First draft? Banish the editor

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I write “instructional” articles as much for myself as for the intended audience.

The fact is, it’s often easier to recommend and even teach certain techniques than it is to put them into action. I need to be reminded. A lot.

That’s certainly the case with this article’s subject: banishing your internal editor.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I have a tendency to try to write things perfectly in the first draft. (I can feel myself doing it right now.) When I finish a story to my satisfaction, I like the idea that I can submit it immediately without much revision at all.

This is stupid. Don’t do this. (I’m speaking to myself here.)

In its best, most creative form, writing is a sloppy business. Sentence construction is suspect, paragraphs are too long, spelling is atrocious, and grammar is unforgivable.

But that’s OK. In fact, it’s perfect.

Writing the first draft of anything should have nothing to do with proper grammar, sentence construction, or anything else that your Freshman Composition instructor would be happy with. A first draft is about creativity. It’s about letting the romper room of overly-caffeinated thoughts in your brain rush down your neck, divert out your arms, and explode from your fingertips until the pounding of the computer keys sounds like the cadence of the natives’ drums in some bad Tarzan movie. The faster, the better. Don’t spend a bunch of time agonizing over each sentence.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Lean closer to your computer so you can hear me.

We all suck.

It’s true. As creative writers, all of us are operating at varying degrees of suckiness. (It’s a word because I just made it up.)

Don’t get me wrong. The world is full of insanely talented writers, but none of us are the Hemingways we think we are as we spend two hours trying to choose between the words “voluminous” and “copious.” However, the more we write, the less we suck, so our goal should be to write more.

Trying to write perfectly — especially in the first draft — results in only one thing: your frustration. Instead of rushing toward a satisfying conclusion to your story — one that can be tweaked, polished, and spiffed up in the editing process — you find yourself wearing lead shoes in one of those dream tunnels that keeps getting longer and longer. The story wants to be written and is straining at the leash, but as the author, you keep yanking it back in pursuit of perfection right out of the gate.

Banish your internal editor. Rudely show him the door and fling out his impertinent red markers as well. The first draft is supposed to be an epic party, and your internal editor is a boorish, high-school chaperone. Invite all your craziest, most reckless thoughts to the first draft. You know, the ones who initiate drunk Twister and end up passed out in the bathtub wearing a lopsided Sharpie mustache. These are the guys you want because they’re not trying to impress anyone.

There should never be a filter between an idea and the process of its expression.

Once you have exhausted your creativity and that party in your brain has resulted in the deranged and unexpected pairings of known elements to create new ideas, you can welcome back your editor with open arms. He will roll up his sleeves, survey the room with mock disgust, and have at it.

And you, my reckless friend, will have a better byline than you expected.

~Mark

Podcasting: What we’ve learned so far

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In February, 2020, my wife, Holly, and I launched “The How in the World Podcast,” our first such endeavor. A few weeks later, I followed that with “The Doofus Dad Podcast.”

Why would we involve ourselves in such a hair-brained scheme and pile even more work on top of our already crazy schedule? Great question. Here are my main reasons for adding “podcaster” to my resume:

  1. Promotion. We wanted to create a podcast “vehicle” to help promote our side business, Hobnail Trekking Co. and to market my books. This gives us a place to advertise. From a business standpoint, this is easily THE reason for creating a podcast — it places your service/product into a different media platform and, theoretically, before a new audience.
  2. Fun. We wanted a fun project we could tackle together, and it has turned out to be a hoot.
  3. Other projects. I knew I wanted to be able to record audiobooks and do voiceover work at home, too, so we wanted to make as much use out of recording equipment as possible.
  4. Communications training. I wanted to dip my toe into the process of producing and publishing a podcast just to learn how it all works. Mission accomplished. I’m now publishing two weekly podcasts.
  5. Revenue source. I really don’t expect either podcast to make money any time soon — or ever — other than indirectly, through the promotion of our trekking company and the sale of my books. Instead of No. 5, this should really be, like, No. 147.

“So how’s it going so far, how do you record it, and is anything in the above list working?” you’re now asking.

Geez, you’re full of questions today…

Format

After we decided on our topic — breaking down and explaining commonly asked questions about the world’s great mysteries — we had to choose a format. Would it be scripted or unscripted? How long would each episode be? Would we have call-in guests? How many episodes per month?

We decided on scripted episodes, around 10 minutes-long, one per week, and without guests (to begin with). This meant we would need to write 1,600-word scripts, roughly, after several hours of internet research per topic. That’s a substantial investment in time, but we committed to trying it. On occasion, we will throw in an unscripted episode where we each do our own research, make notes, and then meet in front of the microphones and “wing it.” This works pretty well, too.

Set-up and hosting

We also knew that the “How in the World Podcast” would need it’s own domain and website (I’ve already got a site for Doofus Dad), so that was another commitment of time and around $200 in hosting, security, domain registration, etc.

For both podcasts, we had to choose a hosting platform; we went with Blubrry (yes, that’s how it’s spelled). Although Libsyn was a close contender, we chose Blubrry mainly because of its seamless integration with WordPress. One the plugin is installed, a WordPress post can easily be converted to a podcast episode and, when published, is automatically routed through Blubrry and out into the podcasting world to all the popular platforms. So far, I’ve found Blubrry to be awesome, with excellent customer support. (Humans actually answer the phone.)

Production

It took me a while to decide on how I wanted to actually record a podcast, and I can’t claim that my way is the best, but it works for me. An old friend of mine from the music business turned me on to a recording device called a Rode Rodecaster Pro podcast production studio. At $600, this constituted our largest financial hit, but there’s a lot of bang for the buck. The Rodecaster is a self-contained podcasting studio that allows for four microphones to be operating simultaneously, each with its own fader and settings. There is also a Bluetooth channel specifically for incoming phone calls, which I haven’t yet used. One of the best features is the ability to record either to a micro SD card or directly into a computer via USB connection. This is great because it allows the recording process to be entirely mobile and without the need for a computer.

(And no, I’m not a Rode affiliate or anything. If only…)

As far as microphones go, we bought two MXL 770 cardioid mics, only about $60 each, as well as two desktop mic stands to hold them. Our headphones are Sony MDRV6 Studio Headphones.

I created a sound-dampening studio in one half of my home office by using two rolling garment racks draped in moving blankets and covered in tapestries to make them look better. On the walls, I installed around $120 worth of acoustic foam tile using Command Strips to hold them up.

As far as the actual recording goes, it’s a piece of cake. Holly and I sit across from each other and each hold a printed copy of the script. We read through the copy and throw in ad libs wherever we want. When we make mistakes, we simply go back to the start of the sentence and read it again without stopping the recording.

For a 10-minute episode, it usually takes us about 15 minutes of actual time to record an episode. Then, I import the audio file into Adobe Audition, edit out the mistakes, add the opening sequence and Hobnail Trekking ad at the end, and export the whole thing as a .mp3 file, which I’ll later upload into my WordPress post. This takes around an hour, depending on how well we did during the initial recording. Aside from writing the script, the most time-consuming process is creating the show notes and building the web page for each episode, which might take two or three hours.

Results

So far, I’ve been relatively pleased with the audience response to our podcasts, mainly because I had very low expectations. One of the podcasting coaches we subscribe to says that building an audience is a slow process, and if you have more than just your mom listening over the first few months, you’re doing well. And in case you’re wondering, it’s impossible to calculate the number of subscriptions. For whatever reason, that’s just not a metric that podcast distributors (like Apple Music, iTunes, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and others) report back to the host. Hopefully, that will change someday.

Incidentally, we’ve been approached by a company that pairs podcasts for cross-promotion, so we’ll see how that goes.

Parting thoughts

You know much better than me about your business’ demographic and whether or not your customers would be receptive to a podcast. Just keep in mind that, when things get back to (the new) normal post COVID, people will again be driving places, and the podcasting platform takes advantage of that “down time” unlike any other. A short podcast may be the perfect way to reach your customers when they are most receptive to listening.

Speaking for myself, our podcasting journey has certainly been worth doing and a lot of fun. Hopefully, within a couple of years, it will start paying dividends as far as our trekking company and books are concerned, but even if it doesn’t, it has been a great project for Holly and me. Even better, I now know how dry cleaning works, how grasshoppers turn into locusts, how cats purr, how the Great Wall of China was built, and a bunch of other stuff I was clueless about before.

If you’d like to check out the website I built for “The How in the World Podcast,” GO HERE.  Also, find “The Doofus Dad Podcast” HERE. If you’d like any other information about podcasting or help setting one up for yourself or your business, email me any time.

~ Mark

Producing a ‘Perd Hapley’ newscaster video

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A little while back, I was asked to make a video to announce the winners of the 2020 CCA Communications Contest. (CCA is a professional association of cooperative communicators. I’ve been a member for 17 years and counting.) The only direction I was given was to read the names of the winning cooperatives in either a Facebook Live presentation or a recorded video.

In deciding how to do this, I thought it might be remotely entertaining to be kind of a silly anchorman, something like the character “Perd Hapley” on the sitcom “Parks & Recreation,” so I gave it a try. It was fun, anyway…

But from a technical standpoint, this took a little bit of work. Here’s what I did. (I’ve included a video below that shows some of this, as well as the Amazon links to a few things.)

Primary lighting

I knew lighting would be one of the main issues because I would be shooting this in my own home office, not an actual studio. The solution came from one of my oldest music industry friends, Dennis Ritchie, who also teaches sound engineering. He had recently been doing Zoom classes and had come up with some great, low-cost solutions for lighting himself. Based on his recommendation, I bought two inexpensive clip-on utility light fixtures from Amazon. (These things are SO useful.) For bulbs, I used two LED BR30 reflector bulbs. Once the bulbs were installed, I covered the entire fixture in a white trash bag. Voila! Instant softbox! The fact that LED bulbs emit hardly any heat at all allows you to use the trash bags. The effect is a wonderful, diffused light for a total cost of around $25.

Much trickier, though, is properly lighting the green screen. More about that in a minute.

Camera

The camera I used was a Canon EOS C700 GS PL cinema camera. No, it wasn’t. Just kidding. I actually used my iPhone 11 Pro Max on a tripod. I recently updated my phone and chose this model specifically because of the camera capabilities, which allow you to shoot 4K video at up to 60 frames per second. Frankly, it would be hard to find a dedicated video camera with the same capabilities for a comparable cost, plus you can make phone calls and play Candy Crush on the iPhone. (Yes, I still play Candy Crush.)

Green screen

The green screen, a 9′ X 15′ fabric backdrop, I also found on Amazon for $36. I draped this over the two rolling garment racks that I use to create my podcast studio and pulled them up behind me at the proper distance. I clamped the fabric tightly to the frame to remove most of the wrinkles.

As I mentioned before, one of the keys of using a green screen is lighting it evenly so the greens will be consistent and easier to remove in editing. I did the best I could, which was to place two lamps on the floor in front of the screen and turned on the overhead. This was by no means perfect, but it got the job done. Given a little more planning time, I would’ve probably used another set of clip-on lights for this, but I had to go with the materials at hand.

In this month’s “Toolbag” section, I’ve included a tutorial video on how to use green screen in Adobe Premier Pro, which is what I used for editing. (The background, by the way, was a photo I found using my Adobe Stock Photos subscription. The opening sequence was already an option in Premier Pro.)

Audio

For audio, I moved my Rodecaster podcast studio and microphone onto my desk and just out of camera frame. After starting the video, I clapped my hands once to create a reference point. When I finished, I imported both the video and the audio track into Premier Pro, unlinking and deleting the audio track that recorded with the iPhone. I then synced the Rodecaster track with the video, again using the handclap as the reference point. Worked like a charm!

So there you have it. This is just an example of what you can do with very little budget. Check out the video below. (Unless you have a weird and inexplicable need to watch me read the names of cooperatives you’ve probably never heard of, you can get enough information just from the opening minute or so.)

The brilliant marketing of Booger Mountain

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You often hear people these days talk about storytelling as it relates to advertising. It seems, in fact, that the art of storytelling has become a cottage industry in the 21st century, as if it’s a new concept. But it’s not. Great storytelling has a mainstay of communications since people first invented verbal language. In fact, this is how most knowledge was shared until the invention of the printing press.

Some great storytellers were famous and some weren’t. Take for example, my dad.

By the end of Saturday, March 26, 1966, my parents had received two life-altering things: a package containing the deed to a farm in the North Carolina foothills and bouncing baby boy they named Mark. Honestly, I’m not sure which excited my dad more. The farm, you see, was a neglected, overgrown piece of land where Dad used to go rabbit-hunting as a teenager, and he had set his sights on purchasing it for years. He finally scraped up the money to do it.

(I, on the other hand, was the third of three Johnson kids, so no big deal.)

The purchase of the farm may have been the single most important move in all of our lives. The property, you see, was said by the locals to be haunted. Like, seriously haunted. Legend had it that a 19th-century family lived in a cabin on the place, and one Christmas Eve, they disappeared without a trace as a strange snowfall fell across their tiny valley only. Neighboring valleys were weirdly unaffected. “Pa Walker,” people said, was a bad fellow — a thief and “heathen.” The devil, they claimed, came to get him in under the cover of that Christmas Eve snow, and the rest of the family was collateral damage.

Yikes.

But this wasn’t the only creepy thing about the farm. A Cherokee Indian graveyard was located near the peak of the small mountain that overlooked the valley. Supposedly, 28 individuals who died during a smallpox epidemic were buried there, and on certain nights, these unhappy souls would drift down from the graveyard to create mischief in the valley below. For these reasons, the locals dubbed the peak “Booger Mountain.” (In those days, Appalachian folk referred to ghosts as “haints,” “spooks,” and “boogers.”)

Well, my dad was not to be deterred by a bunch of ghosts. To the contrary, I think he rather enjoyed them. After purchasing the farm, Dad decided to grow white pine Christmas trees and sell them on a small lot in our hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. Ever the marketing genius, he named his little company “Booger Mountain Christmas Trees” knowing full well that the name would confuse but, ultimately, attract potential customers.

At the time, Dad was also the editor of Progressive Farmer magazine, and he was a skilled writer. In a moment of clarity, he landed on the idea to incorporate storytelling into his Christmas tree business and wrote an account of the Walker family as told to him by the “old, bald-headed barber” who used to take teenaged Dad rabbit hunting on the farm.

The story was short — probably around 1,000 words — and fit on the inside of a letter-size sheet of paper folded in half. On the outside, my artistic mother drew a picture of a friendly ghost and wrote the words, “The Legend of Booger Mountain.” Dad had several hundred of these pamphlets printed up and would give a copy away with the sale of each Christmas tree.

It worked.

Before long, demand for his trees required Dad to open more and more lots, and, over time, “Booger Mountain” became a household name in the Raleigh area. Throughout the ’70s, Dad was routinely profiled in local newspapers, interviewed on television and radio, always telling the story of the Walkers. In 1982 and ’83, he was named “Grand Champion Grower” by the National Christmas Tree Growers Association, and we ended up at the White House, presenting the Blue Room tree to President Ronald Reagan. Back home, people lined up for our trees on opening day each Christmas season. (It helped that we produced a quality of tree that was rarely seen in those days.)

This December of 2021 will mark the 53rd year that Booger Mountain Christmas Trees are sold to happy customers in North Carolina. Although I’m no longer involved in the business, I’m told that longtime and loyal patrons still single out “The Legend of Booger Mountain,” as one of the elements they remember most. Year after year, they would make sure they received their little photocopied version of the story. It didn’t matter that they already knew it by heart.

The simple truth is, storytelling works. It cuts through the dry, predictable elements of business to make a personal connection. Never underestimate the power of storytelling in your own communications.

Footnote: Booger Mountain was, indeed, haunted. My family spent many summers and weekends on the farm, and yes, strange things occurred. Listen to the Doofus Dad Podcast below as I describe my favorite Booger Mountain moment.

The website dilemma: Pay to maintain or live on the edge?

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In 2013, I began a position as communications director for a statewide non-profit. My first and largest responsibility was to oversee the redesign of the organization’s website.

Yikes.

The existing site was so old, it was covered in virtual dust and cobwebs. Every time I logged in, a couple moths would fly out of my computer. The site was built on a version of Joomla — a popular web development platform — that hadn’t been updated in close to 10 years, a lifetime in terms of software.

The fancy new site, already under construction, was being built on a custom CMS (content management system) by a Memphis communications company. Much to my dismay, this new site would cost the organization nearly $50,000! My job was to oversee the completion of the site as well as the transition from old to new.

No pressure…

My previous website experience involved creating a couple simple sites in 1999, back when these things were built with stones and chisels and were powered by hamster-driven spinning wheels. Those sites had cost a grand total of around $800 and were a far cry from this multi-functional behemoth. I jumped in as best I could and rode the learning curve like a bucking bronco.

Half a year later, the new site was finished and installed. It was shiny, clean, and smelled like a new Chevrolet. It looked great, operated quickly, and was an immediate success. Our donors began calling the CEO and heaping praise upon the organization.

I strutted around the office like a prize rooster.

But after about six months, something happened. Things began to break. Parts of the site loaded either very slowly or not at all. Other staff members began grumbling, and pretty soon, I was avoiding people.

What was going on?

I called the Memphis company to complain and was told that we needed to participate in their maintenance program, which was expensive as heck. I felt as though we’d been duped into purchasing an incredibly expensive website that could only be maintained by the company that built it. I was frustrated and embarrassed, even though I’d come into the project after the fact. After only a year, we scrapped the entire site and started over within a much less expensive WordPress environment. That took another six months.

Sounds like fun, eh? I’m pretty sure I had a full head of hair when the project began.

Fast forward to the present. I now own a company that builds and maintains WordPress sites, and ironically, I find myself on the other side of the fence — in the role of the provider rather than the user, although I run four websites of my own. Throughout the past seven years of learning many difficult lessons, I’ve come to these three conclusions about any commercial website:

  1. It will break, and
  2. You’ll probably need help fixing it; and
  3. You’ll probably need help keeping it looking professional.

Why is this? Isn’t the dang thing supposed to work??

Well … yes and no. Let me explain.

1) It WILL break

Think of a new website exactly like a new car, a fancy one. When you drive it off the lot, it seems inconceivable that anything could ever go wrong with it, right? It’s perfect! The problem is, new cars have thousands of tiny moving parts that interact with each other. When one part fails, it often acts as a falling domino and causes other parts to also fail. Before long, this manifests into a vibration in the steering wheel or a weird ka-chink ka-chink noise in the engine. Let this go long enough and you find yourself sitting in your fancy car on the side of the interstate, waiting for a tow truck.

Websites are just the same. Let’s use the WordPress platform, the world’s most popular, as an example. If your WordPress website has e-commerce capabilities, contact forms, a user login, integrates social media feeds, or any other type of interactive functionality, it relies on “plugins.” These are the little pieces of code that make those things work. Each of these plugins are (usually) created by different individuals or companies that are often making changes to improve them. We know these improvements as “updates.” When the webmaster receives notification of the update and applies it, chances are fairly good that a neighboring plugin — one that works in concert with the newly updated plugin — will freak out and stop operating, and in an instant, your shiny new website is stuck on the side of the interstate, or in this case, the internet.

Because the Website Fates are particularly evil, this often happens at the most insidious times possible. (For me, it happened once on December 31, just after I sent out an email blast to 100,000 contacts asking for end-of-year donations. Absolute nightmare!) Now, your boss is furious and you feel like a total dope. Possibly, an unemployed dope.

So what’s the answer? We all have to have websites, right?

2) You’ll probably need help fixing it

Here’s the deal. When you purchase a new website — especially a complex one that includes an e-commerce function and multiple pages — be prepared to also purchase a maintenance program. It’s that simple. When you have a qualified, experienced person dedicated to installing updates, testing purchases, and anticipating problems, you can head most of those issues off at the pass, exactly like you would when you have that new car serviced on a regular schedule.

But here’s a little secret: If you go with a platform like WordPress, you will have many, many companies or developers to choose from to handle your maintenance, as opposed to my situation at the non-profit with the $50K site. Since it was a custom CMS, only that company could do the maintenance, so they essentially had a monopoly and could charge whatever they wanted. WordPress, on the other hand, is an “open source” platform. This means that anybody can contribute to it and, if qualified, work on it, which tends to keep website companies that build WordPress sites “honest” with their maintenance plan pricing.

3) You’ll probably need help keeping it looking good

Communications companies like mine have a peculiar problem — it’s difficult to present prospective clients with examples of our past work. This isn’t because they don’t exist; it’s because we’re often too embarrassed to show anyone.

Why? Well, think about it.

When we deliver a new website, it’s a close to perfect as possible. The colors all match. The photos are all crisp and clear. The grammar and punctuation of the copy is correct. All the various boxes and elements are carefully aligned and all work together. If you’ll allow another analogy, this is akin to that amazing model home you walked through when choosing the floorplan for your dream house.

But unless you hire a professional to decorate it, your dream house will never look as good as the model home. It’s just true, and it is with websites, too.

In most cases, the client takes over the website after we finish it, which means they will, at some point, begin changing and updating the content, which is like you decorating your dream house with whatever furniture and decor that came out of your old house.

Many — actually, most — companies with websites don’t consider this. Unless they are large enough to hire an experienced webmaster to handle this work, it almost always falls to:

  • An administrative assistant who usually handles payroll and accounts payable and plays the church organ on Sundays;
  • A college temp who spends most of his or her time staring at TikTok;
  • The manager’s pimply teenaged kid who needs the money for a new video game;
  • That guy in the warehouse who “has an iMac and knows Photoshop,” or;
  • The marketing person who is also busy designing the showroom, handling ad sales, making promotional videos, and a hundred other things.

You see where this is heading. Within a few weeks, that beautiful website becomes a jumbled collection of incorrectly sized, bit-mappy photos, clashing colors, misspelled words, and all other kinds of unprofessional madness.

So much for the model home.

This isn’t because those people didn’t work hard at it or have the very best intentions. It’s simply because they weren’t trained to design websites. You wouldn’t hire a yoga teacher to clean your teeth or handle your plumbing, would you? Of course not. Then, why assign an unqualified person to handle your website?

Designing and maintaining websites requires a certain skill set, just like anything else. So if you want your website to look great, work like it’s supposed to, and project a professional image of your company to the outside world, you must take it seriously. Here’s what I recommend:

  1. If you’re starting from scratch, work with a web developer you trust and get along with to build your site.
  2. Budget for a monthly maintenance program up front. Expect to pay $200-$300 per month. (In most cases, the developer is the best person for the job.)
  3. Before promoting a new product or anything that involves using the e-commerce part of your site, test it. Then, test it again. Then, test it AGAIN! (Remember, e-commerce functionality requires not only your site to work properly, but also relies on your connection to whatever payment processing company you’re using.)
  4. Develop a plan for who will handle your content updates after you receive your site, and make sure that they have the skill and time to handle it. If nobody on staff is qualified and you can’t afford a new employee, use an outside contractor, freelancer, or the original developer. (This will probably be a LOT cheaper than hiring someone full time.)
  5. Above all, don’t try to beat the system. Like most of us, you are far too busy with your normal responsibilities to add handling a professional website. This will never end well, and I speak from experience, unfortunately.

In these days of COVID, we are increasingly living in a virtual world. Every day, more and more people choose to purchase things over the internet rather than going into a physical store. Every moment that ticks by sees another young person who was born during the internet boom — and never knew life before it — becoming an adult and begin making purchasing decisions. An online presence can no longer be viewed as an afterthought to your business, or simply a helpful tool for your customers. It is quickly becoming the most critical and indispensable tool of all.

Time to take it seriously; you can no longer afford not to.