When my youngest, Max, was 8, he could run off a string of complicated jokes like an old pro in the Catskills. Really, he could have become a regular on the Tonight Show. That good.

We loved to talk about what was funny. I asked him what a really, really great joke would do.

“People would laugh until they cried.”

Exactly. It was then that I came up with an idea that almost drove Max crazy. That wasn’t the purpose, of course, but that’s the way it worked out for awhile. I told Max there was such a thing as The Perfect Joke. It was so funny people would not be able to stop laughing, and therefor they would die. The perfect joke, in the wrong hands, could wipe out the planet. Read more…

When I was involved with …and Ladies of the Club a few eons ago I received an offer for the audio rights for the book. This was to be a condensed version, since the book was more than 1000 pages long. I asked for a sample script from the audio producer, and it turned out to run some 75 pages. You had to laugh. Gone were the inner lives of the two principal characters. Gone was the story of the fifty years of the development of the U.S. from the Civil War to the Depression. Gone were the discussions of ideas. Left was the barest shell of the events of the novel. Anyone buying the tape would have been defrauded, believing they were about to hear anything that resembled this masterpiece. We declined the offer.

Screenplays are similar. No matter how long the original novel, a screenplay is, with few exceptions, not going to be longer than 125 pages. A screenplay is double-spaced, descriptive paragraphs honed down to nothing, and lots of space taken up by the character’s names before their speeches. Bob. (line break) “You know what I’m thinking?” (line break) Jim. (line break) “No. What?” (line break) Bob stirs the campfire. (line break) Bob. (line break) “There’s something out there in the dark.” (line break) In a screenplay, you’ve just eaten up almost half a page.

Which brings me to the umpteenth zillion obituary for the book that has ocurred ever since the new media arrived. That would be movies. Then radio. Then television. Now it’s the Kindle and iPhone. Books are perpetually finished. Who would ever read a book again once they’ve seen that Charlie Chaplin? I can’t imagine. Read more…

The Genius Machine has gotten more than its fair share of great reviews. I don’t post them since they can be found easily. But one came in today, written by Wayne Hurlbert, that is the very model of conciseness.

“This book is about a third kind of thinking, one that is directed toward improving an existing idea, thinking through a complete issue, or creating something new,” writes Thought Leaders International founder Gerald Sindell, in his powerful guide to creative thinking and idea development The Genius Machine: The 11 Steps That Turn Raw Ideas into Brilliance. The author presents a brilliant eleven step system that creates, develops, and completes the idea building process with simplicity and elegance.

Read more…

A few years ago, my son Max and I were at the Guggenheim in New York, spiraling our way down through a show of Very Important Paintings. It was one of those shows that just wasn’t working for either of us. But we like to discuss what we’re looking at, just for the pleasure of comparing perceptions. I suggested we talk about the framing and ignore the art. An added bonus would be that anyone overhearing us would be hard pressed to connect our insights to anything we appeared to be looking at.

Within a few paintings, we had it down. “There’s a beauty. Great sense of mass, and it really works on the wall.” “You think? Seems a little over the top to me, and the felt’s fighting the forest.”

It was so much fun that whenever we happen to end up in a museum together, we just naturally fall into our discussion of the framing. The art has taken a secondary position. Read more…

We get letters. So far, and it’s only been a few weeks that my book has been out, the letters have been pretty nice. No one, yet, has told me they took my advice and bankrupted their company, disinherited their kids, or run off with the circus. But it’s only Thursday. There’s still time.

A letter arrived last weekend (okay, officially it was an ‘email’ but it was so carefully composed it seemed like an old-fashioned handwritten note from a previous era) that thanked me for having helped the letter-writer achieve an epiphany regarding a thorny problem her consulting company had been working through for a year. It seems that, among other things, what made it possible for my book to be genuinely helpful was that I had taken care to get myself out of the way of the message.

I have helped a lot of smart people become successful authors and leaders, and one of my first rules for my clients is: you must tell your audience as quickly as possible who you are. Say it on the flap. Say it on the back cover. Say it in the intro. Because, if an author tries to keep themselves in the background, the reader will be unable to hear your message until they feel that they know where you’re coming from. Read more…

Is it possible for a book to make you smarter? Most of us recognize that books can teach you something new, give you information about anything and everything. But the part of you that thinks is in you, isn’t it? Can a book change the way your mind works?

Seems highly unlikely. Read more…

In the Spring Issue of The American Scholar, William Zinsser, author of everyone’s favorite guide to writing style in English — On Writing Well — tells the story of how he came to write the book in the first place, how he found his own voice along the way, and how regular revisions have kept the book continually useful to more than a million writers. Because my own book, (The Genius Machine: The Eleven Steps that Turn Raw Ideas Into Brilliance New World Library May, 2009) in many ways takes off where Zinsser left me hanging some years ago, I was especially intrigued by two surprises in Zinsser’s lengthy new essay.

First off, Zinsser hesitated to write his book because he was in thrall to The Elements of Style, by E.B.White and William Strunk Jr. He feared that they had already said it all, and he would merely be repeating their insights. He took a fresh look at The Elements of Style and discovered, to his great relief,

“But when I analyzed White’s book, its terrors evaporated. The Elements of Style was essentially a book of pointers and admonitions: Do this, don’t do that. As principles they were invaluable, but they were only principles, existing without context or reality.”

What Elements didn’t do was show how to apply these principles to nonfiction writing in all possible forms. Read more…