11 HOT WRITING TIPS
05-Nov-08
Hints and tips for aspiring (copy)writers. These are my favourite little snippets from my notebook, collected over the years. I thought I would share - hopefully they are of some use to you!
- Show people, seek opinions. If your creative director thinks it’s bad but 10 of your friends think its genuinely good, trust them. Who were you trying to talk to anyway?
- Connection is what tone of voice is about. You are the connection between the brand and the consumers.
- Look around before you write. What else is happening out there?
- Once you have looked around, write with your eyes - observe, ask what, ask why!
- Find a tone of voice anchored in a truth. You can handle the truth, so get to the core.
- Brands need to develop a consistent tone over time.
- Write about stuff that you know. Thankfully you can also learn about things.
- You don’t have to be Oscar Wilde to be a writer, you just have to articulate emotion. If you garner emotional involvement, you’re half way there.- Try writing to a specific person, not a glob of demographic.
- If writing is hurting, write it down once, in full wrong. Then it’s down and you can edit, edit, edit.
- Utilise the gossip factor - what’s the one thing you’d tell people if you could only say one sentence?
- Are you executing your idea in a way that does it justice? Don’t let the execution let down the idea. Separating the average from the great is execution. Remember this, ALWAYS.
