It’s Not Business. It’s Personal.

Sometimes I’ll work on a piece of copy, or a scene, or a dialogue exchange, when I start to clam up. My mind will race about all the things that I’m saying, and in some cases, I’ll let the characters just speak my inner thoughts. I’ll give an ad a piece of personalization, or I’ll turn a scene into a slice of life that I wish would happen. Of course, things don’t go to print this way, but these moments do allow for that necessary piece of humanization that writing requires. And edit after edit and rewrite after rewrite, that scene will morph. That ad will change. That line will become a character driven or a brand driven piece of writing that works with the tonality, at least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Writers have to work for a living, but when someone tells me that a graph or a scene or a line that I write is just business, I get angry, and then I realize- that person is not a writer.

The public at large has already heard everything, seen everything, and most will think that they already know everything. That is a problem, because we really can’t say anything new. We can’t tell them anything they haven’t already heard. That’s why there’s a slew of lines that say  ”The fastest whatchamacallit just got faster.” Everything’s a cliché, and so it comes to us writers to make it resound. And that’s where it gets personal. A paycheck is a paycheck, but a word is a piece of personality. It’s our take on what sounds good, what feels good. We as writers are required to take the known and put our spin on it. We’re required to add that little slice of humanization that can make the difference between what gets noticed and what gets lost. And it makes the difference between truth and lies.

IKEA is one of the largest brands today. Yet, what I remember most about it is a little commercial about a lamp.

It’s just a lamp. But we get caught up in it. The narrator’s right on, we do feel sorry for it. We hate it for the lamp, just as we love when Pixar’s iconic lamp finds another ball to play with. But some writer out there took his personal experience and made it into a great idea. Tell him it’s just business, and he’ll tell you about the time his favorite stuffed animal was put out in a cardboard box for the Goodwill van to pick up. Or about the time when his dog was left outside in the rain, and he felt guilty as hell watching the pup hang his head down low and get soaked.

Tell me writing’s not personal, and I’ll show you a play with no meaning. A script that loses it at page one. Or an ad that I don’t give a second’s worth of time to. It is personal. Writing is more than personal. It’s our inner core of beliefs, structured to sell an idea. It’s everything we are.

It’s always personal.

This sounds… (insert adjective here.)

Tone. Voice. How it sounds. Is it good? Bad? Business?

Believe it or not, people can usually tell who wrote something when they’re reading. Lawyers speak differently than Wall Street. New Yorkers speak differently from Southerners. Certain words are British, some are Scottish, some were just made up by mom… and that’s okay.

Every writer has a voice, and separately, every brand has a voice. Which really gets interesting when, say, you have a casual southern writer trying to write for, say, a multinational billion dollar company. Or, say, when it’s something as simple as a man trying to write to women. While it sounds ridiculous, it’s amazing how many men don’t have a clue how to write for women. Why, you ask? My opinion? They’re not paying attention. But that’s another story.

It’s a fine line, and it’s tricky. So, as a writer, how do you find the right voice for your girlfriend/ screenplay/ love note/ brand/ client/ essay/ email/ personal ad? Well, it’s actually fairly easy. Ready?

Read. Read everything you can possibly get your hands on. For clients, look at websites, brochures, old ads. For dialogue, look at the character, and character motivations. Copy buzz words, watch how sentences flow. Look for action words. If the article you’re reading has words like “flow”, you know it’s to a softer audience than an article that builds itself off the word “flex”. Why? Because of the images the words drop in your head. Where as ‘flow’ automatically sends your mind towards water, ‘flex’ sends you to Arnold Schwarzeneggar.

And then what? Just write, really. Put your headphones on, and go to town. But for gods sake, don’t just guess. Branding is manipulating, it’s matching. It’s matching the history of the business, and the people that work in it. You’re writing for the public, yes, but your first line of defense is the people on the other end of the phone (in 2000, I would have said conference table, but se la vie…). Make them happy. Make them feel good. Make them feel like you’re on their side, because while there will be comments, while there will be changes, if they feel like you’ve written something that sounds like them, they’ll fight for your work, even when you get off the phone.

So how does this relate to the screen and the script? I’ll get to that in another post.