“I have an idea.”
Good for you. You take your idea, nurture it, sleep with it, make love to it, feed it, risk everything on it, and try to bend the world’s will to it. You explain it over and over again to anyone who will listen. If your idea is good, you are a person who benefits from practice, and you listen to other people without running over them, your idea gets better and better. It probably gets bigger. “Now I have a BIG idea!”
That’s the beginning, or part of it.
Your audience grows.
Then comes the place in your story where you have to tell it to some more people, a whole bunch of them. You’re going to be in places, media and venues where you don’t have the luxury of buying everyone another latte and showing decks filled with bullet-points. Someone will say, “What’s that again?” You will have express your idea in a website or some collateral in the context of a jabillion other things your audience is taking in that day. You will be in the elevator, and it will be about to ding.
The dog barks.
Because you’ve been in this incestuous (yet very right and proper) relationship with your idea, you may not be able to see the beautiful kernel of it anymore. Or you may get distracted by experts, well-wishers, investors, wives, husbands and the dog. You start explaining, and the prospect clicks elsewhere, a text arrives or the dog barks. The door opens and you’re in mid-sentence. It’s a very long, run-on sentence. You are a jumbled mess of semicolons and parenthetical phrases. Everyone gets out. The door slides shut.
Scene.
One sentence without a comma.
I am what I like to call an interested third party. I love ideas. I love to see them work. One of the most fun things to do with an idea – besides make money and get famous – is find the way to express it in a tight, clear way that makes people understand it, and love it.
Sometimes, it’s one sentence without a comma. It’s a phrase, a tagline or a well-written paragraph on a piece of collateral. Maybe it’s the one slide in the deck that gives an audience an aha moment.
Sometimes, it’s longer, or the subject is complicated and it needs to be framed in the universal language of “What’s in it for me?”
For that, you’re going to need a story written, some myths built and metaphors made.
It all will begin when we write that one sentence. Let’s.
