Halloween is such a fun time of year. It’s a time of publicly permitted fantasy. It doesn’t have to be horrifying or scary, but it is the one time of year when anyone can put on a costume and have some fun pretending to be, or at least dress like, someone else. And do it all in public.
What freedom! What fun!
If you’re a writer this is exactly the type of attitude, the type of freedom that you need to explore, and not just in October. If you’re writing fiction you need to be able to BE someone else, not just write about them. You have to inhabit them, wear their clothes. What does it feel like to be that person? How do they see the world? How do they justify their actions, what they do, and what they won’t do?
It’s also extremely helpful for business writing and marketing. Marketing materials fail when you write AT someone. I’ve found that I’m most successful when I understand what the prospective reader wants and needs and how they think and feel before I write a brochure, web site, or marketing presentation. When I write an eBook or white paper to try and convince some to buy a product or service it’s more important for me to understand and inhabit the reader’s skin than it is for me to understand the thing I’m trying to sell. Yes, I’ll need those product details, but without the understanding of the prospect, the materials won’t work. The materials won’t sell and the prospects won’t read (or buy).
Boring mostly means, “this isn’t relevant to me.” What may be interesting to you may not have any interest to the person you’re selling to. You have to get inside their head, wear their clothes, before you can discover what they’ll find interesting, relevant, and maybe even exciting.
It’s fun to dress up, to put on that Star Fleet uniform that you have in your closet (I tell my wife that it’s not a costume, it’s a uniform). Put on the cape and cowl. Release your tightly held self-image and be someone else. And when you take the costume off, remember what it felt like. That’s what you need to write successfully.
I am Batman.
The Put On The Cape And Cowl: Writers Learn To Embrace The Halloween Spirit Of Fantasy by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.