Simply Speaking
In The Ghost Writer, his brilliantly wry had-the-Pulitzer-only-to-have-it-cruelly-yanked-away novel, Phillip Roth evokes the Sisyphean writer’s burden in its most elegiac terms. Speaking through the lips of a fictional literary lion, reportedly modeled after either Bernard Malamud or Henry Roth, the then-younger Mr. Roth recounts his shpilkes thusly:
“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.”
The reductionist wouldn’t advise holding your breath until you find a similar dedication to craft at your standard issue ad agency. Venture down those now empty and echoing hallways and you’ll hear the clanking chains of finance departments past, present, and future, doling out writers and art director’s time with all the warmth of an insurance company telling your doctor “we’ll cover 15 minutes, per patient, and not a single dangerously fibrillating heartbeat more.”
This, by the way, isn’t an attack on time-based billing—it’s as good as any other way to skin the compensation cat. Nor do those of us on Mount Minimalism tend to hew to a Scroogian standard on this stuff: if we want to invest extra, on our own damned nickel, to make something stand taller, we think it’s our professional obligation to do so.
But that, too, is a digression.
More to the point of today’s parable, there’s a reason the attack on copy in advertising is different than what you find in other writerly arts: each reflects a different intention. In fiction we want people to get blissfully lost in the story. In marketing, we want them to actively find the reasons that will lead them all the long miles from “I’m interested” to “I’m buying.”
To get there we don’t envision our copy as working in the darkened theater of the mind, transfixing a hushed audience. Instead, borrowing from the British ad writer Dave Dye, we treat our words as a conversation in a crowded bar, competing for a drinking buddy’s attention with the clatter of glassware and the jukebox playing covers of the Dan Hicks classic, “How Can I Miss You, If You Won’t Go Away.”
Do that properly, blend the right mix of ear-candy and information, and something wonderful happens; you look up from your intimate discourse to find the entire bar listening, raptly, as you tell the tale.
Well-known reductionist ad copy pro-tip #1: if you want to know if your ad copy is worthy, read it aloud. Listen for cadence and flow and coherence and conversational simplicity; always recalling that hearing, like seeing, is a gateway to both head and heart.
World-premiere of reductionist copy pro-tip #2: if you’re anywhere in the reviewing and approving chain and have the urge to offer editorial notes on anything other than legal or technical items, do the same thing. Listen for the way the thoughts and the words are interconnected; understand how a tugging on a single thread will affect the tapestry as a whole.
Corollary to both of the above: to get the copy to the point that’s even worth pressure testing aloud, you need time to think, to experiment, to turn the words around and then turn them around again. All because, in the words of the wonderfully inventive George Tannenbaum, arguably adland’s best blogger, “time equals truth” (https://adaged.blogspot.com/2020/02/time-equals-truth-yes-even-in.html).
Speaking of which, there’s a harsh taskmaster hanging on my wall, ticking off the seconds before a deadline collides. Pardon my shpilkes, I’ve got to go.