“A girl I knew was brought up by ‘higher thinking’ parents to regard God as a perfect ‘substance’; in later life she realised that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding. (To make matters worse, she disliked tapioca).”
C. S. Lewis, Miracles
I chuckled when I first read this story. But then I rubbed my chin a bit. And I held up a finger in the air, like a light bulb had just gone on in my head.
Our human brains cannot see words like development. Instead, we have to imagine a picture, a smell, a sound. Like a skyscraper being built… or the smell of wet grass in April… or Ravel’s Bolero.
But there are some dark clouds on the horizon.
Because without thinking, most of us for reach for words like development and substance all the time, like we reach for popcorn while watching a movie in a dark theater. We reach for these words, even though, like popcorn, they have no body to them.
My point is this:
Popular advice is to write the way you speak.
I say this will get you a silver medal at best.
But if you want a gold medal, then write the way you speak… and then take out words like substance and development. And instead, put in word pictures, of tapioca pudding or half-finished skyscrapers.
Because the bigger the weight you take off the shoulders of your reader, the more likely he is to follow you as you lead him down the sales page… and the more likely he is to add another dollar bill onto the stack of dollar bills that makes up your bank account.
I mean, if your bank account really were made of stacks of dollar bills, instead of bodyless numbers in a computer database. But I think you see what I mean.
Here’s something else you can see:
Each day, I write a little letter. I put it in an envelope and I send it to hundreds of people around the world. Some of these people read my letters… some even chuckle or rub their chins in thought. You can do the same. It’s free. You can sign up, with just your address, by filling out the form here.