TED Secrets for Writers
Photo by saeed karimi on Unsplash
I’ve been re-reading Carmine Gallo’s book, Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds. In it, he goes through 9 guidelines that great TED speakers use to structure their talks in ways that make them memorable. They can be applied not only to public speaking, but to writing as well.
The “secrets” Gallo mentions, and how they apply to writers of fiction or nonfiction, are:
Unleash the Master Within – Are you passionate about what you write? You know your story better than anyone else. With mastery of your material comes confidence that allows your passion to shine through. Nothing takes the place of having a real passion for the story you’re telling. And if you don’t have a passion for writing itself, for communicating your ideas through the written word, you will give up easily.
Master the Art of Storytelling - Stories are compelling to the human brain. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, using stories to make your point allows audiences to respond to what you’re telling them. Stories are how we communicate our experiences as human beings, to other humans. This is about mastery of craft as well. Do you practice the elements of craft regularly? Do you strive to improve your craft with every piece you write? A deep understanding of craft also allows you to break the “rules” and tell the story in a fresh and interesting way.
Have a Conversation - In writing, this is called “voice.” What is your voice? Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but don’t try to write in another writer’s voice. Readers pick up on such inauthenticity and reject it. Voice appears in different ways. It can be authorial voice – the voice in which you tell your story. Or it can be a character’s voice, especially in 1st person fiction. Readers respond to voice, that mind-to-mind connection that keeps them fully engaged in the story and caring about the characters (or you as the author, if you’re writing memoir or essays).
Teach Me Something New - We love to learn something we didn’t know before. In writing, it might be some new information on a historical period, or how something works, or about the human capacity for love, or redemption… the possibilities are endless, and in reading we often unconsciously look for new knowledge or insight. We’re gripped by wanting to find out more about the world around us, or human nature. This can often be found in the Point of your novel or book or story: What do you want the reader to come away with? Think about this, and make it the conscious throughline of your piece. You don’t have to hit the reader over the head with it on every page, but by the end, they should have an instinctive understanding of what it is.
Deliver Jaw-Dropping Moments - The surprise, the unexpected twist, the ramping up of stakes… these are what keep readers turning the pages. Readers love to find out what happens next, or how the “heroes” can possibly get out of this big mess. Deliver moments that grab (and keep) their attention. Again, this applies to nonfiction as well. The books that keep us riveted, even when we know the ending, are the ones that keep us guessing, how will they survive this?
Lighten Up - Use humor, or at least find ways to moderate the tension. Even thrillers, where the idea is to ramp up the tension throughout, work in “breather” moments, which allow the next tense moments to have a bigger impact.
Stick to the 18-Minute Rule – For writers, this is about the paradox of constraint. We’ve created this big, beautiful world, and now we want to revel in it. But we’ve all read books that we later think could have used major pruning by an editor, where the author wandered over a hundred pages with nothing of major import happening. Sometimes the genre or form we’ve chosen has its own length requirements, and we have to work within them. Sometimes, constraint is about our writing time, and this means that we can get more done in, say, a focused 18-minute writing session than in 2 hours of noodling around, spending most of that time doomscrolling online. Embrace the constraints and work within them.
Paint a Mental Picture with Multisensory Experiences - This is a no-brainer for writers. Use all your senses to create your story. In an age when we’re surrounded by visual storytelling via cinema and tv, we may tend to hone in on the visual, but we can create richer experiences on the page through judicious use of the other senses as well. This also goes for variety in general: vary your sentence length, your vocabulary, your syntax to keep the reader engaged.
Stay in Your Lane - a.k.a. Write What You Know. Or at least, what you’ve learned well enough to convince us of your authenticity. What do you need to know to create a vivid, believable world on the page? Or a character that resonates with us? You don’t need to be all things to all people, and you shouldn’t try to write to trends that don’t evoke any meaning for you. Be you, and write what you care about, from your own unique perspective. This doesn’t mean you can’t learn new things. If you write historical fiction (or nonfiction) you have to do deep research in order to immerse the reader in the period. If you set a story in another culture, the same thing applies. If you are writing a mystery, you have to know how police approach crime investigation. In this era of Own Voices, it’s also important to make sure you’re not telling someone else’s story, overwriting their own lived experience, especially for those voices that have been traditionally silenced.
What do you think of these TED precepts? Are they “well, duh” moments for you? Do you consciously apply them in your writing? Are there any you struggle with? Are there those you think you’re doing, but really aren’t (or at least as much as you could)? To me, they’re strong basics, to go back to again and again, and make sure I’m applying them in my writing projects.
If you like this, head on over to the Contact Page and sign up to get my monthly newsletter featuring tips on creativity, productivity, and the writer’s craft.
