Turns out, there’s a lot more that copywriters can learn from novelists.
So today, let’s talk about approach. In the creative writing world, there are generally two types of people:
Gardeners vs. Architects – 2 Different Writing Approaches
Gardeners
Also called “discovery writers.” These writers perform best when they don’t plan too far in advance.
They start with a few seeds, watch them grow, and finetune during revisions.
Architects
These are people who write best when they’ve written a whole outline for their story before they’ve begun.
Architects spend lots of time on their outlines, story, and characters before they put a word on the page.
Art vs. Science
Most marketers aren’t familiar with these terms, and even fewer have experimented with both.
This is unfortunate, because like writing a novel, writing ad copy is somewhere between an art and a science.
And, if you’re not using the right approach, you could be missing out on some of your best work.
Try this
Write one campaign—be it an email series, landing pages, or anything else—using the “Gardener” method.
Don’t plan before you write, don’t write down a big list of value props, don’t create any fancy spreadsheets.
Just sit down, write, and write. See what happens.
Then, the next time you sit down to write a campaign, use the “Architect” method.
Write and format everything in advance: Customer personas, value props, all that sort of stuff.
Then, evaluate
Which approach felt better? Which produced a better result?
This will help you figure out what type of writer you are—and help you write better copy as a result.
