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Blake Edwards’ The Party (1968) is a very funny film, and not only for Peter Sellers’ slapstick abilities. The movie makes some caustic statements about Hollywood and the the importance of identity in a town where you’re nobody if you’re not “Somebody.”

Sellers plays Hrundi V. Bakshi, an unknown Indian actor playing a bit part in his first Hollywood film — until he accidentally blows up a gigantic location set, which gets him fired on the spot. The head of the studio, furious at hearing of this incident, writes Bakshi’s name down with the intention of blacklisting him. The only trouble is, he’s accidentally written the name down on an invitation list for his own high-society party that evening.

Bakshi arrives at the party, as mystified by his invitation as everyone else is by his presence. No one recognizes him, not even the producer who was there on the set to witness his catastrophic goof. The guests treat him with a mixture of bland politeness and indifference, even when his accident-prone nature causes him to all but demolish their home during the course of the party. Why? Because this is Hollywood, where only the people “worth noticing” get noticed. Never mind that one of your party guests is destroying the plumbing, or causing the automated bar to send everyone’s drinks crashing to the floor, or baby-talking to the parrot over the house intercom. No matter how incompetent he is, he’s unknown, anonymous, and therefore invisible.

We’ve all heard that bad word of mouth carries even faster and farther than good word of mouth. No company sets out to generate negative buzz. What, then, about the company that generates no buzz at all?

If you haven’t established yourself as a “leading brand” in your field, then for all practical purposes you’re invisible. While the recognized big boys are drawing both good and bad press, you’re a non-player. My advice? Get noticed. Make a statement — as loud a statement as possible. Create a brand identity and distribute it consistently across as many media channels as possible. Don’t wait for perfection, either; if the message is a little off-center or doesn’t get the desired response, then fix it. But until you put that message out there to get some kind of response, you don’t know what to adjust.

Once you’ve established your image as an expert in your field or an industry leader, your statements will carry enough weight that people will actually seek out your opinions and advice. You’ll be a guest of honor at the party and not a neutral interloper.

Until then, be as incompetent as you like — no one’s paying attention anyway!

Meetings. Everybody loves them — right?

What’s that? You don’t like meetings? No one likes meetings, you say? Then why are we seemingly addicted to meetings in the workplace?

It’s a cliché by now — the group of sad sacks clustered around a conference table. Some of them are half-buried behind stacks of files they’ve brought along “just in case.” Others tap away on the desktop surface with a furious finger as they check their watches or view the mounting emails and voicemails on their portable devices. Still others slump in their seats like shell-shock victims, having given up any hope of getting any work done ever again. Then, inevitably, one of the desk-tappers will voice the famous cry: “Who called this meeting?”

Some meetings are good, of course. I’m always more than happy to hold an initial client consultation face to face, if only to reassure the client that I’m a real human being. It’s good for me too, because I can get a real sense of who my client is, his corporate culture, the tone the business uses when identifying itself, and so on. “Face time” is even more important when networking with referrals partners. How can you feel really secure about recommending someone’s products are services to a trusted client or friend unless you’ve had a real conversation with that businessperson?

But once my writing business started branching into other cities and states, I found that I no longer had that option with every client. For better or worse, I would have to substitute phone conferences and email correspondence for live, in-person meetings. Unless my clients were willing to spring for travel expenses to these various territories, there was a very good chance that I would never see them face-to-face. So I tried it — and it worked fine! I’ve found that good relationships with clients can be forged purely over the phone, and in one case I was assigned to write 50 articles by a realtor I never spoke to at all — the entire project was conducted by email. It went quite well, too.

This little lesson opened my eyes to some inefficiency in my business practices. My desire to be “accessible” had me running off to meetings at the drop of my clients’ hats, even when the meetings were unnecessary. On more than one occasion, a client demanded a meeting with me just so he could hand me a hardcopy with some scribbled notes on it and spend about one minute discussing them with me. I never suggested that he scan the hardcopy and email it with accompanying comments, because that would be “unsociable” of me. Well, nobody’s paying me to be sociable, so I’ve drawn a much firmer line about meetings now. The first one’s still free, sure, and so are phone conferences. But for additional in-person meetings, the meter starts running.

I predict that I’ll be asked to attend fewer meetings in the future.

Even when I’m not subjected to meeting overkill myself, I may still get hit with the fallout. I can always tell my “corporate sector” clients from the others because they seem to eat and breathe meetings, and not necessarily with me. I’ll submit a draft to my point of contact at those institutions and get 4 or 5 sets of notes back, none of which necessarily agree with the others. This is rewriting by committee, and it doesn’t work. I have to insist that all these disparate comments be filtered through one person, ideally my point of contact, with the inconsistencies removed, so that I can know what I’m being asked to do; otherwise, I might as well be sitting at the conference table of doom, listening to people ask, “Who called this meeting?”

Not me, that’s who!

There was no way I could write that article — no chance, no way, no how.

I sat at my computer desk, utterly convinced that my writing career was over. Time constraints, fatigue, stress, the sniffles, and lack of familiarity with the subject matter had all conspired to dry my brain into an empty husk. I had absolutely nothing left to offer. Writing the article was simply not possible.

I then proceeded to write a very good article, finishing ahead of schedule.

What happened? What magical incantation or secret Eastern mental technique did I employ to go from zero to sixty creatively? The truth is, I didn’t really do much of anything. I just started writing, having despaired of producing anything good or even competent. I just sort of doodled, and a finished article emerged.

But maybe “just doodling” is the key, not only to overcoming writer’s block, but to conquering procrastination in general. I’m convinced, first of all, that writer’s block does exist, though some very prolific writers continue to deny this (mainly on the grounds that they’ve never had it). I’ve experienced many bleak hours of sitting at a keyboard with absolutely no way to start, or continue, or finish, and countless other creative professionals out there know exactly what I mean. It’s just a particular form of procrastination, which in turn is a reaction to anxiety. We dread applying ourselves and seeing less-than-good results, because the perceived reward doesn’t equal the perceived effort. Perfectionists suffer when they produce imperfection.

So what can we do? We can give ourselves permission to fail. We can give up and say, “Well, whatever. I’m scheduled to write, so I’ll just scribble some notes and maybe some of it will be useful later on.” That’s pretty much what I did on the article. I knew I couldn’t write so I settled for “putting a few thoughts down,” and before I knew it, those few thoughts had transformed themselves into a finished, ready-to-print piece of writing. I stopped caring about perfection for a moment, and in doing so I deactivated my inner critic — which freed me to just write, instead of writing and editing simultaneously. You can’t edit what hasn’t been written yet, not without putting yourself into a feedback loop of inactivity.

So my suggestion is, the next time you don’t know what to do or how to do it — do SOMETHING. Screw it up and fix it later. Give yourself permission to fail. You might surprise yourself.

“Monsters, John — monsters from the id!”

So gasps Lieutenant “Doc” Osroe (Warren Stevens) as he expires, his mind boiling over from the massive injection of too much knowledge for it to handle, in Forbidden Planet, an old favorite film of mine and an acknowledged sci-fi classic.

The story, based loosely on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, concerns a spaceship assigned to discover the fate of a long-lost expedition to the planet Altair IV. The only survivors they find there are the brilliant but secretive Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis). They also meet Robby, a robot somehow created by Morbius using the incredible technology of the planet’s extinct race, the Krell. The Krell had found a way a boost their intelligence to achieve almost godlike levels of power, only to find themselves destroyed by an element of their own psyche they’d all but forgotten — the animal passions of the id.

The “id,” as you may know, is one of the three levels of human consciousness described by Freud and company as id, ego, and superego. The ego is our daily level of get-through-the-day consciousness, the part of us that we’re aware of as “us.” The superego is the higher, altruistic self that concerns itself with the common good, charitable works, the better of society, and so on. It’s the angel on your shoulder, pure intellect, untarnished by lust or greed.

Then there’s the id.

The id is that lizard brain I mentioned in my most recent post. It’s the part of us that never evolved — the animal that pursues its needs and wants with no other thought than “Gimme.” It’s the part of us that would murder, steal, or worse to get what it wants, when it wants it. In the Krell’s laudable desire to boost their brainpower to allow creation from pure thought, they inadvertently fed that same power to this hidden part of their minds. The resulting rampaging ids of an entire population led to just what you’d expect — the extinction of the race. “My poor Krell!” exclaims Morbius. “After a million years of shining sanity, they could hardly have understood what power was destroying them.”

Is the id “evil?” No. The id is simply the pleasure-seeking part of the brain, and pleasure can come from simply feeling loved or safe or excited or fed. It’s these feelings we mean to stimulate when we write marketing copy, because they are such powerful motivators of human behavior. We can deliberate the pros and cons of taking an action, but ultimately it’s our desire for gratification that makes us act.

But while appealing directly to the id will certainly get results, the most effective marketing, in my opinion, is that one-two punch of id and superego that has the reader yelling “Leggo my ego!” (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) For example: “Whizzo Organic Cleanser not only make cleaning easier, so you have more time to relax and have fun (id) — it’s also safe for humans and good for the environment (superego).” My ego is now free to buy Whizzo without guilt over my desire to work less and play more, because hey, it’s the socially responsible thing to do, right? I’m OBLIGATED to have more fun.

Of course there’s a great loophole to all this. When you appease your superego by doing “the right thing” — does it feel good? Sure it does! (Here, id, have a cookie. Now run along.) So when your marketing stimulates both the higher and lower parts of your readers’ brains, that middle part will feel no conflict about taking action. “What’s not to love about this?” they’ll say. “It’s good and good for you!”

And for YOU.

The title of this post is a little misleading, since it’s not the words I hate but the way they’re used. This is probably (and regrettably) the first of an ongoing series of posts where I discuss instances of wrong wording, bad wording, and stupid wording. If we refer to writers as “wordsmiths,” then here are a few cases where the smith should’ve served a longer apprenticeship.

“Utilize” — A way of spelling “use” with as many letters as possible. Seriously, that’s all it is. So here’s an idea — how about just writing “use?”

“Full-service” — I know I’ve railed against this phrase in the past, but I can’t help myself. “Full service” tells me nothing about your business I wouldn’t have assumed in the first place. In fact, to doesn;t tell me much of anything. (I’m reminded of an old comedy spoof of the game show “What’s My Line?” where the host yells out, “And the prize this week is SIXTY-FOUR!”) Does a full-service auto shop work on the front AND back of the car? Does a full-service insurance agency sell you insurance AND then pay the claim?

Unless your competitors are all “partial service” (whatever THAT means), you’re wasting space. Stop it.

“Thus” and “Therefore” — These terms, while not actually incorrect, are the surest way to identify yourself to your readership as Professor Prissypants. (My apologies to any member of the academic community whose family name might in fact be Prissypants. But frankly, I’m not the only one who owes you an apology.) There are plenty of down-to-earth, real-human-being words and phrases you can use to connect a process to a conclusion — like “so.”

More than one word (where one will do) – I see this a lot when copyediting for clients, especially when their products or services are complex. They feel the need to sound super-professional, so they lard the text with phrase strings that accomplish no more than a single, well-placed word could do. For instance, a client might draft a phrase such as, “So-and-so product facilitates events and processes with the ultimate goal of creating the circumstances that make your life easier.”

The correction? “So-and-so product can make your life easier.”

Which sentence would YOU rather read?

That’s enough badness for now. Back with some goodness next time!