In the Margins is a new series by Contributing Writer Emily Seitz. Each installment gathers some of the best writer-focused books from authors of all genres, and summarizes the biggest brand/copywriting takeaways from each.
There are more pieces of advice on writing than there are writers. The tips and tricks keep coming, making it hard to separate the truth from the trends. What’s a brand or marketing expert to do? How can we find more honed/experienced advice without closing our eyes to new ideas? The answer to both is to read books.
There are more marks to success than being a published author, but reading makes us better writers. Though it takes time, giving time to any craft is a universal prerequisite for success. Allow us to help you spend that time with the best of the best.
This first installment of our new series covers three heavy hitters:
- Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by copywriter Luke Sullivan
- Pity The Reader by novelist Kurt Vonnegut and his student Suzanne McConnell
- How to Tell a Story by folks at The Moth
Future versions will include essayists, memorists, documentarians, and more. We hope if something scratches an itch, you’ll pick up a copy from an indie seller.
Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan
In Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, professor and veteran copywriter Luke Sullivan teaches the copywriting fundamentals. It’s a pretty standard ad school/college reading assignment, offering practical advice on everything from writer’s block to radio ads.
Sullivan defines a brand as “The sum total of all the emotions, thoughts, images, history, possibilities, and gossip that exist in the marketplace about a certain company.” Social media means much of our clients’ images live outside our control, but we can help shape the overarching narrative1. To make the most of such an opportunity:
#1 Get started somewhere
Finding a version of my voice that feels like mine took nearly ten years. Coming up with a brand’s voice in a fraction of the time is tough. Luckily, Sullivan offers a kind of shortcut: mimic an existing voice you admire2. When explaining why, he quotes art-directing legend Helmut Krone, who says3, “Until you have a better answer, you copy.”
#2 Think big, start small
“Good advertising, it has been said, builds sales. But great advertising builds factories.” In other words, Sullivan believes we writers have incremental superpowers. “The ad you’re about to do may not make the next million…it’s an opportunity to sharpen the brand’s image.”
#3 Use structure and “Draconian simplicity”4
Sullivan claims simplicity makes everyone’s life easier. “People don’t have time to figure out what your brand stands for. It is up to you to make your brand stand for something. The best way to do it is to make your brand stand for one thing. [Brand = Adjective].” Sullivan goes on to tell us:
- “Headline, then hit A, B, and then end on C.”
- “When you’re done, go back and cut it by a third.”
- “Sweat the details.”
Fine print: A bit of a meta book review within a book review, but Sullivan’s summary of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind recontextualizes simplicity for brand writers: “In each category, there’s room for perhaps three brand names. If your product isn’t in one of those slots, you must “de-position” a competitor to take its place. Before you start, look at the current positioning of your product. What positions do the competitors occupy? What niches are undefended? Should you concentrate on defining your client’s position, or do some de-positioning of the competition? Do they have an adjective? What’s your adjective? In short, you want people who feel X about your product to feel Y.”
Pity the Reader by Kurt Vonnegut & Suzanne McConnell
Kurt Vonnegut, one of America’s classic dark humorists, was prolific in his time. Though he’s best known for novels like Cat’s Cradle or Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut began his career as a copywriter/PR guy for General Electric. One of Vonnegut’s students, Suzanne McConnell, compiled Pity the Reader posthumously.
In this book, McConnell helps crack the code to Vonnegut’s short, conversationalist writing and turns of phrase. Anyone confined to tight word counts—or under any expectation to be funny—can learn a lot from his approach:
#1 Make it matter
“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about.” In this quote5, Vonnegut speaks to us directly, assuming there’s something on our minds or heart worth talking about. He often speaks to this sense of purpose, saying things like, “I feel it is my duty as a human being to ask you to think twice about what is of importance in life…The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”
Fine print: Though this pertains to characters in a novel, our brand characters could learn a thing or two from this advice: “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” He also found it worth adding, “what a character wants and what a character is afraid of are often the same thing.”
#2 Keep at it
Pretty standard piece of advice, but Vonnegut nails the reason for it: “So often it's this belief, or some such belief, that keeps me going after a day when I've been at it for hours and am dissatisfied with what I've produced. But I do keep at it and, if I’m patient, a nice egg-shaped idea emerges and I can tell my intelligence has gotten through.”
#3 Maintain simplicity
Vonnegut believes, “Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’” His more specific advice: “If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.” McConnell cautions against any dogmatic way of writing, but the exercise can be a good gut check.
How to Tell a Story from The Moth6
From its humble beginnings in small NYC living rooms, The Moth has become a global platform and community for stories and the people who tell them. In How to Tell A Story, Moth pros and directors walk us through how they refine, hone, and perform a piece.
As marketers and branding experts, we bring heart to deliverables through storytelling, but how often are we actually telling stories? Is a :06 second ad a story? To help us answer, the Moth offers definitions, rubrics, and practical steps that we can apply to our work, too.
#1 Have stakes
The Moth teaches all stories must involve stakes and some sort of transformation—physical, situational, emotional, behavioral, or attitudinal. To them, stories without any risk really aren’t stories at all. They say, “A good story builds. By the end, things have intrinsically changed. You can’t go back.” Worried about a story getting too specific? Not possible. “Though stories with stakes and transformation start personal, they reveal something universal for the audience.” If we held every brand we write for to the same criteria, the world would be a better place.
Fine print: On a Moth stage, stories need more than adversity and trauma. Those forces are important, but true transformation feels more impactful and holistic.
#2 Find your angle
Moth directors encourage every performer to dig until they find a version of the story only they can tell. Here were some of my favorite probing questions, edited slightly for our purposes:
- What are the stories people can’t wait to tell related to our brand?
- What are The Greatest Hits of this brand/culture?
- How is this time different from all the other times?
- Think about a time when you discovered something about this brand, category, or product.
- Was there a time that you had a moment when everything came into focus?
- What is this piece ultimately about for you?
- How would you describe the brand/the audience at the beginning of the story? Who are they at the end?
To test your angle, try putting your story down in one sentence. The process prunes away the parts that aren’t as important, pushing you to select each word carefully. How to Tell A Story includes this example: “It took a disaster for me to appreciate the important role my father played in the community.”
#3 Pick a structure that serves the story
Whether you’re blocking out a social caption or a TikTok, a structure protects you from “the dreaded and then and thens” that often lose audiences. As long as it pays off your hook/angle, you can get creative with structure, though The Moth cautions, “Don’t assume you have to get fancy with your structure. Sometimes the best way is to simply start at the beginning and tell it from there!”
Fine print: If structure feels too limiting, remember, “It is completely possible for you to tell the same story in two minutes, five minutes, or ten minutes, depending on which detail you feel are crucial to understanding what the story is ultimately about…The Gettysburg Address was around three minutes long and it changed a nation.” Speaking of….
#4 Edit, edit, edit
Attention spans are short. Our CTAs make them even shorter. The best thing to do is make our points as quickly as possible. The Moth offers these specific editing tactics:
- Lose the preamble: “Setting the expectation might actually dilute it…You can tell us about the car ride without including that you got in the car, put the keys in the ignition, started the car, put it into reverse, and backed out of the driveway.”
- Avoid overloading with detail: “Don’t mention your uncle just finished plumbing school unless a pipe is going to burst; Does it matter that it’s Wednesday?”
- Use humor wisely: “Humor is a tempting force in storytelling. It can magnify your emotions or push them away.”
- Lean on the first or third person: “Some tellers get a case of the ‘yous.’ Keep the story rooted in your own experience instead of generalizing.”
- Leave the sermon out: “No need to tell the listener what they should think or take away from the story.”
The Epilogue
Though these three books come from very different perspectives and disciplines, they all remind me:
- Keep. It. Simple. You might have to rewrite ten times before trimming all the excess.
- The best writing—branding, advertising, or otherwise—means something to the person who wrote it. There is no substitute for care.
- Pick a place to start and start. Even if it sounds like someone else, mimicry is closer to the answer than a blank page.
1 With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
2 Bonus reading: Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
3 Read Krone’s advertising Hall Of Fame bio here.
4 Even without my crystal ball, I can tell you this will be the most consistent piece of advice from writer to writer.
5 Originally appears in Vonnegut’s famous article, How to Write with Style.
6 Contributing authors: Kate Tellers, Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Sarah Austin Jenness, Meg Bowles
Happy Reading,
Em, Contributing Writer + Official President of The Subtext’s Unofficial Book Club
You can read more from Em on her blog/newsletter thing called Getting Wordy, or her previous piece for The Subtext on non-alcoholic beverage branding.
In the Margins is a new series by Contributing Writer Emily Seitz. Each installment gathers some of the best writer-focused books from authors of all genres, and summarizes the biggest brand/copywriting takeaways from each.
There are more pieces of advice on writing than there are writers. The tips and tricks keep coming, making it hard to separate the truth from the trends. What’s a brand or marketing expert to do? How can we find more honed/experienced advice without closing our eyes to new ideas? The answer to both is to read books.
There are more marks to success than being a published author, but reading makes us better writers. Though it takes time, giving time to any craft is a universal prerequisite for success. Allow us to help you spend that time with the best of the best.
This first installment of our new series covers three heavy hitters:
- Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by copywriter Luke Sullivan
- Pity The Reader by novelist Kurt Vonnegut and his student Suzanne McConnell
- How to Tell a Story by folks at The Moth
Future versions will include essayists, memorists, documentarians, and more. We hope if something scratches an itch, you’ll pick up a copy from an indie seller.
Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan
In Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, professor and veteran copywriter Luke Sullivan teaches the copywriting fundamentals. It’s a pretty standard ad school/college reading assignment, offering practical advice on everything from writer’s block to radio ads.
Sullivan defines a brand as “The sum total of all the emotions, thoughts, images, history, possibilities, and gossip that exist in the marketplace about a certain company.” Social media means much of our clients’ images live outside our control, but we can help shape the overarching narrative1. To make the most of such an opportunity:
#1 Get started somewhere
Finding a version of my voice that feels like mine took nearly ten years. Coming up with a brand’s voice in a fraction of the time is tough. Luckily, Sullivan offers a kind of shortcut: mimic an existing voice you admire2. When explaining why, he quotes art-directing legend Helmut Krone, who says3, “Until you have a better answer, you copy.”
#2 Think big, start small
“Good advertising, it has been said, builds sales. But great advertising builds factories.” In other words, Sullivan believes we writers have incremental superpowers. “The ad you’re about to do may not make the next million…it’s an opportunity to sharpen the brand’s image.”
#3 Use structure and “Draconian simplicity”4
Sullivan claims simplicity makes everyone’s life easier. “People don’t have time to figure out what your brand stands for. It is up to you to make your brand stand for something. The best way to do it is to make your brand stand for one thing. [Brand = Adjective].” Sullivan goes on to tell us:
- “Headline, then hit A, B, and then end on C.”
- “When you’re done, go back and cut it by a third.”
- “Sweat the details.”
Fine print: A bit of a meta book review within a book review, but Sullivan’s summary of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind recontextualizes simplicity for brand writers: “In each category, there’s room for perhaps three brand names. If your product isn’t in one of those slots, you must “de-position” a competitor to take its place. Before you start, look at the current positioning of your product. What positions do the competitors occupy? What niches are undefended? Should you concentrate on defining your client’s position, or do some de-positioning of the competition? Do they have an adjective? What’s your adjective? In short, you want people who feel X about your product to feel Y.”
Pity the Reader by Kurt Vonnegut & Suzanne McConnell
Kurt Vonnegut, one of America’s classic dark humorists, was prolific in his time. Though he’s best known for novels like Cat’s Cradle or Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut began his career as a copywriter/PR guy for General Electric. One of Vonnegut’s students, Suzanne McConnell, compiled Pity the Reader posthumously.
In this book, McConnell helps crack the code to Vonnegut’s short, conversationalist writing and turns of phrase. Anyone confined to tight word counts—or under any expectation to be funny—can learn a lot from his approach:
#1 Make it matter
“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about.” In this quote5, Vonnegut speaks to us directly, assuming there’s something on our minds or heart worth talking about. He often speaks to this sense of purpose, saying things like, “I feel it is my duty as a human being to ask you to think twice about what is of importance in life…The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”
Fine print: Though this pertains to characters in a novel, our brand characters could learn a thing or two from this advice: “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” He also found it worth adding, “what a character wants and what a character is afraid of are often the same thing.”
#2 Keep at it
Pretty standard piece of advice, but Vonnegut nails the reason for it: “So often it's this belief, or some such belief, that keeps me going after a day when I've been at it for hours and am dissatisfied with what I've produced. But I do keep at it and, if I’m patient, a nice egg-shaped idea emerges and I can tell my intelligence has gotten through.”
#3 Maintain simplicity
Vonnegut believes, “Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’” His more specific advice: “If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.” McConnell cautions against any dogmatic way of writing, but the exercise can be a good gut check.
How to Tell a Story from The Moth6
From its humble beginnings in small NYC living rooms, The Moth has become a global platform and community for stories and the people who tell them. In How to Tell A Story, Moth pros and directors walk us through how they refine, hone, and perform a piece.
As marketers and branding experts, we bring heart to deliverables through storytelling, but how often are we actually telling stories? Is a :06 second ad a story? To help us answer, the Moth offers definitions, rubrics, and practical steps that we can apply to our work, too.
#1 Have stakes
The Moth teaches all stories must involve stakes and some sort of transformation—physical, situational, emotional, behavioral, or attitudinal. To them, stories without any risk really aren’t stories at all. They say, “A good story builds. By the end, things have intrinsically changed. You can’t go back.” Worried about a story getting too specific? Not possible. “Though stories with stakes and transformation start personal, they reveal something universal for the audience.” If we held every brand we write for to the same criteria, the world would be a better place.
Fine print: On a Moth stage, stories need more than adversity and trauma. Those forces are important, but true transformation feels more impactful and holistic.
#2 Find your angle
Moth directors encourage every performer to dig until they find a version of the story only they can tell. Here were some of my favorite probing questions, edited slightly for our purposes:
- What are the stories people can’t wait to tell related to our brand?
- What are The Greatest Hits of this brand/culture?
- How is this time different from all the other times?
- Think about a time when you discovered something about this brand, category, or product.
- Was there a time that you had a moment when everything came into focus?
- What is this piece ultimately about for you?
- How would you describe the brand/the audience at the beginning of the story? Who are they at the end?
To test your angle, try putting your story down in one sentence. The process prunes away the parts that aren’t as important, pushing you to select each word carefully. How to Tell A Story includes this example: “It took a disaster for me to appreciate the important role my father played in the community.”
#3 Pick a structure that serves the story
Whether you’re blocking out a social caption or a TikTok, a structure protects you from “the dreaded and then and thens” that often lose audiences. As long as it pays off your hook/angle, you can get creative with structure, though The Moth cautions, “Don’t assume you have to get fancy with your structure. Sometimes the best way is to simply start at the beginning and tell it from there!”
Fine print: If structure feels too limiting, remember, “It is completely possible for you to tell the same story in two minutes, five minutes, or ten minutes, depending on which detail you feel are crucial to understanding what the story is ultimately about…The Gettysburg Address was around three minutes long and it changed a nation.” Speaking of….
#4 Edit, edit, edit
Attention spans are short. Our CTAs make them even shorter. The best thing to do is make our points as quickly as possible. The Moth offers these specific editing tactics:
- Lose the preamble: “Setting the expectation might actually dilute it…You can tell us about the car ride without including that you got in the car, put the keys in the ignition, started the car, put it into reverse, and backed out of the driveway.”
- Avoid overloading with detail: “Don’t mention your uncle just finished plumbing school unless a pipe is going to burst; Does it matter that it’s Wednesday?”
- Use humor wisely: “Humor is a tempting force in storytelling. It can magnify your emotions or push them away.”
- Lean on the first or third person: “Some tellers get a case of the ‘yous.’ Keep the story rooted in your own experience instead of generalizing.”
- Leave the sermon out: “No need to tell the listener what they should think or take away from the story.”
The Epilogue
Though these three books come from very different perspectives and disciplines, they all remind me:
- Keep. It. Simple. You might have to rewrite ten times before trimming all the excess.
- The best writing—branding, advertising, or otherwise—means something to the person who wrote it. There is no substitute for care.
- Pick a place to start and start. Even if it sounds like someone else, mimicry is closer to the answer than a blank page.
1 With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
2 Bonus reading: Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
3 Read Krone’s advertising Hall Of Fame bio here.
4 Even without my crystal ball, I can tell you this will be the most consistent piece of advice from writer to writer.
5 Originally appears in Vonnegut’s famous article, How to Write with Style.
6 Contributing authors: Kate Tellers, Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Sarah Austin Jenness, Meg Bowles
Happy Reading,
Em, Contributing Writer + Official President of The Subtext’s Unofficial Book Club
You can read more from Em on her blog/newsletter thing called Getting Wordy, or her previous piece for The Subtext on non-alcoholic beverage branding.
Further Reading
