Emotional Attachment to Your Words

If you've tried clicking on the image in the corner here, you will have seen an "under construction" notice. The talented people at Sharp Hue are designing a web site for me, and I'm writing the content.

At the same time, I've been doing site analysis and copywriting for a couple of other people's web sites. The contrast between the two experiences is striking.

At Sharp Hue, we talk about clients having emotional attachment to their words. People get fond of what they've written. They've worked hard on it, and they like their turn of phrase. Sometimes their feelings are hurt if we want to change something.

I'm immune to that. I'm a professional writer, and I've been doing this for a long time. Have you ever played with one of those computer tools that lets you take a piece of music and change the key, the speed, the instrument, the language? Or maybe you like to take an image, resize it, flip it, and change the colors. That's how I feel about writing. The big thing is getting the ideas into words, and then you can mold the language and tweak it and transform it and make it dance around.

You may not feel that way about your writing. You may labor to get a paragraph crafted, and then it's your baby and you don't want anyone even commenting on it, let alone changing it.

If so, then you should stick to your day job, and let someone like me write for you.

There's more to it, though. Even though I don't get attached to my words, I still had more trouble writing for myself than for my clients. I think the emotional attachment problem requires emotional objectivity. You also need intellectual objectivity.

When you write for yourself, you see so many possibilities. One of the clients I was working for is a jeweler. She also paints murals, and does engraving, and plays music -- and you know, all those things about her are interesting, but irrelevant.

Once I did her site analysis and met with her, I could easily map out a five-year plan for her business, and write her content. If things change, that's fine; we can change her web site.

The other client doesn't yet have a web site; his is also in development at Sharp Hue. I'm writing for it. I asked him some questions and wrote down some phrases. "Can I say this?" I asked. "Do you want this effect, or that one?" I think it was most like a visit to the optometrist. I've analysed his competitors' sites and developed his keywords. I know who's going to visit his site and what he wants them to do, so I can write the words that will achieve his communicative purpose.

In order to be effective in writing my own web site, I needed to step away and treat it just the way I treated the other two. All my various clients and how I feel about them, and my own thoughts and feelings about what I do, and all the myriad possible outcomes I can imagine -- they may be interesting, at least to me, but they are irrelevant. I just need to analyze my competitors' sites and develop my keywords, plan my communicative goals, and write. Professionally.