Do you ever have a turkey on your table, a tired, beat-up, ugly old bird… but you still try your damnedest to turn it into a powerful and proud eagle?
You know what I mean:
You squint at the turkey, you look at it from the left and the right…
You primp the tail feathers a little to make the thing seem bigger and healthier than it is…
You tuck in that wattle to give your bird a more raptor-like profile… and then you watch with disappointment as the saggy skin expands again…
You’ve had all this happen, right?
Well, I’ve definitely had it happen. All the time. In fact it happened just last night.
Last night, I spent an embarrassing amount of time to write today’s email. This involved much research and thinking and shuffling of possible things I could say. The basic idea was an old personal story, which I was hoping to tie into a specific copywriting moral I had in mind.
And so there I was, tilting my head to the left, squinting a little, and trying to smile.
“It’s almost there,” I said to myself. “Just tuck in this saggy bit… fluff up up the end part here… and it will be great.”
But then, in a moment of weakness or maybe luck, I took a break. I checked my inbox. It turned I had an email myself — another copywriter’s newsletter.
“Let me just read it,” I said. “Maybe it will help me finish my own email.”
The other copywriter is someone I won’t name to protect my pride. But perhaps you’ll be able to guess who I have in mind.
His newsletter yesterday was making fun of people who tell lifeless stories as a way of drawing an uninspired moral.
He even included a short sample email he’d whipped up just to mock the kind of tired stuff he had in mind.
I shifted in my seat. I swallowed. Slowly, I took this mocking, fake email from the other copywriter’s newsletter… and I put it side by side with the email I was planning to send out. In parallel, I ran down both pages:
Same saggy wattle… check.
Same bony, unmuscled carcass… check.
Same scraggly tail feathers… check.
No, it wasn’t the exact same bird. But it was definitely the same species.
Which brings me to my copywriting moral, or rather, a piece of advice I keep repeating to myself.
I keep repeating it because I keep forgetting it, and I waste a ton of time as a result. Perhaps my reminder will be useful to you as well:
In my experience, the most powerful editing tool is the backspace key.
If a phrase, sentence, paragraph, section, or even entire email isn’t quite willing or able to fly, right now, as it is, without primping and massaging… then out it goes. The sooner, the better.
I have much, much more to write on this topic. In fact, I did write much more. And then, I threw it out. Trust me, this turkey — I mean this email — is better off for it.
“That’s fine for today,” I hear you say. “But what about tomorrow? Will that bird fly?”
I can’t say for sure. If you want to give it a try, you can join the club here.