Woody Allen

Ooooo, child!

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Last weekend, my friend Sam and I went to Savannah. On the drive there, we started started listening to an audiobook of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

That was a 1994 non-fiction book that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a remarkable 216 weeks.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil consists of a bunch of character studies of various eccentrics who lived in Savannah in the 1970s and 80s. The book cuts through Savannah society, from the rich and established to the poor and fringe.

Among the poor and fringe was Miss Chablis, “The Empress of Savannah.”

Chablis was a black drag queen.

The narrator of the audiobook, who normally speaks with a neutral accent, voiced Chablis, like all other Savannah locals, with a kind of southern drawl.

Except that in the case of Miss Chablis, the narrator, who sounded solidly white and male otherwise, also had to awkwardly act out dozens of draq-queeny, Black-English phrases such as:

“Ooooo, child!”

“Oh, child, don’t you be doin’ that!”

“Y-e-e-e-s, child! Yayyiss… yayyiss… yayyiss!”​​

I had flashbacks to this earlier today.

I got back to Barcelona yesterday. I checked my mailbox and found a stack of New Yorkers waiting for me.

This morning, I sat on my balcony and flipped open the latest one. The first feature story is about Ru Paul.

“Ooooo, child!” I said, “No more drag queens, honey, please!”

But as I often do, I forced myself to read something I had no inclination to read. I often find valuable things that way.

Today was no exception. I found the following passage in the first page of the article. Jinkx Monsoon, a 36-year-old drag queen who won two seasons of Ru Paul’s reality competition TV show, explained the power of drag:

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It’s armor, ’cause you’re putting on a persona. So the comments are hitting something you created, not you. And then it’s my sword, because all of the things that made me a target make me powerful as a drag queen.

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If you have any presence online, this armor-and-sword passage is good advice. It’s something that the most successful and most authentic-seeming performers out there practice.

I once saw a serious sit-down interview with Woody Allen. I remember being shocked by how calm, confident, and entirely not Woody-Allen-like he was.

Closer to the email world, I remember from a long time ago an email in which Ben Settle basically said the same thing as Jinkx Monsoon above. How the crotchety, dismissive persona he plays in his emails is a kind of exaggeration and a mask he puts over the person he is in real life.

So drag is good advice for online entrepreneurs.

But like much other good advice, It’s not something I follow in these emails.

I haven’t developed an email persona, and I’m not playing any kind of ongoing role to entertain my audience or to protect me from their criticism.

That’s because I don’t like to lie to myself. Like I’ve said many times before, I write these emails for myself first and foremost, and then I do a second pass to make sure that what I’ve written can be relevant and interesting to others as well.

This is not something I would encourage anybody else to do. But it’s worked out well enough for me, and allowed me to stay in the game for a long time.

That said, I do regularly adopt various new and foreign mannerisms in these emails.

I do this because i find it instructive and fun, and because it allows me to stretch beyond the person/writer I am and become more skilled and more successful.

I’ve even created an entire training, all about the great value of this approach.

In case you’d like to become more skilled and successful writing online, then honey, I am serious! You best look over here, child:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

I shot a moose

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“I shot a moose once,” says Woody Allen. The audience at the comedy club starts chuckling.

“I was hunting upstate New York,” Woody explains, “and I shot a moose.” It’s the beginning of a 3-minute routine. But it’s already funny.

The question is why.

If you don’t want me to kill this joke for you, then stop reading now. But if you’re curious why “I shot a moose” is already funny in itself, and how this can help you write better stories, then read on.

Still here? Let’s dissect this:

“I shot a moose once,” says Woody. The audience chuckles.

Partly it’s the improbable setup. Woody Allen, small, city dweller, nebbish, hunting in upstate New York.

But partly it’s the moose itself. The same improbable setup would not be as funny if Woody said, “I shot a deer.”

Why moose and not deer? A few possibilities:

Moose look funny. They have the round muzzle, the cauliflower antlers, they are oversized and look ungainly.

Also, moose are less common than deer. Maybe that makes the story less likely to be real, and therefore more absurd.

Finally, the word moose is funny for some reason to English speakers. Perhaps it makes us think of “moo” as in cow. Perhaps it’s the unexpected unvoiced “s” at the end. If the animal’s name were pronounced “mooze,” it might not be as funny.

In good comedy routines, as in good stories, the comedian takes you down a meandering garden path. What’s important is not the destination – the punchline — but the journey along the way.

So how do you organize a meandering stroll for the greatest effect?

Like a fountain in a real garden, some things are guaranteed to please during a comedy show — mockery, mimicry, slapstick.

Other times, it’s just important to stroll and take surprising new turns. What exactly lies around the corner doesn’t matter too much, as long as it’s new.

And then, there’s the unimportant detail that’s actually important. The cabbage patch instead of the flower bed… or the moose in the Woody Allen routine.

So why the moose?

We can guess, but ​​nobody knows for sure, not even Woody Allen. Whatever it is about the moose, the fact is this seemingly unimportant detail is actually important.

The point of today’s email is not the moose. It’s that fascinating gardens, like great stories and funny comedy routines, rarely spring forth fully formed.

They are the work of careful craftsmen.

Comedians like Woody Allen will deliver the same routine hundreds or thousands of times, each time perfecting the delivery and testing out small variations, including all the unimportant details. It’s the collection of all those details that ultimately “get the click.”

So that’s my takeaway for you.

If you have a story to tell, but it’s not clicking, maybe it’s not the story. In fact, it’s almost certainly not the story.

Retell it again, tweak it, add in stuff, take out stuff, polish it.

A new audience will keep thinking that it’s new. An old audience will need to be reminded. And to both an old and a new audience, the final walk down the garden path that you deliver will be more fascinating and stimulating than what you started with.

I wish I had a storytelling training to sell you right now. I don’t have one. But I’ve actually written quite a lot about storytelling, and experimented with storytelling techniques myself.

You can learn and profit from my experiments. They are one part of what’s documented inside my Most Valuable Email course, specifically in the Most Valuable Email Swipes #13,#16, #17, #18, #19, #20, and #22.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

A watermelon-headed politician walks into a flat-earther’s house…

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I’d like to tell you a story but first I have to give you a bit of background. Our story has two characters:

First, there’s Pericles, a famous statesman in ancient Athens.

Pericles led the Athenians at the start of their war against the Spartans. He was also well-known for having a watermelon-sized head. That’s why statues most often show him wearing a helmet.

Second, we have Anaxagoras, a philosopher who came from Asia and settled in Athens.

Anaxagoras brought with him the spirit of scientific inquiry, which wasn’t common in Athens before. He also happened to be a flat-earther.

Now, on to the story:

When Pericles the Athenian was a young man, he studied philosophy with Anaxagoras.

Later, Pericles became a powerful man. When he needed to make important political decisions, he still consulted his wise old teacher.

But as Pericles sailed the seas, leading the Greeks in battle, Anaxagoras grew older and poorer. There aren’t many drachmas to be made in explaining rainbows or what the moon is made of.

In time, Anaxagoras became so poor he could no longer afford even a bit of cheese and wine. So one day, he did the only philosophical thing:

He covered his head with a robe, and determined to starve himself to death.

When Pericles heard about this, he rushed to Anaxagoras’s house.

He started begging his old teacher to live. He lamented his own hopeless future if he should lose so valuable an advisor.

There was a moment of awkward silence.

Then Anaxagoras yanked the robe off his head, looked at Pericles, and said, “Pericles, those who want to use a lamp supply it with oil.”

So that’s the story.

I don’t know about you, but when I first read it, it made me laugh.

And because I like to kill a good joke, I asked myself why I found this story funny.

Was it the idea of an old man starving himself to death?

Not really funny.

Was it the lamp analogy at the end?

Not so funny either.

I realized it was the robe.

​​Anaxagoras put it on his head and then pulled it off. It made him seem like a petulant child. It was such a contrast to the image of a sage and self-possessed philosopher.

So there you go:

Seemingly irrelevant details give all the color to a story. They can create suspense. Enjoyment. Or, of course, humor.

But perhaps I didn’t kill enough jokes for you today.

If so, then subscribe to my email newsletter, so I can kill another joke for you tomorrow.

And then, then take a listen to the 2 minute and 45 second clip below. It’s a recording of a young Woody Allen, delivering a standup routine in the 1960s.

Then listen to it again. And notice all the detail — seemingly irrelevant, but really, just what makes the skit funny. it might be something you can use in your own writing.

​​Here’s the video:

Woody Allen and Mark Ford walk into a library together…

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“I don’t enjoy reading,” Woody Allen said once in an interview. “But it’s necessary for a writer, so I have to do it.”

Preach, Woody.

I’ve always found reading is one of those things I do out of responsibility, not enjoyment.

But do you really have to read to be a successful writer? Or at least a successful copywriter?

I don’t know. But I heard two expert copywriters talking today. And their opinion seems to be yes.

The two copywriters in question were John Forde and Mark Ford. You might know them as the two guys who wrote the book Great Leads, which is up there with Cialdini’s Influence and Gene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising as elementary education for a copywriter.

So John asked Mark, where do you get your big ideas from?

Reading, said Mark.

Not by swiping what worked before. Not by intuition. Not by some magic spark of creativity.

Instead, Mark reads. And when something makes him excited and interested, he takes note, and he uses that idea, in some form, in his own writing.

Which might sound pretty simple. Or even cheap. But hold on. Because here’s a second tip from the same interview:

Mark says Googled reading won’t lead you to a big idea. You’ve got to read books.

Yes, it’s work. Maybe even unenjoyable work. But so what? Read lots of books, carefully, and you can make lots of money as a result. And as Woody Allen will tell you:

“Money is not everything, but it is better than having one’s health.”

But here’s what not to do:

Don’t read my daily email newsletter. It won’t lead to your next big idea. And it’s not enjoyable.

If you don’t believe me, or you want to judge for yourself what my daily emails are like, then click here.