best writing advice

4 Important Writing Tips from Warren Buffett’s Letter to Shareholders

Warren Buffett published his much-celebrated annual Letter to Shareholders yesterday. I noticed it was out while I was on a flight home from LA, just as JetBlue and I were 30,000 feet over Nebraska. Nebraska. Buffett. Me. Coincidence? I. THINK. NOT. (To quote The Incredibles‘ Bernie Kropp.) By the time I landed in Boston, analysts and commentators and journalists were all over it. Here’s a hilarious thing: Yahoo can’t seem to get its email client right. But even before the letter’s official release, Yahoo had produced a video highlight reel with Warren’s letter’s best quotes. And by “hilarious” I mean funny-eyeroll. Not funny-ha-ha. Let that sink in for a minute: A letter gets its own trailer. Yes, the letter is written by the world’s most famous investor. But still. Warren doesn’t care about any of them, though. Not the New York Times or MarketWatch or Yahoo’s letter-trailer. He writes his […]

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Why We Need Smaller Stories in Content Marketing

 Image source: Gratisography I talk a lot about thinking BIGGER in your marketing: sharing a bigger story to put your company in the larger context of what people care about. But today, I’m focusing not on big… but on small. I’m focusing on the need to tell the smallest story possible. Small stories are specific. Small stories are human-scale. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, spoke at Columbia University about the need to tell important stories—about refugees and climate change, to name but two—even if most of us are sick and tired of hearing about them. We’re sick of them, Ira told the Columbia Journalism School graduating class of 2018, because such stories have “the two key ingredients of any story you don’t want to hear anything else about: (1) it’s depressing and… (2) YOU ALREADY KNOW THE STORY.” Refugees: 60 million displaced people. The largest refugee crisis since

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Making Boring Writing Fun Again: What We Can Learn from Stink Bugs. (Yes, Seriously.)

  Here’s the best writing I read all week. It’s 170 words tucked into a belly of a 7,000-word article. And yes… it’s about stink bugs. Stay with me. Because those of us writers who write about B2B “solutions” or other boring or complex things can learn a lot from the vivid description of these gross little guys. First, I need to have you read it, too. And then let’s break it down, okay? (via When Twenty-Six Thousand Stink Bugs Invade Your Home)   Making Boring Writing Fun Again Those of us who write about the unremarkable B2B products, mundane “solutions,” or complicated, boring anythings can learn a lot from this passage. Let’s break it down: “Its head is unusually small, even for an insect, which gives it an appropriately thuggish look. Its six legs prop its shield-shaped body up in the air, as if they were pallbearers at the

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The One Thing the Best Career Mentors Do (and an Ode to Mine, Who Did That Very Thing)

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” — e.e. cummings In one of my first assignments from the Boston Globe, editor Dick Powers sent me to cover a fire in the Boston suburbs that had destroyed much of a couple’s antique colonial home. It was a straightforward task, from a newspapering point of view. The coverage I later filed should’ve contained a few paragraphs on what happened—with perhaps a quote or two from the authorities and a family member, if they were up to it. Something like: A house fire northwest of Boston displaced an older couple last night…. But that didn’t turn out to be my story at all. When I got to the house that day, I saw the couple’s belongings strewn about on blankets on the lawn, drying in the sun. Among them was a sizable collection of German books that, it

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13 Books That Will Help You Be a Better Writer and Storyteller

My favorite book is always the one I’m reading now. I get vested in the story, in the characters, in the voice of the writer. The last few pages can feel like a kind of death (a sense of foreboding, a final ending), which is why I often sequentially, and (sometimes) obsessively, read the works of a writer I like. Ten years ago I read Me Talk Pretty One Day, and that year I read so much David Sedaris that I’d observe something—say, a man in a Santa suit waiting in line for a sandwich—and I’d think, “David would love this.” So when I tried to choose my top recommendations among the books I’ve read that will make you a better writer… well, it was agony. I had to exclude more than I could include. But, eventually, I compiled a list of my top recommendations. They aren’t necessarily my all-time

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