#Toni Morrison might be a bit out of left field here but I love her work so much and I actually listen to her interviews

[foolsocracy]

Hi, hello, I’m new to your blog. I’ve made myself at home. Lovely carpet.

Can I please know more about your spider Robbie pie? Can’t seem to find the silverware.

but of course, kind anon

Spider Robbie is an au in which Robbie Robertson takes up the spider mantle after the death of the one before him. He is the third, following Ben Urich and, most notably, Peter Parker.

This au is very much canon divergence from Eyes Without a Face, where Peter makes it in time to save Robbie from his original fate but dies in the process. Peter is shot while rushing Robbie and the others out. In his panic and elation at finding Robbie physically unharmed, Peter outs himself as the Spider Man to his best friend. Robbie stays with him as he bleeds out and resolves to continue to hide Peter's identity.

Peter is buried and remains that way for... an undetermined amount of time.

Robbie is left with a mask, a jacket, and the question of just who was this other half of his friend. As he learns more of who this... Spider Man was, he gets more and more involved in the spider's cases and conflicts. Robbie gets more sure of his own abilities and makes a bit of a name for the Spider Man within his own community, though the people of Harlem are largely unaware that the appearances of a masked vigilante match the interests of one Robbie Robertson.

It is to be noted that none of these aforementioned abilities are spider-god-induced powers like Peter's. Robbie, especially at the beginning of his spidering career, leans more into Urich's role than Parker's. To me, Robbie has been passionate about the press and journalism in a way that Peter never was. For Pete, his job as a photographer and reporter was a job he took until he could get into college and study science. Robbie has a way with words and communication that Peter frankly lacks. Of course, that isn't to say that Robbie won't be kicking ass, because he will. It will just take him a bit of time to get some of those skills as he's, well, a normal guy. Not everyone can get their biology scrambled like Pete.

And just because Robbie hasn't been scrambled doesn't mean he's completely separate from all things supernatural either!

I think the marvel noir universe is at its best when there's a magical, supernatural undercurrent. This concept isn't super prevalent in the actual comics, but HoplesslyLost on ao3 has done some really cool world building with it.

I think in Robbie's case, where he would be the narrator, "magical realism" would be an interesting avenue to take it. I use this term in particular because I most closely relate it to Toni Morrison in my head, when I first learned about it through her work in high school. For Morrison, the concept was inseparable to blackness and I think for Robbie, where his blackness is so central to his character and his motivations, drawing on that could be more of a service to his character. It feels better to do that than ignore how incredibly racialized his society and story is. It will make his relationship with the spider god, Peter (who I will get to very very shortly), his community, and his own mythos as The Spider Man really interesting and complex.

So it's been established that Robbie doesn't have spider powers. And we all know that Peter did-- or should I say does. One of the spider god's abilities is to bring Peter back to life. She does this in the comics, but not in any of the runs from 2008-2010 (the runs that make up this au). When Peter dies on Ellis Island, he does not think he is coming back from that. Waking up again is a surprise.

Here's where I think the au really takes a left turn. Do I think the Spider God is purely evil and spiteful and has it out for Pete? No, not really. Will I be ramping said traits up to 11 for the au? Yeah, I guess I might. This is because I love a little bit of horror and the came back wrong trope. I will hopefully be fleshing the spider god out in the near future, but I really haven't given her the many hours of thought I have the other characters. For that I'm sorry spider god </3

Peter digs himself out of his grave, more spider than he ever has been. For much of his new, waking life he is more animalistic than not. There is clearly something wrong with him; his joints are too flexible and loose, he's got some eye-shine going on, his skin is pale and his veins are starkly dark beneath it. He's possessed. Someone is puppeteering him, someone who knows a lot-- almost everything about him, but it's clear that the someone isn't him.

And Peter--- the body, it can't be Peter. At least, that's what Robbie thinks when the figure catches his eye the first time. Because Peter is dead and buried, and he has been dead and buried for weeks.

[hotspreadpage]

How to Turn Your Content From Lousy to Memorable

My professor told me I would never have a career in writing.

He had just read a story I wrote about my worst vacation, a trip to Disneyland that my brother won in a sweepstakes. It had the potential of a mediocre story. It held the promise of slight entertainment.

The only problem was my story lacked any substance.

It was a four-page pile of crap. As my friend Shakespeare would say, “It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Lousy content comes in many forms – cliché, repetitive, arrogant, boring, busy, and maybe a tad too SEO-focused.

The problem with most writing is that it isn’t memorable. If you want to win loyal readers and create strong readership relationships, you must create memorable content.

The problem with most writing is that it isn’t memorable, says @czollingerBC. #writingtips ‏ Click To Tweet

Let’s look at three memorable communicators.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 27 Reasons Why Your Content Sucks

Say more by saying less (Hemingway)

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” – Ernest Hemingway

What can we learn from Ernest Hemingway, winner of a Nobel Prize in literature? He never wasted words. He wrote as if he paid a steep price for each sentence. He placed a higher value in language than most content creators.

Too often, we fluff up articles with nonsense. Hemingway’s insight doesn’t mean all articles must be short. It means every word should teach or tell something.

To simplify your writing, avoid meaningless phrases like:

In terms of

Needless to say (if it’s needless to say, then don’t say it)

In order to

It is important to note that

Whether or not

As Hemingway wrote in The Art of The Short Story, “You could omit anything if you knew you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

7 Fixes for Common Writing Mistakes [Examples]

15+ Worthless Words to Cut to Improve Your Readers’ Experience

Don’t use cheap tricks (Orwell)

“When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” – George Orwell

Orwell hated the wordy writing of the “wise.” You’ve likely had to read research papers from leading professionals and academics. Often, it’s the type of writing that makes you feel stupid.

Here’s a tip: If someone’s writing makes you feel stupid, that person is not a good writer.

If someone’s writing makes you feel stupid, that person is not a good writer, says @czollingerBC. #writingtips‏ Click To Tweet

In his essay on the slow destruction of the English language, Orwell criticized the type of writing used by many professionals. He hated the misuse and overuse of words to create a sense of expertise, citing a sentence in an essay from a college professor:

I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a 17th-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Orwell saw right through this ridiculous writing, a form of writing still practiced today. (Orwell called this “pretentious diction.”) Today’s content writers often create destructive sentences through keyword stuffing and more concern over the sound of words than the feeling or information they convey.

If you would have wanted Orwell to be a fan of your content, avoid the use of the following types of writing:

Dead metaphors (overused metaphors)

Pretentious diction

Meaningless words

Pointless repetition

Readers are smarter than you might think. They sense fake and insincerity. They want to feel cleverer, more informed, or more entertained than they were before reading your content. Before you write any content ask yourself, “What is my plan to affect the reader’s mind and heart?”

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:  Ann Handley on How to Make Your Writing ‘Ludicrously Spectacular’

Reframe the present (Churchill)

“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” – Winston Churchill

At the time of Churchill’s famous speech to parliament in 1940, England was on the brink of disaster. What does his speech have to do with good writing?

Look closely at the excerpt to see how he told the story of the present situation in future tense. He retold the present to inspire victory from the depths of defeat.

To follow Churchill’s inspired storytelling (without the inherent drama of an ongoing war), learn these three lessons:

Allude to an ideal future.

Confidently repeat the call to action.

Make a stand.

3 more classic writing devices

It’s easy to get bogged down in telling stories if you don’t have many devices in your content arsenal. Now that you’ve added a few inspired by Hemingway, Orwell, and Churchill, let’s shift gears to focus on three other useful writing tactics.

Reinvented clichés

Nothing is more tiresome to a reader than a cliché or an overused phrase. Writers use clichés as crutches, leaning on them instead of taking the time to invent something new and exciting.

For example, at the beginning of this section, I used the cliché, “let’s shift gears.” When you read it, you did not think about a car’s gears shifting and how that relates to a change of subject. You read the phrase as an indication the subject would be changing. Not recognizing the original meaning is a clue to recognizing “a dead metaphor” as Orwell put it. The phrase is now a cliché.

Luckily, reinvented clichés offer an opportunity to breathe new life into your content. Lyricists in the music industry often use them, as they must find new and rhapsodic-sounding lines to move their listeners.

Reinvent clichés to breathe new life into your #content, says @czollingerBC. #writingtips‏ Click To Tweet

Rapper B.o.B. often takes an artistic approach to metaphors by reinventing clichés such as this line from E.T., “I went from being who are you to chillin’ with the who’s who.”

The boring cliché would have been “the who’s who” if left on its own. But pairing it with “who are you,” he makes the phrase come alive again to illustrate his journey to success.

Synecdoche

This writing technique is the act of describing a whole idea by presenting bits and pieces of it. Toni Morrison uses synecdoche to great effect in her novel Beloved:

This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that needs support; shoulders that needs arms, strong arms I’m telling you.

In this example, she conveys what the physical parts of a body need to convey what an individual person in need requires.

Any idea or topic can be deconstructed and presented in a more effective way.

TIP: Writing advice can sometimes be contradictory. The key is to identify what tricks and tools work best for what you’re trying to convey to your audience about a particular topic in a particular format at a particular time.

Hypophora

Strategically ask questions that are immediately answered. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy used hypophora in their famous speeches.

“There are those who are asking the devotees of Civil Rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’ 

“We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality; we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities …” – Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream

“But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? …

“We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard …” – John F. Kennedy, We Choose to Go to the Moon

Refocus your writing

Never approach the keyboard without the determination to convey meaning to another person, even if it’s just one individual. One loyal reader will do more for your brand than 100 passive glancers. Capture your audience by crafting memorable stories that avoid the common pitfalls and embrace the success of great communicators like Hemingway, Orwell, Churchill, and others.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Road Map to Success: Creating the Content of Your Audience’s Dreams

Get memorable tips from great writers and editors at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today using code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Turn Your Content From Lousy to Memorable appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

How to Turn Your Content From Lousy to Memorable syndicated from https://hotspread.wordpress.com

[lucyariablog]

How to Turn Your Content From Lousy to Memorable

My professor told me I would never have a career in writing.

He had just read a story I wrote about my worst vacation, a trip to Disneyland that my brother won in a sweepstakes. It had the potential of a mediocre story. It held the promise of slight entertainment.

The only problem was my story lacked any substance.

It was a four-page pile of crap. As my friend Shakespeare would say, “It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Lousy content comes in many forms – cliché, repetitive, arrogant, boring, busy, and maybe a tad too SEO-focused.

The problem with most writing is that it isn’t memorable. If you want to win loyal readers and create strong readership relationships, you must create memorable content.

The problem with most writing is that it isn’t memorable, says @czollingerBC. #writingtips ‏ Click To Tweet

Let’s look at three memorable communicators.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 27 Reasons Why Your Content Sucks

Say more by saying less (Hemingway)

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” – Ernest Hemingway

What can we learn from Ernest Hemingway, winner of a Nobel Prize in literature? He never wasted words. He wrote as if he paid a steep price for each sentence. He placed a higher value in language than most content creators.

Too often, we fluff up articles with nonsense. Hemingway’s insight doesn’t mean all articles must be short. It means every word should teach or tell something.

To simplify your writing, avoid meaningless phrases like:

In terms of

Needless to say (if it’s needless to say, then don’t say it)

In order to

It is important to note that

Whether or not

As Hemingway wrote in The Art of The Short Story, “You could omit anything if you knew you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

7 Fixes for Common Writing Mistakes [Examples]

15+ Worthless Words to Cut to Improve Your Readers’ Experience

Don’t use cheap tricks (Orwell)

“When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” – George Orwell

Orwell hated the wordy writing of the “wise.” You’ve likely had to read research papers from leading professionals and academics. Often, it’s the type of writing that makes you feel stupid.

Here’s a tip: If someone’s writing makes you feel stupid, that person is not a good writer.

If someone’s writing makes you feel stupid, that person is not a good writer, says @czollingerBC. #writingtips‏ Click To Tweet

In his essay on the slow destruction of the English language, Orwell criticized the type of writing used by many professionals. He hated the misuse and overuse of words to create a sense of expertise, citing a sentence in an essay from a college professor:

I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a 17th-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Orwell saw right through this ridiculous writing, a form of writing still practiced today. (Orwell called this “pretentious diction.”) Today’s content writers often create destructive sentences through keyword stuffing and more concern over the sound of words than the feeling or information they convey.

If you would have wanted Orwell to be a fan of your content, avoid the use of the following types of writing:

Dead metaphors (overused metaphors)

Pretentious diction

Meaningless words

Pointless repetition

Readers are smarter than you might think. They sense fake and insincerity. They want to feel cleverer, more informed, or more entertained than they were before reading your content. Before you write any content ask yourself, “What is my plan to affect the reader’s mind and heart?”

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:  Ann Handley on How to Make Your Writing ‘Ludicrously Spectacular’

Reframe the present (Churchill)

“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” – Winston Churchill

At the time of Churchill’s famous speech to parliament in 1940, England was on the brink of disaster. What does his speech have to do with good writing?

Look closely at the excerpt to see how he told the story of the present situation in future tense. He retold the present to inspire victory from the depths of defeat.

To follow Churchill’s inspired storytelling (without the inherent drama of an ongoing war), learn these three lessons:

Allude to an ideal future.

Confidently repeat the call to action.

Make a stand.

3 more classic writing devices

It’s easy to get bogged down in telling stories if you don’t have many devices in your content arsenal. Now that you’ve added a few inspired by Hemingway, Orwell, and Churchill, let’s shift gears to focus on three other useful writing tactics.

Reinvented clichés

Nothing is more tiresome to a reader than a cliché or an overused phrase. Writers use clichés as crutches, leaning on them instead of taking the time to invent something new and exciting.

For example, at the beginning of this section, I used the cliché, “let’s shift gears.” When you read it, you did not think about a car’s gears shifting and how that relates to a change of subject. You read the phrase as an indication the subject would be changing. Not recognizing the original meaning is a clue to recognizing “a dead metaphor” as Orwell put it. The phrase is now a cliché.

Luckily, reinvented clichés offer an opportunity to breathe new life into your content. Lyricists in the music industry often use them, as they must find new and rhapsodic-sounding lines to move their listeners.

Reinvent clichés to breathe new life into your #content, says @czollingerBC. #writingtips‏ Click To Tweet

Rapper B.o.B. often takes an artistic approach to metaphors by reinventing clichés such as this line from E.T., “I went from being who are you to chillin’ with the who’s who.”

The boring cliché would have been “the who’s who” if left on its own. But pairing it with “who are you,” he makes the phrase come alive again to illustrate his journey to success.

Synecdoche

This writing technique is the act of describing a whole idea by presenting bits and pieces of it. Toni Morrison uses synecdoche to great effect in her novel Beloved:

This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that needs support; shoulders that needs arms, strong arms I’m telling you.

In this example, she conveys what the physical parts of a body need to convey what an individual person in need requires.

Any idea or topic can be deconstructed and presented in a more effective way.

TIP: Writing advice can sometimes be contradictory. The key is to identify what tricks and tools work best for what you’re trying to convey to your audience about a particular topic in a particular format at a particular time.

Hypophora

Strategically ask questions that are immediately answered. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy used hypophora in their famous speeches.

“There are those who are asking the devotees of Civil Rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’ 

“We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality; we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities …” – Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream

“But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? …

“We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard …” – John F. Kennedy, We Choose to Go to the Moon

Refocus your writing

Never approach the keyboard without the determination to convey meaning to another person, even if it’s just one individual. One loyal reader will do more for your brand than 100 passive glancers. Capture your audience by crafting memorable stories that avoid the common pitfalls and embrace the success of great communicators like Hemingway, Orwell, Churchill, and others.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Road Map to Success: Creating the Content of Your Audience’s Dreams

Get memorable tips from great writers and editors at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today using code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Turn Your Content From Lousy to Memorable appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/07/content-lousy-memorable/