Writing & Authenticity

This week has been one of simplifying and paring down and getting to the foundations of what is important.  All this week I was reminded of the words of a very wise friend  who once told me:

“If you want to persuade someone to do something, anything at all, there are five key things you must do in order to insure this.  First, encourage their dreams.  Then you must justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and at the end of it all,  help them throw rocks at their enemies.”

As writers, in spite of how we feel about the world through our own personal filters, we must do these things. We know that some of the dreams of our readers will never manifest. We know that sometimes the failures are their own fault by means of apathy or lost opportunity. We are more than conscious that the fears they face are just phantoms, their suspicions are nothing more than social media fed fantasies and sometimes their enemies aren’t really enemies at all.

It is difficult to motivate or even entice people to read your work if you are regard them for the most part as being stupid, misinformed or deluded. Secretly,   sometimes we writers will often laugh behind our hands or our computer monitors when we realize that someone is actually paying us to state the obvious to the world in the articles that we write. Some days It really can seem like a sham and sometimes there may even be a sort of guilty pleasure in that thought.

The problem is, that what may be obvious for us, is often new information for those who encounter it for the first time.  It is our challenge, I believe to let those things that we reveal within our writing, the stories that we tell and the truths that we state all be something that the reader will never forget.  It is always a challenge to make what we put out to be wholly unlike so much of the information that we are bombarded by on a daily basis and that is just as soon forgotten. While there is no shortage of voices clamoring to be heard in the digital wilderness, there is a palpable void of authentic voices who are completely and undeniably themselves.

We writers and copywriters spend so much time manipulating words to fit the expectations of our clients, or helping them to maximize the SEO returns and any number of other considerations that are applied to our craft, that we can end up being completely disconnected to that deep inner voice that makes us and our writing uniquely our own.