Permanent State of Mind
I’d love to tell you that I’m “normal” and that I go to sleep every night and dream “normal” dreams and wake up every morning and enter into my day “normally” like every other human being on the planet.
But, I’m not. The pad of paper lying next to me every morning full of scribbled notes that I have no recollection of ever writing tells me otherwise.
Why? Because I am a copywriter… and as any copywriter, I literally “work” 24 hours a day EVERY day because you can’t turn your mind off and you can’t (nor shouldn’t) stop the flow of inspiration, whenever it decides to come.
For those of us who are lucky enough to “work” in this incredible field, we know that we are not normal. We are “mind sponges” that absorb everything around us consciously and unconsciously and then have the keen skill for somehow making minute, sub-cellular connections between the jillions of pieces of information that we absorb in one day and its relationship to the words that we need to mold in getting a point across for a client or a product.
Some people say that copywriters are manipulators because, after all, we are “salesmen in print” to be sure.
But, I tend to disagree with the word “manipulation”, not because I have a guilt complex, or need to feel better about how people describe what I do for a living. But rather, because I feel that copywriters, at their essence, write to emotions and massage these parts of people as they walk around relatively “dead” all day every day. People are starving for, or vulnerable to, something that will make them “feel” again… anything, to feel anything at all. The numbness is palpable.
It’s quite remarkable honestly to do what we do, and a great responsibility to help people feel alive again, if even for a moment.
By tapping on, touching lightly, roughing up, pushing upon or stirring up a topic that someone has a sensitivity to, is the responsibility of an ethical writer. We are selling what we know they need. It is a disservice not to “wake them up” and write to them from the inside-out.
We know they need it before they know they need it.
We write in order to allow them to want what they need.
We give them the permission to feel again.
I love being a copywriter… can you tell?
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