Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019

Coming up with ideas
Tips on writing

Finding a novel idea is the hardest part of writing. But originality is critical because people will ignore ideas and stories they have heard before.

Creative and imaginative thinking is actually quite rare. Most people, if encouraged, can find a new way to do something, but either they don’t see themselves as creative or they don’t get that opportunity. Research by Kyung Hee Kim suggests that the American focus on testing and controlling children, as well as frequent group activities, has brought about a steady decline in creativity over the last twenty-five years.

Editors or professors or writing coaches can work with you on executing an idea, but the creativity depends on you. You can be bright and educated and still not manage to come up with an idea that is a new twist on the prevailing conversation. Or, you can have tons of creative ideas and be unable to craft them, intelligently, into a workable piece.

At the Times, we knew that the success of our work rose and fell on the quality of ideas. We had regular daily meetings about the news and how we might respond. Those were quick meetings—so quick we didn’t even sit down. Once a week, though, we would meet for an hour in a conference room. I asked the editors to arrive with ideas to share.

Some editors methodically looked for ideas, often by going through publishers’ catalogs. I tried to read websites and publications that were directed to the specialists in the fields I followed closely, like health and business.

I don’t think most people are creative in groups. But sometimes having a deadline to come up with ideas will force you to do the work that leads to creativity. It puts a structure and a practice into the process of having to think. Some of your best ideas might arrive in the shower or during a walk, but it’s also possible to intentionally capture them.

At those weekly meetings, to minimize distractions, I asked people to turn off their phones and close their laptops. I knew they thought I was being ridiculous, but I wanted them to be fully present. (I’ve never read an article or book on productivity—and I consume a lot of them, trying to tame my procrastinating nature—that doesn’t recommend leaving the phone far away so you won’t be tempted to pick it up and scroll through emails or social feeds. I know that’s good advice. If I leave it right next to me, it’s shocking how often I look at it.)

I opened the meetings by going around the room, asking people what they were thinking about. When one editor shared an idea, the others jumped in with various ways to look at it and offered suggestions for writers. It’s stressful to know that your livelihood depends on being continually original and creative. It’s not as if those ideas just stream out like water from a hose. Sometimes in those meetings, I would look around that long table and see people studying pieces of paper or trying not to make eye contact because they didn’t have anything they thought was exciting. To pretend that they did, sometimes they would mention suggestions that had been sent to them for writers. They didn’t need to use the meeting for that. They were just filling air. I remember one meeting where there was just silence.

Finally one of the editors, Peter Catapano, said, “I was thinking about my recycling this morning.”

When I first met Peter, I thought we might have trouble working together because he so clearly didn’t want to be micromanaged or told what to do, and I was the new boss. Over time I realized that he had an original mind: he came up with unusual ideas, and writers liked working with him. And when he saw that as long as he was productive, I had no interest in controlling him or regulating his days, he accepted me as the boss. If editors came up with ideas that I had never heard before, I didn’t care whether they spent their time in coffee shops or in the office. I asked Peter to elaborate.

“I was trying to wash peanut butter out of a plastic container to recycle it and I was using all of this hot water, and it took like five minutes,” he said. “And so I just wondered, am I doing more harm than good?”

Now, that was interesting. It’s a liberal shibboleth that recycling is good, even when research sometimes shows that the benefits are mixed. It’s always worth looking for an article that will question the readers’ orthodoxy. We talked about the idea as a group, and Peter said he would get in touch with John Tierney, who had written about recycling when he was on staff at the Times before leaving to freelance and write books. I loved that idea because I had long admired Tierney’s work. He was always surprising.

So, that was done.

Anything else?

A few desultory comments. Nothing else of note. But that was fine.

A meeting that produced a Sunday cover story was well worth the time. Those fifty-two articles were among the most important stories we did.

Ideas can come from multiple places. When Google, pressed to be more transparent about political advertising, released some information on who was buying what, Kendall Collins wrote an op-ed that appeared in the Times about the failure of Democrats to use digital ads. The Republicans were way ahead of them in understanding how to use that tool, Collins said. As a former marketing executive at Salesforce, he knew how effective digital ads could be. He was shocked to find that the average nonpresidential Democratic campaign was spending only 10 percent to 15 percent of its budget on digital channels while most of the remaining funds went to TV and mail—even though people average 5.9 hours online every day. He took a kernel of something and developed it into a surprising story.

Ideas can come to you through comments made in passing. Recently, I was at a book party when someone said that half of the world’s population growth in the next few decades will occur in Africa. Really? After all those years of people worrying about population in China? That was intriguing to me. I thought someone could write a good piece based on that factoid.

As you go about your life, you’ll find that someone—your doctor, the groomer for your dog, the guy at the car rental agency—says something that seems worth writing about. I can’t overstate the value of putting down your phone and having conversations with people. People use screens as crutches when they are too shy to talk to people, or when they’re bored. Whether you’re doing a job that has nothing to do with writing or you’re hoping to make writing your career, lift up your head from the screen.

Kate Murphy, who writes frequently for the Times, avoids social media because she doesn’t want to do stories that just chew on what everyone else is talking about. Instead, she starts up conversations wherever she goes. When I told her that I wanted to discuss her idea-generating process, she told me to just look in my email for her original story pitches. I told her that when I left the Times, I lost access to those emails. She jumped on it. She wondered where they went, whether anyone looked at them, what happened—making it clear to me that one of these days, I’ll see an article about how companies deal with the email of former employees. Her stories are often on the paper’s most emailed or most viewed lists, and I think it’s because she is telling people something that they haven’t thought about before. She doesn’t write from news conferences or pitches from public relations people. Regular people she encounters in her day-to-day life, not government officials and other journalists, are her inspiration. And they can be your sources as well, when followed up with research and study.

Once you have a wisp of an idea, do some digging to be sure your take is original. Before you can write an original take on an issue, you have to know what is known; you have to know the territory. Don’t write that it’s time to regulate the tech giants, when others have already been writing about that. You have to think of something that’s not in the conversation, some wrinkle, some aspect. You have to know what is known and then present your own twist. You will not draw attention to your ideas if you simply repeat the accepted wisdom of one side or the other. If you do not know what the most commonly accepted version of reality is, you can’t dispute it. If you don’t take into account the other side, and what is known, your ideas will be dismissed much more easily. Leaving out evidence central to the opposing argument will just make it easy for people to brush you off.

Kate Murphy explains how she found the idea for a Times article on the question of whether your friends really like you:

This one had a lot of threads leading to it. And most of the threads came from just listening to people. I recall more than once hearing people complain that friends didn’t reciprocate invitations to go to lunch, dinner, or the movies. The relationships felt one-sided. If they stopped calling, the “friendship” would effectively be over because the other person wouldn’t make the effort to keep it going.

And, of course, there’s Facebook where people say they have thousands of friends and then can’t get anyone to bother to show up for their birthday party. That happened to someone I know. We showed up and we were the only other couple there besides the birthday boy and his girlfriend. And then I know this other guy who has a lot of “friends” because he’s always buying them dinner and drinks and inviting them to his vacation homes. Finally, I often hear that someone said, “Oh Kate Murphy, yes, we’re good friends.” Um . . . no, we aren’t. I met them like, once or twice, and didn’t like them at all. I have a lot of acquaintances but there are very few people I’d call friends.

It just got me thinking what we mean when we say “friend.” Who are your friends, really and truly? And then while all this was brewing in my mind, this study in PLoS One was published that showed rather convincingly most people don’t know who their friends are. People who they thought were their friends didn’t feel the same way. And what really got to me about the study was the researchers said this was useful information for managers because it suggested ways they could manipulate their employees and customers. Killed me. Hands up for who wants to be friends with the researchers. Anyone?

Can’t find something new? Then maybe don’t bother, unless you are a writer of such talent that you can take a perennial—an evergreen, as they’re called in the media business—and make it new and fresh.

The essayist Tim Kreider—the one who wrote about the love of his cat—excels at this. One of the most popular stories during my time in Op-Ed was “The Busy Trap.” Most of our readers probably already knew that people were complaining of being inundated and “busy,” in some large part due to digital media. Tim made the story feel new by challenging the notion that everyone suddenly had a lot more to do. He gently made fun of those who were constantly saying how busy they were. He argued that they were just boasting of their importance in the world. He made the reader look at a common subject in a different way, showing them that people were choosing this state of constant busyness, a condition that he called “a hedge against emptiness.”

If you can’t persuade me through lyrical language or philosophical insights—and only a few can—try looking for something that will surprise your readers. Take, for instance, the minimum wage. You happen to think that having the federal government increase the minimum is a bad idea, and that states taking that route will end up hurting their economies. You think these higher wages will produce fewer jobs, and when there are fewer jobs, more people will need government help. Your readers might support the idea of a higher minimum wage, but your points might make them wonder, “Could I be wrong? Could costs go up?” You’ve made them think.

A recent op-ed in the Times grabbed me because it came with this headline: “Do Taxpayers Know They Are Handing Out Billions to Corporations?” I read it because although I knew that cities and states have long given incentives to companies to get them to locate there and not elsewhere, I had no idea that the number was as high as $80 billion or that the existence of those subsidies was hidden from taxpayers. It was information I’d never heard, and so I read to the end.

Looking at your life and thinking about how your experiences might relate to the news is another route to publishable ideas. One day I got an email from a reporter whose friend’s father was a Catholic priest. She thought that perspective would help her write something useful around the news that the Pope was considering revisiting the issue of celibacy for priests. People with a connection to an editor will often offer to send something on behalf of a friend, and of course, public relations people will do it on behalf of a client. Sometimes it helps a submission stand out. But most of the time, a sharp, brief explanation of the idea will get your article the attention it wants. The reporter’s friend, Benedicta Cipolla, sent me her piece. Her father had been married to her mother for forty-five years, but he was also a priest in good standing because he entered the priesthood after being married. She argued that making celibacy optional would help solve the shortage of priests by encouraging young people to become priests, knowing that they could choose later to marry.

I sent it around to my editors with this note, “Small slice of the Pope story, but I think it has potential.” One editor said he thought it needed a little trimming in the middle, and he wondered if we could hear anything from a parishioner, dryly noting that in all those years, “somebody must have said something memorable about having a married priest.”

Once you have your idea, go deep. I had a vivid personal experience of what happens when you don’t dig beneath the surface and come up with thoughts that are not obvious. It was a cold winter weekend, and my friend Rachel was visiting. We started obsessing about how crazy it was for Aziz Ansari to be taken down in the media for sexual misconduct by a woman who obviously pursued him, agreed to sex, and then later had second thoughts about the whole episode and anonymously but publicly accused him of bad behavior. We both found it aggravating and unfair, a violation of due process and the idea that people are innocent until proven guilty. While Rachel and I cooked a big pot of curry, we ranted and she convinced me to write about it. After she left, I quickly wrote down about five hundred words on the subject. I was going to try to improve my piece the next day, but didn’t bother after I read an excellent piece on the subject by Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic.

Her writing offered what mine did not: she went deep. She thought of things that I hadn’t. She didn’t just share some off-the-cuff thoughts. If you do that, your writing probably won’t be surprising enough to be truly persuasive. Not because it breaks any of the rules I have discussed, but because it’s not smart enough to make a reader think in a new way.

Unlike me, Flanagan tried to understand why the young woman hadn’t just walked out of Ansari’s apartment. She said the unwillingness of younger women to confront men on the spot can be ascribed to the way these women were raised. She argued that their generation had been conditioned to expect the best of men, and hers, the worst.

We made many of the same points, but Flanagan brought two important things to the idea that I did not: humor and empathy.

So, while I found the Ansari incident a scary example of overreach on a matter that was profoundly important, she pulled the reader in softly with the notion that the article was “a contribution” to a conversation.

Don’t assume that all ideas have been done. You can take something classic and find a new approach, sometimes playing off of the news. One time, the essayist Sloane Crosley sent in a piece on how and why women are always apologizing. She made it fresh by tying it to a new ad campaign in the subway discouraging travelers from inconsiderate behavior.

The next time you are in a coffee shop, or the library, or watching a soccer game, look at the people. Listen to their conversations. Think about whether you’re seeing something you haven’t seen before. Watch a mother interact with a baby. Is she holding her phone at the same time? Would a mother twenty years ago have been talking and cooing to the baby? There’s probably a story there. Ideas are all around us. You just have to look at what your fellow humans are doing, and something will occur to you.

Or, just listen. I came upon one of my best stories in the mid-eighties, when I was sitting through a tedious session at a conference for securities analysts at the Don Cesar Hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida. I listened as companies in the food business made their presentations to the financial types who studied their businesses. I was probably slumping and fidgeting from boredom. It was the time before cell phones; if it hadn’t been, would I have been reading the phone and missed this moment? Because suddenly I heard one of the executives mention that the company had noticed that its customers were “grazing,” and it hoped to provide food to meet that market. Grazing! I loved it. The idea that people were eating the way animals did, like cows did—I hadn’t heard that before. And I figured if I hadn’t, given my total immersion in food publications, few of the Journal readers had either. As soon as I got back to New York, I started interviewing people and produced one of my favorite stories. It was fun to introduce Journal readers to the notion of grazing, which soon became common slang.

So listen, and watch; and if you’re ready for that moment, you can tease out something novel that will show you how satisfying writing can be.