I’ve given this blog a kick to wake it from its slumber, so that I can rant a little: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song…

There’s been a debate, here in the UK, sparked by The Booker prize. It’s a literary prize for the year’s best novel.

It’s been controversial this year, even more so than normal, because the judges have been saying they wanted to reward books that were readable. That ‘zip along,’ as one of the judges put it.

The literary elite have come over all pompous and offended. The self-appointed literati seem to think novels need to be slow and ponderous and incomprehensible in order to be any good.

Meanwhile, in the blue corner, a fair number of people, including quite a few who actually buy and read books, have been pointing out that it is, sometimes, an entirely good thing that a novel has a coherent narrative.

Not so, say the literati. A work of ‘literature’ should have higher ambitions than that. And of course, they do have a point. We wouldn’t want all the bookshops to be filled with clones of James Patterson and Jeffrey Archer, now would we?

So who’s right? Should we reward and hail the novels that contain literary ambition, which set out to chart new territory and stretch the art form? Or the ones that represent a damn good read?

I think you know the answer. Drum roll please. As readers, what we crave and desire and want and deserve and demand is….

BOTH!

Both goddamn you. Both, you silly little intellectuals in your ivory towers. Both, you publishing apparatchicks with your expense account lunches and your ridiculous shoes.

Why can’t we have novels that are well written and a good read? A good story, characters who come alive on the page, suspense, interest. Combine that with a strong theme, something to say about the human condition, imaginative use of language, care and control over every word on the page. Art and story combined. That would make for a terrific novel.

Is it really too much to ask?

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Like many writers, I’ve sometimes asked myself this question: what’s the right length for a novel?

I know lots of rough guidance, such as 60,000 actual words as a minimum, 80,000 for an average adult novel, anything over 100,000 is a bit long and expensive for publishers to produce.

There is also the obvious ‘rule’ that the book should be long enough to tell the story, and not one word longer. (More honoured in the breach than the observance, perhaps?).

Yet I’ve still sometimes puzzled over the difference between actual word counts given to you by a word processor, and how that would translate into the pages of a book.

Even though my writing tool of choice, the excellent Scrivener, gives you not only a word count, but a calculation of paperback pages as well, even so, the number of words per pages is adjustable, and how does it really translate into what you would hold in your hand were the darned thing ever published?

That was what I really sought: an idea of what an actual word count feels like when it’s printed. So what I needed was the actual word count of some novels on my bookshelf.

Simplicity itself, in this age of ebooks. So here are the results:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy: 58,845 actual words (including title and byline, but none of the copyright information, or other preamble stuff) – 303 pages paperback. This novel has quite large print and lots of white space on the page.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (or Harry Potter And the Sorcerer’s Stone to those of you in the USA): roughly 79,500. Actual word count in 79,716, but this is text cut and pasted from a PDF into a word processor. Doing this has caught chapter titles on every page and page numbers too, so it’s not precise. I’m too lazy to clean it up. Precision isn’t called for here). This translates to 223 pages in my paperback edition.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling – roughly 203,500 actual words (same issues as above), which translates to a weighty 607 pages in hardback.

Complicity by Iain Banks: comes out at 99,207 but there’s quite a lot of cruft caught up in this, such as page numbers and random data that shouldn’t be there, so estimate it at 98,500. This translates to a novel of 313 pages in paperback.

And we’ll finish with the most ‘important’ and enduring novel of the 20th century (discuss):

1984 by George Orwell: 110,581 in an ebook version, which again has excessive amounts of cruft, but this equates to roughly 110,000. This translates to 400 pages in the Penguin Modern Classics version. There is, however, a more compact paperback version of 292 pages.

I could keep doing this all day, but you get the general idea. If you want to do this for yourself, you can get page counts for any title just by doing a search on Amazon.

There were a few surprises among other ebooks I checked. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is only 30,000 words. The Dickens classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ is under 29,000, and ‘The War of the Worlds’ by HG Wells is only around 61,500.

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, however, weighs in at only just shy of 200,000 actual words (672 pages in paperback, according to Amazon). I haven’t read The Corrections, and it was on my reading list, until I carried out this process, and scanned the prose. Why is it so highly regarded? I reckon a tough edit would get it down under 80,000, and might even make it worth reading.

As always, quality beats quantity every time.

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The ebook ‘SEO for writers and bloggers‘ is now on sale at the awesome price of $7.95. (That’s an ironic use of the word ‘awesome’ by the way*).

The book is designed for writers and bloggers who want to master the basics of writing for search engines, without mangling their prose and stuffing their copy full of keywords.

• Learn to write for both readers and search engines, and attract more visitors to your website
• Discover how to research and use keywords – and precisely where they should be placed for maximum effectiveness
• 50 pages of facts, tricks, strategies, tips and essential information, explained in clear English, and structured to take you from the basics through to mastery of writing SEO copy.

Not sure how long the sale price will last. Safest thing is to get your copy now.

(*And that’s also an ironic misuse of the word ironic).

UPDATE: Now with a new, snazzy, 3D cover graphic. Same old dependable words as before.

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1. Ebook launch: SEO for writers and bloggers
2. What is SEO?
3. Scribe – the SEO tool for writers

Here’s the fastest way to improve your writing, or master any writing style

If you want to master a particular writing style, there’s one proven technique said by many to be the fastest and possibly most effective method going.

It’s a technique that can be used to master anything, from writing in the style of a particular author, matching a writing voice, or learning how to create copy for specific purposes, such as sales pages or advertising.

What’s more, it’s possibly the simplest and cheapest method you could ever hope to find. You don’t need books, or courses. It takes only minutes to learn. And you don’t even need a computer.

You don’t need books, or courses. It takes only minutes to learn.

All you need is a pen and a piece of paper, plus some text that you would like to emulate. That could come from one of your favourite writers, or from a great sales page, or from a newspaper, magazine – any piece of writing that you really admire.

You take the original text, and you write it out by hand. Again and again. As many times as seems necessary. Once is helpful. Doing it five times or more is better still. If you really want to master the secrets of how a piece of text was put together, you keep going, writing it out by hand until it seems like its part of you.

It’s great way, for example, to learn the rhetorical tricks and techniques used by master writers, or to get a feel for how they express their ideas using a unique voice. This technique won’t necessarily give you full conscious awareness of the writing techniques being used in the original. But you will learn the lessons on a deeper level.

Write it out by hand. Again and again.

If you want to emulate one of the great writers of fiction, or a master prose stylist, then this is an immensely rewarding, and enjoyable way to spend a few hours.

It’s also one of the fastest ways to learn how to write effective copy for use in advertising, sales and marketing environments. It is method recommended by Ted Nicholas in his book Magic Words That Bring You Riches, and by Maria Velosa in Web Copy That Sells. Maria writes:

In web copywriting, the best way to model success is to select a website that you admire greatly and that you know has produced tons of sales for its owner. Start copying it by hand. Write the entire sales letter out in your own handwriting. Write it out two or three times over the next week. Depending on how fast you write, this will take roughly five hours—less if you write quickly or if the sales let- ter you choose is short.
This takes a lot of discipline, not to mention time, but I assure you, it is worth the effort. You will not know the value of this until you do it. It’s positively eye-opening.

So, if you want to emulate any writing style, from the directness of web sales pages to the high rhetoric of the greatest prose stylists, the shortcut is to take out your pen and paper, and get copying by hand. Give it a try, a let me know your thoughts if you can. I’d be interested to hear how you got on.

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1. 7 surefire ways to write an opening paragraph
2. How to master the craft of writing
3. How to write headlines

Name one of the three musketeers. I bet you said d’Artagnan.

Bear with me on this one….

He’s not one of the three – they are Athos, Porthos and Aramis. Old d’Artagnan is the fourth member who joins them, the one people remember most, the hero of the story.

“This is leading to something about web 2.0 and persuasive writing?” I hear you say. Fear not. We’re getting there. Persuasive writing here we come.

Persuasive writing – the old thinking

You see, there were, in classical thought, three styles of persuasive writing, as defined by the likes of Aristotle: ethos, logos, and pathos.

(You can see now why the three musketeers hook got lodged in my head).

• Ethos is the style of persuasive writing that appeals to credibility
• Logos is the style of persuasive writing that appeals to logic
• Pathos is the style of persuasive writing that appeals to emotions.

I am going to suggest to you that, when it comes to persuasive writing, there is a ‘fourth way’ – one that trumps the other three completely, one that knocks every other ‘sales’ technique and copywriting method into a cocked hat. It’s the one technique of persuasive writing you really need to make sales and influence people.

The Fourth Way – some weird mystical stuff

First, you have to bear with me a moment longer. Some background on the phrase ‘the fourth way.’ It was coined by Russian mystic and mathematician (I know, strange mix) P.D.Ouspensky, by way of the even stranger and more exotic Armenian mystic and ‘guru,’ George Ivanovic Gurdjieff.

There is a ‘fourth way’ – one that trumps the other three.

(Boy, Wikipedia’s getting some serious link-love from me today.)

These guys believed some seriously weird s**t. There’s no time to go into it, right now. But Gurdjieff defined three traditional ‘ways’ towards enlightenment / awakening / self-remembering. (Think ‘personal growth’ but in a more Eastern religious context.) These three were:

• Physical – the way of fakir
• Emotional – the way of the monk
• Intellectual – the way of the yogi.

Be patient – we’re getting to the persuasive writing bit real soon.

The Fourth Way, for these guys, was quite straightforward: you do all three at the same time, that way you get there (whatever they mean by ‘there’) much faster.

It seems obvious once you think of it. I mean – why wouldn’t you?

So, the ‘fourth way’ when it comes to persuasive writing means combining the three traditional techniques in a great big powerful one, two, three punch.

Persuasive writing – the new thinking

All right – this is where we come right back up to date and get with the whole persuasive writing on the internet shebang instead of waffling on about Russian mystics, Greek philosophers and French novelists. (You have to admit, however, for a post on persuasive writing, we sure are covering some ground here).

The ‘fourth way’ when it comes to persuasive writing means combining the three traditional techniques in a powerful one, two, three punch.

Let’s talk now about web 2.0, social media, third tribe marketing and that sort of stuff.

There’s been a lot of talk of late, in copywriting circles, about the death of the traditional sales letter.

You know the kind, those endless scroll-down pages full of yellow highlighter stuff, dubious testimonials, hypnotic writing techniques, transparently made-up deadlines, warnings about an imminent price increase, an endless list of extras you get, all with ridiculous ‘valued at’ estimates. And at the end a really, really big price.

There’s also a gang out there, with some real A-list bloggers on it, calling itself the Third Tribe. They’re talking about a new way of selling to people based on resonance and trust, on relationship building and similar touchy-feely stuff. (Though it seems to cost a lot, and not everyone is impressed)

They’re predicting the death of the traditional sales letter on the internet. Good thing too, I say. If they want someone to deliver the fatal blow, stab the beast through the heart, slit its throat and cut out the entrails, I’m your man. I hate them (the sales letters, not the A-list bloggers). I’ve never bought anything from one of them (the sales letters….). In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to read one in its entirety. They’re not what I call genuinely persuasive writing.

Let’s face it – if you need a hard sell that aggressive, it’s because your product sucks. The traditional sales letter is used for snake oil and get-rich-quick schemes. Persuasive writing? They’ve never convinced me of anything.

I digress, however.

The Trifecta Neuro-Affective Principle – bonkers name, clever idea

So, a few years ago, one of the masters of the long-form sales letter, Maria Velosa, wrote a book called Web Copy That Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy That Grabs Their Attention and Compels Them to Buy.

In it, she outlines many of the techniques used by professional direct sales copywriters. If you’re into that kind of thing, it’s well worth a read.

However, she also agrees that in the era of Web 2.0, social media and the rest, the sales letter will be increasingly marginalised.

She recommends the use of a much shorter technique of persuasive writing, which goes under the snappy title of the Trifecta Neuro-Affective Principle. She writes:

One extremely powerful method of changing someone’s mind is by presenting multiple versions of the same concept. In my experience, as well as in most cases that I’ve observed, the optimum number of versions that has the highest likelihood of making an impact is three.

She says to persuade someone of something – to get them to change their mind about something – the best way, the shortcut way, is to use:

three sales arguments presented in one digestible bite.

There’s a lot to the principle, but to boil it down, it involves creating a compelling sales message that appeals to three different elements of human intelligence: narrative, quantitative, and logic. Or, in other words -

• An emotional (narrative) reason
• A credible (quantitative) reason
• And a logical reason.

One, two three. Crash, bang, wallop. All three together at the same time.

One, two three. Crash, bang, wallop. All three together at the same time

Now, you should know that there is more to the Trifecta Neuro-Affective Principle than just this. I’ll come back to it soon, and explain more in another post.

But to round this off and get it clear – to persuade someone of something (or indeed, to sell them something), you should employ the three traditional persuasive writing techniques combined and rolled together into one compelling sales message.

All for one and one for all

How do you do this, in web sales copy, or a blog? In a letter, an essay, a report? Well, you need to do it quickly. Get to the point, get it into a few hundred words or less if you can.

In fact, I would suggest you do it in three bullet points (one for each musketeer – hey, you thought I was just winging that didn’t you!):

You set up with a sentence that summarises the core message you’re trying to get across, then cut to your bullets:

• Imagine how popular your blog will be once people warm to your emotionally intriguing narrative technique.
• Establish credibility by using figures and statistics proven to increase readership by 1000%, and sales by at least 50% overnight.
• Be logical here – if it was good enough for Aristotle, Dumas, and the Russian mystics, it’s gotta make sense, yes?

Then you can round it all off with another sentence, maybe addressing any remaining resistance they might have, and knocking it flat.

There you have it – persuasive writing in a nutshell. How to sell stuff on the Internet. How to persuade people and win arguments in the world of social media. Persuasive writing, the fourth way.

Or as I call it, the “d’Artagnan manoeuvre”.

(That’s a joke by the way. I don’t really call it that. Do you think it’s brandable? Could I trademark it? Let me know your suggestions in the comments.)

Oh, and I want 10% of your first million. Deal?

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This isn’t a proper post, just a piece of admin, and advance warning that this blog is about to undergo a redesign.

I wanted to warn the regular readers (hi Gina, hi Lyndon) that things could get a bit chaotic around here for a few days / weeks. Nothing serious – but things might look out-of-place while I’m rearranging the furniture.

I know that I should do this offline in a sandpit and sweep the new look out in a blaze of glory, but it’s just not my style.

Actually, it may not get a new look – but it is getting a new WordPress theme.

This could break a few things here and there, especially the way images and pullout quotes are displayed on older posts. Please bear with me.

I’ve also recently taken the spam captcha system off comments, as I realised it wasn’t behaving itself. So far so good, no great influx of spam. If you’ve been frustrated in the past attempting to get past the errant captcha system, many apologies. Please try again now it’s gone.

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How do you get ideas for blog posts? How do you add more original content to a blog, rather than relying on reusing material from others?

This was a question posed by a commenter on this blog, who is using the name ‘Beginner’. Beginner wrote:

I have a lot of ideas to write about whizzing around my brain, my question is how do I use these to write original blog posts, as I always struggle with this. Actually a post on this would be awesome. Problem is I seem to use a written pieces but change the words around, does this make sense, so in effect it’s not really my work. Does research have to come into this? If so where and when?

We’ve exchanged a few emails, and have been able to elaborate on this a little. Beginner writes:

“Instead of relying for information and ideas from other places. I want to create something original from my own perspective and experiences… It would be great if I could use my own experience and be able to write and show others what I have learned.”

I’ve seen the blog, which I’m not linking to at Beginner’s request. It’s more of a private journal for a select few than a big public thing.

But it seems like Beginner has lots of ideas of his own, but he tends to write blog posts by basically using other people’s writing, often quoting it verbatim, or sometimes changing things around.

He’s doing a good job of this really, because’s he’s not lifting material, not stealing stuff. He’s selecting wise and timeless advice from great writers, and presenting it as snippets.

But he would like to start more of his own ideas into his posts.

These are a few ideas of mine – I hope they help Beginner, and anyone else who wants to find ways to express more of their own thoughts and personality through their writing.

1. Write your ideas down
When you have ideas, dreams, thoughts, inspiration, write them down. Not straight onto a blog or into an online journal. Keep a scrap book where you can write with complete freedom, and just make quick notes. Hopefully, some of this will give material you can use at some point, perhaps in combination with ideas from your reading. If will also help with point 2…

2. Practice writing, lots of writing

Writing is one of those things that gets easier the more you do it. If you need ways to just get started, and write about anything, see my post here on ways to kick-start your writing.

3. Learn to touch type
I really can’t stress this enough. If you want to write, it really helps if you don’t have to struggle with the physical production side of things. Fighting the keys and hacking back the typos can really knock you out of your flow. I know learning to touch type will take a long time, but let’s face it, we’re all going to be working on computers for most of our lives, and that means keyboard input for the foreseeable future. Practicing touch typing for 15 minutes a day will pay off in the long run. There’s a free online typing course here.

4. Read more
It seems to me that Beginner is pretty widely read already. But the more sources you have for material the better. Because that brings us to point 5:

4. Don’t copy – recombine
If you take someone else’s idea and information and reuse it, even if you’re rewriting it, then that’s not really creative. But if you take three or four related ideas from different people, recombine them in original ways, show how they are related, discuss them, now that’s adding value. It’s also creative. Creative people don’t magic things out of fairy dust. Creativity is recombining old ideas in new ways.

5. Add personal experience and insight
If you take something written by someone else, and add your own perspective to it, add your own experiences to the original material, then you create an insight into how useful that book has been to one person. That’s useful. I think Beginner is already doing this, partly at least, and this is something he could build on. Instead of just quoting material, put something in about why you chose this, how you feel about it, how you found it, your thoughts, how it relates to your life, why you thought it might be useful for your readers.

6. Don’t beat yourself up
By selecting wise and informative snippets, quotes and writings from a wide range of sources, and presenting them in a new setting, you are creating something new. The trick is to do that in a way which adds value.
I found Beginner’s site interesting to read and I came across some new ideas, new names and authors I had never heard about before. So I think Beginner should take their time, and gradually start adding more ideas, mixing some of the stuff up so that each post draws on several ideas perhaps from different areas, showing how they are linked or how one sheds light on the other.

In summary
Beginner wants to: “use my own experience and be able to write and show others what I have learned.” At the risk of stating the obvious, I think Beginner has answered the question already. The solution is to use more of your own experience. Be aware of what you are thinking, doing, experiencing, reflect on that, and write about it when you are ready.

William Wordsworth described poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.” He means that writing poetry is the act of describing and evoking an emotional experience from the past, and doing so once you have had chance to think about the experience, and when you have the time to find the right words to express that emotion in ways that will create resonance with the reader.

Take your time, write lots, record your ideas, mix stuff together, and be honest about where you’re getting your ideas from. Best of luck.

Picture by Okinawa Soba via Flickr Creative Commons.

Related posts:

1. How to have ideas
2. 10 ways to write scannable web copy

Writing advice is everywhere on the internet. There’s way too much to link to on a regular basis without getting overwhelmed. But today there’s a great article on writing advice from a range of writers, mostly novelists, on the website of the UK newspaper The Guardian. It’s well worth checking out.

These are not archive tips from long-dead writers. It looks like they’ve contacted all these writers in person and asked for their thoughts. There are plenty of famous names in there too, although inevitably a little UK-centric. There’s plenty of timeless writing advice here though.

The writers have been asked to give their top ten tips for writers. (Hey, that sounds a bit like a Digg-bait blog post, doesn’t it? Maybe newspapers are finally ‘getting it‘.)

One of my favourites is from Philip Pullman, who only gives one tip:

My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.

Michael Moorcock is in there too:

Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.

Jeanette Winterson says:

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

Margaret Atwood contributes:

Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

Roddy Doyle adds:

Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven’t written yet.

Anne Enright says:

The first 12 years are the worst.

And:

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

The article is a response to a book being published next month – Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. (UK link)

The article is split into two sections here and here.

If you have the time, and fancy a chuckle, go check it out. It’s a keeper.

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People don’t so much read on the web – they scan. There’s lots of research and statistics around scannable web copy to back this up. It’s overly simplified but let’s take it as read (so to speak) and get to it: how do you write scannable web copy?

1. Write powerful headlines

Make sure your headlines are:

• Short
• Informative – give a summary of the whole article
• Structured with the important keyword at the start
• Clear and easy to understand even out of context
• Honest – don’t promise something you can’t or don’t deliver

2. Use subheads

Create scannable web copy by breaking up the copy with subheads that mean something and guide the eye, giving an idea of the progression of the content.

3. Use bullets and lists:

1. Everyone uses bullets and lists
2. They do so for a good reason
3. People like lists
4. You don’t even need a proper list
5. You can just put sentences into a list form
6. And it makes for scannable web copy
7. You see what I did there?

4. Keep paragraphs short
Keep paragraphs short because it’s easier on the eye. And the brain. For scannable web copy, stick to one idea per paragraph.

5. Highlight important words
Don’t be shy about using bold and italics to highlight important words. That way, if they scan through your copy, at least they’ll pick out the important bits – the bits you want them to see. But don’t use underlines: people will expect that to be a link.

6. Get to the point

Create a logical structure for your content – put the important information first using the ‘pyramid‘ style.

7. Use text boxes

Put material such as testimonials, quotes or a summary of benefits into text boxes so that they really stand out.

8. Use design elements

If there’s something you really want to emphasise, you could turn it into a design element – big, bold, brash and colourful.

9. Use short, familiar words
This is good writing advice whatever you’re writing, online or off. But if you’re using lots of long and complex words, your copy starts to look dull. People will start to scan even faster, and perhaps give up all together. Short, everyday words are ideal for scannable web copy.

10. Use hypertext
Links are your friend on the internet. You can break up longer and more in-depth content by using hyperlinks. For example, you could put background information onto a secondary page. You can use the hypertext as a way of showing the reader, once they’ve finished your article, where they should go next.

Related posts:

1. Seven quick ways to improve your writing
2. Before you hit 'publish' … 10 editing tips for crafting better copy
3. Four ways to take your writing to another level

Even though it will take time to reach a climax, and even though the reader will have to wait and wait for the punchline, and even though this may make some readers think ‘hey, what’s this guy’s problem already,’ and even though it breaks just about every rule of blogging and SEO, even despite all these things and more – today, of all days, today I am going to start my post with a periodic sentence.

‘Blimey,’ you may well say, ‘Simon’s gone all rhetorical and portentous on us.’

But I may say in reply, in reply to your raised eyebrows and quizzical stare, I may say to you that you should stop for a moment and consider something important here, because if you want to write with power and impact, if you want to persuade and influence people, if you want to sway opinion and win over hearts and minds, then you will need some rhetorical tricks up your sleeve, and one of the most powerful of these is the periodic sentence.

It’s important to note, however, that a periodic sentence does not have to be long.

Indeed, some of the most powerful are very short.

There is one thing these long and short periodic sentences all have in common, though, and that is, as if you hadn’t already guessed, that the important point, the meat of the sentence, the real punch, always comes right at the end.

One thing I would stress, however, is that the periodic sentence technique should be used with moderation.

That’s not, you will have noticed, something I have done here. Here, in fact, the technique has been used in almost every sentence.

Clearly, that is overkill. It is excusable in this instance, I hope, because it is so clearly done for effect.

I hope you’ve found this little insight into rhetorical devices interesting, hopefully even useful. If so, please feel free to leave a comment, but please, for this post only, all comments must consist exclusively of periodic sentences.

Related posts:

1. Seven quick ways to improve your writing