When I turned 64, I celebrated my birthday by lifting 205 pounds. When I turned 63, I celebrated my birthday by lifting a toothbrush, so that was quite an accomplishment.

How did I hit my personal best so quickly? I hired a coach to show me insider tricks, practiced with him regularly, took his feedback and got a little better every day.

Before I knew it, I was twice as good, then three times as good, then four times as good. And then, suddenly, I was picking up the combined weight of myself and all my roommates with my own personal biceps.

How can you hit your personal best?

I’ve used a similar approach to become a better business owner, teacher and writer, as well. Here’s how I’ve done it, and how you can do it too:

1. Train. Only the best writers come to writing workshops. The rest are busy doing things exactly as they have done for years. No train, no gain!
2. Practice. Practice makes perfect — but only if you’re practicing best practices. Reading a blog post doesn’t polish your skills. Learning, followed by action, does.
3. Get feedback. Work with a coach who can show you how to take the next step, continue to improve and get a little better every day.

One of my business coaches likes to say, “If you get 1% better every day, in 70 days, you’ll be twice as good.”

How good will you be by Feb. 27?

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Edward R. Murrow said of Winston Churchill: “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”

He rallied the British, defied the Nazis and inspired the United States to fight. Some say he saved the Western world with his words.

“Never, never, never give up.”

He was captured by the Boers and escaped. He wrote about his military adventures in newspaper articles and books. By 1899, he was one of the highest paid and best known British war correspondents.

“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

In 1900, when Churchill came to the United States for a lecture tour, he was introduced by Mark Twain.

“There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.”

He coined phrases like “Finest Hour,” “Never give in” and “Iron Curtain.” He showed that words can change people’s minds and move them to act.

“Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory.”

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his contributions to the written word. In his spare time, he wrote 40 books in 60 volumes and painted more than 500 paintings.

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant.”

His words still inspire, 50 years after his death. He’s been quoted by presidents — and on Angelina Jolie.

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

May I ask why every corporate communicator on the planet isn’t using Churchill as her personal and professional muse? Why don’t we model his words every time we write a speech, a sound bite or an executive message?

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

Stop modeling tedious executive quotes.

One problem with executive quotes is that we model them after other executive quotes. That’s how we wind up putting together ridiculous lines like these, from the UK Press quote generator:

“A market first, our cutting-edge software product is a major move towards WAP-enablement.”

“Representing a radical step-change, our new product set tests the performance of enhanced customer care.”

“Out-of-the-box, our end-to-end solution recognises the importance of mission critical operations.”

If you want to write better quotes, steal from better sources. Raise the bar. Change the benchmark. Model the masters instead of the amateurs.

Raise the bar.

So instead of using other executive quotations as your models, model rhetorical masters like Churchill. He’s the guy who said:

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”

And:

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

And:

“Kites rise highest against the wind — not with it.”

Don’t you wish your executives sounded like that?

They would — if you wrote better sound bites.

Find quotes to model.

Once you run out of Churchill quotations, model Lincoln. Or Reagan. Or Clinton. Or George W. Bush. Or Obama.

Find world-class quotes to model at BrainyQuote and Fagan Finder’s Quotations and Proverbs Search.

Learn more about modeling the masters.

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Years ago, I ran across this passage Stephen Schiff wrote about Australian film director Fred Schepisi for The New Yorker:

Later, I interviewed a startup president whose gestures reminded me of Schiff’s Schepisi. I noted the entrepreneur’s hand movements and wrote this lead:

It’s definitely not Schiff — today, I shudder at the verb move — but it’s a whole lot better than it would have been without Schiff.

Don’t just read as a reader.

To model the masters, make sure you’re not just reading as a reader.

Readers read for information and entertainment. Writers read for information and entertainment, too. But they also read for something else: technique.

Another writer might introduce you to a new way of crafting a headline, mastering a metaphor, structuring a story or describing gestures.

How do you read as a writer? Every time you read your favorite books or a piece of creative writing you love, focus on technique, not just the story. You’ll learn to read for writing, not just for pleasure and information.

How do you separate your reader from your writer so you can see the technique?

• Move from your pleasure-reading spot. I do my writer-reading on planes and at my desk. I read as a reader on my couch or in bed. Read the book or other piece in the right spot.
• Before you start reading, gather the right tools. Reading like a writer used to take highlighters, pencils and sticky notes. Now I use my Kindle’s clippings and notes features to capture great passages and write myself notes about them.
• Don’t get swept away. The problem with reading as a writer is that when you read the good stuff, you can get lost in the prose. When you feel this happening, force yourself to snap out of it and focus again on technique.

I never would have remembered Schiff’s passage when I needed it if I’d read it only as a reader. But because I had my writer hat on — because I noticed and studied the technique — I was able to take Schiff’s approach into my toolkit.

Create a clip file.

While you’re reading, look for passages to save and study. Every time you hear yourself saying, “I wish I’d written that,” “that” goes into your clip file.

The result will be an archive of tantalizing twists of phrase, powerful plays on words and stunning snippets of storytelling. Then, when you need to write a creative passage, you can dip into your clips and riff off of one of your favorites.

One of the passages in my clip file is:

When I invited participants in a workshop to model that passage, one wrote:

In another workshop, a P.R. agency’s accountant — the accountant! — modeled that passage to come up with this sentence:

If an accountant (did I mention it was the accountant?!) can come up with that passage, imagine what you can do!
___

Source: Stephen Schiff, “A Cinematic Gallant,” The New Yorker, Dec. 20, 1993, p. 60

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In her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes a moment with her late husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne:

“When we were living in Brentwood Park we fell into a pattern of stopping work at four in the afternoon and going out to the pool,” she writes. “He would stand in the water reading (he reread Sophie’s Choice several times that summer trying to see how it worked) while I worked in the garden.”

“Amateurs plagiarize. Real writers steal.”

— T.S. Eliot, 20th-century American poet

That’s how good writers get better: by studying work they admire until they “see how it works.”

Did you ever take your Mom’s toaster apart to figure out how it worked? You can do the same thing with writing.

Choose a piece you love from your clip file of writing samples. Then take it apart and put it back together until you understand why you like it and what the writer did to make it that way.

Find the template.

In my clip file, I have a short piece about Las Vegas from Time magazine. I collected it for a single sentence:

Lounge music may be to the symphony what Velveeta is to cheese — but hey! — it’s all part of what makes Las Vegas great.

Take it apart. Here’s what I love about that passage:

• The two comparisons (Lounge music = symphony; Velveeta = cheese)
• The fact that those comparisons are also compared to each other
• The word “Velveeta” (cheesy brand names are always fun)
• The full sentence with an exclamation point between dashes

Put it back together. So now you know what to do: Write a sentence with two comparisons compared to each other, a cheesy brand name and a full sentence with an explanation point between dashes in the middle. The template looks like this:

Blank may be to blank what (funny brand name) is to blank — hypershort sentence! — something.

When I asked participants in a workshop to model that passage, one came up with:

Youth hostels may be to the Hyatt what love beads are to diamonds — but hey! — it’s all part of what makes your Adventures Ltd. vacation great.

Practice X-ray reading.

The Poynter Institute’s editorial guru Roy Peter Clark calls this approach “X-ray reading.”

“Using the method of close reading,” he writes, “I find a passage that intrigues me, put on my X-ray glasses, and peer beneath the surface of the text to view the invisible machinery of language, syntax, rhetoric, and critical thinking that creates the effects I experience as a reader. I then forge what I see into a writing tool.”

Steal the techniques (not the words).

When I was in graduate school, one of my favorite journalism professors, Rick Musser, confessed that he’d always loved the introduction to The Dane Curse, a detective novel by Dashiel Hammett:

It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass, about two dozen feet from the blue brick.

Someday, he promised, he’d find a way to adapt that image into one of his own pieces. Years later, when I was editing a piece he wrote for a magazine I worked at, I saw that he’d made good on his promise. Here’s his opening paragraph for a piece on a millionaire scrap man of Kansas City:

Sure enough, those are pennies down there in the muck, their mangled edges glinting in the Blue Valley sun.

That’s reading like a writer: getting inspiration from the very best writers, then adapting it — not adopting it, but adapting it — to your own work.

I know I don’t need to tell you that we’re not talking about plagiarism here. I once outlined this approach to a group of writers in a seminar. At the break, one of the writers pulled me aside and proudly explained how she collects Wall Street Journal headlines about personal finance then uses them verbatim as headlines for the personal finance articles in her own newsletter.

Eeek! I said. That’s not modeling. That’s plagiarizing.

The key to modeling is to steal the technique, not the words. Adapt — don’t adopt — others’ approaches.

Try it yourself. Feel free to borrow and improve on other people’s techniques. It’s a widely practiced form of flattery. Take whatever you can, and keep T.S. Eliot’s advice close to heart.

“Amateurs plagiarize,” he said. “Real writers steal.”

Learn more about reading to write.

• Read like a writer; write like a reader. To build your writing skills, read widely — from Ernest Hemingway to Stephen King. (Even if you’re not writing fiction.) Read voraciously: not just books on writing craft, but creative, writing, short stories and other types of books.
• Make time to read. Read a lot and write a lot. And when reading books, short stories or other brand messages, look for technique, don’t just get swept away in the story. Start a clip file of writing you love, so you can reverse engineer it.
• Absorb the prose. Type up passages you love or sleep on them. Call it “modeling lessons.”

___

Sources: “Stop the Music,” Time, Aug. 21, 1989

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