floor? How do you prefer to sit: foot on foot, legs straight, legs under your bottom? Or maybe you like to lay down? Which sounds help you: silence, classical music, office noise, subway noise? What do you want to see around you: a mess, an order, a beautiful interior? Or where do you like to be: at home, in the office, in a cafe, in a co-working studio, in a park, in the countryside? Analyze and prepare your place for work. You do not live in outer space or in a prison, I hope, so you can always leave, change your setting, and arrange a work space, or… just go into a trance. I can write anywhere; I do not care what is around me. I just open my laptop and start to work. My body is still, and my breathing slows down. I achieve a trance-like state and do not notice anything around me. Nothing can irritate or distract me. Remember that a trance is a full mental concentration on one object. It is natural to all of us when we read, watch a film or drive a car. It is natural and useful when we are writing, and it helps us to be more focused on something and, thus, to be calm and productive.

If you know a comfortable place and a body position you can work in while relaxed, you should sit the same way and in the same condition next time. It seems easy: the body can always be seated in the right chair, with your arms and legs perfectly aligned. Well, what about the state then? It is vulnerable and has no shell.

The right state can be achieved as soon as you get into the right place. Actually, the state is achieved with the right pose: when your body is relaxed and fixed in a comfortable position, and your breathing is slow, you feel calm. But there are a lot of states (interest, inspiration, excitement, curiosity), so it is not only achieved by position. It is also dependent on a process. The state does not exist separately from you, you can create it on your own.

Information and meaning

Information is the content, facts, a brief (a client’s questionnaire); it is specifics. If I want to write some information, I ask myself: what do I want to say? Information is something new that I tell the reader.

Meaning is an aim, an idea, a sense, or a significance. If I want to determine the meaning, I ask myself: why do I want to say this? The first answer is for nothing. That is alright. By default, there is enough of everything in the universe, it does not need your texts. This must be accepted and forgotten. The second answer is for myself; the most honest answer, actually. All authors write for great reasons for sure; to change the world, but we write for ourselves, because we love to write, we need to write, we cannot live without it and we enjoy it. After all, when you have accepted that your text is not needed and you write for yourself, you can give the third answer – I write to tell people something. Selling texts, copywriting, and mass-media texts are the kind of text that is written to ‘tell people’ something, because you could live without this text and the readers did not ask for it, but you should write it to tell about a product.

The meaning is what you mean, but you are not saying it directly, although the meaning can be said aloud: it is a thesis, a theme, sometimes it is a title. Ivan Krylov, a well-known Russian fabulist, prescribed the meaning of each fable with the words: “the moral of this fable is…” But at the end of the advertising text, you do not write “this text is published to arouse your trust” or “I wrote a post so that you sympathize” or “This ad encourages you to buy a toothbrush”. Nevertheless, we use conversion phrases (call-to-action): “Buy our new pesticide-free cucumbers”. This task we will consider in selling text structure. Now, we are discussing what prevents us from writing, so up to this moment, we have two questions: WHAT do I want to say and WHY do I want to say it. If you already have the information (you interviewed your client or you have something to say), you know WHAT you want to say and you can put it down. Some people really do not know what they want to say, that is why they spend hours in front of a blank sheet of paper. They should get some information in order to express the clients’ opinion or their own (depending on the goal).

Well, you know WHAT you want to say, but still spend time in front of the blank, white sheet. What is next? You should ask the third question: HOW do I want to say it? ‘HOW’ is a strategy, a method, a process. ‘HOW’ is a composition (structure), grammar (editing) and the way I write. This way is called freewriting – the best way to write. I learned about it from Mark Levy’s Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content. “Freewriting is deceptively simple: Start writing as fast as you can, as long as you can, about a subject you care deeply about, while ignoring the standard rules of grammar and spelling. Your internal editor won’t be able to keep up with your output, and will be temporarily shunted into the background. You’ll be able to think more honestly and resourcefully than before, and will generate breakthrough ideas and solutions you wouldn’t create any other way”.

Did you noticed? He said: “about a subject you care deeply about”. That means information plus interest.

You always think. You always have some thoughts. And if you have just started to write out all these thoughts thinking: “I have to write all of my thoughts, but it seems crazy. By the way, I have to write that sales text about tire-fitting for my buddy. He says he has the coolest craftsmen in the city, and his prices are below the market average. What else do I know about this?” Congratulations! You have just started. The sheet is no longer white. Such written monologues help to gather information, organize it and get started. Of course, such preparation can be done orally while reading the brief, but only when you have gotten used to writing in any atmosphere for any task.

I can not say that freewriting is a text. A text is a complete thought, it has four components: grammar, information, structure and meaning. Freewriting is reasoning. Sometimes, it should be rewritten into a text, because it is hard to edit your thoughts out loud, “I have to write all of my thoughts, but it seems crazy”. As you remember, we never edit text, we are not editors; we are writers. So, we just do the freewriting this way; we write out all of the important information in one list and reorganize it in a logical order:

– Tire-fitting in the city;

– Masters with 10 years of experience;

– Five dollars per wheel.

Look, we use: ‘10 years of experience’ instead of ‘coolest’ and ‘five dollars’ instead of ‘prices are low’. We clarified the facts instead of giving abstract concepts. After that, we do a new freewriting according to the facts from the list. Maybe it is not a real freewriting, not a free flow, but if you want to buy some bread and butter in a shop without self-service, you just ask for bread and butter.

Perhaps some phrases will be difficult to build. Why?

Live language

Many copywriters, government agencies, and government officials love to write in complex, high-sounding language, replacing human speech with bureaucratic, robotic language. This happened for historical reasons (at least in Russia). Nowadays, we switch from an abstract multilayered language to an understandable and concrete informational style, making the writing easier, but cleaner. To understand this idea, compare the text from this book with any textbook on economics, philology or mathematics (most likely it will be more difficult to get through the wilds of the textbook, but this book is running smoothly). The content, in general, is getting easier to grasp.

If we talk about copywriting, we must attract the readers to the text as quickly as possible so that they follow us from the first line. Overly complicated and confusing language will push them away. Readers instantly make a choice: whether they want to read further or not. If the beginning does not arouse their interest, they will rarely continue.

That is why we clarify the question of “How do I want to say it?”, “How would I tell a friend about it?”

Instead of a friend, you can substitute a representative of the target audience: a man you saw on the street, a young mother, or an accountant, as if they were your acquaintances. This technique helps, because you roughly address their requests and expectations, and you can imagine their reactions and objections. So, you are already writing to a more or less specific person, and not to an abstract person, which means you are more focused.

Live speech is not vernacular, it is the absence of artificial words and phrases used for the sake of pseudo-helpfulness. When you write vividly, your thought is clear from the first reading. This idea can be found in a book by Dan Roam called Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work. He analyzes the speeches of politicians and famous figures at the blah blah blah level, noting that long turns are a sign of a lack of clear thought. The so-called information-style editing in Russia and the Robert Dilts meta-model described in the last chapter are engaged in the same ‘unblah-ing’.

The criteria for living text are extremely simple. If a thought is clear from the first reading, the whole narrative can be expressed in one sentence. In the text, such sentence is called a heading. The biggest scientific theories can be expressed by an equation. All marketing for a product can be expressed by positioning (slogan). The essence of the product can be expressed with a descriptor. If it’s impossible, it means there is emptiness inside, as Dan Roam says: ‘blah blah blah’.

There is no pathos in the living text, no long, empty words or unknown terms. If the terms of the audience are known, they can and should be used. Otherwise, instead of ‘compression underwear’, there will be ‘seductive underwear’, and this is a totally different thing. Moderation and relevance are important in everything. Oversimplification will make you incompetent in the eyes of the reader.