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What Miles Davis teaches you about simplicity

By Patrick Gant

Miles Davis was unhappy.

“The music has gotten thick,” Davis said. “Guys give me tunes and they’re full of chords.”

It was a problem he was ready to solve.

He assembled a group of legendary musicians and over two sessions in March and April of 1959, they performed and recorded Kind of Blue.

The sessions featured almost no rehearsals. There was no sheet music.

Band members were given rough instructions on how each song was meant to be played, instead leaning heavily on melody and improvisation.

The results were stunning.

Kind of Blue remains one of the best selling jazz records and is pointed to by many music critics as one of the most influential recordings of all time.

Simplicity is commonly pointed to among the achievements of this important record.

It’s an accurate choice of words here. But I’m reminded of how often simplicity gets misused to describe the ambitions of a wide range of creative work.

Maybe you’ve heard some of these at a boardroom table before:

“Let’s build with simplicity in mind…”
“We need to simplify the steps required to use this product…”
“Don’t complicate: keep it simple…”

Simplicity is not a process.

It’s tempting to think of simplicity as the act of paring until you’re down to the bare essence of an idea, product or message.

In fact, that’s just good editing.

As Jony Ive, head of design at Apple reminds: “simplicity is not the absence of clutter.”

Sure, as far as writing is concerned, tighter ideas and economy of language are important. But it’s a mistake to assume there’s a process you can adopt to yield simplicity. It’s much more elemental than that.

Turning back to Kind of Blue, it succeeds in its “exquisite simplicity” (as Bill Evans calls it in the album’s liner notes), because Miles Davis started with a clear definition of a problem he wanted to solve.

More than just to music, this applies to all creative work.

And that leads me to my second point.

Simplicity is an outcome of deep understanding.

Early in my career, I padded my writing with lots of literary ornaments: dense paragraphs and plenty of five-dollar words.

Why? Because I lived in constant fear that I’d be found out as a fraud and that I’d have to return my writer’s licence to the Bureau of People Smarter Than Me.

I was half right. Without first having a deep understanding of the problem I’d been tasked with solving, I was regularly putting myself at risk of seeming to dumb things down, rather than finding the heart of an idea.

I still struggle with this, but I do so now at least with the conviction that I’ll study the heck out of my customer’s business problems first before I even attempt to solve them with strategy and prose.

Simplicity is preceded by mastery.

One reviewer in summing up Kind of Blue says how it “sounded different from the jazz that came before it. But what made it so great? The answer here is simple: the musicians.”

Too often, simplicity is thought of as the act of making things look easy. Or that its spareness comes from a kind of idleness.

Simplicity comes only after you’ve begun to exercise mastery of your skills.

Even then, it comes slowly.

Miles Davis explained it best:“You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”

As I see it, writing of all kinds can only start to achieve simplicity—satisfying simplicity—after you’ve dug deeply into your thoughts and have exhausted yourself by writing long form.

I don’t pretend to suggest I’m there yet.

But like you, I get closer, word by word.

The indifference of content

By Patrick Gant

I want you to imagine for a moment that you and I are time travelling.

We arrive in the 2nd century BC at the Great Library of Alexandria. We’ve essentially stepped into the internet of the classical age: a place that houses vast amounts of human knowledge and serves as possibly the most important gathering spot for scholars of that time.

We notice something else right away: it’s not just noted thinkers visiting the library who talk among themselves about its great works. Many of the residents of this ancient city take great pride in being able to cite from its collections too.

Good ideas, as Alexandrians saw them, were worth protecting and sharing. They were choosy.

We move ahead in our time travel to about 50BC and find the Great Library is shattered. Jump ahead a few centuries and there is barely a trace that there ever was a library at all. Today, all we are left with are fragments of stories of its existence. We don’t even have a clear idea of what it looked like in its prime.

What is a greater tragedy than the loss of this library and the world of wisdom it contained is how we lost it.

Modern historians tell us it didn’t happen overnight, but slowly.

It was, as Matthew Battles suggests in his book Library “moldering slowly through the centuries as people grew indifferent and even hostile to their contents.”

Let’s think about that for a second.

Neither fires nor conquest nor enemies of free thought were needed to obliterate one of the pinnacles of classical civilization.

All that was needed was human indifference.

I consider that lesson often when I look at our modern-day Great Library on the web.

It doesn’t have walls and doors but there are plenty of similarities in terms of its purpose and ambition.

We fill it with stories and ideas, commentary and diatribes. And the occasional cat video. Much of this serves as a fine way to capture the zeitgeist of the times.

And yet I’ve grown weary of the word that gets used to label all of this: content.

I used to think that there was purpose behind that word choice–that maybe content was an economical way to describe text, audio and image based ideas.

I’m not so sure anymore.

Let’s be honest. Most of what passes as content online today just isn’t all that good.

Too often, it’s just thinking out loud. And there’s plenty of it: I count 598 million Google hits for the word.

Just as troubling, far too much of it is self referential. In other words: it’s content about the marketing of content for content providers to reach content consumers.

Do you really want to be part of that gig? I sure don’t. I’m pretty sure that’s why you remain a loyal subscriber to CreativeBoost: you’re picky with what you spend your time reading.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some moralizer who seeks to purge words I don’t like from our lexicon. I’m quite sure content still has its place somewhere.

I’m more troubled by what motivates its everyday use: that old foe, indifference.

Most online content is to ideas as fast food is to nutrition. It’s cheap and plentiful. But it’s not good for you. In the long run, there is a price to be paid for it.

Beyond just settling for flabby thinking, a diet of content–whether you’re a consumer or creator–leads to something even worse: unrealized potential.

You and I only have a finite amount of time to make our respective dent in the universe.

And what we have in this tick of time is a chance to share with the future what we’ve learned. It’s the idea tree that we plant for others to later enjoy its shade.

That’s the true power and wisdom of writing (and yes, other media might qualify too but those are not in my area of expertise).

Writing is thinking made organized against its will. And it is our job to put everything we’ve got into ensuring that our efforts are a reflection of our very best selves.

There’s a better way to look at the ideas you create and share. Think of it as your material.

Just as if you were building a house, you want something that won’t fall down when greeted by the first gust of wind.

You don’t want something that chases trends or quickly falls out of fashion.

Solid material–assembled with care, shared with love–has a timelessness to it.

That is how we can learn well from the Alexandrians, if we choose to.

It is our best defence against the corrosive effect of indifference.

Heck yes, you need to write better headlines: here’s how and why

By Patrick Gant

Pay more attention to headlines in what you do.

Sure, you might be tempted to say “but I don’t write headlines in my work.”

Oh yes you do.

Ever find yourself needing to send an email but struggle to get readers to respond or to take some kind of action? Do you do analytical work that involves creating in-depth reports? Maybe you’re trying to find a stronger hook for your fundraising letter. Or maybe you’re looking at ways to get better at giving presentations that connect with people.

These are just a few examples where headlines can be valuable. We just don’t often think of them that way.

With email, we call it “coming up with a good subject line.” With reports and presentations, we ask ourselves “how can I cover all these complicated ideas in a way that doesn’t lose the reader?” See my point? Part of a headline’s power is its ability to compress an idea.

Sure, a great headline can attract attention (a practice that was alive and well 2,000 years ago in Rome when the first gazette, Acta Diurna, couched hard news with salacious stories).

But what they really do is give your reader a good reason to keep reading.

David Ogilvy—the true original MadMan of advertising—once said that “on the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

He wasn’t kidding about that last part. Even in my own work, I spend an inordinate amount of time crafting and refining headlines and subheadings, because it’s “the ticket on the meat” (another Ogilvyism).

Why does it matter so much? Because as I like to regularly remind: people are busy.

We live in a world now where the thing that is most scarce is audience attention.

You have to earn it and keep earning it. With that in mind, here’s what I know about how you can write better headlines that will help you keep earning those readers and find more homes for those ideas you want to share.

Make friends with action verbs
Cut out the fluffy features behind your idea until you’re left with a raw verb that describes what it can do for the reader (e.g., “Do…Grow…Make…Get…Take…Expand…”). It might not seem stylish to use them, but action verbs never get dull and they deliver the goods on answering that one question every reader has: “what’s in it for me to keep reading?”

Be more specific
Boring writing happens when you don’t know where you want the reader to look. As fiction writer Nancy Hale tells us: “The more specific you are, the more universal you are.” That applies to more than just fiction. Headline writing is compressed storytelling. And that’s something you can apply to any business. Find the glowing core in your story.

“How to” is your BFF
Veterans of advertising copy will tell you that you can’t write a bad headline that starts with “how to” (see what I did in the subject line of this email?) Granted, this is more relevant to email subject lines and presentation copy, but never say never when it comes to creating a surprising header even in dense analytical reports. I’ve seen it done.

But say no to link bait
You might think it’s tempting to mimic the linkbait strategies of Buzzfeed and others who peddle McContent (e.g., “You’ll never believe what happened next…” or “Seven ways to do X”). But don’t do it. That’s a race to the bottom and one that’s become so common now that readers are wise to the game. No amount of link baited traffic is going to erase the impression that you’ve snookered your audience into reading something that just wasn’t all that good or memorable. Your best ideas and your readers deserve better than that.

Do the unexpected
“State the opposite, not the obvious.” That’s what Sam Horn says in her book “Pop! Stand Out in Any Crowd.” Sometimes the best way to present an idea is to turn it inside out and say something that goes against conventional wisdom. Often that’s where real insight lives. Longtime CreativeBoost readers know that I’m quite fond of that particular strategy.

Yummy, tasty morsels
Break your ideas up into smaller ones. Assign a subheading to each one. Notice how I do that with by blog posts and newsletter? It’s a great way reward your readers for their attention and to honour their time. The trick is make it look like it’s not work to read things all the way though.

Hey, much like what you just did! See how that happened?

Writing advice: what to do when you’re stuck

By Patrick Gant

[Updated] Anyone can be a writer, it’s true. But sometimes—whether you’re writing for the web, crafting an article, a direct marketing piece or a book—you’re going to get stuck and it can seem as if no amount of rewriting is going to fix your copy.

Don’t wait for that sinking feeling to set in.

Here’s the first thing you must do.

Keep writing.

Don’t give in to that feeling that says you need to walk away.

Giving in is easy. It’s what many people do.

There are cases where you need to shift gears for a bit (and I’ll come back to that). But unless you keep working at your craft and your ideas, you’re going to lose any momentum you started with.

There’s an even bigger danger.

Unless you’re in the deadlines business like I am, there is also a good chance that if you put that writing project away, you might not come back to it. Ever.

Stop with the Point-A-to-Point-B thinking. Be more abstract.

Ideas and the business of writing them down is not a linear practice. In fact, it’s rare to be struck by a fully formed thought that’s ready to share. That’s just the low-hanging fruit, my friends. The rest takes time to ripen. And often it’s going to take you in directions that may surprise you as much as your reader.

Here are a few methods I use when I get stuck. You can use any of these, too.

The tangential method

Find a good quote about the subject you are writing about. Don’t just slap that quote into your copy.

The writer’s first devotion is curiosity and you feed it by asking questions.

Who is the speaker behind the quote? Are there any articles posted online about this person? Book reviews?

How might what they have to say about one thing relate to another thing in an entirely unexpected way?

A few minutes of satisfied curiosity can provide you with an entirely new angle on what you’re writing about.

Here’s a secret: it’s one of my most reliable ways of coming up with new topics for my newsletter.

The switching gears method

I said earlier that you have to keep on writing when you’re stuck. But that doesn’t mean you have to keep bashing your head against the wall and wishing for a different result. Some ideas need to simmer. In the meantime, write something else.

Creativity is a weird visitor (click to tweet). It often walks into your house, puts its feet up on the sofa, grabs pen and paper and tells you it’s working on something. Let it do its job. Just don’t let it switch on the TV.

Switching gears means that you might not be working on the thing you started on in the first place, but you’re still producing.

Practice and discipline. These are your best teachers.

The backstory method

This one applies to fiction writing. Having trouble making a character believable? Invent a backstory and write it down. Need help asking the right questions? Go to one of those free online dating sites and look at the questions they ask of people when creating a dating profile. Fill it in. The answers you’re being asked are meant to help other people decide if you’re likeable and compatible. This is a good resource if you’re stumped.

With a fact-filled backstory (okay, made up facts, but I’m sure you get where I’m going with this), you have new ways to approach your subject and write convincingly. After all, you totally know this guy now.

The undoing method

Some ideas are just not ready for primetime. Some are just crappy ideas. A good way to test yours is to turn them inside out. Play devil’s advocate. Write a short piece arguing the opposing point of view.

One of my business lines is speechwriting. I sometimes use this method when I’m finding the copy isn’t as persuasive as I need it to be.

Undo your arguments.

You’ll quickly reveal the cut line that separates the facts you know are true from the rest of the points that you simply feel are true.

Three things to know about how people read today

By Patrick Gant

Audiences today have high expectations about what they choose to read. And that’s especially true online.

As more and more marketing shifts to digital formats, readers’ tastes are changing.

Here are three important trends that can help you be a better writer, to stay connected with your audience and to have them coming back for more.

Be reader friendly: use narrower columns

Susan Weinschenk illustrates in her report on reader behaviour that while research shows people can read faster when you use wide columns (more than 100 characters per line), people respond more favourably to narrower columns (betwen 45 and 100 characters per line).

It’s no accident that The Economist and The Guardian–two publishers who have been highly successful at switching to online content–continue to opt for this narrower column style for their online version (particularly for tablets). People come back more often to what they enjoy best.

Bullets go bad quickly

If you have to use bullets at all, use them sparingly: never more than in a group of five. They’re designed to draw the eye to something very selective. Use them too often and it will look like work to your readers.

People read more when it’s enjoyable. They bolt when it starts to feel like a task.

Rethink the fold

When it comes to posting things for others to see–and even though much of that today increasingly is digital–we’re still prone to think in newspaper terms. Thus the expression: put your most important content above the fold. It’s not wrong, but don’t be too rigid about what it means.

Digital content doesn’t have a fold quite the way that a newspaper does. It cuts in different places depending on screen size, particularly on mobile devices–and that’s where traffic is really growing. That’s why scrolling and gesture-based scanning have come to be integral to the reading experience online. Research heatmap activities on your site. Look where people click more often. The results can be surprising.