The person in the parking spot next to mine is definitely wondering if I’m having a bad day or am mentally unwell.
I’m simultaneously laughing hysterically and crying into my overpriced iced coffee, while also wiping rivers of snot onto my paper-thin cafe napkin.
It’s a fair question.
I can tell as they slip past my car door they’re trying to pretend like they don’t notice me. They speedwalk into the L.L. Bean entrance, and I can practically hear their sigh of relief as the heavy doors close behind them, cocooning them in air-conditioned safety.
Despite appearances, I’m having a great day because I’m listening to an interview with the writer Anne Lamott on Amy Poehler’s podcast, Good Hang. Tina Fey is the pre-interview guest who “talks nicely behind the [main] guest’s back”.
The episode is a home run.
Lamott is a novelist, memoirist, and essayist (all the ists) who is both devastatingly funny and unapologetically unfiltered. She’s also starkly honest, but, like, in a comforting way?
When I hear Anne talk, her level of neuroses feels so familiar. I feel like she’s me, except she’s more clever, less reserved, way wiser, a superior writer, and I don’t have the addiction and religious awakening bits.
But other than that, we’re basically the same person.
Anne is the older woman who offers you a cup of tea, and you leave an hour later with none of the problems you sat down with. And you definitely cried in her lap while she brushed your hair with her fingertips.
Case in point: I had no idea what to write about this month. But Anne did:
On shitty first drafts:
“All existent writing books said, if you did certain things—probably an outline, and this and that and the other—that things would go well and you would almost certainly sell your book. And then you would have really, really good self-esteem all the time. [Instead] I wanted to say, “This is how I do it. I sit down, and it goes badly most days. I sit down with the bad self-esteem and the raging ego ping-pong game. And I start writing, and it's awful. It's unreadable. It's God-awful.
But I have a secret.
I keep my butt in the chair.
I know, and a lot of writing students don't believe, that the writers they love most in the world, the books they love most in the world, began as God-awful, overly long, purple prose first drafts.”
Dear reader, I know you look to copywriters like me and think, “It must be nice to be a naturally good writer. Meanwhile, I’m hitting rewind on this damn Homepage Template Tutorial for the third time because I don’t understand how to make my main headline say alllll the things plus incorporate SEO in two lines or less.”
Well, guess what, Reader? Neither do I!
It takes me weeks to fine-tune a page to the point where I think it’s good enough to publish.
I use my own templates. I use other people’s templates. I do the outline and the this and that and all the things you’re supposed to do, and I still write shitty first drafts.
The “first draft” I hand over to my clients is actually a second or third. Even then, I tell my clients the "first draft" is meant to be a working draft where we mark up the page and home in on what you really meant to say, now that you can see your words translated on the page.
(Cuz, TL;DR, your copywriter is a mimic, not a mind-reader. Put that on my grave.)
Even I get down on myself when other copywriters take to social media to gloat about how their client had “no notes” on their perfect first draft. (Even though I myself have nailed numerous “no notes” perfect "first drafts" before.)
The ego is a bitch, Reader, but keep your butt in your chair. Actually, go for a mind-clearing walk and then sit your butt back down and triage your hot-mess copy into something closer to what you’re really trying to say.
I’ll be doing the same.
🫶,
P.S. Another reason Anne and I are the same person is we both resort to bribes and threats to get our work done. Ex: This newsletter is brought to you by my $8 iced coffee.