My obsessive curiosity led me to investigate both kinds of writ-
ing. I studied literature throughout college and for years afterward.
I minored in English and American literature. I loved Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Jack London, Mark Twain, William
Saroyan, and others.
I wrote fiction, plays and poetry, trying to adapt what I was
learning and did pretty well at it. I was published a fair amount.
And I saw a play I wrote,The Robert Bivens Interview, produced in
Houston in 1979. It won an award, too, in the first Houston Play-
wrights Festival.
Years later, I studied copywriting. I read everything I could get
my hands on, from in-print marketing books to out-of-print col-
lectibles.The Robert Collier Letter Bookchanged my life. The works
of John Caples opened my eyes.
I spent time practicing what I was learning, writing sales letters
that sometimes bombed, but more often broke all records—some
of them on the verge of being miraculous. My letter for Thought-
line, an old DOS program, is still being talked about today. (You’ll
find it later in this book.)
The result of this foot in two worlds experience led me to create
what I later coined “Hypnotic Writing.”
That didn’t happen overnight, of course. It took well over 20 years
of cooking within me before the recipe was ready. And it wasn’t until
I had read the book Unlimited Selling Powerbefore everything came
together for me.
That’s when I wrote a book that became the beginning of a
movement. I used to sell that book in the back of the room at my
talks in Houston, way back in the 1990s. That book later became
my first e-book. It’s now sold in the tens of thousands online. The
title is Hypnotic Writing.
Generally speaking, Hypnotic Writing is any writing that holds
your attention. Hypnotists call it a “waking trance” (which I ex-
plain in a minute). John Burton, in his advanced book Hypnotic
Languagewrites: “All communication invites the receiver into a
hypnotic trance.”
Note he said invitesa person into a trance. You can start writing
A Beginning