Today, I want to discuss the importance of "the ping."
The ping is the feeling you get when you read something that resonates deep inside your mind...it's a moment in someone's story when you feel connected to them because you're sharing a familiar feeling, insight, or question.
The ping is everything.
You need to offer the ping to your readers, preferably more than once. With no ping, you cannot teach because you have not first connected.
So, how do we ensure we create some pings?
Specificity and familiarity.
When we share a niche detail or start on common ground with a shared reference, we think we're either being irrelevant or too general.
But that's not the case.
We're all more alike than we think, and we want to hear from people who understand us.
If you traded Garbage Pail Kids cards in kindergarten and wore Love's Baby Soft as a tween and a flannel shirt as a teen, you and I might have a few concerns in common today. We can build on that.
Details like the ones I just shared create weak pings. (Still enjoyable, but not the stuff of powerful writing.)
Better, deeper pings involve emotion, usually born of setbacks, failure, triumph, high stakes.
Fear, doubt, pride, love.
Last night I watched the Yacht Rock documentary on Max. It was interesting, as one of the things the talking heads explained about the staying power of the genre was that it was the first time men were singing passionately about being fools for love.
And audiences dug that. They felt the ping.
If you look at the pop charts in 1980ish, songs were super emo. The word "fool," in fact, featured quite prominently in a lot of titles. ("What a Fool Believes" by The Doobie Brothers anyone? What a banger.)
These earnest songwriters were creating pings all over the place, just like Taylor Swift does so consistently today. She goes deep into her own experiences and the deeper she goes, the more connection she creates with her fans.
The ping.
See it. Hear it. Appreciate it. Write it.
Love, Laura
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