Ben Guttmann
Fran Lebowitz hasn’t written a book since 1994. For the last 30 years, she’s had a monumental and infamous case of writer’s block. She doesn’t even call it a block anymore – in her words, it’s a writer’s “blockade” on the “same schedule as the Vietnam War.”
But while Lebowitz isn’t writing, she has sure done a lot of talking in the years since. Maybe you’ve seen her on late-night shows or on a speaking tour. Just a few years ago, millions of people watched her conversational collaboration with Martin Scorcese on Netflix, Pretend it’s a City. She’s a gifted writer – but today, she’s also one of the most engaging talkers in the world.
Writing can be hard. But it’s easy to talk. Once in a while, we might find ourselves “at a loss for words,” but just for a few moments. Never does our talker’s block last for days, weeks, or years.
Back in 2011, marketer and blogger Seth Godin wrote about this non-problem:
The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied.
We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn’t, and if we’re insightful, do more of what works. How can one get talker’s block after all this practice?
It’s easy to talk because we talk. It’s a muscle we work out all the time – to the tune of about 18,400 words a day for women and 16,600 for men. If we ride our bikes every day, biking over that bridge gets easier. If we lift weights every day, lugging our briefcase around gets easier. We talk all day, so talking gets easier.
Unsurprisingly, writing is the same. If we do it a lot, we get better at it. But most of us don’t do it a whole lot. Years after we had English teachers tasking us with essays about The Catcher in the Rye, now we maybe send off a few paragraphs in an email or occasionally write a couple of pages for a proposal.
But if we don’t work out, our muscles atrophy. In just two weeks, astronauts can lose up to 20% of their muscle mass as they float around in zero gravity. Float around too long without writing, and that next blog post becomes a harder and harder hill to climb.
We can also use this strong talking muscle to our advantage. We can write like we talk. It’s easier – and it’s often better.
Here’s what I wrote about that in Simply Put:
If your message is stiff and just won’t shake loose the burdensome confines of business-speak, take it off the page and talk it out. Talk to yourself in the shower, talk to your spouse over breakfast, or, best yet, talk to somebody who’s close to your audience. By virtue of thousands of daily reps, your talking muscle is probably a lot stronger than your writing one, so use it.
Nobody wants to read a dry press release or a wall of corporate jargon. The best writing sounds like a human talking to another human. If you feel uncomfortable saying what you need to say in conversation, you need to go back and talk it out. Use those muscles.
