Everything can be a how-to

How to turn boring into exciting

Actually, this is something I learned yesterday. But anyway.

At Klasse, where I work, we regularly invite creative, inspiring people to give a presentation or a workshop. This is a great source of new insights and ideas. Yesterday, the two wonderful ladies who make DUF magazine told us all their secrets (or so they say).

DUF is a ‘bookmagazine’ (300 pages apiece) aimed at 12-18-year-olds, about all the things you never read about in popular teen magazines. So no fashion, trends, make-overs, celebrities, or must-haves. Instead they cover real stories about real kids, and they tackle complex subjects like sex, religion, media awareness and economics.

It’s quite a challenge to appeal to teens with very ‘adult’ (in the boring sense, not the porn sense) themes like these.

One of the methods used by DUF is to turn it into a howto or self-help guide. “How to become depressed” or “Which religion is best for you?”

This is a deceptively simple technique, that shouldn’t be overused, but can indeed be used to turn nearly any subject into an engaging read.

It’s very important to start out with the overall theme or goal you want to discuss, determine the basic form it will take, and only then to start creating content. You can’t turn a 500-word article that someone’s already written into a howto-guide just like that. You have to start out with a different concept altogether and bring together the right people to realize it.

Key seems to be to let go of the idea that you need to cover everything. You need to create a learning goal, and work towards that. Turning something into a howto forces you to prioritize brutally.

From the reader’s perspective, the promise of a simple howto-guide is very compelling, so it gets people interested. You only need to look at YouTube to know how popular this format is.

Oh yeah, this is my first Medium post. Yoohoo!