2,200 Steps to Killer Content

Do the content marketers in your organization sit in cubicles all day?

They should know better.

Big ideas don't come from sitting.

As Nietzsche said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”

Writers have always understood walks are not trips around the block, but treks through idea-land.

Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, Blake, Dickens, Woolf, Hemingway—all were avid walkers.

"The moment my legs begin to move,” Thoreau said, “my thoughts begin to flow.”

Why does walking work?

Because we don’t have to think hard when we do it.

Our minds are free to wander—and unleash a parade of images.

"Writing and walking are extremely similar feats," Ferris Jabr says in The New Yorker.

"When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps.

"Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands.

"Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts."

Two Stanford researchers have, in fact, shown that walking boosts creativity by 60%.

So, here are the steps to killer content.

Go outdoors.

Walk a mile.

Come back.

Kill it.

A Farewell to Apps

It was a pleasant cat café, bright and clean and friendly, and I took my tablet out of my brown and saffron backpack and started to write. I was writing about the next all-hands meeting and the email was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor drink my mochaccino. Then the email was finished and I read it and saw that it was a good email but very long.

A girl came in the cat café and sat at the table next to mine. She was very pretty with a face as clear and clean as an iPhone box if they packaged iPhones in skin and painted the logo on with crimson lipstick freshened by a cool autumn rain. She smiled at me with her gently modeled face and her eyes looked inquisitive. "Using the app?" she said.

"To pay for my coffee?"

"No, The Hemingway app. It edits your writing."

"It's news to me."

"It cuts dead words from your writing and highlights passive constructions, so you write with the power and clarity of Papa, only faster and easier and without the beard. It costs only $9.99."

"I'll be sure to read the reviews."

She nodded and then I went back to my email and read it a second time and felt sad because it was very long. I clicked on Safari to download the app and launched the beach ball of death showing the wi-fi was broken and all the sadness of the big city filled me suddenly, with the streets turned to wet blackness by a cold winter rain and the storefronts all dark as if they were once Radio Shacks and Borders and Blockbusters and A&Ps and I thought my writing was slow and bloated and perhaps out of date like those stores.

I finished reading the last paragraph and looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone. I hope she's not saddled with student debt like one of the mules we took up the mountainside at Caporetto, I thought. But I felt sad. I shut down my tablet and put it in my backpack and said psh psh psh to a black and white tuxedo kitty that came and restored my dignity.

Did You Know Dashiell Hammett was Once a Copywriter?

Tuberculosis compelled Dashiell Hammett to quit his job as a Pinkerton detective in 1921.

Seeking less strenuous work, he enrolled in a journalism course at a business school in San Francisco, and began to write mystery stories for pulp magazines.

But by 1926 Hammett found mystery-writing couldn't earn him enough to live on, so he applied for a job as a copywriter with Samuels Jewelers. It paid a whopping $350 a month—nearly 10 times Hammett's earnings for pulp fiction.

He liked the new work; but he liked booze better. Before six months on the job Hammett was fired, after passing out in the office.

At the encouragement of a pulp magazine editor, Hammett began writing a "hard-boiled" mystery novel, Red Harvest. He mailed it—unsolicited—to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf in 1929.

Knopf realized it had received something unprecedented: a thriller that was "real art."

With weeks of the novel's appearance, reviewers were comparing Hammett to Hemingway. 

Hammett followed Red Harvest the same year with a second novel, The Dain Curse; and in 1930 published his most famous detective novel, The Maltese Falcon.

Anthem

No nation has a single history, no people a single song.

― Jill Lepore

Activists are calling for "Imagine" to replace "The Star Spangled Banner" as the national anthem, a move I can get behind, although my first choice is the ripsnorting "Born to Run."

But if we want a timeless national anthem―a tune that's perennially PC―one without lyrics makes the most sense.

In which case, my vote goes to the majestic "Fanfare for the Common Man."

With that decision, the US would be join the coterie of five other countries whose national anthem has no lyrics: Spain, Kosovo, San Marino and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

For years, Bob Dylan skipped a warm-up act and, before taking the stage, instead played a recording of "Fanfare for the Common Man" (along with other Aaron Copland favorites like "Hoe Down," "Simple Gifts," "Quiet City" and "Lincoln Portrait").

Historian Sean Wilentz was the first Dylanologist to point out that Daylan and Copland, both American Jews of Lithuanian descent, are culturally linked by way of their roots in the Popular Front.

The Popular Front was an anti-racist, anti-fascist movement in the arts promoted by the Communist party during the 1930's and '40's. 

The movement held sway over hundreds of "fellow travelers," including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Miller, John Dos Passos, Orson Welles, Frank Capra, Dalton Trumbo, Rita Hayworth, Edward G. Robinson, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, Ben Shahn and Mark Rothko.

Copland composed "Fanfare for the Common Man" on commission during World War II after hearing then-Vice President Henry Wallace give a speech in which he said, “The century that will come out of this war, can be and must be the century of the common man.”

It's high time to replace Francis Scott Key's ditty with something more rousing.

If it can't be "Born to Run," nothing would please me better than a song composed by an anti-racist, anti-fascist fellow traveler.

What's your pick for a replacement?

Painting "Homeland" by Bo Bartlett

Good Writers Read Good Books

Erik Deckers contributed today's post. Eric is the president of Pro Blog Service, a content marketing agency with clients throughout the US. He is also the co-author of Branding Yourself and No Bullshit Social Media.

Whenever I attend a networking event, I like to ask questions usually not asked at one of these things.

What’s your favorite sports team? Who was your idol growing up? What’s the last book you read?

I can always spot the sales alpha dogs in any networking crowd. When I ask about the last book they read, or their favorite book, it’s always the same thing.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, someone will say.

Zig Ziglar’s Born To Win, says another.

The Art of War, says a guy with slicked-back hair and a power tie.How to Crush Your Enemies, See Them Driven Before You, and Hear the Lamentations of the Women, says an unusually-muscled guy with a funny accent.

And I can spot the content marketers too.

Ann Handley’s Everybody Writes! someone will say.

The Rebel’s Guide to Email Marketing, says another.

“I don’t read books, I only read Copyblogger,” says a third.

But the writers—the good writers—will tell me about the books they love. The books they read over and over again, not because it will help them get ahead in life, but because it stirs something within them.

Those are the writers who are more concerned with their craft than with their content. Those are the writers who will produce some of the most interesting work, regardless of their employer. (What’s sad is their employer has no idea how lucky they are to have this wordsmith in their corner, and will wonder why the sales funnel got a little emptier after they left.)

Content marketers: as writers, you should understand and build your craft as much as, if not more than, your understanding of your product, or big data, or SEO, or the right number of items in a listicle, or A/B testing.

Good writers are good content marketers, but the reverse is not true. It doesn’t matter if you’re the leading expert in your particular industry, if you can’t make people want to learn more about it, you’ve failed.

If you can’t make people care about your product, they won’t buy it. If you can’t stir basic human emotions, they won’t care. And if you can’t move people to read your next blog article, or even your next paragraph, it doesn’t matter how much you know.

You will have failed as a marketer and as a writer.

The best thing you can do is focus on improving your writing skills.

That all starts with reading.

Stop Reading Business Books

Content marketers—at least the writers—need to stop reading business books and content marketing blogs. They’re no good for you. At best, you don’t learn anything new. At worst, they teach you bad habits.

As British mystery writer P. D. James said, “Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.”

Read for pleasure instead. Read outside the nonfiction business genre. Read books from your favorite writers. Read mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, or literary fiction. Read history, biographies, creative nonfiction, or collections of old newspaper columns.

But. Don’t. Read. Business Books.

This is input. This is how you become a better writer. You read the writers who are better than you, and you skip the writers who aren’t.

That means business books. As a business book author and reader, I can tell you there are plenty of business books that will never be accused of being “well written.” They’ll teach you plenty about the subject, but they won’t teach you about the craft of writing. Sure, you need to study the science of content marketing, but that should be a small portion of your total reading, not the majority of it.

So you study the best creative writers who are considered masters of the craft, and practice some of their techniques.

This is why professional football players watch game film, not only of their opponents, but of players who came before them.

This is why actors watch old movies by the stars and directors from 50, 60, 70 years ago.

It’s why musicians not only listen to their idols, but their idols’ idols, and even their idols’ idols’ idols.

And this is why good writers constantly read the masters of the craft. This is why several writers have must-read books and authors they recommend to everyone.

My friend, Cathy Day, a creative writing professor at Ball State University, and author of The Circus In Winter told me once, "Reading a lot teaches you what good sentences sound like, feel like, look like. If you don’t know what good sentences are, you will not be successful as a writer of words."

Stephen King, who is not a friend of mine, said something similar: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

What’s on Your Bookshelf?

There are only so many effective headlines you can write, so reading the 87th article on “Five Effective Headlines You Need To Use RIGHT NOW” is a waste of time.

There are only so many ways of creating buyer personas that yet another “How to Build Your Buyer Personas” isn’t going to make a difference.

And when you really get down to it, Jay Baer is channeling Harvey Mackay who’s channeling Zig Ziglar who’s channeling Dale Carnegie. 

There’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to business books and content marketing blogs. (Although I love Jay Baer’s bravery when it comes to wearing those sport coats! And he’s one of the few good business writers I admire.)

But there’s a whole world of books out there that have nothing to do with business, nothing to do with marketing, and will make you a better writer than any business book ever will.

Read Ernest Hemingway’s short stories to learn how to write with punch, using a simple vocabulary.

Read Roger Angell’s Once More Around the Ballpark to learn how to make people passionate about the thing you love.

Read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None to learn how to hook people at the start of a story, and keep them until the very end.

Identify three of your favorite authors, or at least authors you’ve heard good things about, and read one of their books. Identify passages, sentences, and techniques that move you and make you go “I wish I could do that.” Write them down in a notebook, and then practice replicating them in your everyday writing—emails, blog articles, notes to friends, special reports, everything.

Once you finished those three books, read three more books. And then three more. And then three more.

When you run out of an author’s work, find a new author. When you run out of authors, ask a bookstore employee or librarian for recommendations. Or join Goodreads and ask your friends about the books they love.

Content marketing is facing an avalanche of mediocre content in the coming years, and the only way you’re going to stand out is if you can be better than the avalanche. That means being better at your craft, not producing more and more mediocre content.

It means reading more stuff by great writers and less by average writers. It means realizing you’re better off reading another mystery novel than yet another article that promises “Five Content Marketing Secrets.”

It means focusing on your craft and becoming a master of language and stories. And it all starts by reading the work of the artists who came before you.

Soup Up Your Writing

There is but one art—to omit!

Robert Louis Stevenson

Many thinkers, including, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Pound and Koestler, have noted the German verb dichten—"to write"—also means "to condense."

The word stems from the Latin dictare, "to dictate." Ancient Roman poets used to dictate their verses to slaves, who wrote them down (hence, "condensed" them) on wax tablets.

The most persuasive writing is condensed.

Its strength comes from conciseness, what Hemingway called "leaving out*"—omitting everything that's irrelevant or obvious.

When you edit your writing, think of Darwin.

When only the fittest survive, what's left is stronger and better.

"Like passengers in a lifeboat, all the words in a concise text must pull their own weight," says journalist Danny Heitman.

Your goal in writing shouldn't be to inform, but to suggest—to help readers reach understandings of their own.

And your goal should be speed—speed that comes only from condensing.

"Modern prose had to accelerate its pace, not because trains run faster than mailcoaches, but because the trains of thought run faster than a century ago," Koestler said.

Here's an example of persuasive writing (85 words) from a white paper:

The resounding message surrounding Millennials is clear: Money means less, culture means more. But that’s not to say money doesn’t matter at all. As the generation with the highest rates of unemployment, lowest earnings and record student loan debt, Millennials certainly care about their financial health. A recent study from Gallup found that 48 percent of Millennials find overall compensation “extremely important” when seeking new job opportunities, and one in two would consider taking a new job for a raise of 20 percent or less.

Here's the same paragraph souped up (condensed by 35%):

Millennials are loud and clear: Money means less; culture, more. But it's not that money means nothing: Millennials suffer high unemployment, low earnings and crippling student loan debt. In fact, 48 percent say compensation is “extremely important,” and 50 percent would change jobs for a raise of 20 percent or less, as Gallup recently found.

Immersion

We are fish in a bowl, dear.

― Erin Morgenstern

Most writers research a topic by turning to experts. But some take a more direct route: they immerse themselves.

• Nellie Bly, on assignment for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in 1887, faked a mental illness so that she could be committed to Blackwell’s Island, a state-run psychiatric hospital with a reputation for inmate abuse. Her resulting book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, made Bly's a household name and prompted Albany to reform New York's treatment of the insane. Bly's critics labeled her the "stunt girl," but she was a pioneer in "participatory journalism."
  
  
• Upton Sinclair worked undercover in the Chicago stockyards in 1904 while researching his novel The Jungle, an exposé of immigrant life and the ghastly meatpacking industry. Two years after its publication, Sinclair’s book resulted in nothing less than the establishment of the FDA, dedicated to protecting consumers from unscrupulous food manufacturers. "I aimed at the public’s heart and, by accident, hit it in the stomach,” Sinclair said.
  
  
• Stephen Crane donned rags, slept in homeless shelters and ate at soup kitchens while he researched "An Experiment in Misery," an 1894 short story that chronicled the seedy plight of the tramps, alcoholics and drug addicts who populated New York's Bowery District. Crane said he sought to show that the "root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice," a willingness to "be knocked flat and accept the licking."
  
  
• Jack London did the same while researching The People of the Abyss, feigning poverty for seven weeks. "In the twinkling of an eye, I had become one of them," he wrote. "My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and advertisement of my class, which was their class. It made me of like kind, and in place of the fawning and too-respectful attention I had hitherto received, I now shared with them a comradeship."
  
  
• George Orwell opted to "submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side" while researching Down and Out in Paris and London in the early 1930s. He lived as a dishwasher in Paris, then as a tramp in London. The experience highlighted the cultural difference between the two cities: in Paris, Orwell wrote, he was called "bohemian;" in London, "scum." His stint as a bum awakened Orwell to his own British snobbery. "I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant."
  
  
• John Howard Griffin darkened his skin to disguise himself as an African American in the Jim Crow South while researching his 1961 book Black Like Me. He hopped a Greyhound bus and traveled undercover through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, undergoing along the way a "personal nightmare." He'd planned to spend six weeks in disguise, but only lasted four weeks before having a nervous breakdown and returning home to Texas. Unfortunately, Griffin's White neighbors weren't forgiving of his "stunt." They sent him death threats, hanged him in effigy, and forced his family into exile in Mexico.
  
  
• George Plimpton tried out for a major league baseball team that same year, while researching Out of My League, a book Hemingway called "beautifully observed and incredibly conceived." Plimpton's experiment led him to immerse himself later in other sports, including professional football, hockey, tennis, golf, and boxing, in order to write books.
  
  
• Hunter S. Thompson spent a year embedded in a criminal motorcycle gang while researching his 1966 book Hell's Angels. Thompson spent so much time with the gang that he was "no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell's Angels or being slowly absorbed by them."
  
  
• John D. MacDonald wanted his 1973 mystery novel The Scarlet Ruse, to center around a swindle involving a stamp dealer, so he immersed himself in the world of stamp trading and speculation for five years. To understand stamps' value, MacDonald studied 10 years of auction catalogs, interviewed dealers and collectors, and began bidding on pricey stamps at auction, storing the ones he bought in a safe deposit box. In the process, he made a 175% return on investment. He called his immersion "adventures in auctionland."
  
  
• Barbara Ehrenreich lived in trailer parks and residential motels and worked as a waitress, a cleaning woman, a hotel maid, a nursing home aide, and a Walmart sales clerk while researching her 2011 best seller Nickel and Dimed. The experience taught Ehrenreich that no job is "unskilled" and that even the most menial ones are exhausting. She also learned that one low-wage job isn't enough, if you hope to avoid homelessness in America.

Immersion is the art of leading readers so close to a topic that they're inside it, like fish in a bowl.

For the writer, "immersion begins simply with a key question, which must be taken literally and figuratively," says journalist Patrick Walters. 

"How do I get inside?"

Writers on the Big Screen

Hollywood routinely returns to writers for characters because, unlike superheroes, they're observant, witty, flawed and vulnerable—qualities a main character must have to woo an audience.

While it's easier for Hollywood to realize other creatives (artists, musicians and dancers, for example), the absurd and scary nature of the writer's life never loses appeal.

My list of the top movies depicting writers (in chronological order) comprises:

Young and Innocent (1937). A short-story writer is on the run from the cops, who are convinced he's a murderer. An early Hitchcock thriller.

The Lost Weekend (1945). An alcoholic writer's weekend plans are dashed when he decides to drop into Nat's Bar.

In a Lonely Place (1950). Screenwriter "Dix" Steele can't manage his anger. His mean streak make him a murder suspect, when a pretty coat-check girl is found strangled. 

Beloved Infidel (1959). A gossip columnist falls for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who's working in Hollywood so he can afford the asylum where he's put his crazy wife.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Holly Golightly drags her neighbor, the writer Paul Varjak, into her crazy life.

Black Like Me (1964). A journalist investigates segregation from an unusual angle.

The Front (1976). Blacklisted TV screenwriter Alfred Miller persuades his bookie to sign his name to Miller's scripts in exchange for a percentage.

My Favorite Year (1982). TV scriptwriter Benjy Stone tells of the summer he met his idol, swashbuckling actor Allan Swann.

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). A foreign correspondent assigned to Indonesia gets caught up in a political coup.

Cross Creek (1983). Novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings deals with rejection by buying a Florida orange grove.

The Ghost Writer (1983). An aging literary giant invites a young acolyte to dine at his secluded country home. Not to be confused with the 2010 thriller below.

Out of Africa (1986). Memoirist Karen Blixen discovers what matters, while she learns to run a coffee plantation.

Stand by Me (1986). Author Gordie Lachance recounts a trip with three childhood buddies over a Labor Day weekend.

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). The family and romantic entanglements of three sisters, one a budding writer, unfold between two Thanksgivings.

Barton Fink (1991). A playwright's Broadway hit propels him into a $1,000 a week job in Hollywood.

Shakespeare in Love (1998). The Bard struggles with his new comedy, Romeo and Ethel, and falls for a wealthy merchant's daughter.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). A drug-addled journalist is assigned to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race.

Wonder Boys (2000). A drug-addled novelist attends a writer's conference with his agent and two students from the college where he teaches.

Adaptation (2002). A high-minded scriptwriter asks his twin brother to interview the author of the book he's desperate to adapt.

As Good As It Gets (2003). Best-selling novelist Melvin Udall discovers a waitress may be the only person in New York who can stand him. 

The Human Stain (2003). Novelist Nathan Zuckerman receives a visitor one dark night. The stranger, a down-on-his-luck college dean, wants him to write a book about his life.

Sideways (2004). An aspiring writer joins his soon-to-be-married former college roommate on a road trip through California wine country. 

Finding Neverland (2004). Scottish writer J.M. Barrie meets a widow and her four young sons in Kensington Gardens and a friendship begins. 

Capote (2005). A writer's masterpiece also proves his undoing.

The Squid and the Whale (2005). Husband and wife novelists decide to call it quits. Their divorce doesn't go over well with the kids.

Miss Potter (2006). Spinster Beatrix Potter becomes an international celebrity and falls in love with her publisher.

HOWL (2010). Poet Allen Ginsburg's colorful verses land his publisher in court, charged with selling obscene material.

The Ghost Writer (2010). A ghostwriter tries his hand at a politician's memoir after his predecessor—under suspicious circumstances—gives up the ghost.

Midnight in Paris (2011). An unfulfilled screenwriter vacations in Paris, where he discovers that a 1920 Peugeot lets him travel backwards in time. 

The Help (2011). An aspiring journalist decides to write a book about Southern housemaids.  

Hannah Arendt (2012). A high-profile New Yorker assignment teaches a German intellectual "the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies."

Saving Mr. Banks (2013). P.L. Travers resists the Disneyfication of her creation, Mary Poppins.

Big Sur (2013). Jack Kerouac retreats to the woods in hopes of drying out.   

Wodehouse in Exile (2013). In the leadup to world war, a famous British humorist is tapped by the Germans to appease Americans. 

Papa (2015). A young journalist goes to Havana to meet his idol, Ernest Hemingway, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution. 

Trumbo (2015). Hollywood's top screenwriter finds himself in deep kimchi for his pinko leanings.

The End of the Tour (2015). David Foster Wallace goes on a book tour with a Rolling Stone reporter. 

Genius (2016). Novelist Thomas Wolfe finds he desperately needs an editor; Max Perkins complies.

Paterson (2016). A bus driver records his responses to the beauty that surrounds him in poems he keeps secret.

Their Finest (2017). A scriptwriter adds "a woman's touch" to a teary propaganda film during the Battle of Britain.

Rebel in the Rye (2017). J.D. Salinger loses his mind, but finds his voice.

The Man Who Invented Christmas (2018). Desperate for cash, Charles Dickens tries his hand at a ghost story.

Mank (2020). A tippling screenwriter and a boy genius take on the powers that be.

Learning to Walk

You don't learn to walk by following rules. 

You learn by doing, and by falling over. 

— Richard Branson

I'm halfway through three months of physical therapy after shattering an ankle. I'm learning to walk again.

The therapists pester me constantly to walk, walk, walk, in order to speed my recovery. Willpower and workouts alone won't cut it, they insist. I have to "learn by doing."

Meantime, I'm tutoring an eighth grader in writing and asking the same of him.

Applying William Faulkner's advice to would-be writers—read, read, read—I've assigned him a small mountain of prose: pieces by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Friedrich Nietzsche, E.B. White, Hunter S. Thompson, John D. MacDonald, George Plimpton, Martin Luther King, and a pack of lesser-knowns. I've also introduced him to speed reading and have asked him to write chapter summaries of How to Read a Book every week through July.

All this for a boy who, before we met, only read an occasional gaming magazine and hardly wrote anything at all (his public school really let him down). But I want to make the most of our tutoring sessions. If he falls over once in a while, so be it; at least he won't shatter an ankle.

POSTSCRIPT: Want to help a good cause? Go to Mighty Writers to learn more.

Stranger Things

While heading the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover spied on many left-leaning artists.

James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Albert Camus, Truman Capote, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Gene Kelly, John Lennon, Dorothy Parker, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and Orson Welles all crossed the G-man's radar.

But Hoover's strangest suspect, without doubt, was French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.

Hoover distrusted all philosophers (particularly French ones) and in 1945 asked, "Are Existentialists just Commie shills?"

To find the answer, Hoover assigned a team of agents to spy on Sartre, who was visiting the US in April of that year at the Office of War Information's invitation.

Hoovers' agents applied routine FBI methods—surveillance, eavesdropping, wiretapping and theft—to find the answer. But the agents were stymied. One stole notebooks from Sartre's personal effects, only to inform Hoover "this material is all in French." Their findings, in the end, were inconclusive (a lot like Existentialism's).

Twenty years later, Hoover again focused on the philosopher, tagging him for a co-conspirator in JFK's assassination, because Sartre had belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Lee Harvey Oswald was also a member. That investigation never quite panned out, either.

INTERESTED IN EXISTENTIALISM? Join The Authentic Existentialist, a private Facebook group.   

PHOTO CREDIT: Victor Romero 

Celebrate!

Dylan is a reminder of how America used to talk to itself.

— Lili Loofbourow

"A great poet in the English-speaking tradition," Bob Dylan became a Nobel Laureate yesterday.

Killjoys will kvetch. "Someone who performed in Las Vegas the same day he became a Nobel Laureate doesn't belong to the club of Lewis, O'Neill, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Bellow and Morrison."

I refuse to accept this.

In his Banquet Speech, Faulkner said:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Things Happen

Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?

— Jill Ker Conway

Memoirs fascinate because the best ones read like novels. We all want our lives to have a through-line, and memoirs provide one. They also confirm how unseemly and accidental our lives are.

Things happen.

Critics dislike memoirs' exhibitionist quality; but not me. I love them.

I find reading a memoir much more rewarding than, say, sitting in a coffee shop and peeping at other people's laptops (the woman beside me is Googling "how to deal with a cheating husband") or eavesdropping on other people's phone calls (the guy behind me is going to quadruple his prices, but not tell customers).

Soldiers', statesmen's and victims' memoirs I could care less for; but artists' memoirs I find irresistible. I recommend those of Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, Ernest Borgnine, Sammy Davis, Jr., Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Anne Truitt, Carrie Fisher, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, Tina Fey, Graham Nash, Woody Allen and Martin Short.

And then there are the memoirs of artisans: I recommend those of Alfred P. Sloan, Katherine Graham, David Ogilvy, Ed Catmull, Rick Gekoski, Maryalice Huggins, Terry McDonell and James Rebanks.

If you like heady, try writers' memoirs: those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Elie Wiesel, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Herman Wouk, William Styron, Willie Morris, Philip Roth, Pete Hamill, Frank McCourt, James Lord, Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr, Richard Russo, Bill Bryson, Elizabeth Gilbert, Stephen King, A.E. Hotchner and Augusten Burroughs.

Novelist Richard Ford has just published a memoir and is completing a book tour (he recommends Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, by the way).

Ford said last week on The PBS News Hour the memoir's purpose is "to remind us that, in a world cloaked in supposition, in opinion, in misdirection, and often in outright untruth, things do actually happen."

Indeed.

Don't Make Me Brake

Web designer Steve Krug pronounced the "Three Laws of Usability" in his decade-old Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. The three laws stated:

Don’t make me think. Make every element of a web page obvious and self-evident, or at least self-explanatory.

It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice. Make choices mindless for ease of use.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left. Be ruthlessly concise.

I now pronounce the Three Laws of Readability:

Don’t make me brake. Strive at every turn to help the reader maintain her preferred speed. Use common words to say uncommon things. Avoid empty, exhausted idioms.

Adding more imprecise words doesn't increase precision. Ambiquity can be lessened with a picture, and our language is rife with picturesque words and phrases. Find them. Use them.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left. No, not an error; the Third Law of Readability mirrors the Third Law of Usability. Be ruthlessly concise. You will capture readers' interest. As Voltaire said, "The secret of being boring is to say everything." So obey Hemingway's Iceberg Theory.