I’ve long believed that copywriting is a tool that can help you in all areas of your life. It’s helpful in business, to help you sell things, and it can help you put in a strong complaint letter to fix your broken things.
But being good at copywriting takes time, practice and reps. As you build your copywriting muscle, you get better and writing becomes easier.
This was highlighted while taking Sam Parr’s “Copy That” course (which teaches you the "copy work" method of improving your writing). I was copying a world class passage of writing and found myself finding writing much easier.
I started posting to my blog more, I started posting better Tweets and probably wrote better complaints…
But as I slipped out of the habit of writing regularly, I found it much more difficult to get my thoughts onto paper and I’d find myself not being proud of a piece of writing and ditching it. I have lots of unpublished blog posts in my drafts.
The great thing about the internet is that you can write whatever you want and publish it for the world to see. The scary thing is you can write whatever you want and publish it for the world to see.
Recently, I spoke to Justin Jackson, founder of Transistor.fm, on the Make Lemonade podcast, and in my research was reading a lot of his recent blog posts. His writing style was brilliant. Concepts were articulated perfectly and his personality shone through. I realised the only reason Justin is able to write so well is that he’s consistently been doing this for over a decade.
When I complimented Justin on his writing, I was surprised to hear that he too feels a little out of practice. The fact he’s been doing it for so long means he can still fire out a pretty great blog post, but not working that writing muscle has made it a lot harder.
So this is an attempt to start working my own writing muscle again. I’m a little out of practice so this might not be as polished as I’d like. But I’m not going to let this become just another draft.
PS - have just gone to post this article and the last thing I published was in November! Since then I've stopped drinking and lost 15kg, so I guess it's not all bad.