The Olympic Peninsula (c) Richard Pelletier

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]ell me, where are you headed in your writing life? If you had wings, where would you fly to next? Are you satisfied? You ever think you could kick this thing up a notch or two? Where could you go with your writing if you could make it better by this much? Or that much? What might happen if you knew how a Shakespearean sonnet is made? What if you actually wrote one? And what if you began to fall head over heels with the whole heaving apparatus that is the English language? What would that be like?

Some of us have to write. Some of us want to write. The road that connects us is the sheer difficulty of the journey. Writing is bloody hard. But it’s not impossible to write well, or even beautifully. You just have to commit. And you have to read.

It also helps to find fellow travelers who have walked some of the trade routes and have come back with the spices and the silks, the sonnets and the similes.

So I’ve come here today to talk about the idea of writing as a deep, professional, creative, and spiritual pursuit. A beautiful, sacred undertaking that asks of you everything you’ve got and then asks for more. The pursuit of writing well gives life depth and meaning and a richness that is transcendent. It is fucking glorious to chase this mother down. There is nothing else like it. It is the hardest damn art form there is and it is better than cannabis or bourbon or chocolate. It is the closest thing to jazz.

In love there are two things — bodies and words. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I remember seeing Joseph Campbell in an interview with Bill Moyers once. The conversation meandered and Moyers said something about people wanting to know the meaning of life. And Campbell said no, he didn’t think that’s what people were after. He thought people were after an experience of life. Meaning was not the holy grail, experience was. I remember thinking this felt exactly right.

And so I want to tell you to seek experiences. Find ways to gather with other humans in the pursuit of writing beautifully. Ask yourself this question. What could possibly be more fun, more inspiring, more, I don’t know… fuckingdelicious, than meeting a bunch of strangers — all engaged in the dogged pursuit of writing well — and spending three or four days together writing and talking and writing and talking and writing? What if you were doing all this in a beautiful place? What could that do to your writing life? Maybe change it forever? It happened to me. And it’s happened to about 300 other writers, too. Published poets, screenwriters, corporate communications people, speechwriters, content marketers, novelists, copywriters. Writers of every stripe.

I speak of the magical, the wondrous, the steeped-in-kindness-and-fellowship-and-personal-connection Dark Angels writing workshops. There is nothing like it anywhere. It is the eighth wonder of the world. Now in our 15th year, the (UK based) Dark Angels operation has flown to New Zealand and to America. If I could clamber up to the top of the world’s tallest building and shout this story out, I would do it.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better. ~ David Foster Wallace

In Seattle, this June, Dark Angels will run a writing workshop aboard a 65′ yacht. The De Anza III. Our captain and speaker, is a Dark Angels alumnus, Ted Leonhardt. Ted is a brilliant and provocative thinker, and a powerful creative force. He came to a workshop, did some great work and got his wings. He is a hell of a writer and evangelist.

I have the distinct privilege of running this American Foundation course with a hugely talented and big-hearted writer, Jamie Jauncey. Jamie and I ran a Dark Angels America workshop last year. We want you to join us this June on the waterways of Seattle. It promises to be amazing in so many ways.

Great writers are indecent people. They live unfairly, saving the best part for paper. Good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating, become immortal. If you read this after I am dead it means I made it. ~ Charles Bukowski

I know of a great winged creature named Proust. Proust is normally found near my house, aloft on the southerly winds of Puget Sound making great big loops over Orr Road. Proust has been here forever, inspiring the artists who live on Whidbey. Lately, for reasons we suspect, but will never know for sure, Proust is often seen leaving Whidbey Island and heading out over the water to make a sweeping right turn where the mainland meets the water. Proust heads south and once she’s arrived over Ballard, Proust circles and circles and circles. We think this is because Proust knows in this place, soon, a group of storytellers will gather and she wants to be there. For you. Do not let Proust down.

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“Attending a Dark Angels course was the single best thing I did for my career, and myself, last year. As I’ve changed roles and companies, one thing was constant — writing. I’m happiest in a role with lots of writing or communicating or editing and I put a high bar on business writing that sounds human and has a personality. And sometimes in business writing, you can lose sight of that human tone among all of the requests to write about fiscal goals and org changes and new processes. So, when I heard about the Dark Angels — a group of professional writers who stand for the power of words and writing, and for personal connection, kindness and fellowship — I couldn’t register fast enough. The candid tutors put me through my paces with thoughtful exercises that taught me if there’s no tears in the writer, there’s no tears in the reader. You don’t have to be a published writer to attend; you just have to be a human who wants to write good words that make people feel your message.”

Lacy Rohre — Director, Content and Communications | EA Customer Experience

“If you want to know how to use a semicolon correctly, or learn the difference between “who” and “whom”, Dark Angels is not the course for you. These are answers found easily inside a book. Instead, Dark Angels is an experience that gently coaxes you into finding something much more important inside yourself. You’ll unearth a genuine, deeply human voice that transforms the way you write everything. I’m sneaking up on 30 years as a professional writer and I astonished myself with some of the sentences that spilled from me over the course of the four days. I feel very privileged to have become part of the chorus.”

Mat Gorbutt, Senior Writer | Fenton Stevens

“Dark Angels was a life-changer. I’ve been an uneasy writer most of my adult life — not trusting my abilities to put on paper what I had in my mind. Dark Angels reminded me about the power of honesty and empathy. Since the course, as long as I feel that I am approaching my writing with those two qualities, I feel much more confident and free of doubt. Thank you for creating a course that spoke to me so beautifully.”

Lourdes Canizares-Bidwa, Associate Director — Marketing | EY LLP

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[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the more curious bits about the intense interest in storytelling for business, is that the two most learned writers in the realm of dramatic storytelling, Robert McKee in America, and John Yorke in England, are taking on business storytelling. Both have quite a lot to offer. Both have deep expertise and experience in the real world of drama, including television and cinema. I took a Story for Business course with John Yorke, which I have to say, was seriously eye-opening. It changed a lot for me. I would not be writing these posts, reading these books or thinking about my business the way that I am, were if not for John Yorke and Nick Parker, who helped design John Yorke’s program. That program lives at The Professional Writing Academy in the UK. They do a terrific job. I highly recommend it.

Onto today’s business — three-act structure in which I’m pulling from John Yorke’s book, Into the Woods.

Excerpt from John Yorke: Three-act structure is the cornerstone of drama primarily because it embodies not just the simplest units of Aristotelian (and indeed all) structure; it follows the irrefutable laws of physics. Everything must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Screenwriting teacher Syd Field first articulated the three-act paradigm breaking act structure down to these constituent parts: set-up, confrontation and resolution, with a turning point toward the end of the first (the inciting incident) and second (the crisis) acts.

CORPORATE STORYTELLING

I want to be careful about diving too deep into drama and in screenwriting. My aim here is to use McKee and Yorke to help us figure out storytelling for business. I want to make sure we’re tacking close to the wind. The reasons that this kind of story structure makes sense for us as business writers are several. This approach helps us to ask better questions. What happened? Who’s story is this? Who or what got in the way? How did the protagonist surmount the obstacles? What are the stakes? This way of working points the way to creating something that is compelling. And there’s an underpinning, a framework to build the story on. So I’m going to offer up another story from the Lucid Content archives.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” –Maya Angelou

A client of mine is a gardening / nursery company in Eugene, Oregon. The patriarch of the family (let’s call him Frank) founded, owned, and ran the business for years. Their mainstay product are DIY greenhouses. Here’s an abbreviated version of their story.

Frank takes his family on a short vacation. He leaves a small, translucent box, (a fruit tote) upside down on his lawn. On his return, the grass beneath the tote, is thick, rich, dark green. Trapped, warm air created a greenhouse effect. He learns what the plastic is, orders sheets of it, then goes into his home workshop and in short order, builds a sort of backyard, do-it- yourself greenhouse. Presto! Successful family business. Over the years, thousands of units sold and shipped across the country. The business takes over family life, even the the family home. Teenage daughter HATES this business and everything about it. All is going well until… A supplier of the plastic, the very material that the greenhouses are made of, ships defective material. (We have our antagonist.) Many customers are impacted. The business owners by now are older, they’re tired. Everything they have built, including their integrity, their relationship with employees (unusually stellar) is in jeopardy. There’s a lot at stake. They consider shutting down. But wait! But the once recalcitrant daughter is a grown woman. And, surprise, she is a Master Gardener with an MBA in Business. She BUYS THE COMPANY. Her first efforts fail, the crummy manufacturer won’t help her identify which lots were bad, making it almost impossible to find affected customers. She can’t produce the greenhouse kits until she has a better supplier. In the interim, she ships a comparable – competitor product so her customers can get their needs filled. Finally, she finds a new manufacturer, doubles the 10-year warranty to 20, and in the process, finds a way to make whole those customers who had received bad product, and, ushers her parents gently into retirement and shifts her greenhouse kit marketing campaign to…cannabis.

Act I: formation of the company.
Turning point or inciting incident: Manufacturer ships defective materials, company survival at stake.
Act II: Daughter buys the company
Crisis point in Act II: Daughter cannot identify all the customers who got bad product, reputation at stake…ships competitor product…
Act III: Daughter finds new manufacturer, doubles warranty, finds affected customers, makes them whole, parents retire…

Whether we want to structure our stories along certain well-traveled paths or not, it’s often the case that stories organically conform to certain types of structure. Even David Mamet says so.

Excerpt from John Yorke: In simple terms, human beings order the world dialectically. Incapable of perceiving randomness, we insist on imposing order on new phenomena, any new information that comes our way. It’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis. As David Mamet says: ‘Dramatic structure is not arbitrary — or even a conscious invention. It is an organic codification of the human mechanism for ordering information. Event, elaboration, denouement; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl; act one, act two, act three.”

Image credit: The Dance Class, Edgar Degas 1874

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“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy

We talked about human consciousness and how story-making emerged to help humans make sense of everything around them. We touched on the eight stages of story design (rather intricate engineering from the Mind of McKee.) We looked to John Yorke’s book on storytelling, Into the Woods. We got into binary values in storytelling: truth/lies, good/evil, love/hate, success/failure. Time and space showed up in blog post six. And in the last post, number seven, we talked about the inciting incident — the event that launches the story.

This next bit that is coming soon from John Yorke, is quite interesting too. I speak of the Three-Act Structure. But for now, just plain old structure…

Excerpt from John Yorke’s book: I smacked my little boy. My anger was powerful. Like justice. Then I discovered no feeling in the hand. I said, ‘Listen, I want to explain the complexities to you.’ I spoke with seriousness and care, particularly of fathers. He asked, when I finished, if I wanted him to forgive me. I said yes. He said no. Like trumps.

Yorke continues -> ‘The Hand is a chapter in a short story, ‘Eating Out,’ by the American miniaturist Leonard Michaels; it’s also in effect a complete story in itself. If all stories contain the same structural elements, then it should be relatively easy to identify within ‘The Hand’ the building blocks with we should now be familiar.

Protagonist — the narrator
Antagonist — his son
Inciting incident — awareness of no feeling in hand
Desire — to explain his action
Crisis — ‘He asked…if I wanted him to forgive me’
Climax — ‘I said yes. He said no’
Resolution — ‘Like trumps.’

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o I’d like to jump in here and bring this back to a business story situation. In an earlier blog post, I talked about an inciting incident that involved Boeing 787 aircraft. What happened was that a couple of years after launch, a number of these new aircraft experienced problems…lithium-ion batteries had overheated. The entire fleet — worldwide — was grounded by the FAA. That is an inciting incident for the ages. Here’s the opening to the case study I wrote for Base2 Solutions a few years ago.

The Right Teams Get the 787 Flying Again
Base2 Joins Experts to Help Solve Boeing Battery Issue

Boeing faced a huge operational and public relations debacle. The FAA had grounded the 787 Dreamliner. Incidents involving lithium-ion batteries took place on two separate aircraft. Engineers from Base2 joined teams of experts working to find and resolve the problem.   

When 15,000 people watched the rollout of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner on July 8, 2007, expectations ran high. The plane was more fuel-efficient than other planes its size. Composite materials made up 50 percent of the primary structure of the plane. And, it relied more on electrically generated hydraulic power for primary flight controls. The first plane shipped in September of 2011.

Then in early January 2013, the FAA grounded the fleet. Two lithium-ion batteries, used for back up power for flight controls, had overheated or vented. The FAA ordered a thorough review by technical investigators.

###

Business stories — and especially case studies — can easily be structured around a time-honored storytelling structure. In this story, is the protagonist the new, but flawed (isn’t the hero always flawed?) 787 Dreamliner? Or is it The Boeing Company? It’s The Boeing Company—whose world has been suddenly turned upside down. It’s The Boeing Company who will have to face down the antagonist or forces of antagonism: the FAA and the problem batteries.

So we already have the beginning ingredients we need for a story. But it gets better. We also have values that arrive in the form of a positive / negative charge. (Ha!) There is success/failure, competence/incompetence, safety/danger and, profit/loss. Right? And by the way there is time and place. The meaning of this story is defined by the period of time that the story describes. Place is simple: the fleet of 787s.

One last point. I loathe the tiresome case study structure of problem – solution – outcome. Just seeing that makes me want to gouge my eyes out. However, that underlying idea that a) something strange or weird or bad happened and b) he/she/they/someone had to work to get things back into balance, and c) balance restored, planes flying again, FAA satisfied, profits and safety secured…it kind of does have a problem, solution, outcome framework underneath it all…

It’s very much a three-act structure, which we’ll dig into more in the next post.

Thanks for reading.

Photo credit: Icarus, Empire State Building 1930 Lewis Hine photographer

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he moment a story appears in front of audience members or readers, they instantly and instinctively inspect its value-charged landscape, seeking an emotional door into the story, a place to stick their empathy.” – Robert McKeee

Have to say, I love that quote. It reminds me of the film The Verdict, by Sidney Lumet, starring Paul Newman. A washed-up, alcoholic, ambulance chasing attorney, goes into battle with the medical and legal establishments to try and deliver old-fashioned justice to the family of a woman who died while in hospital. What a story.

So we’re into our sixth post on Robert Mckee’s book on storytelling and business, Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in a Post-Advertising World. In this section, McKee gets into laying the groundwork for how stories are made. As to audience, he writes that fiction writers and comedy writers have well-tuned antennae for how to reach their audience. In marketing, it’s different and far more demanding. (No kidding.)

Some of this material is, well, bloody obvious, and I’m going to bullet point some of the text.

Subject matter for a story contains three major components: a physical and social setting, a protagonist, and a core value.

World-building is storytelling’s critical second step. The weakest choices of all favor the general over the specific.

TIME

McKee is weak here. A definition of time in storytelling needs to be a lot stronger than a few crumbs about duration and location. Time is a hugely important consideration in fiction, far more important that McKee suggests. In The Art of Time in Fiction, Joan Silber writes, ‘…a story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate. Where the teller begins and ends a tale decides what its point is, how it gathers meaning. Yogi Berra’s famous bit of hope about a ball game—it ain’t over till it’s over—is the storyteller’s dilemma. When is it over?” This is exactly right and as I read those words I think of my friend John Simmons book, Spanish Crossings, which is about time as much as it is about love and honor. Back to McKee.

SPACE

Excerpt from McKee

Two dimensions structure a story’s space: Physical—the horizontal landscape and every object in it. Social—the vertical hierarchy of a society’s pyramid of power and the possibility of movement up or down.

THE CORE VALUE

Excerpt from McKee

“…a setting does not become three-dimensional until the teller adds substance in the form of values. As mentioned in chapter 3, in everyday conversation, when someone says an individual or institution has “values” he means positive qualities such as truthfulness, love, generosity, hard work, loyalty and the like. But for the story-maker, the values he invests in his telling come not as singularities but binaries of positive/negative charge: truth/lie, love/hate, generosity/selfishness, hard work/laziness, loyalty/betrayal, life/death, courage/cowardice, hope/despair, meaningfulness/meaninglessness, justice/injustice and the list goes on.

 A telling may incorporate any number, variety, and combination of values, but it anchors its content in one irreplaceable binary—the story’s core value. This value determines a story’s fundamental meaning and emotion.

More to come, thanks for reading.

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THE DEFINITION OF STORY

Excerpt:

To master storified marketing, CMOs need solid working answers to fundamental questions: “What exactly is a story? What are its primal components? How do these elements interact within a story? How do I create a powerful marketing story?”

Me–> I’d say that it’s not only CMOs who need these answers, it’s every marketing writer, communications professional, PR person, startup entrepreneur, business owner. If the whole marketing narrative is broken, we all need to understand how to create and use stories. Onward into a list of what a story is not.

Me–> A story is not a process, or a hierarchy, or a chronology, and you can see McKee’s blood boil on videos when he gets to this, a story is not a journey.

Excerpt:

Euphemisms, such as journey, separate the mind from the unpleasant realities around it, and, like genteelisms we use when we toilet-train chidren, they have a place in polite society. But the protagonist of a well-told story is not a passive passenger; she struggles dynamically through time and space to fulfill her desire.

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. ”

~ Flannery O’Connor

Me–> Okay, now we have to pay attention. This has been wildly misunderstood by almost everyone, including yours truly.

Excerpt:

STORY IS NOT NARRATIVE

Many marketing campaigns have flopped because an ad agency didn’t know the difference between narrative and story. Narrative may sound academic, even scientific, but in a business context, the term is neither logical nor precise. It’s use commits a categorical error for this reason: All stories are narratives, but not all narratives are stories. The four misnomers above, process, hierarchy, chronology, journey, are narratives, not stories.

Narratives tend to be flat, bland, repetitive, and boring recitations of events. They slide through the mind like juice through a goose, and as a result, they have little or no influence on customers. Stories, on the other hand, are value-charged and progressive. The mind embraces a well-told story; the imagination is its natural home. Once through our mental door, story fits, sticks, and excites consumer choice.

The next time you’re bored to the bone by somebody’s ‘story,’ in all likelihood you’re not being told a story. If you were, you’d be listening and engrossed. Instead the guy is torturing you with a narrative, probably a repetitious recitation of “….and then I did this, and then I did that, and then I did the other thing, and then and then and then…”

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s to the concept of narrative and story. I thought hard about this in a book I co-authored recently. The book is Established; Lessons from the world’s oldest companies. My chapter, The Brush, the Mallet, the Chisel, the Letter, was a kind of history, or chronology—a narrative, if you will—about the founding and survival of the oldest operating American company, The John Stevens Shop of Newport, RI. I kept fighting the exact problem McKee lists above, ‘and then this happened, and then that happened, and then this happened, and then that…” The way I solved it, I think, was to let my utter fascination and love for the entire story come through. I lingered on the space itself, the people in the story, and the incredible skill they have and the generational aspect, three generations of men, twice over, who owned and ran this shop. But it’s probably fair to say I did not storify this piece, mainly because to do that, felt not quite right for the material I had. As my friend Nick Parker has said, ‘there’s an open question as to which sorts of content or material are ripe for a storytelling structure.” Agreed.

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Excerpt from McKee:
A well-told story captures our attention, holds us in suspense, and pays off with a meaningful emotional experience. Emotional because we empathize with its characters; meaningful because the actions of our protagonist deliver insights into human nature. The word itself, story, confuses many marketers. Some, for example, use the words content and story as if they were interchangeable. As as we’ll discover, that’s like conflating paint in a can with a masterpiece on a wall.”

The other, frequent point of confusion, is between story and narrative. There are key distinctions. Hugely important differences. Of which more, later.

Here we go, this bit is where our book gets in gear and begins to really move.

McKee excerpt: In short, story is the ultimate I.T. I in that storytelling demands information–a wide and deep knowledge of human nature and its relationship with the social and physical realms. T in that a well-told story demands skillful execution of its inner technology, its mechanism of action / reaction, changing value charges, roles, conflicts, turning points, emotional dynamics, and much more. A craft underpins the art.

Storify is the word that McKee and Gerace give us to describe marketing that encompasses story structure. You got to storify it!

Here is where we begin to see some clarity around what defines a story. Story involves just what has been said above. Action, reaction. Changing value charges. Roles. Conflict. Turning points. Emotional dynamics. None of which apply to narrative.

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Philip Pullman

For me, the interesting idea running through this approach to marketing is how to apply it. Where and how can you apply a storytelling structure in your business communications? What specific pieces of content can you storify? If we’re talking about content marketing which underlies all this due to Thomas Gerace’ role at Skyword, then there are numerous avenues to work with. Customer stories, also known as case studies, are prime territory. Ads can certainly fit that bill. Corporate history can definitely be storified.

I wonder? Can you storify home page content? Can you hook a reader on the home page with a brief story, maybe as brief as six words? Ten? Stay tuned for post number three coming your way soon. Should be good, ‘The Evolution of Story’ is chapter three.

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I had a bit of a secret. Poorly kept. The situation was delicate, touch and go. I conjure up an image of my teenage self sprawled out on a lawn, at some outdoor concert, half conscious. Don’t know what this bird flew into, but shit don’t look good. The world was spinning faster and faster. Try and keep up. High-school in New England. A mean, beat down, beaten up, mill town south of Boston. Cramped tenements. Chain link fences. Small bore gangs of Irish, Poles, Portuguese. A lost American city. Lost American boys.

Croke was tall, lanky, dispirited. A lad in a brown leather jacket and jeans, with shoulder length, dirty blond hair. I can’t remember Croke being much of a threat to anyone but himself. Croke loomed large at school and on the street. Mainly because he had a monster heroin habit. More than once, I saw Croke being dragged down the hall, his arms around the shoulders of two burly teachers, his feet dragging behind him. Eyes rolling around in his head. They struggled to get him out of the building, down the stairs and stuffed into a cab. Next day they would do it all again.

Dope was easy to get. Like buying a bag of chips. Like whistling at a pretty girl. Dope was language. Fuck you, it said. The men’s bathroom in high-school was part of the franchise. Mom’s sandwich baggies filled with Tuinal, Seconal, Quaaludes, heroin, speed. The cost was low — lunch money low. You could get anything you wanted at Tadeusz Kosciuszko Square five minutes from my house. The Square. At the Square, you could buy your way into your own imprisonment beneath a statue of a Polish hero of the War of Independence. The irony was lost on us. We weren’t interested in independence. Ours was a more noble conflict — obliterate the self. That stealth army spreading a miracle of warmth across your tender groin, courtesy of Adolph von Baeyer, inventor of the barbituate. Just take me out, Adolph. Across from the Square was Joe Gow’s, where you could get a greasy chow mein sandwich in wax paper and a coke for two-fifty, when you resurfaced and got hungry.

Killer Cabral. I don’t know if Killer had killed anyone when I knew him, but the chances are good, or got around to it in due time. I have one memory of Killer. I’ve got my mother’s car for the night. I’m seventeen. Killer is in the back seat — this is an eight-cylinder Oldsmobile Cutlass, maroon. A machine. I’ve disconnected the odometer. Killer is small. In a black leather jacket. His street rep is fearsome. Killer Cabral is in my car. He’s cooking junk in a spoon. He’s got his works out. Rolls up a sleeve. Ties off, finds a vein. Pushes the needle in. Tilts his head back for a second, eyes closing… Come to daddy.…that’s it. Then, Killer is out. Into the night. Hey, Killer Cabral was in my car last night. No way. Way.

For a while, my best friend was Fat Larsch. Toothpick thin. Stringy blond hair. We were tight for three years. Concerts, camping, ski trips, open-faced turkey sandwiches and mashed potatoes at the counter at Rockland Diner. Quarts of Bud. All the shit that kids do. Add weed, downers, and the occasional speed. I never once set foot inside his house. Some kind of weird trouble was going down in that darkened third-floor apartment. Finally, Fat Larsch went for the needle. He died of an overdose. By then, he’d become a respiratory technician at the local hospital. St. Anne’s. I never went to the funeral. I never went for the needle. That was a line I wouldn’t cross.

I woke up in the Emergency Room. Tied it off. All the people who were part of the old world, over. I passed them on the street. I did not meet their eyes. I did not speak. No hellos, no how you doing. I don’t see you.

{ photograph by richard pelletier }

This low-heeled boy had a dream — a wanting. It was so bonkers, so outlandish, and freakish, and buried so deep, it would take over four decades to dig it out. Wanted that mother so hard, had to wrap that fragile thing in blankets and shame and lies and foolish loves and silence.

Touch and go.

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11 Life-Saving Tips for Copywriters Heading Out to Sea

by Richard Pelletier

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hey are the beloved ones. The ones who know how to work with writers. Who know good writing when they see it. Who know that good business writing is incredibly difficult to produce. They profess their love. They say things like, “Love this, but can we move that sixth line up a little?” We love them to pieces. And then there are the other ones. Who don’t quite know how to work with writers. Who don’t quite know how hard it is to create good writing in a business environment. We love them, too, but they are, sadly, a bit harder to love. Like your strange uncle Bob.

Herewith, an instruction manual for writers sailing into the murk. Who think they’ve boarded the tiny ship of order, only to learn they’ve been cast into a vast sea of chaos; the agency or firm with zero experience working with writers. For purposes of illustration, our fictional firm is Ace.

1 — no brief, no work

Never, not even if Hades, Miami and Cairo doth freeze over on the very same day, take on a significant writing project without a brief. If there’s no brief — signed by, or at least agreed to by the client — no work. Matthew Stibbe has a great example of what a good brief looks like.

2 — trust but verify

Don’t assume anything. Just because you’ve been hired by Ace, a seriously reputable firm with an impressive client list, and a good friend of yours brought you onboard, and they’ve agreed to your fees, doesn’t mean that Ace knows how you work, what you need to succeed and how to evaluate your product. If you want to trust team Ace, that’s great. But remember, trust is earned. Don’t give it away.

3 — claim your authority

You’ve been brought in for a reason. You’re the expert. Set the parameters. Write everything down and make it known early. “This is how I work and here’s what I need to ensure success for the client.” If you need frequent, direct access to the client, say so. If you need to revisit and rework assumptions, say so. If you think you need to add specificity to the scope, speak up. If you sense you’ll have to work around a problem person at Ace, find a way to make that happen. Your reputation is on the line, protect that thing, it’s precious.

4 — introductions matter more than you think

You should be introduced to the client as an outstanding professional who has the chops and the experience necessary to meet the needs of the moment. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that it’s true, youare outstanding. The second is that it shows due diligence on the part of Ace. Third is the power of suggestion. If the client has some trust with Ace and Ace says you’re the person for the job, then you have some instant credibility. If you don’t get properly introduced, pay attention because the people that hired you or that employ you, are not singing your praises. Which could mean they see you as a commodity. You are not a commodity. If there’s trouble down the road, you’re probably on your own. If you think there might be an issue, take over. “Here’s how I’d like to be introduced to the client.” Keep it simple.

5 — find out who has your back

A firm that doesn’t produce content or copywriting in-house is not likely to have someone who can provide context and credibility in conversations with the client about what you are doing. As the writer, you’re the creative. If questions come up about your approach, you need someone — who is not you — who actually gets what you’re doing, to manage the situation at a senior level. If no such person exists, head, meet chopping block. Before you take the gig, find out who that person is. Find out if they truly understand what you’re bringing to this effort.

“When you’re in the shit up to your neck, there’s nothing left to do but sing.” Samuel Beckett

6 — push back

Keep a close eye on everything that’s relevant to your piece. If something doesn’t make sense to you, you need to make it make sense. Ask questions. If you get a lot of hand-waving, keep pushing. Go around whoever is in your way. Your job is to help the client. If the people who hired you are making that difficult, get to the next person on the food chain. This is when you have permission to be the world’s biggest pain in the ass.

7 — know where you stand

To work onsite means entering another business with all the wondrous possibilities that entails. It’ll be nice not to work alone, right? But you’re likely to be an employee. Even if temporary, do you want that? Or do you want to be an independent contractor? If the latter, that changes things. You might lose the gig if you don’t want to join the team. But you should know this ahead of time. If this statement is true, “I work from my own space, and I work in a particular way because it’s been proven to work for me and my clients over and over again,” then can you really work onsite inside someone else’s system?

8 — client buy-in

See 1, above. If, due to some unfortunate navigational error onboard your little ship — you find yourself working without clear and unequivocal buy-in from the client on your approach — stop working and demand it. You’re wasting everyone’s time and money. This is another one of those moments when you have every right in the world to be an asshole. You’re trying to protect the client’s project, time, and money. Along with Ace’s reputation and yours. The longer you go without buy-in, the more time there is for a bullseye to appear on your back.

9 — sometimes you have to say no

Most freelancers take on most of what comes their way. Not all of us are in the position to turn down work. But there are times and situations where you have to walk away. A business coach told me once that you can always tell there are going to be problems in the first five minutes. Not long after, I was on the phone with a marketing director offering me a long-term project at good money. Her child was screaming at the top of his lungs in the background. In between talking to me, she was screaming back at him. Reader, I took the gig. Do I need to tell you how that went?

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.” ― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

10 — even the best-laid plans can turn to shit

A good friend of mine has been in the restaurant business for decades. His string of successes is rare and amazing. I’ve lost count of how many times he’s told me this about restaurants, “You can do every single thing right, and it can still fail.” Keep things in perspective. If you find yourself in a sea of chaos and you somehow manage to get back to dry land battered and bruised, take stock. Take an honest look at what you might have done differently or better. Then take your honey and yourself out and…

11— bourbon

(c) Bulleit

It’s the copywriter’s drink of choice. Good luck out there.

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