Make that both earlobes. I hate arty talk with a venom.

You might think these traits are a handicap for a writer. I used to think so too.

But the moment I admitted to myself that I could no more write a novel, short story or poem than I could spontaneously generate maggots in a jam jar – well, it was the turning point in my career.

Instead of wasting my time trying to cultivate the kind of creative imagination I couldn’t achieve and didn’t want, I switched my attention to the nuts and bolts of writing — the words, and the ways you can put them together.

From then on my stuff began to read less like other people’s and started to sound like the way I think.

It wasn’t a case of ‘finding my voice’. I just stopped looking for clever things to say.

Why creativity puts people off writing

There’s snobbery in all the arts, and writing is no exception.

Imagine a Top Trumps deck in which the cards represent different genres of writing.

The most valuable card would be The Novel, surrounded by a entourage of power trumps that placed Poetry and Drama in a rank above History and Biography.

The least desirable cards in the pack would be things like Copywriting, Technical Writing and Trade Mag Journalism.

I think we pick these values up at school. ‘Good’ writing is stuff like Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Orwell and what-have-you.

Bad writing is… well, if you want to read that stuff, that’s your guilty secret.

(In 1994 I was in a tutorial led by Robert Crawford. When he asked which of us had ever read a Mills & Boon novel, my hand was the only one to rise).

But I digress. The point I’m making is that we’re conditioned to admire the creative imagination first, and the words as some sort of servant to it.

That pisses me off, because I think it puts lots of people off writing.

People like me who might not have the creative imagination to write a novel or a book or a play, but who love the sounds, texture, patterns and shapes of words.

And who lose that love because they direct their energies at cultivating an imagination they don’t have, tilling it vainly for ‘literary’ ideas. They become failed poets, failed novelists, failed short story writers — when they could have been some of the most sparkling, engaging communicators out there.

So next time you find yourself cudgelling your brains to create characters you don’t want to meet, scenarios you don’t care about or poetry that does clever things with metre and nothing to the heart — then stop. Whip out your pen and jot down some bold, bouncy, brilliant prose about the stuff that really interests you — whether it’s beer, girls, or the migratory habits of fish.

And while you might not get fêted as the Next Great Literary Genius, you’ll have an audience of appreciative people who like your stuff — and the satisfaction of becoming the writer you want to be, instead of the thinker you think you ought to be.

The session kicks off at 1pm, but if last year’s Q&A is anything to go by there will be plenty happening from about 12.30pm onwards.

So if you have any questions about breaking into copywriting, either as a freelancer or as part of an agency, then log in tomorrow.

If I can’t answer your question, there’s a whole panel of people who can.

The page you need to be on is here. See you there!

He’s lucky. When I’m tired, all I’m fit for is watching low-budget telly, reading thrillers or writing short blog posts like this one.

But he also got me thinking. What stimulates my fellow copywriters when they need to get creative?

For my part, these are the things that really get the creative juices flowing.

1) Blind terror

Nothing puts me on top of my game faster than a looming deadline.

To get the best results, leave yourself two days in which to do the work of five. Icy coolness will settle on you like a mantle and you’ll produce the work of your life.

2) Strong drink

As much as I admire David Ogilvy, there’s only one area in which I’m his true equal. It’s this:

Many people – and I think I am one of them – are more productive when they’ve had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I’m far better able to write.

The only problem with this approach is that the clock starts ticking. I find you get about thirty minutes of good work – after then you’ll instinctively reach for your fourth brandy and become interested only in your fifth.

(By the way, if you rely on this approach, Ogilvy also had some tips for drying out copywriters – but they boiled down to getting help or getting lost).

3) Friendship

Ask me as a friend to write something and I somehow get inspired – in this game, writing for someone you know well really gives you the edge.

4) Not writing

The biggest inspiration of all.

The most creative stuff I ever do is almost finished before I get to writing it down. Reading, listening, looking, thinking, walking, laughing, crashing ideas into each other – they’re the things that help you as a copywriter.

That’s what I find… as long as I’m not tired. Like now.

But what gets you fired up when it comes to writing?

Are you like me, or like my self-styled ‘anti-me’, copywriter Andy Nattan (who will no doubt tell you that serenity, sobriety, enmity and writing are his principle creative influences)?

Let me know – leave me a message for when I’m fully awake.

I would have watched it before, but I was waiting for ASDA to drop the DVD price to seven quid. Yesterday my cheapskate wish was granted…

It’s a fine story. But as I was probably the last person in England to see it, there’s not much point in telling you how the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue helped King George VI to overcome his crippling stammer.

But as a copywriter I do want to share one bit with you again. It comes at the moment the King is about to broadcast his all-important first speech of wartime.

This King is alone with Lionel Logue and his BBC microphone is about to go live. He’s on the precipice of his stammering returning, but Lionel says, simply:

Forget everything else and just say it to me. Say it to me, as a friend.

It works. The King delivers a magnificent, moving and powerful speech.

Because he addresses it to his friend.

It’s a completely different approach to the one the King wanted earlier in the film: help with the mechanics of speaking, of relaxing his throat muscles and strengthening his tongue.

And it reminds me of a lesson I learned the hard way – it’s all very well learning the mechanics of copywriting, but it’s pointless if you let it rob your writing voice of warmth, honesty and conviction.

Because they’re the hallmarks of someone talking to a friend.

Not everyone liked it, though – least of all in the British press.

In 1957, ‘Cassandra‘ complained in the Daily Mirror about the campaign – and the Reading Eagle (that’s Reading in Pennsylvania) picked up on the ensuing spat in a cheery article called ‘Englishmen in Tiff Over American Tourist Lure’.

“What a wretched picture this is of Britain!” rumbled Cassandra. “The supplicatory bazaar.

“What a blatant piece of bribery to catch the Yanks! How the cynical admen (probably writing from the steam-heated Sparta of Madison Avenue) have taken over!”

Back came the reply, in clipped Oxonian tones.

“We’re not steam-heated vulgarian yahoos,” remonstrated David Ogilvy. “A number of fairly thoughtful people work out the advertising.”

A gem of a phrase – though whether it’s as true today, I’ll let you judge.

Read the full Reading Eagle article – online here.

“What is tea, anyway–ugly, shriveled, dried leaves which color hot water a yellowish brown, which make it taste unpleasant and keep you awake, unless you are used to drinking them; you don’t sell a man an auger, you sell him the hole. My problem is not to sell tea. That would be difficult, indeed. I’ve got to sell you that magic spell that is brewed nowhere else but in a teapot; I’ve got to make you think of that spell as a part of Golden Glow tea.

“So I sit at my desk trying to recall all the delightful associations I ever had with tea. I draw in my breath and bring back to my nostrils ghostly odors of the fragrance of bygone tea parties. There’s a certain cosy fire, a green tea-set, and the snow falling heavily outside; a cold tramp, that ended with red cheeks–and a steaming cup of tea. There steals the memory of a woman sitting in a tall chair like a duchess, behind the richness of the silver pot and shining cups. Oh, there are a thousand such memories ! Breakfasts, splendid sunset times, and midnight madness. Tea–the very thought of it begins to drug me with its enchantments, with its fragrance. Haunting pictures of Japanese hillsides, and sunshine, and blue skies are winnowed back and forth by soft winds.

“And so I grip my pencil and begin to weave the echo of my memories into a song of tea. By and by, if I’m lucky and have sweated hard enough, I have written a piece of copy that reflects the witchery of my memories, that sing out to you to stop reading about the President, and stocks, and German perfidy, and take a moment to hear how tempting Golden Tea is, to realize what you are missing until you have some yourself.

“Or it may not be tea that Mr. Bouncing sells. It may be something like a steel monkey-wrench. Then my mind feels the thunder of the mighty hammers, pulses with the roar of industry, and sees the Niagaras of hot sparks leaping from the burning steel. I spend three days talking with the smudged-faced mechanics, about round-shouldered nuts, brittle edges, and barked knuckles; and instead of a delicate legend about tea, a chorus of endurance, strength, accuracy, tough steel, and service rings out from the page. I can’t choose my subject, you know – and I’ve got to make my song echo all the way down to your pocketbook or it’s no good.”

He first used it in the Chambers’ Washington Report, criticising the Office of Price Stabilization for the bureaucratic language it used in a price order.

Milton had spent many frustrating hours trying to explain the order to his colleague, and eventually decided the maddening blend of “incomprehensibility, ambiguity, verbosity and complexity” needed a new word to describe it.

So he created one: bafflegab.

As he accepted his award, Smith was asked to define his new word succinctly. This is how he did it:

…multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies.

It raises a laugh and it reminds me of Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby:

The identity of the official whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of recent discussion is not shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume; but not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question is, it may surprise you to learn, one whom your present interlocutor is in the habit of defining by means of the perpendicular pronoun.

(Translation: “I did it”).

But there’s a serious point. Today’s jargon of ‘going forward’, ‘step change’, ‘facilitating’, ‘solutions’, ‘out-task’, ‘best practice’, ‘roll out’, ‘populus at large’, ‘outcomes’, ‘turnkey’, ‘client side’, ‘paradigm shift’ and so on is nothing more than the worst kind of bafflegab or gobbledygook.

And if your business is using it in print or online, you’re alienating customers.

But don’t just take my word for it – it’s what Michael Shanks, former chair of the National Consumer Council, has also discovered:

“Gobbledygook may indicate a failure to think clearly, a contempt for one’s clients, or more probably a mixture of both.”

So say it simply – if you appear to hold people in contempt, they won’t buy from you.

I just found it on the internet. Here he is on the top left.

I can’t remember anything else about the book, but I was deeply impressed by the first episode in Billy’s TV series, Route 66, which aired last week.

He’s following America’s most famous highway on a massive and ridiculous motorbike, showing us wonderful things and listening to interesting people.

And as I listen to his narrative, I just wish I could bottle some of it and use it in sales copy.

Take a look at him in this clip. There’s a good bit about 4 minutes and 10 seconds in.

It’s worth typing out, in case you’ve not got time to watch. Billy’s talking about a huge statue of a spaceman positioned outside a diner.

Now, if you’ve never seen a giant, you’re about to see one now. He lives just up the road here. It’s the silliest story you’ve ever heard.

There he is.

I’d like you to meet Gemini the Giant. He came here in 1965. The guy who owned this place – The Launching Pad (I don’t know if this place is called The Launching Pad because of Gemini, or if Gemini is called Gemini because of The Launching Pad) but there was a restaurant convention and the guy went to the convention and found this.

He’s 28 feet high and he bought him for $3,000. I wonder what his wife said when he brought him home? “Darling, I’ve got you a present.”

Look at the size of him. I absolutely love him, and I wish there was many, many more of them. Originally the idea of these big guys on Route 66 was to attract people off the interstate highway. But you can’t see the interstate highway from here. I don’t know how many people he attracts, but he certainly wouldn’t attract me to eat. But that’s Gemini the Giant.

Sure, it doesn’t have the same power when you see it in print (not least because I’ve chickened out of transcribing Billy’s Glesga accent).

But even so, you can see how Billy’s brilliant at getting alongside you and sharing the enthusiasm. He’s conversational, he tells stories, he chucks his opinions into the mix.

And it’s all these things that make you listen, and laugh and believe in him.

It’s almost as thought you’re there with him.

Now imagine Billy had said:

Here you can see a giant called Gemini. The owner paid $3,000 for him in 1965. He’s 28 feet high, but you can’t see the highway from here – so he probably didn’t attract many customers.

You’d be bored, wouldn’t you?

Sadly it’s the sort of copy you could easily write if you were a copywriter sticking rigidly to the so-called formulas (address the reader as ‘you’/ use short sentences/ keep to the point etc).

But as Billy knows, the real power in the word ‘you’ doesn’t come from knowing when to use it – it comes from knowing how to use it.

It’s about taking an interest in other people. If you don’t give a toss about your readers, no amount of using the word ‘you’ will help you connect with them.

But to put a dodgy apostrophe in your fashion brand’s name. Well… ce n’est pas chic.

That’s exactly what My Pant’s in Paris’s Rue Montorgueuil has done, as you can see.

Either somebody blundered, or someone thought the extra punctuation would look quirky.

But it doesn’t. It just looks foolish.

And searching for the brand in Google becomes much more difficult – the search engine ignores the apostrophe by default. And that’s a marketing own goal.

So there’s a bit of a lesson here. If you create a brand name in a foreign language, get a native-speaking copywriter to work on it.

If you don’t, you’ll get mocked… c’est fou ça.

“I’ve seen that done,” I replied, wincing at a recent memory. “Amazing what some people charge for.”

“You misunderstand,” the sage continued. “I don’t mean you should write badly. Anyone can do that.”

“Then what are you driving at?” I asked.

“I mean that your stuff reads like… well, it’s just obvious a copywriter has written it.”

“Sorry for having the temerity to be coherent,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster.

“There’s a good example,” came the response. “You’d never have written that.”

“What would I have written?”

“For a start, you wouldn’t have let ‘temerity’ or ‘coherent’ slip through the net. You’d have written ‘Sorry for daring to be clear.”

He had a point. I would.

“So what if I would?” I asked. “What’s wrong with that? It’s much clearer.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s simply that no-one would ever say it. And,” yawned my companion, bringing the conversation to a close, “if you don’t realise that authenticity drums up more business than clarity, you’re in the wrong line of work.”

“Not ‘authenticity’,” I muttered under my breath. “Try ‘being genuine’ instead.”

But I knew he had won.