The Memoir Everyone Was Talking About ...
Charlotte Booth • 9 February 2023
Getting the research right
However, as evidence of amazing marketing it can't be beaten. I have no idea who his ideal audience is, as people were buying it who love him, who hate him and all those in between. The marketing and PR department did a grand job!
When looking at the reviews of the book, however, there was one which stood out and highlighted everything that is difficult when writing a memoir.
"Harry can't come up with any dates, says he can't remember the dates of anything. Said he was at college on a hot summer's day when the phone call came about his Great Great Grandmother passing. He was not at school, he was skiing in Switzerland with his brother (I remember this) and the papers have come back with the proof. Harry says that his mother bought him an Xbox for his 13th birthday in advance of her death, that her sister brought to the school for him, again not true the Xbox didn't come out till 4 years later."
When writing a memoir, in fact when writing anything of which you are claiming to be an authority on, you need to make sure your facts are 100% correct. With our own lives we like to rely on memory but how often have you thought something was a couple of years ago and it turns out to be 20 !? I still can't believe Red Dwarf is 35 years old. I remember watching the first episode like it was yesterday ... but I digress.
In the wake of ChatGPT fact-checking has never been so important, especially if you are putting something out under the umbrella of your business as a means of demonstrating your expertise. Relying on 'it looks about right' isn't going to help your business when someone (like the reviewer above) will know 100% that something is incorrect. It then casts doubt over everything you've written.
Ensuring facts are correct can come from expertise, using the right resources (not Wikipedia) and trying to go to primary sources wherever possible. As a researcher this has been something I have enjoyed doing for years - following a trail to the primary source and finding out that it has been changed in the retelling.
If you would like to talk about outsourcing your business content, or you are thinking about writing a memoir and don't want to get a review like the one above drop me an email or check out my writing mentoring programme.
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There is nothing more amusing than checking out mediaeval artistic renditions of lions and other heraldic creatures. These beasts, grimacing and gurning are a strange juxtaposition of human, animal and demon and as far from the cute image of Alex from the Madagascar franchise or in fact a real lion as you could possibly get. There are three main reasons mediaeval lions are so ‘bad’ and un-representational; The artists were following a very tight brief. Some of the artists may never have seen a lion, and were following the descriptions they were given. These lions were representing heraldic principals of bravery, nobility and authority; all very human characteristics. When viewed through this lens it becomes more understandable why they look the way they do, but they are still ‘not right’ and not a great tool for learning about lions. Generative AI is very similar to an uninformed but talented mediaeval artist. There is a element of intelligence but at the end of the day it is following a brief, with no actual ‘knowledge’ of the thing it is producing. As an example, if you prompt your generative AI (ChatGPT and the like) to produce a blog for your new product or service, aimed at your ideal customer avatar you will in all likelihood get a mediaeval lion out the other end. Sort of recognisable, and sort of not. This is because AI doesn’t know what a customer is (ideal or otherwise), has no idea what your product or service is and does, and has no true understanding of how this service or product will serve your ideal customer and their needs. Of course, AI is pulling all the information available from the internet to help with its answer but there is no understanding there. There is no determining fact from falsehoods or even which websites are trustworthy and which are not. So, it skims the internet and puts together content which suits the brief as it understands it. This is then when the actual work should start as this content shouldn’t be used in the raw. It should be edited and tweaked by a human who DOES understand the brief, has been a customer (ideal or otherwise) and can imagine what your ideal customer will feel when using your product or services. We are in a world now, where we have generative AI promoting products and services to humans, when it has no concept of what a human is and how it thinks, meaning the marketing department are in fact more important than ever for ensuring content and copy is aimed at humans and human emotions. You could argue that the world would be a more entertaining place if there were more mediaeval lions in it, but it wouldn’t be a great environment for learning, or for basing purchasing decisions on. If you want to maintain the human element in your content, then I would love to help . Explain the brief, your CTA and your ideal client and I will know what I need to ask to get a clear idea before writing. Then you can rest assured your content was written by a human for a human and we can leave the mediaeval lions to the museums.
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