writer – Andy writes!

Let’s have fun with it

Writing should not be drudgery

Sometimes, we writers take ourselves too seriously. We’re so busy writing and revising, polishing our jewels of poetry and prose to a high gloss, obsessively monitoring book sales or social media likes, and fretting over audience reaction — will anyone read it? will it even get accepted? — that we forget to enjoy the exciting, invigorating process of the creative act.

We would do well to heed the guidance of Sgt. Hulka from the comedy Stripes and “lighten up, Francis.”

Maybe I’m just giving myself a pep talk here. Maybe no on else takes themselves so seriously. Or maybe you’ve got those worrisome thoughts of perfectionism crawling around in the back of your mind like a cluster of spiders (I envision the daddy long legs variety: creepy but ultimately harmless).

Thoughts on copywork

And my brief experiment with this process.

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.”