The night

Tonight is The Night.

Not the night for a hot date. Not the night for a mind blowing meal. Not the night I launch something wonderful into the world.

Tonight, I'm going to finish Something Wicked This Way Comes if it freaking kills me.*

It probably will. It's already killing me via freaking. I've been reading it for weeks and weeks—months, if you want to get specific—and as I mentioned, it's both killer and freaky.

But my problems with this book seem to stretch beyond the words themselves. This is by far and away the most uncomfortable, alarming book I've ever read. The horror isn't exactly insidious, but it's not obvious either.

And yet my degree of terror seems disproportionate. It suggests that I must have read this in some crucial moment of my childhood when I was particularly sensitive to such terrors. And that raw nerve has stayed with me all this time, waiting to be hit by this second, but no less inexplicably terror-inducing reading.

I don't know. It's just a theory. But tonight I'm going to pour a rum, turn on all the lights, cuddle teddy** and finish this damned book.

*Yes, that *is* a man drinking lava on the cover. Not tea. LAVA.
**Kidding. I think. Man, maybe I better start looking for a teddy.

Short copy smart-arsedness

It began with LOLCATS, then swamped tumblr, and now produces services like capn.me.

The human capacity for smart-arsed remarks literally knows no bounds. Witness that the web is fast becoming little more than a repository for and endless sea of hack snaps topped or tailed with yet another bon fucking mot, and you'll be forced to agree.

That description makes it sound easy. If you think that's the case, take a look at this post, for example, or this tumblr blog (written by a copywriter), and be swiftly disabused of your delusions.

Hilarious captioning isn't exactly rocket science, but it does take some adroitness with language and, well, humour, as well as taste—restraint is key.

If you're the kind of person who thinks 140 characters is an unworkable limit, try captioning. If you think you're a master of the witty one-liner, try captioning.

Me? Knowing full well that (as I informed The Designer last week) short copy is my shortcoming, I'm not trying captioning. In fact, I'm staying the hell away from it. But if you see, or make, something as witty as this, send it to me.

P.S. As an imageless addition to this post, see this title. Oh, humour.

A decent infographic

Okay, you want to see a good infographic? I got one for ya.

It's from New Scientist's 21 April 2012 issue. I'd link to it, but I can't find the article online. It was from a piece called "New Moons" by Stuart Clark. (Yes you can click to make it bigger!)

Questions? No, I didn't expect any. What's to ask?! This is how to make an infographic, people.

Rules for infographics

Often, I have to review "infographics" as potential website content. Through many tedious hours of such reviews, I've arrived at these tenets for what I believe makes a good infographic.

1. Delete the words. The info should be in the graphic.
2. Cut out more words. I don't care if you like them. This thing's meant to communicate pictorially, bub.
3. Reduce that reduced word count by, oh 70%. If you can't, you need a new designer. Or to just stop writing so damn much yourself.

These are my expectations when viewing an infographic:

• No. Reading.
• Single- or double-word prompts/labels are okay.
• The design should communicate the message entirely.

I'm not kidding. Too hard-arsed? Maybe.

I'm now trying to find a designer who I can make an infographic with, so we can prove that a near-zero-tolerance approach to verbiage in this communications format is not just a good idea, but is actually achievable. If you are such a designer, let me know.

Everyone's a writer

There's a common misconception that if you know how to speak a language, you're a writer.

There's an enormous amount of condescending bitching about this undertaken by writers.

It's certainly counterproductive to have someone who's not a writer override your recommendations without responding to your rationale. It's also fucking frustrating.

But in most cases, the rewriting stems from a difference of opinion on a subconscious level. I'm finding this is particularly the case with clients who haven't trained in marketing—by which I mean they're thinking primarily about saying stuff, rather than thinking about what matters to their audience on the whole, and at this point in the communication.

When this kind of client wants to change a copy line, I ask them what they want to change it to. Then I pull out the the key message of their revised copy line and give it back to them.

"So, you want to talk about features here, not the benefit to the customer?"

"This line says 'global experience'. The line you're suggesting says 'affordability'. What do we want to say here?"

Call me crazy, but this shuffling and debating and recasting is one of the best bits for me. Often, trial and revision is the only way to get to what the client wants. Also, they often have a perspective of their audience and their dream position which is inarticulable but for trying and retrying copy lines.

And often they have great ideas.

In a world where conceptual communicators are few and far between (and by that I mean my own world, not an objective environment), this argy bargy is key to making the creative process fun (as well as, oh, meeting the client's expectations as well as the audience's needs).

Writing isn't about turning out golden concepts, perfectly finessed. It's not a race to the best. It's about pitching concepts and seeing how well they communicate—to your client, in the first instance, and to their audience in testing. it's about building on those initial ideas with them to make them better, more targeted, clearer. It's best when it's collaborative.

So that title's a bit of a deceit. Everyone's not a writer. But most of us have something that's worth communicating.

The lost generation

The Canadian sent me this, and now I give it to you, dear reader.

I wonder what will happen to a generation that grows up without Seinfeld. Without any knowledge of Seinfeld. You can extoll his hilarity to the skies, his timing, his characters, his whatever, but in my books, Jesus H Christ, it's about the language. That's not all—not by a long shot, but there are so many signature lines. Really.

• Get out!
• The sea was angry that day, my friends.
• No soup for you!
• I'm going out on a high!
• The Manziere
• man-hands
• Jerry! Newman!

I could go on.

Back in the day, the Copywriter and I used to talk-giggle Seinfeld all the time. "How fucking funny is he?" we'd ask each other, already agreed on the answer.

Retrograde

Do you ever find yourself pining for the places and people in a book you read?

I do this all the time. All the time. Right now I'm pining for the Moors and Jamaica Inn, for brave Mary and the uncanny Vicar.

I've only read that book once. The problem arises when you succumb to the pining, and re-read. This, in turn, cements the pining, causing the need to re-read again. It becomes an addiction. It's terrible.

Books whose characters, situations, and often actual sentences for which I now pine almost continuously include:

• The Secret History
• Other Voices Other Rooms
• The Little Friend
• The City of Your Final Destination
• The Quiet American (actually, for all Graham Greene, as a sort of amorphous longing)
• Less Than Zero
• All the Pretty Horses

Interspersed with these longings are less clear-cut desires, just as strong: for the writings of Yann Martel, Aravind Adiga, Jared Diamond, Margaret Leigh, Rumer Godden.

They are with me always now. I think about these books, these authors, every day. Not all of them, but all of them in what I imagine must be a subconscious sequence that takes each in its turn over a period of, say, 10 or 14 days.

Thank god they're all in the house. Imagine where I'd be otherwise.