Are you a mentor? Or an ass-kicker?
What makes a good client? Or boss? If you like being regaled by war stories, ask any creative pro. You’ll get an earful. The stories will astonish you, but they will likely be greatly entertaining. Creatives are like that.
I was thinking about some of mine. Some I’d rather not think about ever again. Which makes writing this a bit of a challenge. And this thought clanged into my brain:
A tough master will make you a better writer.
Substitute any other profession. It’s almost universal. No matter what you do for a living, the tougher the customer, the better you have to be. If your boss is the type who won’t think twice about calling you at 2 a.m. to yell about your latest screw-up, you’re going to work very hard to avoid another screw-up.
It’s one way to get the job done. Is it the best way? I don’t know. That’s a question for somebody way smarter than I. I guess it depends on the job. If you’re an Army squad leader with life and death on the line, maybe it’s OK if your commanding officer beats the snot out of you when you make a mistake.
But what about us, mere mortals in the storytelling trade?
No help!
Had a boss once who would not approve any piece of copy including the word help. Ever. I forget his rationale, it was 8 million years ago. Some gung-ho bullshit like – our clients don’t help, they do. And, no. I couldn’t just use another word. He was against the very concept. What happens when you get an edict like that? You stretch. You think harder. You discover new ways to get the message across without sounding like a thesaurus. And your writing skills grow.
Too much copy!
I’m a big fan of the rule of three. I don’t know if there’s any such rule for copywriting, I just co-opted it, this second. A good copywriter can sell just about anything in three crisp, punchy paragraphs. It doesn’t tax the reader. It looks good in design. But if I submitted a three-graf ad to one former boss, she would have yelled, “too much copy!”
She was smart as hell and one of the best salespeople to ever walk the earth. But she didn’t have a creative bone in her body and had the attention span of a gnat. She couldn’t stand reading more than six words at a time.
Since she was also the one who signed the checks, she refused to be confused by facts. Like, the more you tell the more you sell. Or that a potential buyer in the market for a potential product will read reams to be sure the investment will pay off. She just made the broad-brush declaration that, like her, nobody reads anything. (Man, what a dream job for a copywriter.)
What happened? You can guess. My three-graf ads become three lines. That, she could manage. It was hell, sometimes. Especially when we were selling something complex like commercial energy savings or external counterpulsation therapy, whatever the hell that is. Tough shit, Word Boy. Get cutting. And cut I did. I became the tightest copywriter, ever. And I learned a valuable skill that I still use, to this day.
Sleep when you’re dead
Another didn’t really get his brain in gear until about 10 pm. Some people are just wired that way. That’s when I’d get the call with a demand like “I need at least 50 ideas.” I kid you not. So, around midnight, after I had squeezed every drop of whatever my feeble brain could produce, I’d get the second call. “None of these are any good. Give me 50 more.” And so on, until the birds started chirping.
Did that make me a better writer? Tough call. I’m not sure. It did make me appreciate clients who work during daylight.
Ass-kickers get the job done. Mentors get the job done and cultivate employees who will walk over coals for them. My humble opinion. I maintain there’s a price to be paid for a take-no-prisoners management style. When you kick underling ass, every day, day after day, you stoke the fires of burnout. And unless you’re providing value far above and beyond the paycheck, you’re going to lose people – especially in a competitive industry.
Case in point, the outfit that hired a writer whose work they hated. A morass of dense, wordy, unreadable brain drain. They hired me to fix it. Reduce the word count and increase the readability. No problem. Until they introduced me to my project editor, the very same writer who made the mess I was supposed to clean up. Predictably, he kicked my professional ass by transforming my tight, concise and readable prose into a morass of dense, wordy, unreadable brain drain.
Did it make me a better writer? Hell, no. But it did make me a better businessperson. I resigned the SOB.
=SE
Like what you found? Subscribe and get a regular dose of more.
Write Your Comment