Before we get into this week's issue: My friend Tiffany Neuman is running a live workshop called The Authority Gap Workshop on May 11, 13, and 15. If you're someone who can diagnose everyone else's positioning problem but hasn't fixed your own, this is for you. I've written a lot of things that technically worked. They got opens. They got clicks. And they didn't move anyone. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to understand why. William Zinsser explains it in a way that clicked for me. In his book, On Writing Well, he says: "You are writing for yourself. Don't try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience." If you've spent any time in marketing or copywriting, that sounds wrong. We've always been told to know the customer. Write for the reader. Enter the conversation already happening in their mind. (Hell, I've even said it here over the last few weeks.) All of that is true. But Zinsser is also right. And if you don't understand how both can be true at the same time, your writing will always feel a little off. Clean. Competent. Sterile. Forgettable. He broke it down: there are two separate issues, craft and attitude. Craft is the technical work. Clear sentences. Logical flow. Structure that holds. You don't get a pass here. But attitude is something else entirely. It's writing what you actually think and feel, without trying to manage how it will land. You are who you are. The reader is who they are. Either it connects or it doesn't. Most people try to collapse those into one thing. And most are afraid of the attitude. They are afraid it will scare people away. And good writing should. That's where the problem starts. 1. Discover what is true to you.If you skip this step, you don't have anything to say. You just have something to publish. I did this for years. I'd sit down to write and immediately start performing. Thinking about the hook. The structure. How it would read when it was done. It looked right. But it didn't feel right. That's because I hadn't actually figured out what I thought yet. This part of the process is messy. It's not linear. It doesn't look like something you'd send to anyone. It looks like notes. Half-formed ideas. Contradictions. A sentence that goes nowhere followed by one that hits something real. Most people avoid this because it's uncomfortable. It's slower. There's no guarantee you'll land somewhere useful. So they skip it. And what they produce is technically fine and completely empty. It reads like it was assembled, not written. Anne Lamott said, "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head." I suspect, in quieting those voices, she is understanding her truth. If you start with the audience, you stop thinking for yourself. 2. Translate that truth to someone else.Finding something real is only half the job. If you stop there, the writing makes perfect sense to you and no one else. Which was never the point. This is where most people swing too far in the other direction. They think writing for the reader means becoming the reader. It doesn't. It means building a bridge. Now you ask different questions. What does someone need to understand this? Where are they going to get lost? What am I assuming that they don't know? Zinsser compared writing to carpentry. You have to learn to saw wood straight and drive nails before you worry about how it looks. If the structure is weak, the whole thing collapses. Clarity isn't dilution. It's respect. You're not changing what you think. You're making it possible for someone else to follow it. The door is open. The room is still yours. 3. Preserve the original energy.This is where most writing dies. In this bridge building phase. You take something that felt real to you in your first draft and clean it up until there's nothing real left. The sharp sentence gets softened. The specific detail gets replaced with something more general. The opinion that made you hesitate gets rounded off so it's easier to read. Now it "works". And it says nothing that matters anymore. Zinsser saw this constantly. He said writers put a "dinner jacket and tie" on their language the moment they think someone else is going to read it. And in this day and age, AI makes this worse. It's very good at writing the generic draft. One that has structure. Clarity. Flow. All of it. It cannot write the first one. And it never will. It cannot know what you think. Or what your truth is. And if you let it try, it will sand down whatever you actually found in step one into something that looks right and feels empty. AI can translate. It can't originate. And it definitely won't fight to keep the sentence that feels a little too honest. That part is still on you. The fix is simple. After you clean up the draft, go back and compare it to where you started. Find the lines that lost something. The one that was rough but real. The detail you cut because it didn't fit neatly. The opinion you softened because it felt like too much. Put some of those back. Not all of them. But enough that it sounds like you again. And puts just enough honesty to feel a bit dangerous. 4. Put it to workTry this next time you write. Two drafts. First draft: write for yourself. No structure. No audience. No pressure for it to be good. Just figure out what you actually think. You're looking for one thing: the sentence that surprises you. Second draft: write for someone else. Now you structure it. Clarify it. Make it readable. Build the bridge. But don't lose the thing you found. Every time you're about to cut something because it feels too personal or too honest, pause. That might be the sentence that makes the whole piece work. Most writing problems aren't about tactics. They're about skipping the first step. You didn't figure out what you actually think. So there's nothing underneath the structure. Fix that first. Then make it clear enough for someone else to see it too. Go move someone. - Darrell from Copyblogger P.S. There are 3 ways Copyblogger can help you build your content business: Copyblogger Accelerator — A 60-day sprint for content entrepreneurs making under $10K/month. Darrell personally takes apart your positioning, offer, content system, and sales process, and rebuilds them with you. Next cohort begins April 2026. Learn more about the Accelerator. Copyblogger Coaching — 1:1 strategic coaching with Darrell for content entrepreneurs at $250K+ scaling to $1M. Diagnostic-first. Six-month commitment. Learn more about Coaching. |
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