Adam Street's Blog
The spiritual and practical path to freedom to do your art

Fishing Out Writer’s Block

Blank screen.  What do you write?

Coming up with good ideas to talk about can be tough sometimes.  

Holidays are usually my cop out.  Especially if you use a website like Holiday Insights.  You can find all sorts of outrageous ‘days’ to talk about like Hammock Day and National Marshmallow Toasting Day.  

Bill Veeck was a baseball team owner who knew how to get butts in seats.  In 1941 he bought the cash-strapped and last-place Milwaukee Brewers and turned them around.  He invented wild new concepts like ladies night and shooting off fireworks after the team scored.  These things are normal now but back then they were revolutionary.

I’m not suggesting you need to reinvent the wheel by the way…   Look at Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.  How easy was that?  Lets take one of the most terrifying fish in the ocean and let’s talk about it for a week!  Sounds simple to me…

In picking your subject my only caveat is, talk about something you enjoy or find interesting.  Chat about it and anchor your business goals to it.

Being Normal is Boring

Yesterday I came across an interview with Vampryn.  Vampryn is weird.  And by weird I mean her appearance is a bit outrageous.  Take a look at her… What’s your first thought?  

Maybe she thinks she’s a vampire?  Maybe she hangs out a QAnon parties drinking blood with Hillary Clinton?

Vampryn said her style is 80’s/90’s goth but then she said this:

“Being normal is just boring.  There’s no point.  Why live a life to be boring.”

Her appearance may make your grandmother reach for a crucifix but she gets one GIANT fundamental of marketing.  If your marketing is boring, ‘there’s no point’.  It’s just….noise.

You need to find a way to be weird like Vampryn.  Maybe it’s not your appearance.  I saw a real estate agent dancing in a house she was selling on TikTok.  

Maybe it’s your guarantee. Back in the 80’s Hyundai cars were garbage. So they created the best warranty in the biz and they started selling cars. Lots of them.

You may despise me for it but you WILL remember that picture of Vampryn for a while.  The question is… What can you do to be just as memorable to your tribe?

Shipwrecking Your Ideas

In copywriting groups on Facebook, someone asks daily what they need to do to be a copywriter.  Why none of them don’t type those exact words into Google I will never know… 

Most responses are about books to read and courses to take but almost all of them forget one important thing.  The path to being a good writer is by studying other writers.  NOT copywriters. WRITERS.  

You wanna study copywriters too but not as much as you think.  You want to learn how to tell stories and make copy that jumps off the page.  Who does that better than Michael Crichton, Stephen King, or Mark Twain?

All business have struggles and if you spend all your time looking at what everyone else is doing you’ll end up shipwrecked.  You need to use your imagination.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”   

Albert Einstein

I remember I wigged out when I learned Einstein wasn’t a quantum physicists, he was a theoretical physicist.  I read his biography and so many of his discoveries were sparked by him using his imagination and thinking about space or riding on a light beam.

Sound like something from Captain Marvel or Guardians of the Galaxy, right?

In your business, get best practices and model them.  Use great ideas from different industries.   But also use your imagination and chill!  

This is why ideas hit us in the shower or right before bed.  Our bodies ooze dopamine when we’re relaxed. Once settled down we’re able to make connections and get inspired. 

Researching, analyzing, and combing the Internet for ideas, rarely helps us connect the big dots.  It’s like buying a box of cake mix, mixing the ingredients, and never putting it in the oven to bake.

Charging Like a Doctor

My friend Miguel is a fireman.  I’ve known him since high school.  Like me he’s creative, competitive, and entrepreneurial.  The fact that he likes running into burning buildings is where our similarities die off.  

A couple of years ago he started a t-shirt screen printing business.  He also does his own graphics and logo work for his clients.  A couple of weeks ago I was in his studio looking at his work.  

He was good.  For a guy who just picked up graphic design his work was solid.  I asked him how much he charged on his last project and he told me less than $200 (don’t remember the exact number).

My brain rattled the biggest WTF! I could manage without saying the acronym out loud!  

As Wayne Dyer used to say, there’s a fine line between being a prophet and an asshole.  I know what I know but I try not to annoy my friends (and strangers too for that matter) with my unsolicited wisdom.

But me holding this one back would be like a single beaver trying to damn up Niagra Falls.

I barked that he was too cheap.  He explained how he made money on the shirts, used software that made it easy, plus he was new…  Blah, blah, blah.

I fired back with, “when a doctor graduates and starts a practice he charges what a ‘doctor’ makes.  So stop making excuses and charge what a graphic artist charges!”  I did all this while smiling so I could come off more as a prophet and less of a Sith lord.

His wife worked in a dentist office for years so she got it immediately.  He got it too but who knows if he changed his prices moving forward.

I say the same thing to you..  Are you charging the right amount or are you playing small?  And if what you’re charging is good are you raising your prices every one to two years to keep up with inflation?  

I do and I recommend you do too.  It’s so easy to get faked out thinking we always need new clients.  Sometimes you need to charge the ones you have MORE. 

Story isn’t everything. No wait, it is.

In Hollywood story is everything. The story in the movie trailer. The story behind how someone makes it, or how a movie get produced, is what audiences remember and talk about.

The Empire Strikes Back had mind-blowing visual and special effects. It was gorgeous, had great acting, and introduced us to lovable characters like Yoda. And what do people still buzz about decades later? One of the most nerve-shattering story twists of the century, “Luke, I am your father.” And of course some great Yoda quotes…

“A good story makes a good film possible, while failure to make the story work virtually guarantees disaster. A reader who can’t grasp this fundamental deserves to be fired.”

Robert McKee, from Story

This may sound like a nice little quote about writing movies from a ‘screenwriter’ but don’t think for a second that this doesn’t apply to you or your business. If your story doesn’t connect with your audience YOU are likely to be fired.

Or maybe they still do business with you but they only buy one thing. Is cross-selling them products working about as well as Icarus flying towards the sun? Sometimes you don’t have to change your offering, but you do need to change the story behind it.

Your story isn’t some tangible thing that’s in front of them all day like a computer monitor, it’s something that rests in their mind. It’s what you believe, how you communicate to them, and how you treat them.

If they don’t FEEL any different when you interact with them or if there’s nothing unique about doing business with you, then why should they? They may as well go to Fivr.com or Walmart and buy whatever’s cheapest.

Don’t let this happen to you. Give them a story that is so compelling they have to share. Send e-mails they like so much they forward to friends. Have Facebook posts that actually entertain and don’t put them to sleep.

Craft great stories to sell everything that you do. Be interesting. And keep cashing them checks.