Narendra Modi Shapath Grahan as Prime Minister 2014

A Man by Whom we have Alot of Expectation 

Gorakhdham Express crashes into goods train 20 dead

  20 people are feared dead after the Gorakhdham Express rammed a stationary goods train near Khalilabad in Uttar Pradesh. At least 10 passengers were injured.

The incident took place this morning when the express train came on the same track as the goods train near Churaid Railway Station at the Sant Kabirnagar district some 230 km from state capital Lucknow. Six bogies derailed.

Railway Board Chairman Arunendra Kumar said, "Relief work has begun, there are casualties but the exact figure is not known yet."

Narendra Modi, who takes over as Prime Minister today, expressed condolences. "Spoke to the Cabinet Secretary. Asked him to take an overview of the situation & ensure timely assistance to those injured," Mr Modi tweeted.

Rajnath Singh, who will be sworn in as part of the Narendra Modi cabinet today, tweeted his condolences for those who have been killed. for more go toNDTV.COM

13 Timeless Lessons from the Father of Advertising

In 1962, Time magazine called David Ogilvy “the most sought-after wizard in today’s advertising industry.”

In his years as an advertising executive and copywriter, Ogilvy created some of the world’s most successful and iconic marketing campaigns, including the legendary Man in the Hathaway Shirt, plus notable efforts for Schwepps, Rolls Royce, and the island of Puerto Rico among many others.

As content marketers, we can learn a lot from the legendary Mr. Ogilvy. He was, after all, one of the pioneers of information-rich, “soft sell” ads that didn’t insult the intelligence of the prospect. For example, consider The Guinness Guide to Oysters, an early form of what the kids are now calling native advertising — from 1951.

We can study Ogilvy’s successful advertising campaigns to learn how to persuade prospects, influence readers, and create memorable, evergreen content. But “The Father of Advertising” also has plenty to teach us about productivity, branding, research, and ambition.

Let’s look at some things David Ogilvy had to say, and see what we can learn from each of them.

On creativity and creative process

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

Cleverness doesn’t sell products and services. Original thinking in marketing is great, but not just for the sake of being witty or clever. If you aren’t thinking about connecting with your audience, building trust and selling your products or services when you sit down to write marketing copy, you need to reexamine your motivations.

Don’t just create content to get credit for being clever — create content that will be helpful, insightful, or interesting for your target audience.

Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you.

I like the idea of “stuffing your conscious mind with information” in this quote. Ogilvy wholeheartedly believed in research, and he was always prepared before sitting down to write.

Learn everything you can possibly know about your topic (and your audience) before you write — then unleash your unconscious mind, and see what bubbles up.

If you have all the research, all the ground rules, all the directives, all the data — it doesn’t mean the ad is written. Then you’ve got to close the door and write something — that is the moment of truth which we all try to postpone as long as possible.

Bottom line — inspiration comes to those who keep butts in chairs. We all avoid the “moment of truth” to some degree, and dealing with resistance and procrastination is part of the writer’s life.

Ogilvy’s contemporary, Eugene Schwartz, had a simple technique for eliminating distraction — he worked in blocks of 33 minutes, using a timer to structure his writing time. Don’t be afraid to use techniques like this to get to that moment of truth.

Talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.

Think different — the best thinkers often do.

On research and testing

If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.

It is vitally important that we research and understand how our prospect think, speak, and search, so that we can use that language in our headlines, blog posts, sales letters, and ebooks. The better we understand how our readers think, the better we’ll be able to connect with them (and persuade them).

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.

If you’ve done the research to understand what your audience needs (and the language they use when they’re speaking about your topic), you’d be a fool to ignore that information. Use it and every way you can, and let your research shape your decisions about your content, sales letters, products, emails, and social networking campaigns.

Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.

Our online world gives us hundreds of ways to test the effectiveness of our copy and messages. Make sure you’re making use of those testing methods on a regular basis, and always remember that the more you test, the better your writing will be.

On why we write

Do not … address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.

Sometimes as writers, the idea of trying to connect with a large audience is troubling. Just like public speaking is often more intimidating than talking to someone one-on-one, writing for a group can be tough. But Ogilvy’s advice — remembering that when each person reads your post, they are alone with your words — can help you get past the overwhelm and allow you to really connect with your reader on a personal level.

On standing out

There isn’t any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey, or cigarettes or beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines… The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.

You want your produce or service to have a unique selling proposition — a public personality that defines who you are and what you do. And as Ogilvy and other advertising executives remind us, the more sharply defined that personality is, the more successful you will be as a content marketer.

Ogilvy on headlines

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

Here at Copyblogger, we continually stress the importance of writing great headlines, and this statistic from Ogilvy just reminds us of of how critical headlines really are. Make sure to continually hone your headline writing skills to lift your blog posts and sales letters to the next level.

Never use tricky or irrelevant headlines… People read too fast to figure out what you are trying to say.

Simple headlines are better. Always remember that on average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of the piece. If your headline is confusing, tricky, or awkward, they won’t continue reading.

On greatness

Play to win, but enjoy the fun.

Remember to keep things in perspective — even on our worst day as content marketing professionals, we’ve still got one of the best jobs in the world. We get to do something amazing every day — create killer content for audiences who really need it and want to share it. Let’s make sure that ambition doesn’t crowd out true enjoyment of our craft.

Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.

This is my favorite Ogilvy quotation. What we do in our day-to-day lives might occasionally seem mundane, but remember this — every day, we are giving the opportunity to make a difference. To teach, to stimulate conversation, to persuade.

That’s pretty extraordinary.

So aim high. Make sure you’re always thinking, how can I make more of a difference? How can I think bigger?

David Ogilvy’s legacy

Ogilvy’s work continues to inspire us, and his world-famous marketing campaigns live on. But some of Ogilvy’s best lessons are about how he approached his creative life, and how he aimed for greatness instead of settling for second best.

Who are your marketing heroes? Who inspires you to work harder, dream bigger and aim out of the ball park?

A Short Guide to Writing Good Copy

The term “style” is thrown around a lot by writers, but it’s a misnomer for copywriters because “style” doesn’t work in the extremely short attention economy of the internet.

Good copy isn’t necessarily “stylish.”

But copy that establishes trust, authority, builds relationships, and gets people talking, sharing, and buying is in high demand.

A lack of style is what makes it work, so writers who master this “style” are sought after and revered.

Legendary ad man David Ogilvy was one of those writers, and he said, “A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.”

It sounds counterintuitive, but it holds up under pressure, and I’ll explain why great content marketing is built on that exact premise.

Clear communication is the key to effective copy

Your best copy needs to be “display window clear,” and you need to be out there every morning with your Windex, to make sure it doesn’t distract from the product or service you provide for your clients and customers.

Every writer eventually reaches for a style guide to help them craft clear copy, and there are countless helpful rulebooks and list posts that offer writers advice about proper usage and consistent language.

Copyblogger actually has its own internal style guide, and members of the editorial crew often squabble about usage over (virtual) martinis.

I am also a big fan of the classic English guidebook, The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. The aged copy I keep handy is dog-eared and yellowing.

In it, William Strunk advises writers,

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

This is very solid advice for online publishers … from 1918!

A copywriter comes to the rescue

It was actually famed writer E. B. White who updated professor Strunk’s “little” 43 page English rulebook in 1959.

He revived it from scholastic obscurity to become what Time magazine has called“one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.”

E. B. White was more than a revered journalist (contributor to the New Yorker for 60 years), and award-winning children’s author (Charlotte’s Web).

He honed his writing style as a copywriter in the 1920s, and contributed what he learned to The Elements of Style re-issue in chapter V, “An Approach to Style.”

It’s no secret why this revered text is so short, and so effective.

Mr. White edited the style guide with some reluctance, and was quoted years later as saying,

My role in the revival of Strunk’s book was a fluke — just something I took on because I was not doing anything else at the time. It cost me a year out of my life, so little did I know about grammar.

Make every word tell

White’s lack of grammatical knowledge did not prevent the guide from becoming a bestseller for the better part of the last 50 years.

In interviews, White wanted to remind writers that rules are meant to be broken, and that every writer has their own unique point of view and voice.

Style results more from what a person is than from what he knows.

In other words, every writer can memorize rules, but how you get people’s attention requires some creativity.

Don’t get too hung up on the rules, or your copy might end up sucking, and that would break the first rule of Copyblogger.

In honor of E. B. White I have updated Dean Rieck’s post The Ultimate Blogger Writing Guide.

This list is only a sampling of the vast amount of knowledge available to online publishers and content marketers, but they are a few things that have helped me most along the way.

What I present to you is an annotated guide to effective online copywriting “style” …

1. Headline Writing 101

Every writer who wants to make an impact online must take this clinic.

There is only one reason your client or prospect will read a single word of the copy you’ve written: your headline. This is where you should spend 70% of your time.

Start with the 4 U’s:

• Useful
• Urgent
• Unique
• Ultra-Specific

2. Use common spelling

Flourishes and variations of common words distract your readers and pull them out of the story you’re telling (unless your demographic is girls aged 7-13).

Avoid:

• pleez for please
• thru for through
• nite for night
• 2moro for tomorrow
• @ for at

Tweets and text messages require some brevity, slang, and LOL acronyms, but connecting with your audience in longer copy requires fewer distractions.

3. Avoid hyperbole and fancy words

One of the first lessons I learned as a writer at Copyblogger was to tone down my language.

Good copy cuts like a knife. When it’s action you’re after, avoid big words thatmake you sound like you’re trying too hard to sound smart or important.

E. B. White said it best,

Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word, when there is a ten-center handy …

4. Put the reader first

It is our job as copywriters to tap into the hopes, dreams, and fears of our audience. This requires research, and the magic of the word “you.”

Proven to be one of the English language’s most powerful words, you can’t lose.

5. Write in a natural way

This is an indispensable tip for all bloggers and copywriters.

You must speak the language of your audience, and do it in a way that conveys you are a real person, with genuine interest in offering your help and expertise.

How else are your prospects going to get to know, like, and trust you?

How else are search engines going to recognize that you have the answers to people’s questions?

Research, research, research. Know your audience inside and out.

6. Work from an outline

Outlines work! Even if you don’t have the energy or time to sketch out a simple AIDA outline, give yourself some idea of the goals you’d like to accomplish.

Even something as simple as a post-it-note with a few bullet points works. Successful writers use outlines. They don’t stifle creativity … but they’re helpful in reminding you to stick to the point.

7. Write with nouns and verbs

This is Copywriting 101 — Precise language convinces; flowery language distracts.

Concise and specific copy moves the prospect along, but adjectives and adverbs are just filler.

The more descriptors you throw in there, the higher the chances are that someone with the attention span of a hummingbird will click away (unless you are describing the features of something technical).

8. Revise and rewrite

Ogilvy is quoted as saying,

I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor.

He would edit his first draft four or five times before showing it to a client, who would inevitably change it again.

9. Do not overwrite

Without clarity your copy is shot. Overwriting is a symptom of under thinking. Good copy is damn hard to write.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
~ Albert Einstein

10. Do not overstate

Superlatives have the power to wreck your copy.

When you overstate or exaggerate your claims (with things like trumped-up testimonials), you risk losing the trust of your audience.

An understated promise often does a better job of capturing reader attention than screaming hype does.

11. Be clear

Shine that display glass.

Do some editing. Then put it down and do something else. Then, come back and edit again.

I’ve found that printing something out on paper helps lessen distractions of a computer screen.

12. Don’t mix metaphors

If a product sings when used correctly, but sinks if used improperly, then it is guilty of being both a songstress and an anchor, and this is very distracting.

Stick to one metaphor or the other, but not both in one sentence.

13. Simplify your language:

Make every word tell.

Delete the words that are just window dressing.

Copy is haiku,
simple yet evocative.
Don’t mess it up, please.

I am a copywriter

As an added bonus I’d like to share Tom Albrighton’s graphic I am a copywriter(thanks to Copyblogger’s VP of Operations Jessica Commins for finding it) …


It sums it up rather nicely.

Funny how such simple blocks of text can communicate so much.

I especially dig the phrase “Give me just a mo and I’ll give you le mot juste,” which is a French term for “just the right word.”

Does it do the job it’s meant to? Drop your reactions into the comments.

PS. Let me reiterate that rules are meant to be broken, and I am as guilty as anyone. Cheers, see you out there.

What Good Memoir Can Teach You About Good Copywriting

What does David Sedaris know about writing that most of us don’t?

What can Anne Lamott do that your traditional copywriter can’t?

How about entertain and engage an audience, then lead them to action? How about telling stories that captivate and convert readers into advocates?

Wait a second …

Are we talking about memoir writing — or copywriting?

Exactly.

After recently finishing writing a memoir, I realized how much copywriting had prepared me for writing narrative nonfiction. Turns out, the two have more in common than I thought.

Maybe you, like me, had the relationship between a literary tradition like memoir and copywriting all wrong.

If you’ve been around Copyblogger for a bit, you know there’s much more to writing good copy than bullet points and bolded words. In the end, good copywriting looks a lot like plain, old good writing, and vice versa.

So here are three keys to writing great memoir — and good copy:

1. Tell an interesting story

Just because it happened doesn’t make it interesting.
~ Marion Roach Smith

Everyone loves a good story. And everyone hates one that drags on. But rarely does a bad storyteller know he’s boring his audience to death.

So what do you do? How do you craft a gripping narrative that makes a difference?

Simple.

First, write the story. Then ruthlessly cut every detail and piece of dialogue that doesn’t drive the narrative. And then retell the story — Hemingway style — with only the bare essentials.

If it still holds together, you’ve got something good. Something strong. Something worth sharing.

2. Write what’s deep inside

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal.
~Anne Lamott

Good memoir isn’t about what happened. It’s about a theme, something bigger than the subject and context.

In other words, your story about growing up in the 1960s with an alcoholic father is merely the setting for the tale you are about to tell. The story itself is about redemption or forgiveness or learning how to survive in impossible circumstances.

But don’t ever make the mistake of thinking your brand, your idea, your message is about the product it represents or the person telling it. That’s merely the excuse for sharing the Big Idea, the thing that will connect with the reader’s heart.

A good theme is universal, something anyone anywhere can relate to. It’s your duty as the writer to connect the audience to the theme. If all you do is tell a good story, then you haven’t done your job.

3. Don’t make yourself the hero (but don’t make us hate you, either)

Liking the person we go on a journey with is the single most important element in drawing us into the story.
~ Blake Snyder

There is a counter-intuitive trick that most great comedians use to win over their audience. It’s a simple, but effective strategy for getting you to love them. And it works every time.

What is it?

Embarrassing themselves. They must do or say something stupid and expose it for all to hear. This is how they get you to like them. Self-deprecation just works.

What happens when you mess up and don’t try to hide it? We start to believe you. Because you’re human, just like us — warts and all. And if you are going to be honest about your shortcomings, then maybe we can trust you.

What does this mean for you? It means when you sit down to write that next ad or blog post or newsletter, you need to look for some weakness of yours you can expose.

Show your scars and see how it opens up conversations that weren’t there before. Then leverage that trust to communicate something deeper, something important that your audience needs to hear. And look for ways to make your readers — not you — the hero.

But be careful … Because before you know it, you’re no longer “just a copywriter.” You’re now writing memoir.

Here’s How Maria Popova of Brain Pickings Writes

Most serious writers and online publishers are relentlessly on the prowl for fresh inspiration to fuel both their creativity and productivity.

If you aren’t familiar with the writing of Maria Popova, prolific author of the “discovery engine for interestingness” known as Brain Pickings, you’ve been missing out on some of the most fascinating and heady publishing on the web.

Ms. Popova is a wellspring of knowledge and she daily cross-pollinates a wide variety of disciplines, all in the spirit of creativity and discovery. She has contributed to Wired, The Atlantic, is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow, and was named to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business (among many other accolades).

Although she began her professional career in advertising, she found the DIY integrity of publishing her own website far more rewarding, and her indie work ethic has contributed to a growing legion of fans (including quite a few celebrities).

Join me as we examine the file of Maria Popova, writer …

Maria religiously publishes three posts a day for her more than 350,000 Twitter and 590,000 Google+ followers — as well as 150,000 plus email subscribers — and in a recent interview she talked about the organic growth of her creative brainchild:

My philosophy, and the one thing I’ve been strategic and deliberate about from the beginning, is reader first …

Maria admits to putting in some exhaustive hours to get where she is today, and we are honored that she took the time to stop by The Writer Files.

In this installment of our Q&A, Maria Popova shares her thoughts on a lifetime of “research,” the power of ritual, the toxicity of approval, and much, much more.

About the writer …

Who are you and what do you do?

A reader who writes.

What is your area of expertise as a writer or online publisher?

I’m not an expert and I aspire never to be one. As Frank Lloyd Wright rightly put it, “An expert is a man who has stopped thinking because ‘he knows.’” Brain Pickings began as my record of what I was learning, and it remains a record of what I continue to learn – the writing is just the vehicle for recording, for making sense.

That said, one thing I’ve honed over the years – in part by countless hours of reading and in part because I suspect it’s how my brain is wired – is drawing connections between things, often things not immediately or obviously related, spanning different disciplines and time periods. I wouldn’t call that “expertise” so much as obsession – it’s something that gives me enormous joy and stimulation, so I do it a great deal, but I don’t know if that constitutes expertise.

Where can we find your writing?

BrainPickings.org

The writer’s productivity …

How much time, per day, do you spend reading or doing research?

Practically (pathetically?) every waking moment, with the exception of the time I spend writing and a couple of hours in the evening allotted for some semblance of a personal life. I do most of my long-form reading at the gym (pen and Post-Its and all), skim the news while eating (a questionable health habit, no doubt), and listen to philosophy, science, or design podcasts while commuting on my bike (hazardous and probably illegal). Facetiousness aside, however, I have no complaints – as the great Annie Dillard put it, “a life spent reading – that is a good life.”

Because Brain Pickings is simply a record of my own curiosity, of my personal journey into what matters in the world and why, it’s hard to quantify how much of my life is “research” – in fact, I feel like all of it is.

I just had tea with someone – a writer whose book I’d written about and who reached out and wanted to connect – and that hour-long conversation gave me a dozen ideas to think about, to learn about, and thus to write about (including two books I already ordered based on our chat). Is that “research” in the sense that one deliberately sets out to find something already of interest? No. Is it “research” in terms of the unguided curiosity that lets one discover something previously unknown and succumb to the intellectual restlessness of wanting to learn everything about it? Absolutely.

And I think that’s part of our challenge today, not just semantically but also practically – we tend to conflate “research” with search, which is always driven by looking for something you already know you’re interested in; but I think the richest “research” is driven by discovery, that intersection of curiosity and serendipity that lets you expand your intellectual and creative comfort zone beyond what you already knew you were looking for.

Before you begin to write, do you have any pre-game rituals or practices?

Given I write several thousand words each day, there’s no room for “pre-gaming.”

The “game” IS the ritual.

Do you prefer any particular music (or silence) while you write?

I have music on all the time (unless I’m transcribing archival audio), with various playlists for different purposes or moods. My taste is too eclectic, both across genres and eras, to list specific artists. But, I’m an incredibly loyal listener – some of the songs in those playlists have gotten more than 10,000 plays over the past few years. Familiar, beloved music – much like habit or ritual – is a remarkably powerful creative grounding force, I find.

How many hours a day do you spend writing (excluding email, social media, etc.)? What is your most productive time of day?

Anywhere between three and eight hours. It’s hard to separate the reading and research part of the process from the writing and synthesis one. The osmosis of the two is where the magic happens – that place where you pull existing ideas together into a mesh of insights that germinates your very own point of view, that illuminates the subject in an entirely new way. Is that reading? Writing? Or some other form of sense-making we don’t yet have a word for?

Ironically, I prefer to write earlier in the day, but find the onslaught of email too overwhelming – even though I can’t possibly even open everything, just the awareness of it being in my inbox is uncomfortable. It’s hard to retreat into a quiet corner of your own mind when you feel demanded of. So I tend to write later in the day now, often well into the night, when email is quiet. The dark, too, is somehow grounding – I’ve always found lucubrating strangely meditative, like a bubble of light that envelops you and silences the rest of the world.

Do you write every day or adhere to any particular system?

I publish three articles a day, Monday through Friday. All are pre-scheduled and pre-written, some weeks in advance and others the day before. I try not to write on Fridays, which I reserve for email and meetings.

Do you believe in “writer’s block”? If so, how do you avoid it?

I think the operative word here is “believe.” If you fixate on it, it’ll be there. It’s kind of like insomnia – the more you think about not being able to fall asleep, the less able to fall asleep you become.

It’s different for everyone, of course, but I find that you break through that alleged “block” simply by writing. As Tchaikovsky elegantly put it, “A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.”

The writer’s creativity …

Define creativity.

The ability to connect the seemingly unconnected and meld existing knowledge into new insight about some element of how the world works. That’s practical creativity. Then there’s moral creativity: To apply that skill towards some kind of wisdom on how the world ought to work.

Who are your favorite authors, online or off?

That’s what my side project, Literary Jukebox, celebrates. Though it’s impossible to name all, some are Susan Sontag, Anaïs Nin, Carl Sagan, Henry David Thoreau,Stephen Jay Gould, Annie Dillard, Mark Twain, Henry Miller, Debbie Millman, Andrew Sullivan.

Can you share a best-loved quote?

Another near-impossible task – I live in literature! But I do always come back to the approximate words of Seneca:

The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life.

Practically everything in Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom is words to live by.

How would you like to grow creatively as a writer?

By never ceasing to be curious because “I know” – but, at the same time, by reconciling this with the knowledge that I’ll never be able to “finish” all of literature, or the Internet, for that matter. That, I guess, is tied to my aspiration not only as a writer, but as a human – to be more comfortable with the open-endedness of life.

Who or what is your Muse at the moment (i.e. specific creative inspirations)?

I’ve been obsessed with the diaries of Susan Sontag, Anaïs Nin, and Maria Mitchell for a while. And old, out-of-print anthologies of letters: Raymond Chandler, Edna St. Vincent Millay (oh Edna!), Anne Sexton. The best writers (or artists, or scientists), I find, are also extraordinary philosophers full of timeless wisdom on the triumphs, tribulations, and imperfections of being human.

What makes a writer great?

The same thing that makes a human great:

Curiosity without ego, and generosity of spirit. No amount of talent is worth anything without kindness.

The writer’s workflow …

What hardware or typewriter model do you presently use?

MacBook Air for writing, iPad mini for reading whatever is available as an e-text, and lots of Post-Its for my copious marginalia in paper books. (I prefer reading in the Kindle app on the iPad, so I can search my highlights and travel without having to carry hefty tomes, but since I write mostly about old books, they tend not to be available in digital form.)

What software do you use most for writing and general workflow?

My site runs on WordPress, but I write straight in HTML – on my desktop, in Coda – and not in the WYSIWYG editor on WordPress. I use Evernote to save notes on various items I’m reading and to photograph the marginalia on book pages, which are then searchable thanks to optical character recognition. I read almost everything online in Pocket. 

Do you have any tricks for beating procrastination? Do you adhere to deadlines?

I don’t procrastinate when it comes to reading and writing. Having a daily rhythm of such intense pace makes that practically impossible.

How do you stay organized (methods, systems, or “mad science”)?

I keep a comprehensive editorial calendar that stretches weeks, months, and sometimes well over a year into the future, where I plan my reading (and thus my writing) – book releases, notable birthdays, anniversaries of important historical events.

I take copious notes on books I’m reading, as well as online materials, and save everything to Evernote, where I tag meticulously – it’s so easy for any extensive library or archive to become useless if the items in it aren’t searchable or retrievable, and I find the tagging system is an incredible memory aid to help counter that.

How do you relax at the end of a hard day?

I resort to the completely unoriginal yet completely comforting blend of yoga class and a cozy evening with my partner or with Anaïs Nin’s diary.  

A few questions just for the fun of it …

Who (or what) has been your greatest teacher?

I grew up in communist Bulgaria. My family didn’t have much when I was little and though communism fell in the early 1990s, things didn’t change much. Going to college in the U.S. was a challenge to begin with, especially an Ivy League school where most of my classmates came from families of privilege – a trying test of withstanding the inevitable erosion of self-esteem that befalls a young person who doesn’t “fit in” in such stark ways.

But having to pay my way through school by working up to four jobs at a time taught me a great deal about making do, about time management, and about the difference between what you’re good at versus what makes your heart sing.

There’s nothing like being tossed into necessity to help you figure out who you are and what matters most in life – necessity may be the mother of invention, but it’s even more so the fairy godmother of self-invention.

What do you see as your greatest success in life?

Not having relinquished the hope that happiness is possible. Waking up excited to do what I do. Going to bed satisfied with what I have done.

And, okay, it was rather gratifying when the Library of Congress included Brain Pickings into their archive.

What’s your biggest aggravation at the moment (writing related or otherwise)?

We’ve created a culture that fetishizes the new(s), and we forget the wealth of human knowledge, wisdom, and transcendence that lives in the annals of what we call “history” – art, literature, philosophy, and so many things that are both timeless and incredibly timely.

Our presentism bias – anchored in the belief that if it isn’t at the top of Google, it doesn’t matter, and if it isn’t Googleable at all, it doesn’t exist – perpetuates our arrogance that no one has ever grappled with the issues we’re grappling with. Which of course is tragically untrue.

Choose one author, living or dead, that you would like to have dinner with.

Susan Sontag. And who knows where the evening might take us.

If you could take a vacation tomorrow to anywhere in the world, where would you go (cost or responsibilities are no object)?

Henry Miller’s library in Big Sur.

Can you offer any advice to writers that you might offer yourself, if you could go back in time and “do it all over?”

Writing is meant to move the heart, the mind, the soul – not the page-view meter. I’m fortunate – biased, perhaps – in having always approached my writing as personal development rather than business development and always having written for this personal audience of one. Everything external has been a byproduct rather than an objective.

So the most critical thing an aspiring writer can do, I think, is to always know why he or she is doing it and for whom. It’s fine to find gratification in the approval of others or in financial success or in any other extrinsic reward, but it’s toxic to make that approval or prestige the motive to write.

The most important piece of advice, however, renders the premise of the question somewhat moot:

Learn by doing.

Please tell our readers where they can connect with you online.

brainpickings.org

twitter.com/brainpicker

And finally, the writer’s desk …

To borrow one of Maria’s oft-cited quotes:

A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
~ E. B. White

Ms. Popova, thank you for a glimpse into your inspiring creative process!

Photo by Elizabeth Lippman, provided by Ms. Popova.

And thank you for perusing The Writer Files …