That’s the answer given more than two decades ago by Nicholas Negroponte (founder of MIT’s Media Lab and of the “One Laptop per Child” project) to the question, “What’s the next step beyond personal computing?” It came to mind when I read this piece from the New York Times this morning:

Intimate theater

I attended such a performance in Manhattan in the early seventies, and loved it. Physical touch is important to me, and I experienced the event as being warmly and lovingly embraced, with safety and even propriety.

Not everyone likes to be physically touched. But every reader likes to be touched emotionally by what they read–even if the way into their emotions is through facts and logic.

When I write, I like to think about what my reader would experience as intimacy. Here are some of my thoughts:

• The reader wants to feel as if the text is addressing them personally, not as part of a mob.
• The author should come across as human and vulnerable, but without detailed discussions of hemorrhoids or other manifestations of TMI (too much information). Of course, what is and is not TMI will vary by audience.
• For me, typos and misspellings are jarring. I’ve learned that this is not a universal sentiment, but I nonetheless work hard to eliminate them.
• I avoid phrases such as “Some of you…,” which address a group of people rather than an individual reader.
• I experience smart-ass “humor” and cynical statements as turn-offs; your taste may vary.

I strive for intimacy in my writing—appropriate intimacy. What’s appropriate? Clearly, that’s up to you. Lately, I’ve noticed that movie trailers open with a rating caution: “The following preview has been approved for appropriate audiences.” Huh?

You are the author of your book. You choose your audience, by design or default. It’s up to you to decide what’s appropriate. Be bold.

Fiddling with type is not a fruitful pursuit for most authors. Unless your expertise is page design or typography, this domain—full of subtlety, nuance, and beauty—will distract you from your writing.

I think it’s a left-brain/right-brain issue. If you are drawn to the niceties of fonts, it’s because your right brain has itches that need scratching. By all means, honor them—but not during writing time. Treat your attraction to typefaces as a hobby, a passion to be pursued in time you’ve allotted for it.

I’ve spent hours on type and typefaces with the feeling that it’s the stuff of books. And it really is—but for designers, not authors.

Having issued that dire warning, let me now share a couple of resources I ran across this morning. First, Typetester, a site that makes it really easy to compare fonts:

Next, the current issue of the Big Brand System biweekly newsletter has fascinating information, including why you should avoid Verdana on your website. (Sign up for this free missive here.)

When I became a coach, I joined a BNI chapter in Palo Alto. And when I decided to focus on helping people write books, I was struggling to come up with a memorable “elevator pitch” that would encapsulate what I offered. One Wednesday morning, the words just popped out of my mouth, unpremeditated: “I’m Joel Orr, book midwife. You have a book inside you, and it wants to come out; I’m here to help it be born.”

Mindy Gibbins-Klein

I loved the image, and so did my BNI friends. It was sticky and evocative. And having attended a live birth in my youth, it resonated with my feelings on helping an actual human being into the world (as I had on January 5, 1975).

I began to use the “book midwife” term to promote myself–by inserting it in my email signature. Shortly thereafter, I received a warm and polite note from Mindy Gibbins-Klein. She’s been “The Book Midwife” since 2002, and has actually registered the trademark for it in both the UK and the US. She asked that I not refer to myself in that way, and I responded that I would stop doing so.

What I did not immediately understand was that calling myself a “book midwife”–quotes, no caps, no “the”–might also weaken her claim to her intellectual property, because it could lead to the phrase becoming generic. Now I know better.

As a coach of aspiring authors, I am very sensitive to such issues, and fully support Mindy’s position on this matter.

So I thought it would be appropriate for me to state publicly: If it’s “The Book Midwife” you’re looking for, that would be Mindy. From what I’ve learned about her products and services, they are first-rate. I encourage you to go to her site and sign up for her inspirational emails.

Are you in the Bay Area of Northern CA? I just scheduled my first MeetUp, in Mountain View, for Monday, 8/9/10, at 7 pm. For full details, including the address, and to RSVP, see this link. The meeting is free. I plan to hold them every 2 weeks. Come join me!

I heard a coach say to another coach at our Silicon Valley Coach Federation meeting last night, “I tried to word my website copy so as not to exclude anyone who might become a client,” she said. The other coach replied, “Bad idea. Think of it like this: If you needed knee surgery, would you prefer to see a surgeon who does heart surgery, brain surgery, knee surgery, and plastic surgery? Or one who only does knees? You need to focus narrowly, so that your potential clients will see you as an expert in the domain that is of interest to them.”

It’s the same with your book. You must address it to SOMEone, not to everyone. If you attempt to reach everyone, nobody will see themselves addressed by the book.

So, yeah, you need to choose your niche carefully. If you choose one that is too small, you will have difficulty building your business.

One powerful set of tools for use in finding your niche are the ones used by Internet marketers for keyword research. Some of the best of these are free, like Google’s keyword tool. Use it to find out what keywords match the topics in which you are interested, and how many searches there are for them. That will give you an idea of the size of your market.

And within your niche, find out what the greatest areas of “pain” are. What are the problems to which most members of the target market are seeking solutions? Visit forums and blogs that focus on your niche topic, and learn what people are most interested in. Focus your book on your chosen niche, and address the problems of the niche in its title. That will help your audience find its way to you.

You are an expert; your clients are seeking your expertise. You can’t be a general expert.

I’ve heard more than one account of friends who set out to write a book together–and lose their friendship. This won’t happen to you if:

• You write alone, or
• You have clear boundaries in the collaboration, and
• You observe the boundaries assiduously.

Whether you have read my book, heard me speak on my method, or just been a reader of this blog, you know the essence of “The Simple Secret To Writing A Non-Fiction Book In 30 Days, At 1 Hour A Day!”: Structure first, then content.

Sounds simple, I know. But it is not something most people are used to doing, and they don’t know why it might be important when undertaking to write a book. The metaphor I usually use is the building of a house: You don’t start with a trip to the lumberyard. If you do that, you will wind up with a yard full of stuff, and no idea as to how to assemble it into a house.

You start a house with a trip to an architect, who creates a plan. The plan makes its way into the hands of a builder, who uses it to create a list of materials. Then, after the materials have been acquired, a foundation is prepared and a frame built. That becomes the skeleton of the house.

It’s the same with a book. If you create your “framework”–your outline–first, it’s easy to write your book. If you don’t–well, good luck. You’ll need it if you hope to get a book done.

Creating the framework has an additional benefit: It makes the delicate process of collaborative writing practical. It does so by creating boundaries.

You see, once your framework is complete, all the book’s pieces–its chapters and subchapters–are defined and named. So if two people are to work collaboratively on a book, they should:

• Structure the book together, at least at the table-of-contents level.
• Then they can split the chapters between them, and each create the list of subchapters for his or her own chapters,
• Or structure the whole thing together, and split the subchapters up.

The place where many collaborations bog down is at the level of paragraphs. By dividing up subchapters and chapters, that opportunity for failure is avoided.

You and your partner may choose to identify yourselves as the respective authors of different parts of book. Or you may choose to have an editor “Homogenize” your distinct writing styles into a consistent “voice.” Either can work.

Structure makes collaboration possible.

I keep coming back to the power of clustering in this blog because I keep meeting people who once learned how to cluster and then never used it.

Our Creator did not provide our brain with an index. As a result, we usually don’t know what we know on any particular topic. “Do you know anything about electric trains?” “No. Well, wait–I had a Lionel set when I was 10. It had three tracks. I remember seeing some other kinds in my neighborhood hobby store–I think they were HO scale and NN scale. Oh, yeah, and…” 20 minutes later, you realize you do know something about electric trains. And given more time, you’d discover more.

Neuroscientists are making great strides in understanding how we remember stuff, but it is still mysterious in many ways. Without understanding how it all works, clustering gives us access to our knowledge so that we can make a list of what we know and don’t know about any topic.

This is useful at many phases of the book-writing process. You can cluster a title for your book; a subtitle; chapters; subchapters; and more. And before you talk to your book coach, you can cluster the topics you want to be sure to cover.

Cluster what to say in your presentation. What to tell people about on your web page. What you should pick up at the supermarket.

Cluster is a mining tool, to let you get at the riches you have stored in your mind. Gabriele Rico devotes an entire book to it: Writing the Natural Way. Highly recommended.

How do you cluster? Here’s description from the blog of writer Dustin Wax.

Try it!

Not in the printing; in the writing.

Colorless writing is boring. In his blog, journalist (The Economist) and teacher Andreas Kluth writes:

Color has to be in support of something. And that something has to be an idea, a thought, a story. The mistake many writers make is to list details. Lists are boring; we use them to go shopping. Details are boring, unless they illuminate some meaning. It does not have to be epic. It can be quirky, amusing, moving, insightful, whatever. But there has to be a there there.

So the trick is to find substance, and then to take away details so that only a few splashes of light and color remain, which then filter out the entire sensual world around the reader and deliver him to that one place that you, the writer, have in mind for him. In terms of thought process, it may be the opposite of what my students were doing, and what I used to do.

I can find no better illustration than Rembrandt. You are drawn deep into this man. If I asked you, you would say that there is so much color in this painting, so much light. Only then would you notice that most of the canvas is dark, that very little of it is … in color. (Click here to see what he’s talking about.)

Thanks, Andreas. That works for non-fiction books, as well as for journalism. You want to take your reader on a journey, but it must be purposeful. I was once on a flight from the east coast to California, and the pilot took us down for a view of the Grand Canyon, because the day was beautiful. The view was fantastic, but I learned later that the pilot was severely reprimanded for departing from the flight plan. Several passengers, it seems, felt they had been taken for a ride they did not ask or pay for. Your readers deserve to get where you promised to take them, too.

Dalia’s daughter Tamar bought Dalia and me an introductory Improv class for our birthdays (10 days apart in June). We went a couple of nights ago. It was wonderful!

Improvisational theater, now known as “improv,” is a Zen-like practice of being in the moment and interacting with others in games. In our class, and in improv in general, there is a general atmosphere of positivity. A “safe place” is established by the teacher and the students, where no-one need fear criticism or ridicule, and the goal is to have fun.

Some simple rules make possible a wonderful and warm intimacy among strangers:

• “Yes, and….” Whatever frame, story line, or assumption is put forth by the person from whom you “receive the action,” honor it. If she says, “And then a duck flew into the room,” and looks at you, you must accept the duck and move the action forward from there.
• Make others look good. If another actor seems to have departed from the harmony of a scene, do your best to expand the situation so that the possibly awkward move somehow fits harmoniously.
• Feel free to make mistakes, because none of us cares.

As I sit by my computer, working on my book, I am now benefiting from these rules. Whatever weird idea is presented to me by my muse, my research, or my editor, I explore it from a “yes, and…” point of view. Where might it lead? I can do this freely, with abandon, because right here and now, it’s ok to be wrong, it’s ok to step out of harmony.

And I am determined to make others look good. Whatever I’m writing about, whoever was involved, whatever strange things they may have done, I choose compassion as my guiding emotion when commenting on them and their actions.

All of this gives my writing an uplifting spirit, an exuberance it had been missing for a while.

Try it!

I’m afraid of fiction writing. I’m afraid if I started, I would lose myself in it and forget to come out, forget to pay the bills. I’d just refine and refine and read more good writing and go back and write some more.

So I push it away. I stick to the purposeful prose of non-fiction, and teach others to do the same.

But still. I love the beauty of the writing craft, the endless possibilities. And while you are writing your book that tells your story, in a way premeditated to communicate your uniqueness to prospects and clients, you have the passion that can move, even dazzle–that can fuel a small fire in the reader, or even fireworks.

Go read about matchbook literature, and enjoy the stimulation.