Writing Tips at GarySpeer.com

With the new year rapidly approaching, I thought I’d take an opportunity to share one truly serious “rule” you ought to live by as a writer. There are a world of skills and bucket loads of information you need to master when you work at the craft of writing, whether you write fiction or non-fiction. Likewise, writing for websites and/or blogs carries its unique set of skills and challenges.

But there’s really one thing, and one thing only, that absolutely must be at the heart of your writing if you expect to succeed as a writer. Let me give you that “tip” for the new year:

Write about what you love, what you feel real passion for.

You can write until you wear out a thousand keyboards, or use up a river of ink, but you’ll never be the writer you should be and the writer you wish to be unless you do whatever it takes to write about your passion.

Let’s say you want to set up a blog and write regularly about something people are looking for on the Internet and find ways to turn visitors to your site into some sort of customers so that you can make money with your writing. Let’s just say you study diligently and find tons of people who search online for lighting fixtures. You line up some advertisers who’ll pay you to run ads on your site about light fixtures, you do a lot of research and get ready, then find you need to write something in your specialized blog about lighting fixtures at least three times a day for a year or year and a half before you ever begin to make significant money from your writing.

How much passion do you really have about lighting fixtures??

On the other hand, if your passionate about physics and astronomy, and you love researching all things about astronomy and physics, you need to launch a blog about them. Your passion will sustain your writing while you pile up hundreds and eventually thousands of blog posts about astronomy and physics.

Suddenly you find yourself with 600,000+ blog visitors each month and you’re making several thousand dollars a month from various ad sources and other ventures made possible — because you wrote about subjects for which you had passion.

I wanted to share that with you as the underpinnings of a new writing career this new year — or perhaps just a bit of inspiration to renew your writing career this new year.

Oh, yeah: I never made up that astronomy/physics site. It isn’t hypothetical. It’s a real blog an online acquaintance of mine created out of his passion for the subject a number of years ago. He makes a decent income from it today.

How would you write copy to sell something sort of “low-tech” in our “high-tech” world?

The first thing that comes to mind (but I’m an Old Guy, so maybe I’m thinking differently here) is nostalgia. Remember the good old days?

In this case, I’m looking at writing copy to sell copper kitchen sinks in a stainless steel sink world. If you have the strength, durability, and easy upkeep of stainless steel on the one hand and copper, or old-fashioned “farmhouse sinks” as they are often called on the other hand — what can you say?

The copy I’m looking at as I work on this puzzle emphasizes the nostalgia idea well enough, with lot’s of phrases like “old world charm” and a focus on the soft, glowing elegance of copper, etc. But here’s something I didn’t know: According to the copy I’m looking at, copper has some sort of anti-bacterial properties, hence bacteria on the surface of a copper sink won’t live as long as a stainless steel or, I presume, some space-age plastic surface.

I don’t know about that. It seems sort of risky to me, given the sensitivity of so many consumer agencies nowadays. I would hate to write something hinting at health or hygiene claims if I wasn’t absolutely sure I could support them.

So you get the idea. Appeal to emotions as much as intellect. Make the product desirable, not just useful or practical.

Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear depressing statistics about the current (though hopefully improving) impact of the recession on everyday lives in the U.S. and worldwide.

In most cases, the facts are presented by the numbers, or by use of charts, or with detailed accounts of specific people who have lost their jobs or homes, suffer because they cannot afford health insurance, etc.

In the very best writing about such things, we are shown a glimpse of life in the homes and families of real people. It’s one thing to give employment or unemployment figures by the numbers — it’s entirely more effective to profile someone who’s lost their home or job and how they’re doing now, i.e., where they’re living, how they’re paying the bills, how the feed and clothe their kids.

I was thinking about this after watching part of “60 Minutes” on CBS last evening (December 20, 2009). The lead story on the broadcast was a revisit to Wilmington, Ohio, a year after the town lost something like 10,000 jobs in one swoop when an air shipping company closed down. They showed specific “before and after” pieces with individuals and their families. The news was not good. In fact, it made for a pretty grim broadcast for the last “60 Minutes” show before Christmas.

But it was griping and very effective. I’ll never think of unemployment/employment figures merely as numbers again. They are numbers based in the lives and fortunes of real men, women, and children.

Your most effective writing always should “show” readers what’s happening, not just “tell” them what you want them to know.