Express yourself

Express yourself

We are all individuals, and we all have our own way of doing our creative work and expressing our creative ideas. You can gain inspiration and motivation from studying the lives and the methods of other great creative people.

Ed Bernd says that he took some comfort when he heard playwright Neil Simon tell interviewer Larry King, "I'm not a television writer. I can write hits for stage, movies, musicals. I don't have a talent for writing television. I was not born for that."

Simon, who wrote such hits as The Odd Couple and is one of the most successful playwrights of our time, went on to say that he spends the first two or three days of work on a project working on the name of the play. "If you get the name right," he explained, "you know what it's about, and the audience knows what it's about."

Ed says that it frustrates him a bit that he seems to need to do everything in sequence. "That's what happened with the Sales Power book that I wrote along with Mr. Silva and Dennis Higgins," he said. "I couldn't start the actual writing until I had a working title that made sense to me.

"Every three or four months, I would call Dennis and discuss things with him. I made a lot of notes, and had a lot of information to include in the book. But I just couldn't seem to figure out how to express it without having a title. This was really frustrating. I figured up one time that during my lifetime, growing up in the newspaper business, I have written 10 million words for publication! It frustrates me when I get stuck. I may have been stuck, but I never gave up.

"Then Dave Bellizzi, a wonderful salesman, came up with the phrase I needed: 'Use the untapped power of your mind to increase your sales and income.' That became my working title, and after that it was easy.

"But I still had to do it in sequence," Ed continued. "I organized all of my information into an introduction and fourteen chapters. I had fifteen file folders stuffed full of notes and information. I should have been able to write any chapter, but my mind just doesn't seem to work in 'random access' fashion. I had to write the introduction first, then Chapter 1, then Chapter 2 and so on.

"The good news," Ed continued, "is that once I got started, it was very easy to write, thanks to the Silva techniques. I was writing one chapter per day. How did I do that? I usually write for about forty-five minutes before I run out of things to say. That could be one page, or several pages during that forty-five minutes.

"Then I go stretch out on the sofa and listen to music. I daydream about anything except the book. I just leave it up to my mind - my inner conscious level - to arrange what comes next. Suddenly I feel like I am ready, so I get up, go back to the keyboard and start typing to see what is there.

"Of course, I program myself in advance that I will do a good job. I go to level at night when I am in bed and ready to go to sleep, and I use the MentalVideo Technique, making a video about how easy the writing will be and how good it will turn out."

Despite his misgivings about not being able to write chapters out of sequence, Ed's way is obviously a good way for him to work. The Sales Power book has been translated into a dozen foreign languages, and is being sold in more than two dozen foreign countries. It was the first Silva book to be translated into Russian. And Ed is not too modest to show people a copy of the article that appeared in Publisher's Weekly, the leading trade publication for the publishing industry:

The article was published in the May 18, 1992 edition, shortly after Putnam published the English language edition, and says in part:

"With an assist from agents overseas, New York agent Jeff Herman has sold translation rights in Malaysia, Israel, Spain and Spanish South America, France, Hungary, Thailand, Brazil, Taiwan and Denmark. Other foreign contracts are under negotiation.

"Income from the various guarantees so far has passed the $100,000 mark."

"It was definitely a collaborative effort," Ed says. "Jose Silva gave me so many techniques to work with, and Dennis Higgins helped so much to write it in a way that sales people and everyone else would really relate to and benefit from...I just used my experience as a reporter to arrange the words, sentences, and paragraphs, and we wound up with a fabulous book."

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