Thoughts on copywork

There’s this guy who used to be a dentist, but now he’s a marketing copywriter. His weekly newsletter for other marketing writers offers some good tips for, I think, just about any kind of writer.

A couple of months ago, this former dentist — Kieran Drew is his name — wrote about how copywork can help writers get better at the craft.

“Copywork,” he writes, “is where you copy, by hand, great writing.”

Sounds simple enough. But also, sort of unimaginative and rote. As Drew himself writes, “it sounded slow and boring.”

But many great writers swear by the process, and success leaves clues.

So three years ago, I started handcopying every morning before I wrote.

Like going to the gym, you don’t notice progress day-to-day. But keep chipping away and your writing becomes lean and sharp. You feel what it’s like to write like the pros and infuse their style into your own.

– Kieran Drew

Ben Franklin and Hunter S. Thompson can’t be wrong, right?

According to another copywork evangelist, Sam Parr, (founder of CopyThat), the copywork method was how children learned to write once upon a time. (Maybe that’s how I first learned; I don’t remember, it was so long ago.)

As for the “many great writers” Drew says swear by copywork, Parr mentions a few, including Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, Benjamin Franklin, and even Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who “said rewriting The Great Gatsby gave him his foundation for his voice.”

Another more contemporary writer who follows a similar path is Sherman Alexie, a fine novelist, poet, and short story writer (check out his Substack).

“I don’t often give writing tips,” he wrote in a January 9 Substack note, but here’s one of my tricks.”

When I’m feeling stuck, I’ll grab a random book off the shelf, open it to a random page, and begin typing/transcribing what I’m reading but also reading aloud the words as I’m typing. This combo of physical actions—keyboarding and voicing—eventually lead me to start typing and saying my own stuff. At first, it’s just a reaction to what’s in somebody else’s book but then it often leads me into my own thoughts and tangents. I’m sure there’s a psychological term for how this works but I think of it as a kind of holistic muscle memory. I typed, am typing, will type.

– Sherman Alexie

Alexie’s approach (which I recorded, word for word, into my journal one day in January) isn’t quite the same as Drew’s, but far be it from me to argue with either of them. They’re both successful writers in their own way.

Six days of copywork

I decided to experiment with copywork for a few days — six days, actually — and devoted the bulk of my journal entries to the effort.

• Day 1: January 30, 2025. Using the Sherman Alexie method, I selected a book at random from my shelf — Granta 163 (Spring 2023), “Best of Young British Novelists”–and copied, by hand, two pages of a piece by Eliza Clark called “She’s Always Hungry.” It filled three and a half pages and left me with writer’s cramp.
• Day 2: Monday, February 3, 2025. I again selected a book at random. This time it was the Winter 2022 edition of the literary magazine Prairie Schooner. I opened the slender volume to page 86, where I found, and copied, two poems by Kathleen McGookey, “Pandemic Ode” and “Domestic, or the Family Machine.” These two poems filled a page and a half — a volume of writing more in line with my regular daily journaling.
• Day 3: February 4, 2025. I took a more deliberate approach this time, choosing to copy some writing of one of my music critic idols, Lester Bangs. (I chose Bangs, as well as the next day’s writer, another music critic from the 1970s and 1980s, because I wanted to reread writings about music from that era to possibly inform my novel-in-progress, which is about a fictitious punk band — or wannabe punk band — from that same time frame.) From the posthumous collection of Bangs writings called Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, I copied about half of his verbose review of David Bowie’s album Station to Station, which was originally published in Creem. Bangs’ words translated into four-plus handwritten pages and, again, writer’s cramp..
• Day 4: February 5, 2025. I copied part of “Life and Life Only,” an essay by Greil Marcus about the murder of John Lennon and republished in his collection of essays Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92.
• Day 5: February 6, 2025. I copied two printed pages’ worth of words from Greil Marcus’ review of The Clash’s London Calling, which, if nothing else, possesses one of the great long titles of all time: “Hi, This is America. We’re not home right now, but if you leave a message after the beep, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”
• Day 6: February 7, 2025. Time to shift gears to some literary writing. I chose to copy three paragraphs from John Williams‘ novel Stoner (which I pulled at random).

Lessons learned

Did my brief, scattershot foray into copywork make me a better writer? No more than six days of practicing anything — tennis, piano, meditation — will turn anyone into an overnight success. As Drew says, the practice is like going to the gym — “you don’t notice progress day-to-day. But keep chipping away and your writing becomes lean and sharp.” In that way, copywork is akin to the Atomic Habits approach advocated by James Clear, who writes:

All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger.

– James Clear

I did take away a few lessons from this brief excursion into copywork, such as:

• An appreciation for different writing styles and methods. I exposed myself to some writers I hadn’t read before, even though their words had lingered in the pages of long-unopened literary journals on my bookshelf. Also, rediscovering some writers I hadn’t read in a while, and contrasting their styles (the rock critics Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus in particular) was informative and entertaining. And I was reminded about how much John Williams really, really loved to use the semicolon.
• A more focused study of the writing at a granular level. When we read, our minds sometimes gloss over the words and their meanings. The same goes for punctuation (like the preponderance of semicolons in Williams’ Stoner). The copywork effort forced me to slow down and consider — examine, even scrutinize — each word, or clusters of words, more closely, more critically. In so doing, I thought more deeply about how the words, sentences, and paragraphs worked, and why.
• A rethinking of my long-held admiration of Lester Bangs. Don’t get me wrong. I still think Bangs is one of the greatest rock critics ever (and I’m not alone here), but it’s obvious much of what he wrote in his halcyon days — the 1970s through early 1980s, a peak time for rock music — was fueled by ample quantities of adrenaline and amphetamines (much like the music he wrote about). He wrote on speed, and at a high rate of speed, creating articles that swerved and careened like an out-of-control hot rod on a country road Saturday night drag race. That writing can be enjoyable, if you’re in the right frame of mind (or was, in the early ’80s, maybe), but it is also self-indulgent and ponderous. As I struggled to copywork his Station to Station review, for example, I grew weary of Bangs’ bloviations through four dense paragraphs, most of which was about Bowie’s previous work, especially Young Americans. When will he get to the point? I wondered. Finally, in paragraph four, he mentions the album he’s been tasked with reviewing, and when he does mention it, it’s in the form of a rambling, 128-word (!) run-on sentence, which was the last one from that review I had the fortitude to copy. Contrast that with the way Greil Marcus, whose writing can also be ponderous and meandering (and pedantic and occasionally doped with weird references to philosophers and ancient poets), introduces his review of London Calling: “London Calling is a two-record Clash album with nineteen songs and an in-store price of eight bucks. Pointed toward the future, it’s also full of history–but the sleeve design, lifted from the first Elvis Presley lp, is almost a false clue. History here includes the history of times barely left behind: a history left unmade.” To the point, but also a teaser that keeps the reader interested in learning more.

The next time?

The next time I dive into copywork — if there is a next time — I think I’ll be more deliberate about it and less random in my selections. I think I’ll focus more on classic literature or short stories.

How about you? Have you done copywork? What’s your experience with it? How has it/does it help your writing?

AI-generated image.