Writing Lessons You Can Steal From Learning How To Juggle
Or, how to keep all those balls in the air
- Get the headline right
- Get the subheadings right
- Leave plenty of white space
- Make sure it’s formatted correctly
- Keep your sentences short
- Don’t make the article too long
- Or too short
- Write like you’re having a chat with a friend
- Include stats
- Don’t include stats
- Imagine the person you’re speaking to
- Tell a story
- Include emotional language
The list goes on and on.
There’s a lot to take on board when you write anything before you even get to the stage of pressing ‘submit’.
Years ago I learnt to juggle.
I got a book for Christmas.
It was a book called ‘Juggling for the Complete Klutz’.
It took me, a budding juggler with zero idea of how to juggle, through each step of how to juggle with three balls. It looks pretty impressive when you can do it.
The first step was juggling with ONE ball and getting used to tossing it from hand to hand using the correct scooping movement and getting the height correct.
When you’ve got that right, you can add in a second ball and get used to the movement with two balls.
Then, and only then, do you add in that all important third ball.
By now the movements are automatic and juggling with three balls is actually pretty straightforward.
You look at yourself and go
Look at me! I’m juggling!
But, if you throw a fourth ball in there, it quickly becomes chaos and you’ll find yourself picking balls up off the floor every few seconds.
In writing , like juggling, you need to make sure you’ve got one part right before moving on to the next.
Catch this
Apple’s Head of Adverstising threw Steve Jobs a balled-up piece of paper during a board meeting.
He caught it easily.
The exec then balled up 5 pieces of paper and did the same. Jobs didn’t manage to catch any of them.
The point the exec was making was that when you have just one thing to concentrate on, you are more likely to succeed.
Your ability to perform any given task is diluted the more things you have to deal with simultaneously.
Have you ever tried driving a car and explaining to someone what you’re doing every few seconds?
It’s really hard.
Our brains, even though they’re more complex than the most advanced computer ever built, find it hard to work on two new things at the same time.
When we drive a car, 99% of what we do is done without thinking through years and years of practice and experience.
If you’re starting out or looking to improve your writing, choose one area, and focus really hard on one improvement at a time until becomes second nature, then include another.
Focusing on multiple things at once, trying to juggle all those balls of writing, especially starting out is daunting and very tricky and, you’ll more than likely fail.
Like juggling, like driving a car or doing anything that takes time to perfect, writing needs to be taken one step at a time, and each step needs to be worked on, before moving on.
