by Danilo Soscia, art director but above all copywriter
Copywriting is (a) life
I have often found myself wondering what the best copywriting manual ever published might be. Over a working lifetime I have pored over a great many of them, in a great many languages.
It is curious how Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium so often turns up among them, in the guise of a wisdom text. A work born to exemplify the contemporary, and its utopia, which in today’s reading seems to have become a handbook for learning the art of writing to persuade. To persuade people to act, to listen, to buy.
Anyone who writes for a living probably knows it: lightness, quickness, exactitude (some of the values Calvino discusses) are dizzyingly abstract notions. At worst, mythological creatures we have all heard about and that nobody has ever really seen up close.
Lightness is almost always an awkward compromise, quickness is a standing threat, exactitude is — today above all — a rare commodity, practically unobtainable.
Which is perhaps why the best copywriting manual ever published simply does not exist. Unless one could reduce to a manual that irreducible, stubborn thing, rich and terrible in its reversals, which is life: everything that has contributed, right up to the moment we set pencil to paper, to making us what we are. What we have read and eaten, the music we have listened to, the films we have watched. Our unaccountable happiness, and our very often overrated sadness. In short: what we know, in the true sense of the word.
The first recipient of any message is the person writing it. In my experience, lose sight of that sentimental axiom and you end up writing something of very little interest. Identification, incidentally, is another false myth. Why fantasise about being something else? Why pretend to know something? Far better to have experience of it, a view of it, a judgement on it.
Better to understand, perhaps, than to imitate. And with gravity, if need be, with slowness and subjectivity. Which by definition is never exact.
So the copywriter is the one who writes
Probably, yes — but on the seventh day, as a form of rest after a long journey.
- First they imagine. To imagine is to see clearly something that does not yet exist. It is a sense trained from childhood, at the bottom of boredom. It is the genesis, where everything is still possible. Where concepts do not exist, only the stories that tell them.
- Then they plan. Planning means deciding the order in which things happen. In a text — whether a social message across its various formats or the concept for a campaign — the chain of events, of ideas, is the substance.
- Then they discard. Discarding is the highest instrument in the negative metaphysics of those who write for a living. Because a message is made above all of what is not there: of white space, of the things one has chosen not to say and that are nevertheless there, determining the depth of a message, of a story.
- And so the copywriter finds themselves fighting against common sense. Restoration and comfort have, by their very nature, a short life. They do not last. They repress, they control, but they are containers destined sooner or later to overflow. We know how it goes: there is the client, there is reasonableness, there is good sense. But there is also mannerism, the fetishising of an idea or of a way of expressing it, which — when driven by the need for change — carries within it the seed of a small revolution. In the end we are talking about messages that more often than not are of use to people, words that speak to their world. That is no small thing.
- The field cleared of resistance, the moment comes for the copywriter to let go. At a certain point you have to abandon the idea you fought so hard to win, and almost never out of tiredness. In this saga of intensely personal habits and impressions, the only certainty is forgetting in order to remember. A little like playing at time capsules, over a shorter interval. Shut everything in a box, bury it, then dig it up again, archaeologists of our own selves. Then come the surprise and the disappointment, the elation and the defeat. This is the roulette table you are obliged to sit down at.
- At which point, armed with their treasure — if they have found one — the copywriter goes home. And there they find their sheet of paper and their pencil again (I speak for myself: ever since somebody gave me a Blackwing I have felt I was a better copywriter), and perhaps a little of their solitude too. But only for a moment. There is a whole journey behind them, with its bends, its labours, its discoveries. The time has finally come to
- Write, and then write, and then write again. Now, and without ceremony. Perhaps paying homage to one of copywriting’s patron saints, Gustave Flaubert, inventor of the gueuloir: shutting yourself in a room and shouting your sentences out loud to hear whether the rhythm holds. Not advisable in an open-plan office, but the principle is the same. Under your breath it works almost as well.
Words are (not) everything
They are, rather, an instrument. Or perhaps the imprint left behind once the pressure of our passing has traced something legible.
Like all imprints, words need ground. A text never exists on its own: it lives on a page, inside an interface, next to an image that somebody else has usually chosen, within a reading time decided by somebody else again.
The claim on a poster is one third words and two thirds point size. An allegory of its author’s solitude? Quite the opposite. The copywriter almost always works in company (a better word than “team”). A creative director, a graphic designer, a designer, a developer, a client with reasons of their own — legitimate ones, and often more solid than we find it convenient to admit. The text is the last mile of a thought that is the work of several people.
Then there is the least romantic part, the part concerning what words promise. When you write for a public service, for a prevention campaign, for the portal somebody will open at eight in the evening to work out whether they are entitled to something, the question is not whether the sentence is beautiful, well made. It is whether that person, having read it, knows what to do. A stricter criterion than any award, and a far less consoling one. To borrow the title of an excellent handbook on the history of advertising edited by Giuseppe Mazza: Cose vere scritte bene — true things, well written.
Words are not everything. They are the visible part of a larger responsibility, and the only part the copywriter takes home. The rest — the thinking, the time, the journey, the life that brought us there — is not visible. But it is felt.
Above all when it is missing.
Danilo Soscia is one of the authors behind Net7’s most recent campaigns, including the communication for the Portale Cultura Toscana (social, video and podcast), the Medici Villas and Gardens in Tuscany, the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani and the 5xmille campaign for Monasterio.
