POP writing

You’re aiming for your writing to be a balance of Playful, Observational and Personal. Too much of one and it becomes, respectively, too surface level, too like a manual or too like an excerpt from your private journal. POP is about making writing memorable, and helping you write pieces that only you can write.

Personal

• Recall a personal experience — tell a personal story from your life, or discuss an experience you readers can all understand.
• Revealing things about yourself - helps readers connect with you. Facts aren’t enough. You can find those on Wikipedia. Instead, write about intimate emotions or intense experiences. Tell stories about your life. If your words make you feel naked, you’re probably onto something.
• Personal writing goes wrong when it lacks the other components of POP because it’s neither insightful or fun to read. Remember, nobody cares about you as much as you do. If you don’t distill the lessons from your life stories, they aren’t relevant to others.
• So many writers have stage fright, especially at the beginning. If you’re scared of judgment, write under a pseudonym.
• Relate to other's personal experience.

Personal prompts

• I saw...
• I felt...
• I heard...
• You've seen...
• You've noticed...
• You've been there...
• Tell a story about your life and write about private and intense emotions
• Shared experiences - write about what it's like to take public transit, go to school have siblings, etc.
• Open the memory bank - refer to things that have happened in the past.

Observational

• Reveal new insights — make the readers say "I never saw that before, but now, I can't stop seeing it."
• Susan Sontag once said that “writers are professional observers.” It’s true. Good observational writers either have a deep knowledge set or a distinct way of looking at the world, which makes readers say: “Huh, I’ve never thought of it like that before.”
• When writing is only observational, it’s boring. School textbooks come to mind because they are neither personal or playful.
• Observation will come easily to you once you start taking notes. With a database of facts and epiphanies to draw from, you’ll be able to expand your readers’ knowledge set.
• King of this is David Foster Wallace -write's hyper-specific and personal. When writing about Tennis, he looked into specific rackets on eBay to make observations about the weight and tensile strength of rackets.

Observational prompts

• I noticed a pattern...
• Look at this trend...
• The best-kept secret is...
• If you turn your head...
• You don't know this but..
• You haven't seen that...
• Bed, bath, bus — ways to give your subconscious room to think
• capture your hmmmms — write down any ephiphanies or any ideas that accelerate your heartbeat
• look for surprises — if something surprises you or the person you're with, make a note
• make things unfamiliar — when things are familiar, we stop looking at the world.

Playful

• Playful, brings out the kid in them — jokes, sports, movies, TV, pop culture, food, dialogue, stories, characters, and analogies.
• Jokes, riddles, slang, coined terms, funny phrases, and thought experiments are all part of the repertoire. Sneak your sentences some swigs of tequila until they’re a little tipsy (too much will make your reader gag). If you’re making your prisoner reader smile, you’re onto something. Like relish on a hot dog, playfulness is a condiment — not the main dish

Playful prompts

• plays on words
• silly words & phrases
• sensory words
• storytelling
• jokes, puns, riddles
• imaginary characters
• Play like a theater — personify things, make up fictional characters, use existing ones
• Mind games — use thought experiments (imagine if...)
• Lightheartedness — use fun analogies, refer to pop culture, use pictures and illustrations
• Play with language — choose interesting words and phrases, or tricks like alliteration and repetition.