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Jay Posey

Your Voice, Their Language

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There are a couple of big Milestone Moments you should celebrate when you’re on the road to becoming a Professional Doer of Words.

The first is a really big deal, no matter what your particular mode of writing expression happens to be (whether it’s advertising copy, or greeting cards, or graphic novels, or whatever): it’s when you find your voice. 

After you’ve been writing for a while, there will come a time when it all just clicks, and you’ll suddenly find that you’re writing in a way that is uniquely your own.  A way that feels comfortable and natural.  A way that your readers will come to recognize.

When that happens, it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate and celebrate it.  Yay you!

But there’s another milestone that frequently gets overlooked.  In fact, in many cases it isn’t even recognized as a goal worthy of being achieved.  It’s when you’re able to adapt your voice to speak your audience’s language.

Think about your favorite joke.  You know, the one everybody loves about the guy with the moose and the shotgun.  If you don’t know that one, it’s okay because I totally just made it up.  You might tell that joke one way when you’re sitting around with your best pals from college, and quite a different way to your professional colleagues at the country club.  Same joke, but tailored to suit the sensibilities of the current crowd.  (As a side note, NEVER TELL THE MOOSE AND SHOTGUN JOKE AT A COUNTRY CLUB.  I did that once.  Once.)

Flexibility in your writing is a great thing to strive for.  If you’re a Professional Doer of Words, you’ll most likely find yourself getting paid at some point to write something targeted at a different audience than the one you’re used to.  It might be a change of medium – when you’re asked to write a movie treatment for your novel, for example.  It might be a change of genre, when you decide to go from writing high fantasy to a modern military thriller.  Or it might be when you’re using your ninja-like word skills to make some extra cash writing copy for a website.

In those cases, no one’s asking you to sell out your artistic integrity or to be something you’re not.  But they do want to be able to understand what you say.

Your voice, their language.

Fans, Tag-Alongs, and True Believers

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Fans are great.  At least, that’s what I’ve heard.  If you’re in the creative business (or you know, delivering a service, or a product, or pretty much doing anything at all that gets people to notice you), you’ve likely got a crowd of people who like you.  It’s tempting to think of them all as fans.  But it may be useful to peel back the proverbial onion skin a bit and take a peek below the surface.  Mmm, proverbial onions.

As has been clearly documented above, fans are great.  They’re the ones who pay your bills, who eagerly await your next release, who market you for free, and who defend you whenever someone says you’re an overrated hack.  But they’re also the ones who are most likely to feel betrayed if your next work strays too far from what they expected of you, who will call you a sell-out when you hit it big(ger) than they’re comfortable with, and who will say your old stuff was better.  They’re also the most likely to offer you advice on what you should do next, or how you could improve.

Tag-alongs, on the other hand, are fans of fans. They’ll buy your stuff and tell everyone how much they like you, as long as their friends are doing it.  They’re mostly just going with the flow, so the influence you have over them is limited.  They’ll be largely indifferent to the discussions your fans are having unless there’s a particularly passionate argument, in which case they tend to amplify the loudest voices in the room.

True Believers are the rarest of your entourage, and are your most ardent supporters through it all.  They’ll buy everything you put in front of them, even if it’s the same thing you gave them last month wrapped in a newer, shinier package.  They’ll go toe-to-toe with the angriest detractors even when they’re outnumbered 1000 to 1.  And even when you’ve totally blown it, they’ll reassure everyone (even you; especially you) that the thing you did that you are ashamed of was actually brilliant and one of the best things you’ve ever come up with.

It’s easy to think that True Believers > Fans > Tag-alongs, but I don’t think you can really rank your audience.  Every person who supports you deserves to be appreciated, regardless of their motivation.  It’s just important to be able to identify who it is you’re talking to.

And it’s even more important to know who you’re listening to.

When Free is Worse than Nothing

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Generally speaking, there’s no better way to get someone’s attention than to offer them something FOR FREE.

(I said generally … if you want to get specific, okay, sure you can probably get a lot of attention running naked down the freeway or wearing flaming pantyhose on your head or both, but let’s not go there, k, thanks.  And yes, I know what you’re thinking smarty, if you have flaming pantyhose on your head you can’t also be naked unless you’ve got some kind of quantum clothing arrangement going on; you’re very clever.  But we already knew that because you’re visiting my site which is, as clearly stated, a place where everyone who visits is clever and attractive, so, you know, well done.)

It’s easy to think that there’s no risk to giving somebody something for free.  If they like it, great, they’ll probably be back for more.  And if not, no harm done, right?

Actually, it turns out that by mishandling a freebie, you can turn someone who didn’t know about you (or even worse, someone who had a neutral-leaning-positive attitude about you) into a RABID HATE FURNACE OF RAGE.  Hate furnaces are bad enough, but come on people, RABID.

There are lots of ways to screw up the “Here take this free thing” interaction, but a way to guarantee you’ll make enemies?  Give people something they think is worth less than the effort it took to get it.  The critical qualification there is that they just have to think it wasn’t worth the cost.  Sometimes factors beyond your control can turn what should’ve been a low-risk interaction into a PERSONAL INSULT AND INJURY.

That free chicken sandwich?  TOO MUCH MAYONNAISE, NOT WORTH THE 20-MINUTE DRIVE AND 15-MINUTES IN LINE.  That app?  I HAD TO FACTORY RESET MY PHONE TO UNINSTALL IT.  The meeting where they promised pizza?  THEY ORDERED TWO MEDIUMS AND 36 PEOPLE SHOWED UP.  This blargh post?  TOO MANY ALL CAPS.

There are many more ways to measure cost than just money.  Time, effort, opportunity, expectation.  When you’re offering something “free”, it’s important to consider exactly how “free” it is.  If your first “no-risk” interaction with someone turns them into a RABID HATE FURNACE OF RAGE against you, it’ll be nearly impossible to win them back.

Keeping Promises You Can’t Make

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As a general rule, being a Person of One’s Word is highly admirable and a sign of character and integrity.  But in some very special cases, it might do more harm than good.

In the rare circumstance, it might actually be better to bite the bullet and admit you made a mistake, to confess you underestimated the workload or overestimated the time you had to commit, than to push through and meet the deadline with a rushed solution.  Whoever you’re doing the work for right now might be annoyed (or disappointed or frustrated or angry) about a week’s delay, and they might have every right to feel that way.

But in many cases, once your work is out there for the world to see, it has to stand on its own.  There’s no special tag hanging off the side saying “Wrote this in three days instead of twelve!”, or “Could’ve been a lot better if I’d had two more weeks!”.  For many people, whatever that project is, that will be their first contact with you and your work.  It might be worth it to slip the schedule to make sure you’re representing yourself well.

Of course, it only works if it’s truly a rare case.  (And if you’re not, you know, ruining a wedding or a funeral.)  If you’re regularly missing deadlines or under-delivering, you’re digging a mighty hole for yourself in the long run.  But if you’ve done the work and established yourself as a Generally Reliable Sort, you’ve got some Character Credit built up that can give you an emergency cushion, should you ever need it.