In addition to writing the newsletter you’re reading now, I also run a one-man copywriting shop called Honey Copy, where I write everything from product descriptions to slogans to tweet threads to video scripts. If you’re in need of copy, just respond to this email.

Novelists have historically had a complicated (if not toxic) relationship with advertising. Many see it as selling one’s soul to the devil. Yet, despite this disdain, it hasn’t kept some truly great novelists from guiltily crawling in bed with some of the world’s biggest (and highest-paying) agencies.

Augusten Burrows wrote advertising for Ogilvy & Mather, Saatchi & Saatchi and DDB before drinking himself into such a stupor that he fell into rehab, ending his days as a copywriter and launching his career as a novelist.

F. Scott Fitzgerald took work as a copywriter at a small agency in New York City in hopes to prove to his beloved Zelda that he wasn’t a deadbeat, where he was tasked with writing copy for a laundry service in Muscatine, Iowa. The tagline he came up with was brilliant, “We keep you clean in Muscatine!”

Then, of course, we can’t forget about Steven Pressfield, who wrote copy for Benton and Bowles before going on to write screenplays and later novels. While today Pressfield claims to loathe advertising, he attributes his brevity to his days crawling through the trenches of the industry, which bring us to today’s lesson…

At Benton and Bowles, Pressfield was tasked with writing tv commercials. He would take a long-winded script he wrote into his creative director’s office and his boss would tell him to, “Cut it down!”

Pressfield would cut it down and then show it to his boss a second time. Again, he was met with the same instructions, “Cut it down!”

After enough cutting and chopping and slicing, Pressfield found that he could say the same thing in 25 words that he normally said in 250 words. Today, the novels you read by Pressfield are about 50% their original size.

During the creative process, it’s important to first focus on creating. You create whatever it is you’re creating and you don’t at all consider whether it is too long or too abstract or too long-winded. It’s impossible, after all, to be both creative and concise at the same time.

But, once the creative thing has been created, brevity is the respect you show your reader or listener or consumer or admirer. Brevity is saying to that person, “I care about your time, so I’m going to take the time to cut this creative work down to its truest, purest form.”

Michelangelo was once asked how he went about sculpting one of his great marble masterpieces, to which he responded…

“I saw the angel in the marble, and carved until I set him free.”

This is brevity.

By Cole Schafer.

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