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.