Matthew Sheret

This week Quinns, Anne and myself were joined by music critic Chal; four’s a neat number, and I imagine we’ll stay about that size for a little while now. It was a good moment to recap where we’re at and what we’re up to, and why we’re doing this in the first place.

We’re four young writers, all of us doing a blend of copy production, product marketing and product management. We’ve had no formal training in what we do, and we’ve come at it sideways from other disciplines. We are hoping, with these meetings, to share a little bit of what we’re up to, to swap lessons, learning and ideas. To ask for advice from people finding their feet too – an important qualifier for all of this.

I skipped a lesson a few weeks ago – something Molly mentioned – because I thought I’d find a better time to surface it. Now seems to be it.

Lesson Seven: Talk about what you’re up to.*

On the surface of it, Lesson Seven is similar to Lesson One, but that was more about broadcasting your work; finding ways of framing your process and thoughts for other people to digest. Talk and discussion is as important as the connections you make by being interested.

It’s an especially pertinent lesson for me, because I’m a terrible collaborator. I’m much better directed at briefs and feedback than actually hammering work out in parallel with others. I’m lucky to have found ways around that so far, but it’s going to be sorely tested by a couple of projects quite soon. I need to get better at the discussion/feedback/let’s-all-work-together stuff.

By contrast Quinns and Anne were both super-enthused this week by their recent opportunities for successful collaboration. It’s forced on Anne by the nature of film production and the medium itself. By contrast it’s something that Quinns actively seeks out. I am learning from their enthusiasm that it’s something I need to work on.

* Actually, Lesson Seven totes got revised. Take a look at it here.

The second gathering of the After School Club for Copywriters saw Quinns and I joined by Anne. Anne works as a producer for film production company Lonelyleap, and she recently produced the films for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2011. It was super-interesting to hear about different facets of their creative process.

There’s something there about core processes and identity. Lonelyleap’s films share a lot in terms of technique and style, and it’s clear that they have a scalable creative process that adapts to different budgets and briefs without compromising that core aesthetic.

That’s super-important while thinking in terms of beefing up my copywriting ‘tools’, that sense of scale. I want to ensure that I’ve got tools and techniques that present scalable solutions that can be customised, rather than just working on the fly from situation to situation.

(Which is something I find myself doing naturally, but as with all of these lessons it’s not something I’ve ever framed formally or as a lesson/learned behaviour.)

Lesson Six: Your tools and techniques should be scalable and adaptable.

I had the pleasure of catching up with Dan and Ceri at Innocent the other day. We had a chat about copy, specifically around how to produce copy guidelines for partners or other creative teams, and a few things came up that can be added to the lessons.

Lesson Three: Write your core message once, then busk around it.

It’s a simple directive that’s actually very difficult to carry out, but if you can get the sentence down that says that thing you do then it’s an awful lot easier to produce other copy around it.

David Whittle referred to this as ‘the story’ the other day, which is useful; it calls out that it could be a complex proposition, that must nonetheless have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Also worth noting that this might not be the thing that goes out to the public, but it’s the thing you base that copy around.

Lesson Four: Boil down your tone of voice into principles.

But be careful about over-analysing your content. Make the points short and easy to grasp.

Lesson Five: Buy a red pen.

If other people are writing bad copy then don’t make suggestions, just jump in and edit.