If they’ve ever told you they can do your job better than you…
Some really bad things will happen to you at some point in your career. Sometimes, these bad things will repeat itself over and over again and you won’t be able to walk away from them.
Talking about walking away from it, it’s only easy when you say it to yourself. Or when you’re counselling someone else who is going through that phase to do it. You’ll say it with so much conviction that when the person you’re counselling doesn’t take the shot, you’ll wonder what kind of coward they are.
Of course, because this is abuse! Emotional abuse. And people are supposed to walk away from that.
As a designer, you’ll experience that a lot. But as a copywriter, it’s even worse. Your skill is too simple and everyone thinks they can do it. No. You can’t even confuse them with any technicalities like RGB and CYMK and Gestaltism and those things.
Therefore, it’s easy to trivialise what you do. And everyone won’t miss a chance to trivialise what you do. They’ll do it in front of you. They’ll do it behind your back. The bad thing is that these people, they’ll be part of your team: They’ll be the ones who did one Literature-in-English that year in secondary school; they’ll be the ones who self-published 3 poetry pieces at height of .blogspot.com in 2012; and they’ll be so desperate to show that they too, they can do what you’re paid to do and that you’re awful at what you do.
“Should I write it?”
It’s never far from the back of their throat and indeed, they’ll rewrite what you wrote. Or even push a different copy forward. That’s totally fine. After all, is it not just to write copy? Frankly, anyone can write it!
Look, when this kind of thing happens to you, don’t fret at all. Always let them flex their copy skills. It’s even better when the work is already in the public domain and they’re confabulating about how you shouldn’t have written it that way and how they could’ve written it better and how the copy shouldn’t be “do it for state” and it should’ve been “do it for all of us” etc.
When they actually pick up their pen to write new lines for you, then you should run to your Instagram story and call yourself “Top 5 copywriters doing it in the country right now”. Why, because your work is so good it’s inspiring people who wouldn’t have written anything to pick up their pen and start coming up with headlines. Cheers.
In fact, if no one can be inspired to make improvements on what you’ve written because its purrfect then it’s shit. Start all over. Frank Lowe picked out perfect lines from Geoffrey Seymour’s — who was badass in his day by the way — scripts. Same for Tom McElligot. Same for Abbott. Same for the biggest copywriters you know. Someone was in the corner helping them refine their work; highlighting parts that work well more than parts that were dismiss-able.
You see? You can’t vex at all. It’s all good. If your work is shit, nobody would be inspired to write because they saw what you did and said shit I can write that better.
However, there’s a way these things work. Some people are so respectful and humble when they want to tell you why this particular copy you’ve written shouldn’t be what it looked like. But many others are not: They’ll just open their mouth waaaaahhh.
These people, as you’re opening your Google Docs to write for another campaign, you have to carry eraser and erase them from your mind, because you’re baba forgive them for they knoweth not what they’re doing.
