James

For copywriting, I’m often given the message I’m to convey ahead of time. My creative challenge is to find a way to make the message resonate with an audience who have likely never asked to see it. That takes emotional resonance and a lot of empathy. I’ve found that generative AI helps immensely with iteration on messaging approaches, but not with coming up with concepts or empathizing with audiences to understand their point of view. So, I start with creative problem-solving on my own and bring in AI when it’s time to iterate.

For article and journalistic writing, I often don’t know what the story is going to be. So, the first step is fact-finding. I let curiosity drive this process and try to uncover the most compelling elements. Once I’ve collected so much compelling information that I can’t wait to get started, I know it’s time to start writing. I organize the research into a narrative and use these organized notes to write the draft. In my experience so far, generative AI has been very helpful in the data collection phase and in the data organization phase but doesn’t yet understand what makes a narrative compelling. So, for now, I’m still shaping the story myself.

For creative writing, inspiration and imagination tap me on the shoulder, and I use everything I’ve learned about writing and storytelling to bring the idea from my mind into the world as completely as possible. Final outcomes are never as grand as what’s first in our mind, but I’ve found that skills and experience help to narrow that gap. So, I keep practicing and learning.

Larger brands have provided access to incredible resources and tools, which has been a lot of fun. But smaller brands must be agile and flexible, so working with them is a great way to flex one’s creative muscles. Really, though, all brands want the same thing—for their audience to hear their story amid the others and for that audience to be moved enough to act. With commercial work, my job has always been to bridge the gap between the brand’s story and the audience’s attention.

I have a lot that I like to pull from, but here are a few:

I use etymology to help me write clear, easy-to-understand messages that don’t sound condescending or simple. Only a third of the words in modern English have Anglo-Saxon roots, but they form the core of our language and have the most emotional resonance. “Kinship” sounds warmer to us than “association.” “Burden” is more familiar than “imposition.” And we celebrate “wisdom” more than we do “sagacity.”

There are also constructions that fit English better than they might other languages. For example, English has the strange ability to not only combine two nouns into a “kenning,” but also give that term new life and emotional resonance. We still do this today with words like “bookworm,” “rugrat” and “showstopper.” The right kind of kenning can create a unique, powerful one-word message.

Aside from that, rhetorical tools always make for fun ways to create interest. Devices like isocolon (“buy one get one”), anthimeria (“Think Different”), syncrisis (“won’t fill you up and never let you down”), antonomasia (“zero sugar, zero compromise”) and others have been around for ages because they continue to work.

A big part of any project is creative problem-solving. Being able to solve problems creatively starts with having the right mentality. Be curious about how you can find ways to say “yes” to creative solutions. That’s really what you’re there for—how to find the process required to make an idea manifest in reality. Find ways to say “yes” to this process and enjoy the journey you need to take to get there.

And always work on your skills. Your industry is going to change, and you, too, are going to change. Never stop being a student. It’s more fun that way anyway.

I always wrote stories. I’d say they’re my earliest memories, but they go back farther than that—my parents saved books I made when I was too young to remember them.

In terms of professional work, I started in journalism. This gave me some incredible experience and led me to my master’s program. While there, I took a deep dive into the origins of English—the language, the stories, and the reasons why both have endured for over a thousand years. I learned how stories shape who we are, change us and give us a guide toward our better selves.

After my master’s program, I worked as a proofreader, an editor, a journalist, an article writer, and a copywriter. In every role, it was apparent to me that whether I was fixing dangling modifiers or writing for a national campaign, storytelling is always crucial.

With any given project, there’s a lot I need to know before I get started. So first I’ll try to do some fact-finding and learn everything I can.

After that, some creative solutions might immediately come to mind, so I write them down. (Several years back I traded my traditional wallet for one with a notebook so I would always have paper and a pen handy.) Sometimes, these first ideas are the best and they’re what I end up using. But I’ve learned to wait and be patient—much better ideas might come along later. So, after research, I engage in activities that activate the brain’s default mode network: taking a walk, riding a bike, cleaning the house, making coffee. These facile tasks allow other ideas to percolate and present themselves.

When it comes to the first draft, I try to write the idea down in its entirety without worrying about the nuts and bolts. Then, with every iteration, there’s a back-and-forth between my intuitive, emotional side and the analytical and logical. I use both to refine the work.

It can be difficult to stay mentally fresh and enthusiastic if a project is sustained over a long period, so throughout the process I also make time for reading, spending time in the outdoors and mentally resting so that I can give the work my all when it comes time to.

I took some dinosaur stencils, along with markers, pens, notepad paper and staples and started making my own stories. Tracing the dinosaur shapes wasn’t enough for me—I needed to them lines, which developed into stories, which developed into continuous characters. I was doing this around the time I started kindergarten.

I’ve been writing stories ever since.

Messages aren’t effective unless the audience is moved emotionally. So, step one is empathy. I place myself within the audience’s shoes, and mine for information so that I can understand who they are and what’s going on in their life that the time they’ll be reading my message. What are they stressed about? What are they going to do on the weekend? Whom are they worried for? What makes them laugh?

Then, I look for sparks. Considering what I know about the audience, what’s going to make them light up when they see the message? What would stop them in their tracks and make them glad they read what I wrote? Why?

This is where the collaboration begins. I bring what I’ve researched to my clients or partners, and we discuss the findings. Based on the audience, I present a few messaging angles and discuss why they’d land with the audience. The goal at this stage is to agree on a single way forward.

Afterwards, there’s iteration. With each iteration step, we all agree on the goals of the next iteration, so we have a quantifiable way to evaluate them. With each round of changes, we review what the requests were during the last iteration phase and how those requests were completed.

The style, the technique and the tools are different for every project. Sometimes it’s been using generative AI to create a brand personification that can talk to customers and remind them to wear sunscreen. Sometimes it’s simply been a captivating headline that stands alone on a page. These particulars provide the “how,” but they need to be in service to the “what” and the “why” or the message falls flat.

At its core, it hasn’t changed all that much. Creative problem-solving require developing the sensibilities to discern between “good,” “better” and “best” when evaluating solutions. There’s still no substitute for that. So, I continue to read and write, practice and learn. Creativity is a muscle, and the most sophisticated tools or techniques won’t make up for an atrophied imagination.

That said, AI has been transformative for certain parts of my workflow. It allows me to iterate on good ideas, consider new angles and approaches, and flesh out ancillary components to projects that would otherwise have been impossible.

With every new tool or technique, I start with intention. How can this be used to serve my purpose? Without a clear answer, I don’t use the tool. Generative AI is a very powerful tool, but without a clear reason for its implementation, it’s as helpful as a Tesla for writing copy or crafting a story.

I think people are starting to change—specifically, their relationship with technology. It’s becoming no longer true that technological innovations are considered good for their own sake. We’re no longer lining up out the door to get the next phone, and downloading yet another app is often considered a burden instead of a convenience. And few people get excited about talking to a chatbot.

Some things are becoming more convenient, but less meaningful. We can be more connected but with weaker connections. And we can get more done, but often experience less.

I don’t think this is a call to shy away from technology. Rather, I think this growing sentiment creates a massive opportunity for brands and projects that offer genuine connection. There are already enough messages and stories out there in the world—they’d take lifetimes to sift through. No one’s looking for another distraction. But what people are looking for more than ever is connection and understanding. It seems that brands and stories that provide this rising above the others. And technology can absolutely help with that if used in the right way.

This one's my superpower. My writing experience involves in-depth subject matter, but the variety has been quite broad.

Just for starters, I’ve written user manuals, poetry, keynote speeches, radio scripts, headlines, feature articles, quarterly reports, and social ads. From these experiences, I've found that "style" consists of (1) the message you want to convey, (2) how you want the audience to feel when it's conveyed, and (3) how you want the sender to be represented. All of these are deliberate choices. The nuts and bolts of style—say, Saxonic versus Latinate language, modern colloquialisms versus more formal constructions, rhetorical structures, etc., are all in service to these three. Experienced writers understand how to do this and can write to any style or purpose. My personal writing is very different from what I use for clients, and every project is different.