Ninety Facts

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the subject is a sentence that already exists, in a drawer, in a building you have not visited.

Two writers take the selfsame brief,
Both want a line beyond belief.
One sits and thinks, and thinks again,
One spends three weeks and holds his pen.
The finest line was never wrought.
Where had it lain? And who had sought?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms sat down in the same month to write about what they sell, and their trades, all together now, were equally good.

The first did it the way it is nearly always done, which is at a desk, on a Thursday, with a blank page and a strong cup of something. He thought hard, which is a real effort and deserves saying. He tried to find a way of expressing that his work was thorough, and reliable, and better than his rivals', and he tried perhaps forty ways of saying it before choosing the least bad.

Everything he produced came out of his own head, which contained only what he already believed, phrased in the language he had picked up from everyone else in his trade. So he wrote about quality, and care, and results, and every sentence was true and none of it was information. He was inventing a way to describe a thing rather than reporting anything about it, and readers can always tell the difference, even when they could not tell you what the difference is.

The second firm did something duller and slower and got a better result, and the method has nothing clever in it at all.

She spent two days finding out. She sat with the man who does the work and asked him what he checks and why, and wrote down the answers. She telephoned four customers and asked what had nearly stopped them buying and what they told other people afterwards, and wrote those down in their words rather than hers. She read the notes her own people keep, the complaints file, the supplier's technical sheets that nobody had opened in three years.

Out of two days of that came about ninety facts, most of them useless, which is the normal proportion and worth expecting.

And among them was a sentence a customer had said on the telephone, almost in passing, about the thing she had actually been worried about and how it had turned out. It was better than anything either firm could have composed, because it was true and specific and came from the mouth of somebody with nothing to sell.

She used it, more or less as she had heard it, and it did the work of a page.

What ought to be said plainly is that she did not write the best line in her own material. She found it. Her skill was in going to look, in writing down ninety things when eighty-nine would be discarded, and in recognising the one that mattered when it went past. That is a different skill from composition, and it is the one that is actually short in most trades.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The best sentence about your business already exists. It is in somebody's mouth or somebody's file, and your job is to go and find it rather than to invent a better one at your desk. A blank page can only give you back what you already carry, which is your own trade's stock phrases and your own sense of what you would like to be true. Two days of looking gives you material that nobody else has, because nobody else has bothered to go and get it.

And note where the good material actually lives, since it is never where people look. In the words of customers, particularly the ones describing what nearly stopped them. In the head of whoever does the work, who knows nine things that would astonish a buyer and considers all nine too obvious to mention. In your complaints file, which is a list of exactly what your market is afraid of, written by people with no reason to be polite. In the technical detail of what you use and why. None of that is on your website, and all of it is free.

This is a different job from the one the workshop letter asked of you. That was about describing the ordinary care you already know about. This is about the ninety facts you do not know, sitting in other people's heads, one of which is worth the whole exercise. You cannot describe what you have not gone and found.

Two things make the difference between doing this and pretending to. Write it down verbatim: the customer's own phrasing, not your improvement of it, because your improvement will smooth away precisely the specific detail that made it persuasive. And expect the ratio to be terrible. Ninety facts, one line. Anybody who tells you they went and looked and found three excellent things in an hour did not go and look.

Three questions, and put a date in the diary for the first one:

1. When did you last spend a day finding out rather than composing? If the honest answer is never, then everything you have ever written about your business has come out of your own head, and your rivals' material comes out of theirs, which is why it all reads the same.
2. Who could you ask this week? Four customers, the person who does the work, whoever answers the telephone, a supplier. Ask what nearly stopped them, what surprises people, what goes wrong most often, what they tell others. An hour each, and you will have more than you can use.
3. Where is your complaints file? Read the last twenty, and mark every fear they contain. That is your market speaking without manners, which makes it the most valuable document you own and the one nobody in your business has opened this year.

The Answer to the Riddle

Where had it lain?

In somebody else's sentence, said in passing, by a person who was not trying to sell anything. The first writer spent his Thursday searching a room that contained only his own furniture, and produced, inevitably, his own furniture rearranged. The second spent two days in rooms she did not own, and came back with ninety things she had not known, one of which she could not possibly have invented. The finest line in this business is almost never composed. It is overheard by somebody who took the trouble to be there with a pencil.

The verse:

You will not find, however long,
In your own head, another's song.
Go stand about, and write down all,
And one in ninety pays for all.

Until next time. Go and book one day this month for finding out, ask four customers what nearly stopped them, and write their answers down exactly as they say them.

P.S. Keep the ninety. The eighty-nine that were no use this year are the raw material for next year's letters, your quotes, your answers to objections and the awkward questions at the door. Nobody ever wrote down too much about their own trade, and almost everybody has written down nothing at all.

Also in the archive: The Bootmaker's Handbill, What They Did, Not Why and Everyone Does It, Nobody Says It.