Category Archives for Articles
Newsflash! Your Customers Understand Synonyms: Building Trust with Better Content
As the Craft Your Content team gets older and wiser (maybe that’s just Elisa), we’ve gotten over the whole fake content marketing thing.
You know — the big push for SEO-focused articles and listicles that serve no purpose but to fill Google with more of your brand, the buzzwords that get people to buy your stuff even if they are not inclined to, and the constant pop-ups.
Part of the reason I love what I do (and love working for this company) is that we care about quality content. We write what we believe will be informative and interesting to writers and entrepreneurs like us, and we always try to honor our identity as an honest company devoted to our craft.Continue reading
The Importance of Word Choice When Discussing Your Writing Career
As writers, we understand the impact of language. We pour over each syllable, agonize over a “but” versus a “yet,” and spend hours deciding the best way to communicate a specific idea or narrative.
We know that a single word can alter how an audience feels, create moods, encourage action, or inspire people to change their minds.
Yet when it comes to discussing our writing career — even to ourselves — we often don’t put the same consideration into our word choices. Even more problematically, we may unknowingly be self-sabotaging our careers with our language.
Be in the Present: Using the Five Senses to Overcome Writer’s Block & Spark Creativity
If there’s one thing we here at CYC know well, it’s the agony of writer’s block.
When you write for a living, your words are your moneymaker, but making them come out and play is not always easy, or possible. Sometimes, you’ll sit down at your keyboard, poised to make magic happen, and suddenly find that you’re down the rabbit hole of YouTube’s finest dog trick compilations.
What happened there?
Your creative juices just weren’t flowing, so you abandoned the empty document for the internet playground, in the false hope that distracting yourself would ‘spark something.’
The Six Shapes of All Stories – with Entrepreneurial Tales
It’s confirmed. Science has found six core shapes underlying all stories.
At the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Laboratory (CSL), Peter Dodds, Chris Danforth, and their team made the discovery.
The concept of a common story shape is not a new one. Aristotle, in his seminal work Poetics, first discussed the shape of stories in 335 BCE. He wrote about the importance of unity in the beginning, middle, and end of a story, and broke popular examples like Homer’s Odyssey down to their rudimentary parts, revealing a shape found in most Epics and Tragedies.
In 1985, Kurt Vonnegut wrote his master’s thesis on the subject, finding eight shapes that can be easily plotted and replicated. He gives a lecture on the graphs here and there is a friendly infographic here.
These scholars were challenged on their numbers and the simplicity of their theories. The author Georges Polti suggested there are 36 story shapes, and Vonnegut’s thesis was rejected by the University of Chicago.
CSL has now provided the proof. There are six basic shapes to all stories.