I’m sitting on the couch as I write this, next to the open balcony doors, in my underwear, eyes bleary, hair looking like a lawnmower went over it, in a press to write a personal and yet valuable email to you before.
Before what?
Before it’s time for me to rush out of the house and go pick up my rental car and then drive up the coast for the day. The idea is to give myself a chance to burn in the sun, on a beautiful beach I will visit for the first time in my life.
But what to write about?
Fortunately, I wrote down a concept for today’s email almost two weeks ago:
“The six-word email, with examples”
That concept is based on an idea from Hollywood.
Your story should fit into six words, say Hollywood screenwriting . Here are a few examples from Dumb Little Writing Tricks That Work, a series from Scott Myers’s Go Into The Story blog:
1. Human Spy on an Alien Planet
2. Loner cop. New partner. Police dog.
3. Infatuated boy. Dream girl. Find condom.
“Fine,” I said to myself when I read this idea. “Let me put it into action and try it out.”
So I made a list of 10 possible email ideas, each just six words. And then, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly sending them out. Example:
1. Emails without offer: stupid. Hence, consulting.
2. Results of my “rape” subject line.
3. What’s working on Substack right now?
And of course today’s email is another example of the six-word email.
Because it’s not that the email has to actually be six words itself. But rather, the core idea should be simple and easy to express, in just six words.
In some of my example emails above, I ran on too long and covered up the core message with too many words.
I won’t make that mistake today.
So let me just say, if you think you have no time to write daily emails, then do what I did.
Make a list of 10 six-word email concepts. Flesh them out a bit in an interesting and insightful way, and then send them out.
And if you say you don’t know how to come up with interesting six-word email concepts… or a way to quickly and easily flesh them out in an interesting and insightful way, then you might like:
A free presentation I will be putting on in the next week. It’s called the Most Valuable Email.
The details of this presentation will come tomorrow. If you’d like to read those details when they come out, or even sign up for my Most Valuable Email presentation, you can do that by getting onto my email newsletter. Sign up for it here.