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I’m a latecomer to poetry. Recently I had some help. My son and daughter-in-law gave me a subscription to Master Class, online lessons taught by well-known professionals. I opened the site and up popped a series by poet Billy Collins. I started listening.

Right away I was hooked. Everything he said seemed new and useful. I grabbed a notebook and started taking notes. I wondered what Collins might say that would help me improve my proposals and other writing.

He said a lot. Here’s some of what I learned, in my words, from Billy Collins and others.

Welcome distractions. Collins says there are no such things as distractions. What might seem like random thoughts may appear because they belong in our writing. In a recent talk, historian Annette Gordon-Reed echoed this notion when she said “things … come to me out of nowhere.” ¹ Think before dismissing seemingly oddball ideas.

Consider movement. Rhythm can help move a reader from vague attention to focused interest. Collins says that a flow of words with meaning can keep the reader engaged. In my article about lyrical writing I quoted Quntos KunQuest, who said “there’s…a metronome in writing. There’s still a beat to it;” and, from Barak Obama: “We come from everywhere and contain multitudes.” ²

Vary the format. Collins uses structure to help the reader settle into the story. Occasionally variations in format, such as substituting a three-line stanza in a poem with four-line stanzas, can help keep the reader engaged. In proposals, funder guidelines provide structure. We can vary the format with, for example, a one-line paragraph to focus the reviewer’s attention on your priorities.

Be imaginative. Collins suggests introducing something unexpected when writing poetry. A proposal reviewer may also find this refreshing. For example, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that progressive magazine Mother Jones shared information in a gift acknowledgement letter about four journalism outlets led by people of color. Readers expressed their appreciation.

Keep it simple. I enjoy short poems with lots of white space. I can see the words better, ponder their meaning, and consider how the poet has put them together. I also like simplicity in writing. Here’s a wonderful quote by Jack Kerouac that I saw written on a bookstore window: “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”

Summing up
It’s never too late to start reading poetry, and there are benefits. Poems of all kinds can spark ideas, and sometimes these find their way into proposals and other kinds of writing.

Parting poetry
Here is a poem in the format in which I received it in my daily Poem of the Day from the Poetry Foundation. I hope you enjoy it.

A Blank White Page
by Francisco X. Alarcón

is a meadow
after a snowfall
that a poem
hopes to cross

Summer is the perfect time to write postcards. You can say a lot in a small space, and who doesn’t love finding a perky postcard tucked in an otherwise mundane pile of mail?

Here are some ideas about writing postcards.

Think about what you want to say before you write. Space will run out quickly.

Don’t try to describe your whole vacation. Pick one experience that you can capture in a line or two. It will have more impact that trying to cram your whole vacation onto a 4×6 card.

Polish your penmanship. True postcards must be handwritten. I’ve learned that a good match between the pen and the surface of the postcard improves handwriting. Experiment.

Be proactive. On vacation, it seems like there’s plenty of time to write postcards, yet no time at all. Dash off a few postcards while you’re sipping lemonade.

Stick with the facts. If you really mean “Wish you were here!”, by all means say it. Otherwise, find another way to express your enthusiasm.

Send postcards from home. Keep a stash from prior vacations, museum visits, or your hometown. Lean into the novelty by, for example, sending a beach postcard during a blizzard.

Send postcards to kids. Most mail is for grown-ups. Postcards are a fun way of telling a young person that she or he is special to you.

Be creative. Use colors, doodle, draw a picture, write a poem, or just leave ample white space to make a point: “This vacation is AWESOME!!!” To me, this sentiment expresses joy, relaxation, contentment, and an experience worth the cost – in four words!

Hidden benefits

• Writing postcards is a wonderful way to sharpen your writing skills. We have to be brief, so we have to decide what’s most important.
• For a short document, postcards go a long way. I appreciate people who take the time to send me a postcard when they’re on vacation.
• Postcards foster connections. Surprise someone you’re out of touch with, with a quick hello from Bali, New York, or the inside of your tent.
• Postcards help sustain memories. Buy some for yourself and keep them in a special place. Then find them months or even years later as treasured mementos when you come upon them unexpectedly.

Postcards are a quick but nevertheless meaningful way to communicate with the people we care about. Whether or not you take a summer vacation, take a summer coffee break and send a postcard. It will brighten someone’s day.

This article is about big writing projects – the ones that are important, strategic, and usually due on short notice…the ones we nevertheless put off for as long as possible.

I’m sorry to say that these are also the projects that remind me of those arduous late-night term papers in college. They are the documents that require us to quickly read and digest information from multiple sources, extract what’s important, and synthesize it into a concise and compelling narrative.

It can be a slog. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Don’t tear your hair out

• Get ready. Assemble and organize the people and material you need to inform your writing.

• Educate your team about what’s involved, what you need from each person, when, and why it’s important. This may be a new experience for some of the people involved.

• Become an expert on what the recipient wants to learn from this document. Don’t let mountains of contributing material divert your attention.

• Plan ahead. It takes time to synthesize all your material into a clear and persuasive document. Unfortunately, there may be no way around it.

• Stay calm. Things can get messy in the middle. Take a break and do something different. Then return for a fresh look and, likely, faster progress.

• Leverage deadlines. Take advantage of what can be an unfortunate timetable to keep the attention of everyone involved.

Food for thought
Dive in. This is an iterative process: read, organize, read again, extract what’s important, distill and integrate your material for easy consumption by the reader, edit, and likely do it all again (and maybe even again).

Be flexible. Priorities can change. What was considered a priority at the project’s outset may be replaced by something else, requiring new writing and/or a change of emphasis.

Assess balance. Periodically, step back from the details to make sure you’re communicating the big picture and the impact you expect.

Be patient
Your project may involve coalescing different points of view from staff in very different roles. All are important, but you may need extra editing to get it right.

The sunny side
It’s immensely satisfying to incorporate all those piles of information into a coherent story that may not have been told before, or told in the way that you’re writing about it now.

The result can build pride in organizations, uncover new strategies, and help launch work that makes the world a better place.

I’ve considered writing about white space for a while. I thought it might be useful. I never dreamed it would be so much fun.

I started by looking at what others have to say about white space. First, the standard definitions. Merriam Webster defines white space as “the areas of a page without print or pictures”. Pretty basic. Collins’ definition is similarly uninspired: “the portions of a printed page that lack text, illustrations, etc. and are therefore blank.” 

I was looking for something more. I found this description: “In design, white space is … not blank space because it has a purpose…The white space helps focus your visual attention.” Here’s another: “White space is a design principle…The absence of text draws your eye to the text.”  

These two descriptions made me think. We can use white space to provide emphasis, while adding style to the rather mundane formats called for in many proposal guidelines. White space can provide clarity and visual relief to busy readers, whose gratitude for your help might cause them to give your proposal a second look. 

Here are some ideas.

• Use bullets, judiciously, to break up narrative writing. 
• Keep your paragraphs short. My limit used to be 12 lines. Now, it’s 6-8 lines or less, if possible.
• A table might help the reviewer quickly understand, for example, an implementation plan or summary of project staff and their roles. 
• Try 1.5” line spacing. I like this look, especially for people who are voluntarily reading your document. 
• You might then decide it’s ok to reduce the font (11.5) and margins (0.9”). Like in this article!
• Keep your sentences tight to create more white space. 
• Be creative. Try a one-sentence paragraph to get attention and add emphasis, perhaps as the final line of your proposal.

Finally, one writer described other benefits to white space: “It’s as underrated as silence between musical notes…White space calms us, letting us breathe.” 

I love this! 

In a prior Short Takes article I wrote about articulating big ideas. It’s one of my favorite kinds of writing. But how do we come up with good ideas in the first place? For those of us who write documents for donors, it’s a fundamental question.

Take these articles. I don’t just sit down at my desk and plan ahead for the upcoming year (though perhaps I should). For the most part ideas for Short Takes just pop into my mind, for no apparent reason. Something sparks them; if I don’t write them down immediately, they’re gone.

Learning from the experts
I decided to see what others have to say. In a talk sponsored by the Eric Carle Picture Book Museum, Raúl Colón, illustrator of children’s books and several New Yorker covers, said “Lose your mind to the other…It got me to where I am now.” He quoted the Wright Brothers: “Daydreaming is needed to create anything new.” It was during a leisurely visit to a beach in North Carolina, according to a CNN article, that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. Physicist and astronomer Abraham Loeb has said: “Without vacations from distractions, ideas are scarce.”

New ideas can emerge from prior thinking. As described in a Smithsonian article, John Livingston Lowes traced lines in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to his “fiery imagination…fueled by identifiable sources in his library.” Such references may be essential; Coleridge had never been on a boat before writing this well-known masterpiece.

And in a Ted Talk, author Steven Johnson described ideas as “cobbled together from whatever … happens to be around. We take ideas from other people, people we know, people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into something new.”

I think it’s fascinating
I love this topic. It’s universal. We all have ideas and there are so many possibilities.

The challenge for me is capturing new ideas before I lose them, and then allowing them to develop into something concretely useful. Here are strategies that have worked for me:

• Write down your ideas. We have so many thoughts simultaneously; new ideas can disappear as fast as they appear. Keep a small notebook handy – or your phone – and capture them before you forget them.
• Let them simmer. Given time, new ideas will evolve and improve.
• Talk with others. Together your ideas and perspectives can turn into something more useful for a wider audience.
• Memorize them. Don’t lose a good idea just because you can’t write it down at that moment.
• Know your patterns. I read a lot, and am learning to be alert to ideas that might be useful later. Sometimes I discover that an idea is a new take on something that’s been rattling around in my mind for quite a while.

We need ideas more than ever
Our world is changing. New ideas inform productive conversations about such urgent issues as equity, the environment, health, and peace. According to Loeb, new ideas must be nurtured in “informal dialogues in environments where mistakes are tolerated and critical thinking is encouraged.”

I find this hopeful. Keeping an open mind about seemingly established ideas can foster new thinking that contributes to meaningful change.