VersaQuill

This article follows “Inspiration: Laying Out the Welcome Mat.” For other articles in this series, see Important Posts.

Ogilvy said, “Big ideas come from the unconscious.” How can you feed your unconscious so it has the raw material for such ideas? Try the following.

Inspiration Tip #1: Do your homework

Gather information on the product or service you’re writing about. Think about what categories it falls into—the obvious ones and the unexpected ones.

Consider your target audience: who they are, what they want, how they feel.

The worksheets in Part 1 of the VersaQuill Copywriting Workbook are geared toward making it easier to do your homework. Writing down the information on the worksheets helps fix it firmly in your mind, so your subconscious will be able to find it and juggle it.

Tip #2. Look at other ads

Flip through Ogilvy on Advertising, Cone’s Steal These Ideas!, or another illustrated work on copywriting. Go through your swipe file. Do some Google searches. Look not only ads that sell products similar to the one you’re working on, but at some that were developed for categories that are only distantly related.

Tip #3. Consider the approach

Think about the approaches you might use to promote the product, based on your target audience. Are you presenting news? Offering facts? Rousing curiosity? Telling a story? Promising immediate results? Focusing on a visual? Blasting the competition? (This is an abbreviated version of the list in Chapter 7 of the Workbook—suggestions for additions always welcome.)

Tip #4. Digest

Give your subconscious time to digest all this information and sort out what’s particularly important or interesting. While it’s fresh in your mind, this mass of information may be confusing rather than helpful. For me, overnight is the minimum digestion time. I often work late gathering information, just so that I can sleep on it. If you can’t wait overnight, at least break for lunch.

Tip #5. Commit to writing

Commit to setting ideas down on paper for 10-15 minutes. It doesn’t have to be a draft of an ad: you can start with possible hooks, headlines, or approaches. If 10-15 minutes sounds unbearably long, promise yourself to get at least 5 ideas down on paper.

Why? Because it takes time for ideas to start bobbing up from your subconscious. Caples said, “The human brain is like an automobile engine. It works best when it is hot. When you sit down to write an advertisement, your brain is cold.” (Tested Advertising Methods, 5th ed., p. 95)

I like Ayn Rand’s formulation even more:

In steelmaking, a blast furnace must be heated for weeks before it is hot enough to forge steel. A writer getting himself into the writing mood is like that furnace. Nobody likes to get into that state, though once you are in it you want no other, and would probably snap at anyone who interrupted you. (Art of Nonfiction, p. 69)

It is indeed a difficult state to come by. It’s also what gives most of us the strength to keep writing.

But what do you do if you have writer’s block? What if you start writing, and find you’re stuck? That’s an upcoming post.