This is from an Instagram and Tumblr project that I launched in March 2014. It involves 12 photographers from around the world taking photographs, or editing existing photographs (as is the case above) and adding 62 words that speak to the image. To see project in all it’s glory, go to Stories and Pictures.
A few months ago, I was asked to participate in a project with D&AD, headquartered in London. The project was called The Story Works. A group of writers from around the world were asked to select a film, play, book, movie or advertisement that worked and show how the story worked. My choice was Robert Frank’s The Americans. [Read more…] about The Story Works
An excerpt from an interview at the Paris Review…McPhee talks about submitting to the New Yorker for ten years to no avail…the money shot comes at the end when McPhee describes how William Shawn gives him a staff job.
MCPHEE
The thing about writers is that, with very few exceptions, they grow slowly—very slowly. A John Updike comes along, he’s an anomaly. That’s no model, that’s a phenomenon. I sent stuff to The New Yorker when I was in college and then for ten years thereafter before they accepted something. I used to paper my wall with their rejection slips. And they were not making a mistake. Writers develop slowly. That’s what I want to say to you: don’t look at my career through the wrong end of a telescope. This is terribly important to me as a teacher of writers, of kids who want to write.
INTERVIEWER
You spent seven years at Time before you started at The New Yorker. What was useful about that experience for you?
MCPHEE
Time was where I was trained. I spent five of my seven years there in the show-business section, and the show-business writer did a lot more of his own interviewing than some of the others at the magazine did. Cover stories on Jackie Gleason, Richard Burton—I did all the reporting. Jack Benny comes to New York and I get into a taxicab with him and conduct an interview. Whereas if you were writing in the foreign-affairs section, as it was called then, you’d be writing out of files that people sent in from foreign bureaus. The sheer business of turning out five structured stories, however short they were, every week, was excellent training for me.
Now, throughout that period I was in dialogue with The New Yorker. I even sold a brief reminiscence piece to them, but spoke with an editor only over the phone, and did not advance one cubit toward a future there—I had written the piece for another magazine, and it found its way into this one kind of by accident. But there was a guy there named Leo Hofeller, who was reputed to spend a good bit of his time at Belmont Park. And Leo Hofeller, like almost no one else there, had a title. He was the executive editor, and his job was to talk to people off the street. He was William Shawn’s screen—his office was right next to Shawn’s. Leo Hofeller said he wanted to give me a little tryout. Would I think up six Talk of the Town ideas? I wrote these sample pieces, and I sent them there.
INTERVIEWER
Do you remember what they were?
MCPHEE
One was about somebody growing corn on the Lower East Side. But there was no discussion about any of them going into the actual magazine. Then, Leo Hofeller called me up and said he wanted me to come in. This is old Leo Hofeller of Belmont Park. This is nowhere near William Shawn—you don’t see William Shawn, who’s right through the wall. I went there, all excited, and he sits down and says, These pieces are pretty good. And then he turns around and says, I said pretty good, not very good! I’m sitting there shaking like an aspen leaf. Then he said he wanted me to think up three ideas for somewhat longer pieces. And then he said, And don’t come in here with that basketball player! We just did a basketball player.
INTERVIEWER
Bill Bradley was already playing?
MCPHEE
Bradley was playing at Princeton at this point. I was so caught up with him—not just that he could hit a jump shot, but that his story was so interesting. I had soaked up Bill’s story for a couple of years around Princeton, with my father being the doctor of the team. So I sat down and I wrote a five-thousand-word letter to Leo Hofeller. A lot of that letter is in A Sense of Where You Are. I mean it was seventeen thousand words in The New Yorker, and the letter was five thousand words long, and I probably used three thousand words from the letter. And what I said was, I’m so caught up with this subject that I’m going to write this piece on a freelance basis for somebody and then I’ll come back to you with some other idea. But then I just babbled on about Bradley.
I get this back from him: Despite what we said, we would be interested. But he told me that there were no guarantees, of course. I wrote the story and sent it in, and then Leo Hofeller called me to say that they were going to buy it. I showed up at his office, and he said something like, You will never speak to me again. From now on, you will speak to Mr. Shawn, and you’ll forget about me. Forget anything I ever told you, forget everything. It’s a blank slate. Then he leads me eight feet around the corner. And it’s, Hello, hello, Mr. McPhee. And that was the beginning with Shawn.
And then there’s this —
MCPHEE
After the last proof had gone to press, before I was leaving, I told him that I wanted to join The New Yorker staff. Ooh! The tone changed. Shawn turned from this wonderful and benevolent editor of words into a tough customer. He said, Oh, how could he encourage that? How could he know this wasn’t a one-shot deal where somebody produces something good because of their intense commitment to it? And furthermore, I had four children. How on earth could he encourage me to give up a job with a salary and benefits? He said, Morally I can’t do that. He was guiding the conversation toward a real flat dead end.
I said, Having had this experience—publishing these seventeen thousand words, with the spirit of it that the writer be satisfied—how can I go back to writing shorter pieces at Time? And I said, If I can’t work on staff here, I think I’ll go work for a bank or something, and try to write pieces independently for The New Yorker.
And Shawn goes, Oh. Oh, oh. I see. Well, then you might as well join the staff. And that was it. I walked out. That was the very beginning of ’65 and that was the moment I became a staff writer.
As a business owner, or marketer, you are intimately concerned with the decisions that other people make. Your principal goal is to affect those decisions and to persuade people to choose you over the other guys. As you might expect, there is both art and science involved in the art of persuasion.
In today’s column, I’ll discuss a few ideas that might help you think differently about how your home page, and your website in general can help or hinder these decisions.
Take a Customer-Focused Approach
The words you use on your website communicate to the visitor what your focus is. If your home page blasts a 72-point headline that says, “We’re the Number One Interior Design Firm in the Northeast,” then it is very clear where your focus is. It’s on yourself and your amazing number oneness.
In this instance, you are “marketing” to people, which means you are not having a conversation with them. And all marketing is conversation, especially these days. And not to put too fine a point on it, but who cares if you are No. 1? In certain marketing circles, this is referred to as the dinner party problem. Who would you rather meet at a dinner party? The person who can only talk about himself? Mr. “I’m Numero Uno?” Or, the person who is genuinely interested and curious about you?
A customer focused approach means that the aim and thrust of your site is less about how great you are and more about helping your customer/visitor easily learn, do, achieve what they set out to learn, do or achieve. Minus the chest thumping.
Language and the Gobbledygook Manifesto
A customer-focused approach goes a little deeper than what I’ve outlined above. A customer-focused approach avoids what David Meerman Scott calls, “gobbledygook.” In the Gobbledygook Manifesto, Scott identifies meaningless phrases like cutting-edge, market leading or my personal favorite, solutions.
Scott has said gobbledygook is a problem because these words have lost their meaning. He’s right about that.
But I think it’s more than that. Gobbledygook is a problem because it leads with your language and your point of view instead of your customer’s language and point of view. This kind of language puts a wall up between you and your visitor.
Here’s an example.
Let’s say you and I meet at a dinner party. I ask you what you do for a living. You look me right in the eye and say, “Bay state interior design is a leading provider of interior design solutions for residential, business and government environments.” I would look for another drink. Wouldn’t you?
But what if you said, “Thanks for asking. Our company does interior design. We focus on sustainable materials and ergonomically correct workspaces. We’ve got quite a few residential clients, quite a few in business and government, too. We’re all about helping people create comfortable and productive workspaces.”
A Marketing Voice versus A Human Voice
That first voice is a deadly marketing voice and, sad to say, it is all over the Internet. The second is a human voice, and a human voice is the one that connects. It’s that voice, true and authentic, that signals a customer-focused mindset. It is that voice you need to get onto your website.
P.S.
Gerry McGovern is a highly sought after web content specialist based in the UK. He’s written a new book, The Stranger’s Long Neck that outlines his views on how people use websites. Mr. McGovern also puts out a weekly newsletter that I highly recommend for anyone who has responsibility for an organization website. Just click his name to get to the subscription page.
Next week: Cognitive Fluency. What it is and why it matters.
Robert Frank’s ~ The Americans
Once upon a time in a long-forgotten place, I fell in love. This was a life-changing, head-over-heels-kind-of-love, and the subject of my swoon was Robert Frank’s seminal book of black and white photographs, The Americans.
At the time, I was an aspiring photographer, and Frank’s pictures blew the top off my head and showed me what photography could be. The Americans had the same effect on tens of thousands of other photographers at all skill levels, and it reverberated among artists, writers and other observers of the American scene. Such is its power that 50 years later we are still talking about and showing the Americans.
Frank’s pictures were idiosyncratic, brutally honest, dark, foreboding and furtive. Those pictures absolutely killed. Robert Frank’s take on America was almost exactly the opposite of the country’s prevailing vision of itself – more Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac than Eisenhower. It was a beat generation document but a whole lot more. The Americans upset a lot of people of course, given the less than rose colored tint it portrayed. “A sad poem for sick people” was one comment.
In the recent New Yorker write-up on the Frank show at the Met, Anthony Lane remarks on how Frank shot over 760 rolls of film on three trips around the U.S. on a Guggenheim grant. He developed his film, made his contact sheets, and set about printing a group of selected images. He printed one thousand work prints (a work print refers to a quickly made image that a photographer will consider over time and then later print to exacting specifications) of this place called America. That a Swiss born Jew in 1955 would conceive of somehow capturing the soul of these United States in a group of photographs is quite an astonishing proposition, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Here is what’s amazing. Robert Frank shot thousands upon thousands of photographs – 27,000+ in all. It’s not unusual for a documentary, street-shooting, photo-journalist type of photographer to shoot vast amounts of film – it’s the nature of the beast.
What’s incredible is the discipline and vision it took for Robert Frank to cull through his work and edit it down to only 83 (!) pictures. In the shooting, he collected the raw data. But like the filmmaker that he would soon become, it was in the editing room where the miracle occurred.
Through careful (and brutal) editing, and his sequencing, he told his unique story, changed the course of contemporary photography, influenced legions of photographers who followed him, and, reflected back to us an image of ourselves wholly unexpected, uncomfortable, unsettling, true.
So any of us who write for a living, (or do other kinds of creative work) one of the lessons of Frank’s achievement is this: Great work involves culling, murdering your darlings – letting go of all your favorite, nifty little phrases and word choices and give the reader the heart and soul of the story.
Murder your darlings, if you have not yet heard the phrase, is attributed to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch who taught writing at Oxford.
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