Success in Sweatpants

Are you in the midst of writing a book or script that will become an information product? Are you finding it a bigger challenge than you expected?

I have written a lot of content, for my own enterprises and as a ghostwriter for my clients. I also teach the essentials of fiction writing, and I facilitate creative writing sessions (where we write to prompts that I provide). Based on my experience, here are some observations and tips about writing top quality content.

Creating content, whether you are doing it yourself or having a ghostwriter do it, is the core of your info product and the critical success factor. It needs to be done well.

The characteristics of info product content that make so much of it out there mediocre:

• Superficial – Doesn’t have depth or meat
• Derivative – Paraphrase of other peoples’ work
• Cliché – use of pat phrases or clichés
• Wordy and complex – involved phrases and long words where simpler content could be used

What causes content to have those characteristics? The main culprits are time and space.

When a writer doesn’t allow sufficient time to work in an uninterrupted space, he or she can’t get immersed in the material. Without that immersion, the writing skims along the surface, draws on other peoples’ ideas, and uses short cuts like cliches to communicate.

So immerse yourself. If not for the first draft, for the second, or for when you are reviewing the work of the ghostwriter. Strive for these things:

• Fresh ways of describing or explaining
• Opportunities to tell stories for illustration
• Simplicity in language

Here are some suggestions to help with immersion:

• Go someplace different. Don’t work at your usual work station.
• Turn off the Internet. Take away the distraction of email, social media and Google by taking away  your online connection.
• Step away from the keyboard. Pick up pen and paper and write. Or create mind maps to help you organize your ideas and thoughts into a graphic version of your outline.

If you’ve given yourself time and space, and things just aren’t coming for you, here are some ideas:

• Start in the middle – If you are having a hard time writing the outline linearly, pick a place in the middle and write that part.
• Say it out loud – Use your dog, cat, or stuffed toy as an audience and say what it is you want to say.
• Just write – Don’t worry about grammar, syntax, spelling, usage, or any of that stuff. Just write, and write, and write. You can go back and clean it all up in the revision round.

Finally, if you encounter writer’s block—the paper or screen just sits there blank and you can’t think of how to start or what to say, here are some exercises to get you jump started:

• Writing stream – Sit down and write anything with pen and paper for 10 minutes. Don’t stop, no matter what.
• One long sentence – Set a time for five minutes and just start writing. The only thing you can’t do is end the sentence. Colons, semi-colons, and commas are allowed, but no periods.
• Five words – Select five completely random words from the dictionary. Take 10 minutes and write a short piece, using those five words.