The Warp And The Weft

I always feel like a fraud when writing about my craft. I’ve yet to have anything published, so I lack that essential and fundamental approval from the professional writing world necessary for me to feel qualified. Which is silly really, as I strongly believe that the definition of a writer is someone who writes copiously, who tells stories compulsively, and who listens voraciously.

Structure and form and patience and trust fall from those three, because at the end of the day they’re about excess, obsession, and practice.

So what is my craft?

I am a copywriter by trade and a novelist by choice.* 

At work I write elegant messages that sell ideas. 

The rest of the time I generate ideas. 

I could present this as a series of X and Ys...

• Novel writing is about input, copywriting is about output

• Novel writing is about discovery, copywriting is about distribution

• Novel writing is a wave in your mind, copywriting is a wave in their mind

...but these don’t really sum it up. The success of copy is measurable in a very different way to the success of a novel. Yes, both are linked with sales, the real world dictates that this is true, but the multiple ideas communicated in a novel are far more complicated than the single idea communicated in most copy. 

So here I will say that copywriting is the art of isolating and communicating one single idea, whereas novel writing is about weaving together a whole ragged bunch of them. And more than that, the idea being communicated in copy, needs to be upfront, laid bare and said quickly. In our digital age of instant gratification people are not in the habit of searching for the idea in their advertisements or emails or web pages, they want it within seconds or the copy has failed. 

In a novel, ideas have space to move around and to grow and to form slowly in the reader’s mind. Crucially, there’s often more than one, they can be complex and they can also be up for interpretation.

When I start with a novel it is a jumble of threads. I have characters, world, politics, history, origins and, somewhere in the distance, an idea of where the story will end.

Characters are important.

Their world is important.

The powers that influence them are important.

But at first, this only adds to the confused mass.

This jumble can be writhing around in my mind for months or even years. It might get tangled for a while, I might start weaving two people together who should not be together… I unpick and start again. But then all of a sudden I have two or more threads that are right. 

I hold them.

I feel the shape of them, the colour, the weight and the strength of pull between each. 

And then I begin to weave.

Momentum, for me, is key. The weaving is part of the discovery. I feel the rhythm of the story I am telling and how each warp and weft feeds into and supports the next. Weight of thread dictates this and the plot points unfold.

The great oral storytelling tradition was often accompanied by the creak of the spinning wheel or the rhythmic hollow clunk of the weaver’s shuttle and heddle. The beat is important; it is the underscore. 

But while a beat can be comforting, it can also be relentless. I often find that writing is riddled with anxiety; anxiety to finish and anxiety to do my characters justice. For me, this anxiety feeds into the tempo, or pulse. If I take too much time, I feel I am in danger of dropping the threads, so I hold onto them like a lifeline. 

Edits happen… stitches need to be picked-up, knots untied, frayed edges tidied. Sometimes a whole section needs to be cut, or relocated, and there’s a furious scrabble to reconnect the threads in their new order before the whole thing unravels. It is easy for this to become stressful, but the more I do it, the more confident I am in my ability.

Copywriting, on the other hand, starts with the brief. I have a collection of tools: tone of voice guidelines to follow, key messages to lift, a word limit to stick to, research, and a purpose. It’s a knotty mess, but it is my job to find the one, strong thread that will carry the rest. 

Tight deadlines are a daily fact. The brief needs to be untangled, clarity found and copy executed in a matter of hours. Time to “mull it over” is limited to say the least. All I can say is thank goodness copywriting is primarily about function. If it works, it works. What defines the rightness of the words is not in the dark recesses of my mind, it’s in the results of the user testing included in the brief, or the tone of voice set down by the brand. 

Processing all of this information is a challenge in itself, but the more I do it, the more confident I am. Copywriting is the process of bringing elegance to predefined parameters, and there is genuine joy to be found in it. 

What is universal, is the collaborative nature of writing. This will probably come as a surprise, especially as novelists are often viewed as hermits, but it is true. In copywriting the brief is defined by a team and the copy I produce is critiqued and passed back for edits and amends until everybody is happy with it. Because of the nature of the work, this happens daily. 

With novel writing, the bulk of the work is solitary, for sure, but eventually the text goes out to beta readers, who provide critique and feedback. If an Agent picks it up, they systematically pull it apart and you put it back together again. And if it gets published, then the readers and the writer begin the most mysterious collaboration of all. Readers are active, and they will either accept the story or they will not, but whichever way it goes it is a shared experience. 

So what is my craft? I find the threads that matter, I weave them and untangle them until they are clear and supported in their given context. Then I hand them to other people who tell me to start all over again!

* By “choice” I mean an innate need that cannot be denied… so not really choice at all!