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Writing on Writing

Writing has a literature all its own. To become a better writer, you might consider looking at some of these books:

Will Blythe, editor, Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998): Selections from a New York Times essay series by some of the most important authors in the world.

Robert Boynton, editor, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers On Their Craft (New York: Vintage, 2005: Interviews on every aspect on nonfiction writing -- research, interviewing, writing, rewriting, and style -- from the best practitioners working today.

Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (New York: Little, Brown, 2006): A terrific store of tips on the mechanics of writing, tricks to give writing greater meaning and life, strategies of storytelling, and the habits of good writers.

Stephen Denning, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005): Inspired by Robert McKee, a guide to business writing that helps lift writing beyond dreary memos and PowerPoint.

Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose (New York: Broadway Books, 1999): A lively book that shows how to make writing zippier and more telling at the same time.

Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, editors, Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (New York: Doubleday, 1994) : A collection of talks and commentary from the Nieman Foundation's annual conferences.

Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing And Life (New York: Doubleday, 1994) : An intimate story showing how you, too, can use the best of your right and left brains.

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (Washington: DC Comics, 1999): A comic book explaining how storytelling can merge words and images to tell a more compelling story. Amazing insights about how the mind works, how stories unfold, and how meaning shifts with different formats and perspectives.

Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (New York: ReganBooks, 1997): A classic work by Hollywood's most famous "script doctor." McKee understands the eternal principles of storytelling. Written for film scriptwriters, the book has inspired countless of novelists, nonfiction writers, business people, and more.

Louis T. Milic, editor, Stylists on Style: A Handbook With Selections and Analysis (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969) : Great passages from great writers, with very useful commentary.

Steve Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (New York: Warner Books, 2002): A Zen guide to dealing with the emotional trials of writing.

Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, editors, Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995): An anthology of great narrative nonfiction, with strong commentary.

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, with illustrations by Maira Kalman, The Elements of Style (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005) : The classic guide, updated with whimsical art.

Containerize This

The world is being remade to fit into containers. So what are the implications for the look and feel of cities?

A provocative article in the Telegraph of London by Paul Fisher traces the transformation of the shipping industry by “containerization.” The idea is simple: It is much more efficient to ship goods that fit into a standardized package, because it is easier to manage the movement of those parcels on and off of trucks, train cars, cargo jets, and ships. Since 1966, when a North Carolina trader sent the first container ship across the Atlantic Ocean for Rotterdam, containerized shipping has grown to 60 percent of the total value of world trade.

Fisher also notes that containers are the critical element in the explosive growth of computer technologies. Information packets of 1,500 characters are easy to send through global networks. The information explosion depends on using standardized containers, just like cargo shipping.

Because of standardized parcels and new systems of information technology – tracking systems that improve the speed and efficiency of moving cargo – shipping costs now account for just about 1 percent of the overall retail price of a consumer good.

Ports that can keep up with the container system have a better chance of thriving in the world market than their competitors. Just a few years ago, Massport adopted a master plan for its ports that consolidated container shipping at Conley Terminal in South Boston. Fundamentally, the success of the port depends more on getting the products off the boat and into other vessels for movement inland.

But containerization goes farther than shipping. It extends to retail, where “big box” outlets like The Home Depot and Wal-Mart offer large quantities of a broad selection of goods at lower costs. As a friend noted, consumers these days demand being able to buy just about everything in doghouse-sized shrink-wrapped parcels. Such parcels are best stacked up in those cinder-block monstrosities you see on the side of the highway.

Home-builders increasingly use modular construction techniques, which put together pre-built segments like Legos. More than a generation after the construction of Levittown – where William Levitt created a kind of movable assembly line, where workers moved from station to station rather than having the product brought to them on a conveyer belt – housing manufacturers are able to bring ready-made pieces of a house or office building to the work site.

The container principle has been applied to city and town planning as well. Since the practice of zoning was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1926, towns and cities across the U.S. have compartmentalized their different activities into different spaces – downtown here, residences there, cultural activities over there, historic buildings here. In many cases, municipalities have created such extreme separation that it’s hard to see how the pieces relate to each other.

Backlash against containerization

In recent years, there has been a backlash against this territorial containerization. The New Urbanism movement has emphasized the importance of mingling activities rather than containing them. These planners have emphasized how important it is for synergies to develop between people and activities. It’s important for different activities to take place near each other not just for convenience and costs, but also for the tension and creativity that come from proximity.

The seminal statement of this principle is an early essay by the architect Christopher Alexander called “The City Is Not a Tree.” The tree that Alexander refers to is not the natural variety but the organizational variety – the tree that lays out places in a city as if they were part of an organizational hierararchy. Instead of thinking of cities as discrete containers, Alexander argues that we should consider another image – the lattice.

The lattice image suggests overlap, sharing, a lack of centralized order. It suggests a physical form that connects rather than separates. Streets are the great common spaces of Alexander’s city. Streets contain numerous modes of traffic – cars, bikes, feet – as well as a variety of businesses, public buildings, parks, gardens, historic spots. One leads into another and supports the other. Alexander’s vision is decidedly anti-container.

Alexander argues that people follow the “tree” approach to planning and design because it is difficult to hold a mental picture of something with more than a handful of elements. We like the simplicity, the order, of the organizational chart. But just because something looks orderly does not mean that it yields the best place for people to live their lives.

The brilliance of Alexander’s lattice image is that is embraces all that is great about cities – diversity, experimentation, accident, old and new, the natural and the manmade. It all comes together because we allow it to.

The merits of regularity

But that doesn’t mean there is no place for a regular form in the city. One of the most creative and dynamic urban forms is the grid – the ultimate regularized structure. Grids are important because they create a common ground. They make it easier to make connections. A community of grids is easier to traverse than a community of cul de sacs. You always have a number of choices of how to get from A to B. In the cul-de-sac community, you often have only one way to get around, which means that traffic gets congested at the entry ramps for the main roads and the feeder roads.

Consider a Boston example. It’s easier to get Marlborough and Hereford to Newbury and Exeter in Back Bay than from Oakview Terrace to St. Peter Street in Jamaica Plain – even though the distance is much longer. The reason is that you can put together literally dozens of route combinations to get around the gridded Back Bay. Traffic can spread pretty much evenly across the grid. But J.P.’s Oakview Terrace is locked in a cul de sac and you have to get all the way out – with no choices of how to do it – before proceeding to your destination. Without the grid, you can be just feet away from a location but have to travel a roundabout journey to get there.

Containers also have their place in building design. Lots of isolated boxes are depressing and hard to move around. But to create structures that can adapt over time – accommodating a wide range of activities, larger and small, over the years – a certain kind of modularity is desirable. In How Buildings Learn, Stuart Brand calls for architects to build structures with many small pieces that can be combined and recombined in different ways. You might call this flexible modularity. Old warehouses, manufacturing buildings, and schools not only look elegant compared with their modern counterparts, but they have a form that is easier to reconfigure as the years pass.

The key to containerization is whether the modules can be combined, recombined, and filled in different ways. A good building can break a large space into smaller spaces – or combine smaller spaces into something big. Boxes that fit the way people move about can be filled with a variety of different things, making those spaces as eclectic as a Frank Gehry’s Bilbao. On a larger scale, Manhattan’s street grid might look boring and regimented from a distance; but its simplicity accommodates a greater variety of sub-forms than are possible with more stylized street networks.

What planners and architects need to develop are containers that can adapt to changing needs and connect with nearby people and activities. It’s OK to have a world of boxes, but they need to be organic.

If we build them right in the first place – with good building materials, good street grids, and decent common spaces nearby – then someday we might even retrofit old Wal-Mart warehouses for housing or community centers.

This article originally appeared on the web site of the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.

Let's Get Sticky

Remember the old Steve Martin routine about getting small? It’s a great bit spoofing the way druggies giggle and cackle about getting high.

“I like to get small. It’s very dangerous for kids, because they get realllly small. I know I shouldn’t get small when I’m driving, but I was drivin’ around the other day and a cop pulls me over … says, ‘Hey, are you small?’ I say, ‘No, I’m tall.’ He says, ‘I’m gonna have to measure you.’ They give you a little test with a balloon. If you can get inside it, they know you’re small … and they can’t put you in a regular cell either, because you walk right out."

In the media world these days — in advertising, the Internet, marketing, promotion, publishing, you name it — people are carrying on about getting “sticky.”

Stickiness is the quality that products have when readers or consumers feel the need to linger a while. Rather than surfing to a new site, readers “stick” to a site that offers something intriguing and engaging.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, a brotherly duo of biz-school professor and entrepreneur, have written the ultimate manual for getting sticky. Made to Stick outlines six qualities needed to make anything — idea or image, web site or ad jingle, catch-phrase or product design — stick.

THE SIX REQUIREMENTS OF STICKINESS

1. Simplicity—If you argue ten points, nobody will remember even one. People easily remember two things (which set up a yin-and-yang kind of contrast) or three (which set up a triangle in which each corner affects the other two). And if you give them a mnemonic device, they can remember a string of ideas. But to get people to remember, you have to work hard at simplifying your message.

The Dale Carnegie Training offers a simple formula for giving memorable talks. It’s called the Action/Benefit speech. Talk about an incident, describing a specific action and the benefit it produced. Done well, these talks impart memorable wisdom. And advertisers love the format. Think of all the slogans that take this form: “Get Met. It Pays.”

2. Unexpectedness—As Aristotle noted 2,500 years ago, the reversal produces a powerful impact on the audience. When you’re expecting one thing, and something dramatic and different happens, you remember.Simplicity tells people what they need to remember. It’s like the proverbial string tied to a finger tip. It’s a way of saying, Pay no attention to the noise and confusion around you. Just focus on this point. Advertisers succeed when they leave a single simple message. Southwest Airlines, for exampe, sells itself as “THE low-cost airline.”

The key to simplicity is to find a single core idea and build everything else around that. Whatever else may be present, they need to be tied to the core idea. Southwest Airlines builds its low-cost identity into everything. The goofy behavior of the flight attendants, the no-frills seating and snack arrangements, the random boarding passes — all tie into the low-cost core idea.

In Story, his masterful guide for screenwriting, Robert McKee talks about opening and closing “gaps” throughout the picture. Give a character something he has to reach for–and then, just as he’s about to reach it, pull it away. And when you make the hero’s job harder, do it by surprising him with some demon or challenge that he had no idea was waiting for him.

3. Concreteness—Don’t use adjectives and adverbs. Ever have a friend who recommended a book or movie that was “interesting”? That word means nothing.

Think of some memorable meoments of popular culture. We remember the horse head in the film mogul’s bed in “The Godfather.” We remember Jake Gittes slapping Mrs. Mulwray in “Chinatown.” We remember Carlton Fisk waving his home run fair in the 1975 World Series and Bill Buckner coming up empty in 1986. We remember Kennedy and Reagan at the Berlin Wall, the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team surrounded by American flags, the screaming girls at Beatles concerts. We know what a freshly mown lawn smells like. We know how good a beer tastes on a blazing summer day.

Political and business people often don’t even know what concreteness is. They use vague general slogans, thinking they’re speaking to the most immediate concerns of their constituents. I remember running planning meetings in Boston, thinking that terms like “transit-oriented development” and “Emerald Necklace” were specific and concrete to the ordinary folks. They’re great terms but, ultimately, plannerspeak.

Words go only so far. Our most successful discussions of planning used maps and images of the streets, houses, business districts, parks, etc. The more concrete, the more people responded to our planning efforts.To be concrete, think of the senses — sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.

4. Credibility—People want to believe, but you have to tell them why they should believe. Everyone has a different tool. Academics love footnotes and statistical analysis. Sports fans also love stats, the more exotic the better. Lawyers like expert witnesses. Marketers pull a reversal and put the expertise in the hands of the consumer with guarantees and trials: “We know you’ll like it, but YOU decide.” Politicians often try to do the same thing, as when Ronald Reagan asked, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago.”

Demonstrations can also increase credibility. Beyond War, a peace activist group, uses the image of a bucket of bee-bees to demonstrate just how we have overarmed ourselves with nukes. Each bee-bee represents a nuclear warhead ith the firepower of the bombs that demolished Hiroshima.Which raises another point about credibility. The more visual and specific you can be, the stickier your credibility claim.

Celebrities are often used to strengthen a campaign’s credibility. Now, celebs are often the least credible spokespeople for a complex issue. But celebrities who have established a strong emotional connection with audiences have also established trust, which is another word for credibility. And so we listen to Richard Gere on Tibet, Meryl Streep on environmental health, Sting on global warming, and Mia Farrow on Darfur.

Credibility can be manipulated as must as anything. Profesisonals use technical-sounding language to take the upper hand in debates. Lawyers, doctors, researchers, professors, even web-designers take refuge in gobbledygook language to bewilder their audience. When people cannot explain things in simple terms, you should be suspicious of their knowledge or motives.

5. Emotions—Make people feel something. People remember fear best of all. They also remember hope, when it’s connected to their fondest childhood hopes and dreams. Least of all, they remember the elements of a logical and systematic argument.

Think of how powerful emotions have been in American politics. Lyndon Johnson conjured the image of nuclear war in his mushroom cloud ads against Barry Goldwater. George Bush conjured a world of menacing rapists like Willie Horton carousing the streets if Michael Dukakis wree elected president. The Tip O’Neil/Claude Pepper raising the specter of pensionless oldsters starving to death if anyone dared to reform Social Security. When people fear losing something, and a demon is connected to that fear, that’s what they remember before all else.

6. Story—More than anything else besides physical needs, humans need to tell and listen to stories. Stories provide meaning to everything from the most mundane to the most unknowable aspects of life. Stories give order to things that would otherwise feel chaotic and meaningless. Stories create a sense of wholeness. Stories also stretch the imagination, spurring people to think of achieving something beyond themselves.

Stories have, essentially, three plots: Challenge (David and Goliath conflicts, underdogs rising up, rags-to-riches tales, and triumph of will dramas), Connection (Good Samaritan, relationship that bridges a gap), and Creativity (Ingersoll Rand testing of materials, Shackleton’s dealing with rebellious guys).

THE STICKINESS OF MADE TO STICK

The Heath brothers, true to their message, make sure that their stickiness message is also sticky. Look over these six attributes of stickiness. They’re listed in an easy-to-remember mnemonic. The first letter of the six terms spells out the word “success”—almost, anyway.Let’s review (another critical tool to make an idea sticky):

S—Simple
U—Unexpected
C—Concrete
C—Credible
E—Emotional
S—Story

Got it?