Why you should never write a first draft
It’s not goofing off if you’re writingYesterday, I had a coffee meeting with a prospective client. Before the meeting, he’d sent me a brochure he’d drafted for a new product.
The brochure was fine. The writing progressed logically; it told me exactly what I’d get with the product, and it was all grammatically correct. But it was fatally flawed. You’d have bought what he was selling only if you were already convinced that this was something you wanted and that he was the guy to sell it to you.
The amazing thing was that he fixed that fatal flaw from the moment he sat down in the cafe. He just didn’t realise he was doing it.
Over coffee, he told me why he cared about what he was selling, how far he’d travelled to find the right product, and how many other products he had tested and rejected as not just right for his clients.
In the end, he’d spent tens of thousands of dollars on finding the right thing (and saving his clients from products that looked good but wouldn’t deliver).
He gave me examples of people who’d been helped by what he was selling.
It was extremely convincing.
So why, I asked him, was none of that in his draft brochure.
Over coffee, he had effortlessly convinced me about what he was selling and his credentials to be selling it. But when it had come to writing it down, he had reflexively started to be “serious”.
The great story of the question that had needled him into traveling to three continents looking for an answer had not made it anywhere into the brochure. Even the stories of the people who’d benefited as a result were nowhere to be found.
Why the story is everything
Those stories probably seemed flimsy next to all the concrete detail he now had about what he was offering. But the stories were far more powerful than the features of the product because they held the answers to the most important questions anyone would ask before buying from him:
Why you? Because I care about this so deeply that I spent years tracking down the right answer and rejecting alternatives that look good but ultimately disappoint.
How will I benefit? I could list for you all the “things” that you’ll get, but let me show you the difference these products have made to him and her and her and him and that guy.
Years of school teach us that the Devil is in the detail, but detail is often the Devil when it comes to persuasion. We make our decisions based on emotion, whether we like to believe it or not. The research is in and it’s conclusive, whatever your English teacher told you.
So next time you’re sitting down to write something persuasive stop and do nothing until you talk it over with a friend over coffee.
We’re generally better at interesting our friends over coffee than we are at convincing strangers in writingHow to write copy over coffee
Your first draft shouldn’t be in writing because it should be that conversation.
Be natural but notice:
Where do you instinctively start? Trust your gut. Do you start by describing how finely your new pepper mill grinds pepper or do you start by talking about how fantastic food tastes with finely ground pepper? Where you start in conversation with a friend is probably the most interesting part–we want to fascinate our friends–so that’s where your writing needs to start.
What stories do you tell to illustrate your points? Every time I asked my prospective client a question about some aspect of what he was selling, he answered me with a story. “Well, I found the answer to that when I visited this guy in Malaysia…” But there was not a single story in his brochure. The more he told me of his story in coming up with his product, the more I was convinced he was a guy to trust when he said he had the right answer.
Free persuasive copywriting course
Following the chat-over-coffee approach will help you naturally hit many of the points we teach in our free persuasive writing course. If you haven’t checked it out already, you’ll find it here.
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