Nicolas Cole watched Craig Clemens spend a day writing thousands of words but nearly finish only the headline. Cole realized the headline matters more than word count, so he now spends hundreds of hours on the core idea before drafting anything.
All right, rule number 10, start with the big idea. So let me tell you a quick story. When I lived in la, I became friends with arguably the most successful sales copywriter on the planet today. His name's Craig Clemens. He built a very, very successful company off of his ability to write and write ads. And one day I was up at his house. You know, we would do these writing sessions together. We'd sit in his office. He had this house up in Hollywood Hills, and we would just sit down and write side by side. And I remember one afternoon we were writing, we both. We turn on a timer. We both sort of went into our own individual worlds. And an hour later, we. He goes, how was the writing session? I go, oh, it was really good. It was really productive. I got down like over a thousand words. Well, how is it for you? He kind of takes his time to answer and he goes, good. You know, I think I've almost got the headline figured out. And that experience completely changed the way that I thought about writing. Up until that point, I was so anchored to writing, and productivity is all about how many words you can write. That writing session with him and after talking with him about it, made me realize, no, where you should spend the majority of the time is actually with the big idea. And the big idea could be if you're writing an article, that's the title. If you're writing a newsletter, that's the subject line. If you're writing a book, that's the main title and subtitle. If you can't succinctly say the big idea in one sentence, you're not going to know what you're trying to say in a thousand words or 10,000 words or 100,000 words. So one of the best lessons, you know, that I've learned from one of the most successful sales copywriters on the planet is you always want to start with the big idea. And after that day, I completely changed my writing process. I started spending way more time on the front end, thinking through the idea, brainstorming different titles. With every book that I write now, I spend hundred hours thinking about the positioning of the book and the main title and the subtitle before I even write a single word. So you should always start with the big idea.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
