Blog

John Kennedy Toole put a bullet in his brain in 1969.

Thought his manuscript was garbage.

Thought the world didn’t want to hear about Ignatius J. Reilly…

This sweating, farting, medieval philosophy obsessed manchild who rails against modern society from his masturbation stained bedsheets in New Orleans.

(The rejection letters piled up)

His mother, god bless her stubborn Southern soul.

She dragged that manuscript around for eleven years.

Practically holds a gun to Walker Percy’s head until he reads it.

And then? Pulitzer Prize…

Imagine someone today getting their sanitizing hands on Ignatius. This walking dumpster fire of toxic masculinity, casual racism, and weapons grade narcissism.

Imagine them trying to make him palatable.

You know what you get?

Nothing. A corpse dressed in Sunday clothes. A vampire with its fangs filed down to nubs.

Cause this is what’s happening in the literary world with all of these types of book burner folk. The ones who are trying to wipe away great work and not allowing people to read, understand and see how the world really works.

Books aren’t instruction manuals for living. They delve deep into the human condition.

Like in medicine. You sometimes need to see the disease to find and understand the cure.

Ignatius works BECAUSE he’s a monster. Not the fun kind with tentacles and teeth, the real kind. The kind you’ve met. The kind posting conspiracy theories on Facebook. The kind living in their parent’s basement at 35, blaming everyone else for their failures.

You’re supposed to recognise him.

But no. There come the protectors. The saviours. They’re the types of people who think you’re too fragile. Or maybe too stupid. Hell, too impressionable to handle what really goes on down the darker sides of humanity.

If censorship was a hammer they’d be swinging it all of the damn show.

Take Huckleberry Finn as example. Gets yanked from schools faster than you can say “that word makes me uncomfortable.” But strip out the racial language and you strip out the entire point. That’s a book about a kid unlearning his programming. About choosing humanity over society’s rules.

Anyways. The main point of this email is to just read the hard books. The ones that might make you wince.

If they’re banning it. It’s for good reason.

If you truly want to understand people. Those works will unravel everything at a visceral level for you.

Here’s a silly long link again that’ll take you to grab the book if you want it.

Stephen Walker.

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

I came across this quote and if you let it.

It might slap you across the face and give you a different way of looking at things…

“What a beautiful gift it is to hit rock bottom. To be stripped of any and all pride, ego and false responsibility. To be left with nothing but possibility. A chance to climb upwards and make anew what once seemed impossible. Every man, at one point in his life, could benefit from the raw, pure, and radically humbling experience of being left with nothing to realise that everything is possible.”

Beautiful gift.

That’s what they called losing everything. And here’s the twisted part…

They’re absolutely right.

Most people spend their entire lives avoiding rock bottom like it’s some kind of creative death sentence.

They cling to mediocre jobs, toxic relationships, and half ass dreams because the alternative, losing everything and starting over…

Feels like failure.

But if you think about it. What if it’s actually freedom?

If you look around and find your favourite artists, creators or even entrepreneurs you admire. You can almost guarantee they’ll have their version of a rock bottom story to tell.

There’s that little blip of a moment where they knew that everything was going to get stripped away which left them naked, terrified and without excuses.

And scarily enough that’s where the real work begins.

When you have nothing else left to lose. You can finally risk everything. When your ego gets demolished, you can finally create without worrying about looking stupid. When all your “safe” options disappear, you can finally chase the impossible dreams you’ve been too scared to pursue.

Rock bottom burns away everything that isn’t essential. All the bullshit personas you’ve been maintaining. All the “shoulds” and “supposed tos” that have been guiding your decisions. All the fear based choices disguised as practical ones.

What’s left is pure possibility.

I know creators who spent years playing it safe, making work that was “good enough” to keep the lights on but not brave enough to matter. Then life kicked them in the teeth.

Divorce, bankruptcy, career implosion, health scare and suddenly they had nothing left to protect.

That’s when they started making their best work.

Desperation is a helluva motivator.

When you’re truly fucked, you stop asking for permission. You stop waiting for the perfect moment. You stop caring about critics who’ve never risked anything themselves.

You just create. Raw, honest, desperate, beautiful work that comes from a place most people are too comfortable to access.

And as someone who has been at the bottom of multiple occasions. There is beauty in the rebirth.

It’s completely democratic. Gravity doesn’t care about your background, your education, or your previous success. Everyone gets equal access to the bottom floor.

And everyone gets equal opportunity to climb back up.

There’s always a catch though. People would call you crazy if you said to them that rock bottom is a gift. It’s punishment. Or some wild detour. The type of setback where you scramble to come back from it ASAP…

They miss the point entirely.

Rock bottom isn’t something to escape. It’s something to embrace. It’s where you learn what you’re actually made of when all the artificial supports get pulled away.

It’s where you discover that the person you thought you were was mostly costume and performance, and the person you actually are is much more interesting and capable than you ever imagined.

So if you’re there now. If everything’s fallen apart and you’re sitting in the wreckage wondering what the hell happens next?

Congratulations.

You’re exactly where you need to be to create something that actually matters. The climb up is going to suck. But the view from where you’re going will be worth every scraped knee and bloody knuckle along the way.

I’ve always found the best stories always start with “I lost everything and had to build it all back from nothing.”

It’s a new book or a chapter 1 moving on to chapter 2.

And if you want a quick way to help slap you out of that bottom funk. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho will quickly drop you into a beautiful perspective which will change the way you see the world.

Stephen Walker.

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

This is basically about how I accidentally proved headlines matter more than everything else.

Which strangely also includes audio.

So yesterday I screwed up so spectacularly that I accidentally proved the most important copywriting principle of all time.

So I’m out walking, feeling inspired, decide to record a YouTube short. (Which is the new thing I’m doing with my walks/hikes and NO you can’t see them…yet)

Just me riffing on some random topic while wandering around like a philosopher hopped up on all of the caffeine…

I’m dropping what I think are absolute gems of wisdom into my phones camera.

Two minutes of pure brilliance. Or so I thought.

I wrap up, feeling good about the content. Upload it straight to YouTube with a killer headline that I spent actual time crafting.

Then I get a notification about an hour later. 200 views. Not bad for a random walking video.

Except when I check the video.

No audio. None. Zero. Zilch. Not even subtitles of me mouthing off or anything.

There I am, gesticulating wildly at the camera like a mime having an existential crisis, while viewers watch me mouth words they can’t hear for two straight minutes.

And yet… 200 views.

It’s weird that people clicked on a video that didn’t have audio but stuck around long enough for the views to count…

The headline did ALL the heavy lifting. Not my brilliant insights. Not my engaging delivery. Not even basic technical dumbfuckery.

Obviously I’m not going to make a habit of testing this but I thought it was pretty entertaining anyways.

But there it was. Just the promise in those few words at the top. Cause as far as I know YouTube shorts don’t really allow anything else from an optimisation point of view, other than a headline and maybe part of the thumbnail of the clip.

And so I’d probably say that this is the copywriting lesson every creator needs tattooed on their eyeballs.

Your headline is important but it’s everything else too, It’s the bouncer that decides who gets into the club. It’s the salesperson that gets people to stop scrolling and pay attention.

Without a strong headline, your content could cure cancer and solve world hunger, and nobody would stick around long enough to find out.

With a strong headline, people will apparently watch you mime your way through a walking meditation and somehow find value in the experience.

The funniest part? I’m going to re-record that video tomorrow and make the whole audio disaster part of the joke.

If you’re spending more time perfecting your body copy than your headlines, you’re doing it backwards. If you’re writing headlines last, you’re doing it backwards. If you think good content can overcome a weak headline, you’re definitely doing it backwards.

Your headline is the promise. Everything else is just keeping that promise.

And apparently, sometimes the promise is strong enough that people will stick around even when you literally can’t deliver on it because you forgot to press the record button properly.

So before you write another email, post, video description, or piece of content. Write the headline first. Make it impossible to ignore. Make it create a curiosity gap so wide that people have to click just to close it.

Cause if my dumbass can make a silent video get 200 views based purely on headline strength, imagine what happens when you actually include the audio?

Stephen Walker.

P.S. This is why I don’t really do video. I have a knack for breaking things. I’m writer dude. I write words and sometimes they come out okay.

P.P.S. This long link will take you to TSGS opt-in page where all of the silliness and seriousness will commence in the not so distant future.

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

You are a detective.

Your mission is to document and observe the world around you.

As if you’ve never seen it before.

Take notes.

Collect things you find on your travels.

Document findings.

Notice patterns.

Copy. Trace. Make rubbings…

Focus on one thing at a time.

Record what you’re drawn to.

Don’t stop there though. Expand on it. Share it. Write about it in visceral detail. Extract every last ounce of emotion from it. Make a video of you explaining it poorly. Write a poem about it. Create a not so pretty dressed up PDF and sell it to the world. Hell…

Give it away.

Spark conversations. Drink bad coffee and drink even worse tasting beers.

Look up the sky and try count the stars or not.

You’re a fire filled soul. You’re not here to just fizzle out and die.

You are me and I am you and we are all supposed to be part of a community.

We are part of humanity in all of our little quirks and and imperfections…

That is it.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Go here. Get ready.

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom