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Put Some Love Into It
If your writing was a cake, what would the ingredients be?
You would certainly include structure. You’d think about the audience. If you were writing research, you would include some data or case studies. If writing fiction, you would make sure to include plot and characters. And if you want to work to be read, you must also think about publishing and marketing.
All those are important, but there is one ingredient of great writing that rarely gets talked about: love.
Love? Seriously?
What about marketing? What about building a platform? What about monetization, big-time publishers, sales numbers, or downloads?
Those can all be important factors, and we all would like to have a big audience or platform. However, you can’t have any of those things unless you first bake a great cake.
Remember how your Grandma would bake a cake? She would use the standard ingredients, but there was also that extra something special she would put into it—Grandma would be just a little bit of love into that cake, and it made all the difference.
So back to the analogy: if writing is a cake, how do we put love into it? The answer is simple: we care about our readers and want to create something special for them.
It doesn’t matter what the genre is. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing fiction, articles, blog posts, speeches, podcasts, or business books. We should always put a little bit of love into everything we do.
One of the world’s foremost authorities on love, Mother Teresa, once said, “It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.” It’s a great goal to build an audience or make tons of sales. But on the other side of those sales are individual people who are looking for a great story to read, or they’re looking for a solution to their problem.
We might be able to construct a great plot or impress people with our beautiful sentences, but if we don’t put some love into it and want the very best for our reader, it won’t mean much.