Stop Talking About Your Process

I have a dry cleaner. Every Tuesday, I drop off a week's worth of wrinkled disasters. Every Friday, I pick up crisp, pressed perfection hanging in those satisfying plastic sleeves.

I don't need to know what chemicals they use. I don't care about their state-of-the-art pressing equipment or their eco-friendly cleaning process. I couldn't tell you how long they've been in business or whether the owner went to dry cleaning school (do they even have those?).

All I care about is this: I can walk into any meeting looking like I've got my shit together, even when I definitely don't. My shirts don't have mysterious stains from last Friday's lunch disaster. My pants have actual creases instead of looking like I slept in them.

It's one less thing I have to think about in my already overstuffed brain.

Your clients feel exactly the same way about your copy.

When a business owner lands on your website or reads your pitch, they're not hunting for your "proprietary 12-step messaging framework" or your certification from the International Academy of Words That Sell Good.

They don't care that you've been studying consumer psychology since the Clinton administration or that you use a special blend of neuroscience and ancient storytelling techniques passed down through generations of Mad Men.

Here's what they do care about:

• Their sales page converts visitors into buyers while they sleep. Their email campaigns actually get opened instead of banished to the spam folder. Their brand voice finally sounds like them instead of every other beige business in their industry.
  
  
• They want to stop lying awake at 2 AM wondering if their copy is the reason their launch flopped. They want to feel confident hitting "send" on that email campaign. They want their website to work as hard as they do.
  
  
• Most of all, they want to stop being their own copywriter.

See the difference?

One version is about you and your impressive toolkit. The other is about them and their real life getting measurably better.

Your process matters … to you. It should be bulletproof, battle-tested, and refined through years of trial and error. But your process is like the dry cleaner's industrial steamers: essential for getting the job done, invisible to the customer.

What your clients can see, feel, and desperately want is the outcome. The relief. The transformation.

So here's your homework: Go read your About page, your service descriptions, your LinkedIn summary. Count how many times you talk about your method versus how many times you talk about their life after working with you.

If you're like most copywriters, you'll find a lot more "how I work" and not nearly enough "how you'll feel."

Your clients don't want to hire your process.

They want to hire their better future.

Give them that instead.

21 Quotes About 1st Drafts

First drafts are the swamp monsters of writing. They smell weird, look worse, and if you stare too long, you’ll start questioning your career choices. But here’s the dirty little secret every writer knows (and tries to forget until deadline): you don’t get to the shiny stuff without trudging through the muck. 

Marketing copy, blog content, ad headlines ... it all starts as a mess. And that’s fine. Better than fine, actually. Because without that shaky, ugly first draft, there’s nothing to refine, polish, or sell.

So, in the spirit of celebrating the mess, here are 21 quotes to remind you that your first draft doesn’t have to be brilliant ... it just has to exist.

The first draft of everything is shit. – Ernest Hemingway

I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles. – Shannon Hale

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. – Terry Pratchett

Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It’s perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist. – Jane Smiley

I just give myself permission to suck.
I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts…
so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day
I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will
stick in the minds of my readers forever,
because there’s a 90 percent chance
I’m just gonna delete whatever
I write anyway.
I find this hugely liberating.

John Green

Short copy actually takes longer to write. That’s why I go through so many drafts; because it’s a process of distillation. You start with 25 gallons of sour mash to produce a fifth of whiskey. – Jim Punkre

Sometimes my first drafts look like I was typing with hammers. – Scott Frothingham

The first draft is a skeleton. Just bare bones. The rest of the story comes later with revising. – Judy Bloom

Never create and edit at the same time.

Get all the sloppy, ugly roughs and first drafts out.

Quantity is more important than quality at the start.

Mess is more.

Brian Collins

Most times, I’ll just sit there, suffer, write shitty sentences, and hope I can make the next draft less putrid. – Daniel Pink

The first draft reveals the art; revision reveals the artist. – Michael Lee

Get it all down. Let it pour out of you and onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can. – Anne Lamott

To become a proper writer, you have to forgive yourself the catastrophe of the first draft. – Alain de Botton

Because getting it all onto the page and not worrying about perfection is a super-important first step in many a creative process. You can redraft, edit and fine tune later (or ask somebody else to). Give yourself permission to write something imperfect, and then you’ve got something to work with. – Sophie de Albuquerque

Underthink. Overwrite.
The secret to a good first draft.

Joe Jeffries

When working on a first draft, go into the project knowing that 33% of what you write will be good “as is”, 33% of what you write could be good after editing, and 33% will be trash. – Soundarya Durgumahanthi 

With rare exceptions all early drafts are imperfect, but that imperfection is a gift — the raw material you need to make things better during revision. – Roy Peter Clark

Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something — anything — as a first draft…Until it exists, writing has not really begun. – John McPhee

Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix. – Dominick Dunne

Afraid you can’t write your first draft like
polished Hemingway prose?
Neither could Hemingway!

Daniel Parsons

Call To Action

 

Close with an outcome, not a feature.

“Choose your plan” is closing with a feature ... sounds like homework.

"Choose your 6-pack abs by summer" is closing with an outcome ... sounds like motivation.

The Union of Mess and Precision

People tell me "The magic’s in the mess. But the paycheck’s in the precision." should be my catchphrase.

Apparently I say it often.

Sometimes, however, it doesn't land the way I'd like it to. 

Sometimes, the recipient of my oft repeated observation think I'm referring to the deliverable that will be handed to the client or presented to the public. 

But, I'm not referring to the end result of the creative process: what we'll use to market a product or service.

I'm talking about what's going on in the mind of the creator: Creatives need both the "mess" and the "precision" to mold that "mess" into something that resonates with the intended audience.

To quote Dorothy Parker: "Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye."

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
New York based American poet, literary critic and writer of
fiction, plays and screenplays known for her caustic wisecracks.