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The mind map from which Perfect Press Releases will be written
Sometimes you’re introduced to a tool by the wrong teacher and, because they’re the wrong teacher, you think the tool is no good.
I was introduced to mind mapping years ago by a friend of mine in Hong Kong. We were talking about going into business together and met in various pubs to discuss various plans. Jo always carried a giant pad and annotated every conversation in sprawling, spidery diagrams.
As those of you who mind map know, a mind map is often a picture of just one brain and won’t necessarily make sense to anyone else. Jo’s generally made no sense to me.
That wasn’t the main reason Jo put me off mind mapping, however.
What really put me off was that Jo threw herself at any passing fad. Her enthusiasm for giant pads and what I saw as indecipherable notes kept me away from mind mapping for years because I thought it was just another Big Thing she’d get over.
It has taken a drip-drip of references to mind mapping from people I respect to get me to try it again. My regret now is that I wasted years making my notes in a conventional form.
My blogging course at the Sydney Writers’ Centre, for instance, is delivered entirely from a mind map.
When I started writing the course I went straight to PowerPoint. I you’re going to spend the day presenting a course, PowerPoint seems a logical first step, except it isn’t. Within about half an hour my PowerPoint had become an unwieldy mess; I kept losing sight of where I was and my mind was racing ahead while my fingers were held up formatting slides and rearranging them as I had new ideas about structure.
One of the best ideas I ever had was to scrap the slideshow and start mind mapping. As the ideas came to me I simply branched out and, if I had a new idea for an old line of thought, it was easy to go back and add a new branch.
Because I have the mind map in front of me at the seminar — as do the attendees — it’s easy to go off on tangents knowing I’ll always be able to find my way back to exactly where we are in the day’s material.
Where the muse struck
Perfect Press Releases
I just spent two wonderful weeks with my family in Bali and Singapore. I did my best to relax but what happens to me as I relax –- and I’m sure you’re the same -– is that the ideas start to come. In my case it was the idea for my next Taleist guide, a guide to how to write the perfect press release.
As a journalist I used to receive several hundred press releases a week, all of them written by professionals and most of them terrible. Later, as a PR person myself, I wrote hundreds of press releases and saw all the results in publications all over the world.
Writing a press release should be simple, especially for writers and authors, but it’s a deceptive art: a balance between creating an enticing but brief story and cramming in pertinent facts that are easy to extract.
As the ideas for the book came to me, a mind map was the perfect way to capture them. Every possible chapter or section became a branch with sub branches and callouts flowing from them. Links between the chapters were easy to draw.
I wrote my first press release in 1992, so 19 years of experience, tips, tricks and winning formulas were coming out of me on my sun lounger.
Fortunately my iPad was there to catch them. I like pieces of paper as much as the next writer, but I live in fear of losing valuable one. With an iPad app like iThoughtsHD, maps can be sent to DropBox where they’re not only backed up but shared with my other computers.
Also I have my iPad with me almost all the time, unlike the A4 notepad that I might use to mind map.
This is in the post about how to mind map, there are plenty of books about that and I don’t claim to be an expert in anything other than capturing my own thoughts. And to many of you I’ve been singing to the choir.
But if you haven’t tried mind mapping yet or, like me, dismissed because it was introduced to you by someone who was just as likely to try to turn you on to The Secret, you should give it a go.
I haven’t started writing my guide to the perfect press release yet, I’m still catching up after the holiday, but it’s exciting to know that it is laid out for me in a way that means I just have to write it because all the ideas are there in a logical, cohesive structure already.
Incidentally, if you’d like to know when the book comes out, make sure you subscribe to this blog. Subscribers always hear first and benefit from discounts and offers. And speaking of offers, I’m cooking up something I think will be quite special, which is another reason to subscribe now.
Update
Perfect Press Releases, a guide to writing a press release now has it’s own website…
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