About pondering like a copywriter
Copywriting can sometimes feel like a poor cousin to images in our visually dominated world. With access to all kinds of ideas, opinions and carefully crafted bonmots only on our phones, we arguably read more than ever before. And as anyone who spends time on Twitter knows, words matter – get the nuance of your reasoning or branding message wrong, and all hell can break loose in just a few lines.
There is little doubt that making a great copy takes a lot of skill, and so most creatives are looking for ways to do it better. Step up a new book called Copywriting Is … by Andrew Boulton, Senior Lecturer in Copywriting and Creative Promotion at the University of Lincoln to help you through the swamp.
As Boulton explains from the start, the book is not a guide. "For example, it won't walk you through individual techniques and methods of writing," he writes. “You are also not shown specific examples of real world displays and concepts to illustrate how these techniques are used. The reason is quite simple. Writing a book like this is much more difficult and I am much more lazy than the kind of person who is able to write one. More importantly, such books already exist, and there are a handful of them. I am absolutely sure that there is nothing I can do to improve it. "
Instead, Boulton offers over 30 pieces of advice to guide you through the "feelings, fears, failures, frustrations, and half-hearted solutions of living copywriting and teaching copywriting." Here he's shared four excerpts with CR that cover the topics of hiking, collaboration, envy, and exploding, to give you a taste of what the larger book contains.
HIKING RING
Some jobs are tied to a specific environment. Pilots can only actually pilot when they are in a cockpit. Otherwise they are little more than a covered airport equipment, which in this environment is no more pronounced than an uncomfortable plastic bench or the weak "poof" of a suspicious travel bag that is blown up by the security service.
Copywriting, on the other hand, is not tied to a specific point. Unless, of course, if it is. Which of course is a lot.
Interview the copywriters in your immediate area and I would be surprised if they didn't all spend most of their creative time in the same place, working with the same device, and trying to get inspiration from the same environment.
On the one hand, it is understandable. Familiarity, comfort, and the calming sovereignty of a habitual space result in a controlled and consistent workplace. But in our work, controlled and consistent, an unusual kind of chaos can arise. At least it creates a stale kind of fluency that gradually erodes the need for imagination.
Choosing the places we work in is often more about conformity than suitability. We work at our desk because it's there and it's ours, not because it's necessarily the most effective environment for creative thinking.
Instead of being the place we're most likely to write, the desk becomes the easiest place not to. Often, without realizing it, we create the perfect growing conditions for distraction. The desk becomes the place where we stop and redirect, where work cannot hold us. And, as Tennessee Williams once wrote, "the right condition for him (the writer) is one in which his work is not only convenient but inevitable".
COLLABORATION
If Lethal Weapon was a movie about a lonely detective approaching retirement and quietly grumbling alone in his police car that he's "too old for this shit" – even though he's in very little actual shit – it would be a lot been shorter, far less interesting movie. You may even complain that there was nothing deadly or armed about what you just saw.
Buddy Cop action films are similar, if only in this way, to copywriting.
Now I know that many copywriters would rather come into contact with a bag of Scrabble tiles than spend too much time in the company of people. As appealing as the solitude of business may be, a buddy-free copywriter can be like a submarine in a swimming pool. You can only go so far.
There is often one little addition that will improve your writing: creative chemistry. If we pretend we're calculating, I'd say the compatibility ratio for creative partners is about one in a thousand. That is not to say that the majority of potential creative partners are inferior, just that your relationship with them collides with too many barriers that make people such complicated and self-destructive creatures.
At the top of the list of these obstacles is undoubtedly courtesy, the malicious scourge of effective and courageous ideas. And when you find yourself carefully controlling your partner's sensitivities or suspecting that they are doing the same, that hesitation pervades the work again and again.
ENVY
Copywriting is a jealous business in its dark heart. Few of us have never seen the pervasive surge of professional envy of a fellow writer's brilliance. I suspect most of us get pierced so often that if you dropped us in the water we would seep away like tea bags.
Such a desirable way of working could easily be debilitating. Too often, get beaten up by the great things you don't do and you could desperately get away from the great things you could do.
Yet envy can be a powerful and positive emotion for any copywriter. We exist in a turbine of inspiration after all – and must necessarily include the things that inspire us first before we can exclude the things that will inspire our reader.
And although inspirational writing is hardly in short supply, a copywriter who does not properly filter his inspiration quickly blurs the distinction between poetic and convincing. Then it makes perfect sense that our creative inspiration comes primarily directly from the puffy udders of copywriting. And it's a grumpy and self-destructive copywriter who views the inspiration of great lyrics as an affront to their originality.
On the contrary, breaking down the elements that make a great copy line so effective is like carding a more compelling solution. Following someone else's impeccable thinking is not a cheat (and it doesn't end up breaking the line that inspired you in the first place). Like a 1980s computer game cheat code, it will only lead you over the dangers and lead you on a more rewarding path.
EXPLODE
At some point in your copywriting career, no matter how much you resist, you will take a small step that I like to refer to as the One Word Rub.
It doesn't sound quite as dingy, it just means you write the first word of your copy, immediately rub it out, start over, rub it out again, and so on, until you've wasted an entire morning giving birth and then butchering a single word that corresponds for some reason not your requirements.
It is an excruciating way of writing, albeit perfectly understandable. Something in our brain says if our beginning is weak, then that is the height we have assigned to the entirety of the piece. But of course that's not true. Some writers would even like to argue that the shit of their first draft is a necessity if they are to produce something of value later.
By far the most useful piece of advice I've ever read comes not from another copywriter, but from the writer Ray Bradbury. He says this: “Hot today, cool tomorrow. Burn the house down this afternoon. Tomorrow, pour cold critical water on the boiling coals. Time enough to think, cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today – explode – fly apart – fall apart. "
This act of explosion contains enough power, fire, and deafening noise to take you away from doubts or the urge to find flaws in whatever you set aside. And today you are only responsible for splattering the walls with imagination. Tomorrow you'll be the one to clean it up.
Copywriting Is… by Andrew Boulton is published by Gasp! Books priced at £ 12.99; gasp