There are the exclamation-point addicts out there, you see. They’re the writers who feel they really can’t put across the excitement, immediacy, or sincerity without that little extra boost (!) to make it feel super-charged. They’re the writers who believe that they should slap an exclamation point at the end of a written sentence anytime they would allow their voice to lift at the end of spoken one.

They’re the writers who are just flat-out addicted, who punctuate nearly everything with a series of multiple exclamation points, getting progressively worse as the writing goes on.

You should get this product! It will change your life!! Seriously!!!

Exclamation points, you see, are evil.

In Business Copy, They’re Unprofessional

Think about every effective advertising campaign you’ve seen. Think about advertising with really punchy headlines that suggest motivation, excitement, and daring. Think of car commercials, of sporting goods stores, of Apple and Nike.

Now think about their taglines. Go look at the copy on their website. What do you see?

More to the point, what don’t you see?

That’s right. No exclamation points. Not even a straggler.

This is not because Chevy, Spalding, Nike, and Apple can’t afford exclamation points. It’s not because they lack for great copywriters. It is because their great copywriters hate exclamation points.

With good reason. Copy is far more effective without them.

Here’s a little exercise to try. Pick three taglines from big brand names. I’ll pick my favorite three:

Like a rock.

Just do it.

Think different.

Those are pretty strong statements. They seep into your brain. They have impact, like a fist. They make you think, “Yeah. I should do that. I should be like a rock. I should just do it. I should think different.”

Now try each of those statements with exclamation points:

Like a rock!

Just do it!!

Think different!!!

All I can say is, “Ew.” I bet you are too.

Why Exclamation Points Devalue Your Writing

Think about being on vacation traveling on a luxury cruise ship for just a moment. There are two activity directors on this cruise. One of them talks using exclamation points, the other one doesn’t.

Director 1: “Hey guys! We’re going to have just a great time on this cruise! We have lots of activities for you to choose from, and it’s going to be so much fun!! Who wants to go try out the tennis courts?! I know I do! You too? GREAT!!”

Alternative Director 2: “Hey, guys. We’re starting up a Nerf gun war in the cruise lounge, and it’s going to be awesome. First twenty people there get the grenade launchers. Who’s with me?”

Who do you want to play with?

To be fair, the cruise director with the Nerf war has a much better offer – you want to be one of those first 20 people. But see, that’s the thing. When you’re good, you know how to make a better offer without riding on exclamation points to create excitement.

This means that when you do hear an exclamation point (or read one), your brain wants to be skeptical about the authenticity of the statement. If Director 1 had suggested a Nerf gun war, and you heard him talk about it in that bubbly voice, you’d probably be thinking, “Lame. What’s up with him?”

You’d think it was lame even if you would LOVE a tennis game. The reason is because that person think the only way you’re going to get revved up about playing is by hearing those exclamation points.

If you have confidence in what you say, in what you write, you sound much more believable without exclamation points. Every time. No exceptions.

And if you don’t have confidence in what you’re saying? The exclamation point won’t save you. Scrap your draft. Start over. Try a different angle. Try explaining your client’s offer or profiling your client’s business in a way that makes it sounds great, even without the over-enthusiasm an exclamation point suggests.

The Final Argument

Need more proof that exclamation points ruin good writing? Pick up a book by any major mystery novelist you like. Dick Francis. John Grisham. Stephen King. These guys specialize in keeping you on the edge of your seat. These guys are all about anticipation and excitement.

Now go find one single instance where a new action is introduced with an exclamation point. Try finding, “There was a gunshot!” instead of “There was a gunshot.” Try finding, “He came at me holding a machete!” instead of “He came at me holding a machete.”
Would adding exclamation points have left you feeling more creeped out or less creeped out? I rest my case.

There are a very few occasions when an exclamation point is appropriate. Mostly, those include writing scripts for bubbly cruise directors.

Until then, leave ‘em out.

Another rockin' post from the Men With Pens! Copyright 2009 - All Rights Reserved


Is Your Website Copy Too Excited?

If you’ve missed the first posts in this special fiction writing series, you can read them here:

Day One: How to create a believable character
Day Two: How to create a setting for your story.
Day Three: How to create plot
Day Four: How to get serious and make money from fiction writing
Day Five: How to create character flaws

Today, for our last post in the series, we’re going to discuss a topic no one really talks about much: prejudice in fantasy worlds.

Fantasy Has Prejudice?

Yeah, I’m afraid so. Pick a fantasy trope – werewolves, vampires, goblins, dwarves, elves, races from lands that don’t exist – and you’ll find there’s a lot of emotional strife bound up in those worlds.

If you think that all these folks should get along just fine, I invite you to look at race relations worldwide here on Earth. We’re pretty strife-ridden. And we’re all PEOPLE, all the same. Imagine if you had whole other SPECIES to be prejudiced against.

It would be insane.

In the real world, poor people feel certain ways about rich people who feel certain ways about middle-class people who feel certain ways about everyone else. Black people and white people and yellow people and brown people from various backgrounds feel certain ways about all the other races. French people and English people and Chinese people and Icelandic people feel certain ways about each other too.

It has to do with background. It has to do with how people are raised and what they believe.

It has to do, in short, with history.

You, my friend, are writing a fantasy world. The history that you know just ain’t a part of that reality. You not only have to invent a character, but you have to invent a whole series of emotions around how this character feels about all of the interactions going on around in this fantasy world.

Here’s a news flash for you: It’s simply not realistic to think that your character, along with every character your character interacts with, is just going to throw open his arms and say, “Can’t we all just get along?”

No. There’s going to be a lot of emotional turmoil. You should embrace that fact. It’s going to be a big part of this world.

Don’t Overdo It, Though

Once you’ve embraced the fact that your character is going to have some emotions regarding the other species and races in the world he lives in, it’s tempting to over-do it.

It’s tempting to think that since your character is a vampire, and all vampires in your world hate werewolves, therefore your vampire character wants to tear the skin off every werewolf he encounters, inch by inch.

That makes for some vivid storytelling. But it isn’t necessarily accurate.

Let’s go back to the real-world race relations. There are some seriously screwy people in the world who really do want to do physical harm to other races. That’s terrifying. But the great majority of prejudice doesn’t go that far. It’s more in the NIMBY realm (and NIMBY, for those of you who don’t know, is the acronym for Not In My Back Yard).

Prejudice usually manifests in one simple way: “You’re not like us. Go away.”

That’s it. If people have to make someone different than them go away by being physically violent about it, they will. But most people don’t wander around with a secret desire to maim people of other races, even if they did grow up prejudiced against them.

So how deep does your character’s prejudice for other species and races run? Where did he learn this prejudice? And before you rely on the old, “Someone of that species killed my father” trope, consider the following question:

If a white guy killed your father, would you automatically think all white guys were EVIL? What if it was a black guy? Are all black guys now evil?

Yeah, I didn’t think so. That’s really not how our brains work.

It’s an easy way to let your character act hateful to another species, but even in a fantasy world, it doesn’t really work. It’s not realistic. If your character really does HATE another species, give him a good reason why he should.

Don’t Underdo It Either

The reverse of overdoing it is also tempting. Being as your character is naturally intelligent and super-cool and generally a joy to be around, it’s pretty hard to decide that your character is uneasy around, say, dwarves.

For no good reason. Dwarves just make your character edgy. Why? Well, he’s heard stories . . .

Hearing stories is how most prejudice is created, and it’s a mistake to not allow your character to feel any of the emotions regarding stories he hears. Almost every place, especially a place with this many species who are so very different from one another, has violent and uncertain histories.

I’d like you to think about the following scenario to prove my point:

Back in the olden days of all of these species growing up, the very first time they encounter one another, they’re likely going to attack. Not because either of them is bad. Not because either of them particularly wants to fight.

They fight because neither side has the ability to communicate this sentiment: “No, dude, I don’t want to fight you or steal your resources or kill your young.” There would be no way for these species to communicate until enough time has gone by for a common language to be established.

And until that point, there are going to be miscommunications and misunderstandings between the groups that lead to violent bloodbaths for generations.

In our own human history, we completely wiped out our brethren when we encountered them, because we thought they might be a threat for resources. Those we wiped out were other humans. Imagine if we had encountered big scary semi-humanoid creatures who looked nothing like us and looked very much like they could kill us.

We would definitely have attacked them.

That means that even if these violent encounters have long been forgotten by the time your character shows up on the scene, there will be lingering resentments.

Many characters won’t have very solid reasons for that resentment, either. Too much time has passed. It’s just that this one village really doesn’t do business with Halflings, okay? And this other village is totally cool with dwarves, but centaurs give them the heebie-jeebies. And this other village has heard that all elves want to seduce their women so that they can gradually breed out the human race altogether.

Need proof? Have you SEEN all the half-elves?

Pretending that your character never encountered any of these kinds of comments and stories is absurd. Maybe the character happens to have a background that isn’t that prejudiced, and that’s great. But he’s going to hear stories from other people, and he’s not going to be able to avoid being influenced by those stories.

Your character is not immune to species/racial prejudice. Period. Even if he’s generally a really decent dude. Even if he doesn’t want to be prejudiced, even if he works really hard at not showing it, he’s still going to have feelings about it.

And just like in the real world, the sooner your character acknowledges those feelings, the sooner he can move past them and get onto being that awesome, fully-rounded, all-species-encompassing dude you want him to be.

By the time he does, though, you’ll have created a character whose emotions and personality you know inside and out. And that’s great for you.

One Last Pitch for the Win

Guys, this is the last day you can get in on the Men with Pens exclusive offer to sign up for the Gamer Lifestyle Course. If you’ve been reading our posts this last week and just itching to pick up a pen and create a world all your own, we really encourage you to check the course out.

Because writing a story, gaming away and earning a living from it? We just can’t think of anything sweeter than that.

It’s a huge, handholding course with experts who are extremely well known in the RPG world. You’ll receive their one-on-one advice, hours upon hours’ worth of modules and guides, and a forum full of your peers.

If all that’s holding you back from making a living as a fantasy writer instead of whatever it is you do now is fear, then there’s really no reason to hold back anymore. And you have today left to break free.

Go for it. We believe in you. Send us your first published clips. We’ll be so proud.

Another rockin' post from the Men With Pens! Copyright 2009 - All Rights Reserved


Special Fiction Writing Week: Creating Prejudice in Fantasy

If you’ve missed the first posts in this special fiction writing series, you can read them here:

Day One: How to create a believable character
Day Two: How to create a setting for your story.
Day Three: How to create plot
Day Four: How to get serious and make money from fiction writing

Today, we’re tackling a topic that has plagued fantasy writers and gamers for eons (or, you know, since gaming became popular): Is your character TOO awesome?

Is There Such a Thing As Too Awesome?

Yes, I’m afraid there is. This is mostly common among beginner fiction writers and gamers, but let’s give you the skinny. Many people get into story writing and gaming because they want to invent a character that is just like them – only cooler.

Way cooler.

They give their character the body they’ve always wanted and a bunch of talents they wish they had. They make their character strong and powerful and generous and benevolent and give him the will to do anything for the ones he loves and also secretly a DRAGON, because dragons are so cool, oh and he can fly too, and he can go through walls, and, and, and . . .

You get the idea.

So yes, there is such a thing as too awesome. This is one of the reasons Superman annoyed the hell out of everyone until there was Kryptonite. Not so with Batman. Batman had his anguished past, he could get hurt, and he did get hurt. You felt for Batman.

But Superman? Bullets literally bounced off the guy. Maybe you admired him, but there’s no way you sympathized with him.

Here’s the other thing: No one ever believed Superman was real.

Batman could actually be real. He was just a normal millionaire who worked out a lot and had a bunch of cool gizmos. Without the weird fetish for dressing up as a bat (which showed a serious psychological weirdness that made him human), he could’ve been James Bond. He was just a guy who became awesome by the sweat of his own brow.

Superman became awesome because . . . Well, because he was just awesome, okay? He came in the package that way.

You see the problem.

This is why people became attached to Batman in a way that they didn’t with Superman. Batman had flaws. You could judge Batman’s actions, and sometimes you weren’t at all sure he was a nice guy. He was confusing. He was often stupid, or misinformed, or just plain wrong.

He was human.

Even If Your Character Is an Elf, He’s Still Human

No matter what kind of character you’re writing about, you still need your readers to feel a connection to that character, or they’re not going to give a goddamn what happens to him. Your readers will feel pretty much the same way they did about Superman when he was in a potentially dangerous situation:

“Eh, he’ll get through it. He’s Superman. Nothing can hurt him.”

And they simply won’t care.

Think about Batman potentially doing something really stupid because he has issues about his parents. He could DIE. You have to know – do his flaws get the better of his virtues? Does he do that really stupid thing? Does he battle inwardly and do the right thing after all, even if it nearly KILLS him?

That’s the kind of tension you want for your character. You want your readers to wonder if his flaws will outshine his virtues this time. You want readers to wonder if this is the day your character’s flaws actually destroy him.

That’s not possible unless you .

How to Give Your Character Flaws

The flaws you give your character don’t have to be blatantly obvious flaws. You don’t need to give him a crippled limb or blindness or a really lousy history with his parents. You don’t need to kill everyone he’s ever known or give him a traumatic sexual past.

You just need to make your character human. Even if he’s not.

We all have human flaws. We have short tempers, or we eat too much, or we get whiny when we’re tired. We’re a little selfish when it comes to sharing. We’re prone to panic in tough situations. We’re overly critical. We hate staying up past midnight. We sulk when we’re insulted.

All of these things are small, but imagine them in a real life-or-death situation. Suddenly they become flaws that can truly result in someone’s destruction.

What if your character was supposed to guard a prisoner, but he got offended by a companion and ended up marching off into the woods after an argument? That prisoner gets away and KILLS SOMEONE SO HE CAN ESCAPE.

Your character’s sulking just got someone killed.

It’s a human mistake. It could happen to anyone who didn’t realize this stupid little flaw could have dire consequences in this situation.

So let it happen.

Ready to Rock Your Story?

Yesterday we told you about an amazing course designed to teach you how to live the Gamer Lifestyle and make money through your love of fiction. If you’ve been reading our special fiction writing series and just dying to try your fantasy-writing britches on for size, you should seriously check it out.

You’ll discover how to live, breathe, and damn it, earn a living doing the kind of writing you love best.

The Gamer Lifestyle is a fantastic course with two iron-clad guarantees, one-on-one experts right there for you, and literally months’ worth of modules and training courses. Check out our article on it, or click here to head straight to the Gamer Lifestyle Website and sign up.

Oh, have we mentioned the course is an exclusive offer for MwP readers only? It’s open for signups now – but only for just 48 more hours. Better hurry.

Another rockin' post from the Men With Pens! Copyright 2009 - All Rights Reserved


Special Fiction Writing Week: Creating Character Flaws

Because I’ll tell you right now, it’s not what I want to do.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy copywriting immensely. It’s hard to find a better job than being a freelance writer. I like the hours, I like the work, I like the vast majority of the people I work with. Of all the possible jobs I could have, copywriting is right up there in the top 10.

It’s not at the very top, though. At the very top of my ultimate top 10 jobs is being paid to write fiction.

That’s what I’ve wanted to do all my life. It’s what I wanted to do when I was 10 years old. It’s what I believe I’ll want to do when I’m 100 years old. And I’m betting I’m not alone in this desire.

Copywriting is a great job. But writing fiction would be the best. Job. Ever.

Second-best job? Getting paid to play games. You may recall that over a year ago, Men with Pens launched its very own gaming fiction forum over at Escaping Reality, which has been insanely popular and garnered some amazing stories.

But we Men with Pens people don’t get to play with creative writing as much as we’d like, because we have to stop and do the work that actually makes us money so we can pay the bills.

We wish like crazy that gaming and writing was how we made our bread and butter.

That’s why we were thrilled when the gentlemen at The Gamer Lifestyle offered Men with Pens readers an exclusive offer on how to do just that.

The Credentials

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the whole offer, here’s what you need to know about Johnn and Yax:

Both these guys are way cooler than I am. They’ve actually been doing my dream jobs – writing and gaming – for years now. Writing and gaming are big sources of income for them. Let’s just break down the cool factor for you right now:

• Johnn wrote a Dragon Magazine column for two years. He’s written for Wizards of the Coast, who produced Dungeons & Dragons, and he’s authored three books on gaming. He puts out the incredibly popular Roleplaying Tips newsletter and hosts a blog just for game masters at Campaign Mastery.

Basically, the bread on Johnn’s table was buttered with dragon blood. He’s pretty amazing.

• Yax is the founder and President of Expy Inc., a role-playing gaming company that runs the huge website Dungeon Mastering, which also features crazy-cool online DM tools. Yax has written for Wizards of the Coast as well, published two books, and drinks his wine out of a goblet stolen from a goblin king.

Yax times Johnn equals awesome, essentially.

The duo have become advocates for what they call the Gamer Lifestyle . These guys are telling serious gamers who are talented writers, “Look, you really can make good money doing the stuff you love. We’ve done it. So can you.”

Thankfully, you don’t have to go on their word alone. There’s a bunch of cool free stuff to show you what’s up.

The Free Stuff For You

To get an idea of what Johnn and Yax are talking about when they discuss the Gamer Lifestyle, we highly recommend you check out their excellent Gamer Lifestyle Blog. It’s all about how to work in the RP gaming industry.

You should also download their FREE EBOOK for gamers and writers who want to be published.

This baby isn’t one of those crappy free reports, either. We know. We read it. The Gamer Lifestyle Strategies gives you 72 pages worth of how to sell and publish your adventures, campaign settings, novels, sourcebooks, and artwork, and it’s free.

Free, guys. Free.

The Exclusive Offer for Men with Pens Readers

When Yax got in touch with James and showed him everything, James nearly fell off his chair. Here was his ticket to creative fiction and making money through writing for role-playing games (which James already loves).

James is picky. Really picky. So he sat down and went through the free ebook, he meticulously checked out Johnn and Yax’s credentials, and he opened up every module of their Gamer Lifestyle course to see if it had true value for members.

The big question for James was, did the Gamer Lifestyle course really – really, seriously, honestly, truly – give people what they need to know to make money through writing gaming fiction and non-fiction?

It did.

Even better, Johnn and Yax said, “We’d like to open this course to your readers, and no one else. An exclusive Men with Pens offer.”

That’s pretty cool.

The Gamer Lifestyle is a value-packed guide that holds your hand and teaches you practical, concise, useful information so you can discover to how to make a living as a writer and gamer. Johnn and Yax take you through the process of learning how to make this type of writing part of your income stream. They’ll show you how to do it, step by itty-bitty step.

Here’s what you’ll get from the Gamer Lifestyle Course :

• Extensive and Ever-Expanding Training Modules – These modules are real modules, not the skimpy fast ones that don’t give you much of anything good. The Gamer Lifestyle Course gets right into it and gives it all, teaching you everything you need to know to make money through writing and gaming. Each module covers 10-15 hours of coursework and offers huge audio instructions and guides.

• Task Lists to Keep You On the Ball – It’s easy to listen to modules and interviews and then do nothing. Come on, we all do it. That’s not what these guys have in mind. They want you to really put your talents and skills into action to start earning money, so they’ve included follow-along task lists and guides to get you moving and track your progress.

• Weekly Coaching and Q&A sessions – With Johnn and Yax, you’re never alone. You’ll always have two people who know what they’re talking about, who’ve been there, and who offer a place where you can ask questions about your specific company, project, and products so you get in-depth answers on how to create a successful income stream through writing.

• How-To Videos – More of a writer and a gamer than a technical person? These videos get you through the set-up side so you can make this lifestyle work for you.

• Community Forums – Discuss the gamer lifestyle, your own difficulties and achievements, and get well-deserved support from other writers and gamers just like you.

And when we say other writers just like you, we mean it. The Gamer Lifestyle is open for three days – and three days only – exclusively to Men with Pens readers, the same people who have similar likes, interests and lifestyles as you do.

Get in on it before it closes down.

The Crazy Guarantee

What we really love about the Gamer Lifestyle course is that it comes with a guarantee. Actually, the course comes with two guarantees, and we think both are equally crazy:

1. Three Months to Your First Dollar Guarantee – If you follow these modules and put in the work, Johnn and Yax guarantee you’ll make your first dollar within three months.

That’s not just a guarantee that you’ll like the course. That’s a guarantee that the course works.

2. Six-Month Money Back Guarantee – Johnn and Yax go one step further. If you don’t like the course after six months, even if you’ve followed the entire course, clocked in time with one-on-one coaching with Johnn and Yax, and started earning money from what you’ve learned, they will give you your money back. It’s that simple.

Yeah. See? Two crazy guarantees. It’s a total win.

The Cost

We know you’re waiting for it: the price tag.

All of this stuff, the modules, the task lists, the one-on-one coaching with guys who’ve actually done this before you, the how-to videos, the forums, the whole nine yards to teach you how to write for the gaming industry and make money, costs $447. If you’d rather break it up into payments, Johnn and Yax let you make five payments of $97.

It may sound like a lot, but we really think it isn’t. Here’s why we believe the Gamer Lifestyle is a great deal:

1. The membership is for life. That means you can work at your own pace. That means you pay one single price, and if you don’t use it for months, you don’t have to pony up again.

2. New modules are added continually, and we’ve seen what’s already there – there is a lot of valuable material that’ll keep you busy for a long time. This isn’t a tosser course, people. This is value.

3. Johnn and Yax created enough teaching material to get you producing 10-15 hours every week from one course alone. James and I will be the first to tell you that means more learning than you ever put into college or university, and we paid a lot of money to go to those institutions.

To put the cost of education into perspective, James paid $700 per university course, and he needed 30 courses to graduate with a B.A. That’s over $20,000, people. All that money went towards a career that he still wouldn’t be able to earn money from unless he invested a lot more cash into setting up his own practice and marketing his services.

And he’s Canadian. You don’t even want to know what Taylor paid to go to a top ten school in the U.S.

4. These guys are running a school for people who want to write and game for a living. You should really attend, because we can’t think of anything we might like to do more than write and play games as our income stream.

5. Speaking of income stream, did we mention that Johnn and Yax promise that Gamer Lifestyle members can create a reliable income stream from the course, and that you’ll start earning your first dollar back in just three months?

P.S. One more thing to think about: When these guys got in touch with us, I personally read what they do for a living and became practically puce with envy. Can you imagine being at a party and someone asks what you do for a living? It’d go something like this:

“I’m a clerk for a retail store,” you’d say. “I do okay.”

“That’s nice,” says the guy. “I write fantasy gaming material all day. And people pay me for it.”

Don’t you want to be that guy?

Yeah, that’s right. Sign up for the Gamer Lifestyle course before it’s too late. You’ll thank us when you write the next Dungeons & Dragons game.

Another rockin' post from the Men With Pens! Copyright 2009 - All Rights Reserved


Special Fiction Week: Your Exclusive Men with Pens Offer

If you’re one of those people who writes copy for a living in order to make enough money to support your fiction writing endeavors, then this series is for you.

This week, Men with Pens offers a full six days of posts, each on writing fiction and boosting your potential to create a kick-ass novel. We’ll also have an exclusive Men with Pens offer for readers this week – stay tuned for tomorrow’s post, where you’ll discover how to earn money from fiction writing.

The series began with tips on how to create a believable character, and the next installment discussed how to create a setting for your fiction novel.

Now we’ll discuss something everyone gets fired up about: plot

Plot is the nitty-gritty that gives your characters something to do. You’d be shocked at how many people leave this step out of their story. They’ll invent a great, well-developed character with a personality anyone could sympathize with, they’ll come up with a kick-ass backstory, and they’ll place the story in a beautifully described, poignant setting.

Then nothing happens.

Well, stuff will happen. The character probably interacts with other characters, has conversations, and does things in this exquisitely described location.

But there won’t be any conflict. There won’t be one driving element that propels the story forward.

In essence, there won’t be a plot.

Why a Plot is Often Absent

Many writers mistake dramatic action for a plot. For example, if they put their character through tons of traumatic experiences in their book, they’ll point to those action-packed experiences and say, “Look! Plot!”

That’s not plot. That’s action. They are two very different things.

The plot of your story is what other people would say your story is about. No book reviewer would sum up your novel as, “This is a story about a woman who gets the crap kicked out of her. A lot.” That’s not a legitimate summary of the story because it isn’t the story.

That’s something that happens within the story. That’s action driving the overall plot.

So What Is Plot, Then?

The plot of any story can more or less be summed up thusly:

• Your protagonist wants something.
• He or she is unable to achieve it, for whatever reason.
• He or she achieves what was desired or fails to achieve it at all.

That’s it. This is the plot of almost every story. Allow me to demonstrate:

Moby Dick: Captain Ahab wants to catch the white whale. The white whale, understandably, does not want to be caught, which gets in the way of the Captain’s goal. Ahab fails; the white whale kills him. Sucks to be you, Ahab.

The Da Vinci Code: Robert wants to solve a puzzle about the origins of Christianity. Robert is impeded by a crazy albino. Robert achieves his goal anyway. Good job, dude.

Bridget Jones’ Diary: Bridget wants a nice, attentive boyfriend, specifically her shagedelic boss. Shagadelic boss is a jerk, which means he fails at being said boyfriend. Bridget fails to get shagedelic boss but succeeds at getting another nice, attentive boyfriend, mangling standard sentence structure in the bargain. Decent job, Bridget.

Lord of the Rings: Frodo wants to get the One Ring to Mordor. He can’t because of all the evil critters in his way (Orcs, Ringwraiths, etc.) He achieves his goal by chucking the Ring into the Cracks of Doom. Well bloody played, Frodo.

Take a look at your story. What do your characters want?

The Critical Missing Element in Most Plots

Once you’ve established what your characters want, you need to establish why they want it. These things go hand-in-hand.

Captain Ahab wants to kill the white whale because the white whale cut off his leg (he’s got a point). Da Vinci Robert wants to solve the mystery because someone was murdered (initially) but also because he is a professor of these matters and he must know. Bridget wants a boyfriend because, well, she’s a pretty shallow chick, so let’s say status. Frodo wants to destroy the One Ring because the world will be cast into chaos and ugliness if he doesn’t.

This helps readers know what’s propelling characters’ actions throughout your story. Either characters support your protagonist in their quest for whatever, or they get in the way somehow.

Dude, My Plot Is Way More Complicated Than That

Think your plot is more complex than that? I hate to break it to you, but it really isn’t. Even the most convoluted plot structures break down to this point.

The only exception (and it’s not really an exception) are plots where there is more than one protagonist, in which case each of the protagonists may have a separate goal.

Of course, if your protagonists’ goals do not interrelate in any way, then you have two separate stories. Usually two parallel plotlines coincide in that a single character wants a certain goal and the other character does not. Or, conversely, the characters want the same goal, but for different reasons. It’s up to us as readers to determine who has a better reason.

Either way, it’s still the same plot: Want, inability to achieve, then achievement or lack thereof.

Here’s a quick example of a plot that seems convoluted but isn’t:

In the book Pride and Prejudice, the reader has to cope with five sisters, a mother, and a friend of the family. The mother wants all her girls married because it will make her super-cool in her social circles. The eldest wants to be happily married to a specific dude. Tthe second eldest wants to be intellectually satisfied for the rest of her life and doesn’t much care if it’s with a husband or not. The third wants to be left alone. The fourth wants to get laid. The fifth wants to be the fourth. The friend wants to be financially comfortable and doesn’t care if she even likes her husband, so long as she can achieve this goal of wealth.

That’s SEVEN different people in one story – and I haven’t even brought in the other characters yet.

Seems like a really complicated plotline, right? It’s not.

Elizabeth is our main character. Her basic goal is to be intellectually happy, and she wouldn’t mind finding a good man with whom that was possible. We’re following her in her quest for that situation.

All other characters in the book, every single one of them, are only there to contribute to Elizabeth’s quest for that situation in some way. Every single sister and friend who gets into some romantic entanglement somehow feeds Elizabeth’s understanding of what she desires in a mate, bringing her a step closer to finding him.

This doesn’t mean that each of the other characters are actively trying to help or hinder Elizabeth. It just means that, from an author’s perspective, they contribute to Elizabeth’s goal. The fact that they contribute to Elizabeth’s goal unwittingly while pursuing their own goals is beside the point.

Elizabeth is our protagonist. Everything mentioned in the book must contribute to her goal in some way.

What should you take away from this? If there is a character or a situation that does not serve your central character’s goal, it does not belong in the story.

So go ask yourself those questions, and see how much clearer your story becomes:

• What is my main character’s goal?
• What are my minor characters’ goals?
• How are my minor characters’ pursuits of their goals contributing to my main character’s pursuit of his/her goal?

If you can’t answer these questions easily, then you don’t have characters. You have stick figures. What’s worse, you don’t have a plot.

Another rockin' post from the Men With Pens! Copyright 2009 - All Rights Reserved


Special Fiction Writing Week: Creating a Plot

If you’re one of those people who writes articles or ebooks or website copy for a living in order to make enough money to do the other kind of writing – yes, fiction – then this series is for you.

We’re offering a full week (yes, six posts) all about writing fiction and improving your skills. We’ll also have an exclusive offer for Men with Pens readers later on this week; you’ll be able to put your fiction to work for you and earn money off its originality.

Yesterday’s post began the series with tips and tricks on how to create a believable character. We also established that it’s easier to create a setting than it is to create a good character.

For one thing, often your setting has been created for you. Many books have stories that take place in real cities, on streets that you can drive down today, with characters that walk in and out of stores and restaurants that you yourself shopped or ate or got sick in.

Even if you’re creating your own setting, which includes making up a whole new world like Ursula K. LeGuin does in nearly every book she writes, building that setting is still a pretty straightforward task. It’s not particularly easy to create all the little bits and pieces that make up a world, but creating a setting is straightforward because no one can argue with you about it.

If you decide that everything in your world is blue, for whatever reason, no one can argue it’s not “realistic”. Readers realize they’re within a sci-fi or fantasy world and move on.

Not so with characters. If your character does something completely unbelievable, no reader is going to go along with it, even if your character lives on the blue planet that they accept.

So creating a setting is a breeze, right? Nothing to see here.

Nuh-uh. Creating a setting is easier than creating a character. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t require some serious thought and attention.

Working in a Real Setting

For the purposes of this article, “real” means “exists in the world in which you and I walk.” That means the setting is in the present time or thereabouts (it can be a few years ago, but not 100 years ago), it’s in a city you can point to on a map, and the buildings, streets, and storefronts are all more or less as they stand today.

This is perhaps the simplest kind of setting in terms of being able to describe where everything is and what the weather’s like. It’ll trip you up if you’re not careful.

For one thing, your readers are going to know this setting too. That means when you write about the impression of the place – it’s “bustling”, or it’s “weary”, or it’s “dirty” – you’re going to have contend with the opinions of people who have actually been to these locations.

If you decide that New York is a clean, cheerful city, for example, you had damned well better be prepared to back that up with some weird quirk of your character’s personality, such as how he sees only the good in everything.

The handy part about writing a setting that actually exists is that it’s completely unnecessary to make up anything. London is still there, and so is Iraq. The religions are established, the history is set. You can just sink into what you already know and begin from there – though if your setting is crucial to your plot, as in a historically based investigation, you’re going to want to be sure you have your facts straight. But it’s pretty smooth sailing insofar as creation goes.

That’s not to say you can just decide you’re good to hit the keyboard and start writing.

If you’re going to write about a place that actually exists, make sure you really do know that place. It’s best if you’ve lived there, at least for a little while. Make sure that your idea of the setting is a valid idea before you go writing it on paper as though it were fact.

Your perception is valid – but if you’ve never actually been to the city you’re writing about or only stayed there on a short visit, your perception won’t matter so much as your gross inaccuracy.

Working in a Made-Up Setting in a Real World

This is a pretty common tactic used by authors who write novels set in small towns. The setting is essentially in a country that actually exists on a map, but you’ve completely fabricated a town within that country.

Your town may be – and should be – similar to towns in that region, for believability’s sake, but creating your own town setting means you have more freedom about the general impression of the place. You can say that everyone in town feels like the place is dead, and no reader can refute you, because this town does not actually exist.

This strategy also works if you’re creating locations that don’t exist within a place that does. For example, if your characters have an underground money-laundering scheme and they need a bar to meet in, make up a bar. Just try not to put it where an actual bar exists or you’ll have blown your cover.

Made-up settings in the real world are also great for fantastical realities. The current vampire craze works like this; so did the Harry Potter books. It works very well to use the real world to disguise a secret, made-up underground that you have free rein to manipulate.

Just don’t forget that the real world is out there. Youre accountable to it. If you decide that your vampires just blew up the town, you have to remember that the National Guard is going to come investigate that, no matter how cool your vampires look smoking cigarettes on the rubble.

Working in a Made-Up World

A make-believe world is the stuff of fantasy and sci-fi novels, and the epitome of doing it well has been (and will probably always be) J.R.R. Tolkien.

That is, until someone else actually invents several different languages, grammar and all, for the various races of the characters created, not to mention writing thousands of years of documented history for said made-up world. Tolkien was a devoted historian and linguist with a lot of time on his hands, people.

In short, you will probably not wind up creating another Middle-Earth.

However, you will wind up creating a history. History is essential for a made-up world, and it possibly one of the biggest drawbacks of using this type of setting.

In a real-world setting, history is more or less as it always was. Your reader knows the history of the real world and has easy reference to it. In a made-up world, there’s a good chance that presumably the Middle Ages never happened, presumably the Greeks never sat around and discussed philosophy, presumably medical advances weren’t discovered at the same time or in the same way.

When you work in a made-up world, it’s not just about writing down how your setting looks and feels. It’s about how your setting got to be that way. Your readers need to know that, in order to accept the setting you’ve put before them.

This is one of the reasons made-up settings frequently resemble our own world quite closely. There’s a hilarious xkcd comic describing why you shouldn’t bother coming up with new names for everything in your world. It’s mostly because then your story becomes all about describing this new world instead of about describing what’s happening within it.

You can definitely name creatures and objects that don’t exist in the real world (everyone’s cool with J.K. Rowling making up Horcruxes and Patronuses), but deciding you have to scrap everything you know and start fresh isn’t going to do you – or your story – any favors.

So which would you choose for your story’s setting? Where are your characters going to live and interact? What does that place look like? What does it feel like to be there?

Another rockin' post from the Men With Pens! Copyright 2009 - All Rights Reserved


Special Fiction Writing Week: Creating a Setting

That’s right. For six consecutive days this week, we’ll be talking fiction. How to write it. How to be better at it. How to make your stories feel real to your readers. How to help your characters leap right off the pages and into people’s hearts. And later on in the week, we have an exclusive offer just for Men with Pens readers.

You see, we know that many of you who come hang here with us at Men with Pens are closet fiction writers. (We’re fiction writers ourselves.) You may do business writing as a job, but you might also write short stories, participate in NaNaWriMo every year, or have a novel that you’d like to polish into a publishable manuscript.

That’s fantastic. Being a professional writer doesn’t mean you can’t be an amazing fiction writer.

Some great writers have done the very same. John Scalzi (Old Man’s War, Zoe’s Tale), Don Delillo (Underworld, White Noise), Augusten Burroughs (Dry, Running with Scissors), and Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses) all worked as copywriters until their fiction writing careers took off enough to support them.

We hope you become famous enough that you’ll be listed alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett (yeah, they did this too) as former copywriters who became great fiction writers.

Creating a Character

It’s a habit of many a lifelong fiction lover to sit down and create a world before creating even a single concept of a character who’s going to live within that world.

The reason is that mostly, creating a world is more a matter of logistics than reality. If you can make it work logically, then you can have anything you want in your fiction world. You can have dragons, or flying spaceships, or (in more traditional fiction) a tiny town in the middle of Arkansas where no town currently exists on the map.

Oh, but characters. Ahh. Characters are fickle. They won’t do what you tell them to do. They have strange personality quirks. They don’t seem real enough until they’re a little inconsistent, and if they’re too inconsistent, then they’re not real either.

Characters are difficult to contain and control, which is often why you notice some of the more mediocre fiction having an amazing setting and truly unbelievable characters.

These authors have made a classic mistake. They’ve tried to shoehorn their character into the setting, instead of creating a real person and asking themselves what the world around this person looks like.

Without at least one character, you simply don’t have a story. J.R.R. Tolkien created one of the most extensive fantasy worlds ever known – but you don’t give a damn about Middle-Earth if there is no Bilbo Baggins, no Gandalf, no Aragorn, no Tom Bombadil.

Your characters are the souls of your stories. So how do you go about creating believable characters for yours?

Start With Clichés

When you first start writing your character, your impulse might be to create a person unlike any other out person out there. A completely unique individual, with a background that’s new and different, or a person with a weird way of looking at the world, an unconventional mind.

You’ll fail.

At our core, every human being – and that includes each one of us – is a cliché. You’ll have a very hard time creating a character who meets absolutely none of the standard tropes, whether you’re writing conventional literature or fantasy or a mystery novel. As the saying goes, every story has been told a thousand times before.

So has every character.

Pretending your character is somehow going to transcend every single fictional trope that ever existed is absurd. Heck, YOU, a real live breathing walking talking reading blogging human being, fit into at least half a dozen standard tropes.

The housewife who aspires to be a writer. The quiet but strong man who lives alone by choice. The stressed-out college student who just wants to get away from everything.

They’re tropes because they come up again and again in real life. Don’t try to work against the grain on that one.

So go ahead. Create your character and let this person fit into a cliché. Give him or her a background and a basic outline for the person’s life. She’s a middle-aged woman struggling to balance her work and her family, and she has issues with her mother.

It’s okay. She’s not going to stay a cliché for long.

Imbuing a Personality

Once you have your character’s basic circumstances sorted out, you need to give her a personality (your character may very well be a he, but we began with a female example so we’re going to stick with it).

Imbuing a personality is much, much harder than it might seem.

Think about your best friend, someone that you know very well. Think about whether she fits any clichés. She probably does; she probably fits half a dozen clichés. But until we asked you that question, you probably have never thought of your friend as a cliché. She could be the most stereotyped person in the world, she could have shown up in literature since the dawn of the written word, but you would never have thought of your best friend as a cliché.

Why? Well, because she’s your best friend. She’s not a cliché. There’s a reason for where she is in her life and why she feels that way.

And she’s, well, her. She’s your friend. She makes you laugh and she has a funny way of sticking her finger out from her coffee mug as though she’s always having tea with the queen. She remembers you like daffodils, but she can’t be relied upon to remember a birthday. You like the way she thinks, the things she says, and the way she sits next to you at a movie.

Her circumstances, the clichéd part of her, are secondary, tertiary, even farther back. They are not who she is; they are simply what has happened to her. Who she is, is the person who reacts to those circumstances in a particular way.

To give your character a personality, you need to figure out what sort of person your character is. You need to give that person a handful of quirks that are hers and hers alone. It’s rather like creating a recipe – many dishes require flour or eggs or cinnamon, but in differing amounts and in combination with different other ingredients, they’ll result in different final dishes.

So it goes with personality creation. Your character won’t have any personality quirks that don’t show up in other people – impossible. What your character will have are those qualities in different amounts and in unique combinations.

A Little Exercise For You

Write out a full conversation between yourself and this character. Pretend you’re stuck in an elevator together and have nothing else to talk about but one another.

See what kind of humor develops, how quickly this person trusts you with new information, the way her mind works in a time of minor stress, what she’s worried about, who she’s concerned about knowing.

Don’t assume that all people react the same way, and don’t assume your character spills everything about herself at the drop of a hat. The point isn’t to get the entire character history on paper; the point is to see what other people see when they meet this person on the page.

What sort of person is this? How would you describe your character to a friend later on, when you’ve gotten out of this elevator? What would you remember?

Another rockin' post from the Men With Pens! Copyright 2009 - All Rights Reserved


Special Fiction Writing Week: Creating a Character

Welcome to the fourth installment in our Freelancing SMART series written by resident SMART consultant, Elizabeth Fayle from Make Way for Biz.

If you missed the first three posts, you can find them here: The Grand Introduction, Step One: Being Specific, and Step Two: Getting Measurable.

Up for discussion today, Step Three: Is It Agreed Upon?

Welcome to the next post in our series on freelancing SMART, and you’re in luck today – we’re going to take a look at “Agreed Upon”, the middle letter of that smart freelancing you’ll soon be doing (if you haven’t started already).

If you’ve been following the series from the beginning, you’ll know that SMARTening up your business means making it:

Specific
Measurable
Agreed Upon
Realistic
Time-based

Because you’re all brilliant people, you’re surely seeing how each aspect of SMART works with the next. They all go hand in hand, and create a solid foundation to rock out your business.

Since you’re most likely becoming Specific in all your communications, and you’ve started to make sure everything you do is Measurable, you’re in an excellent position to having it all Agreed Upon.

“Oh, I don’t do anything unless my client agrees!” you say.

YAY!

But do you stick to your agreements?

“Well, of course I do!”, you huff. “I’m very professional. I tell my clients exactly when I’m going to deliver and I do. Jeez, lady!”

Ah, but I’m not questioning that. You wouldn’t be in business for very long if you missed delivering on time.

What I am questioning is a wicked little freelancer money-suck that runs rampant in business. It sneaks in when you aren’t looking. It slowly drains you and you don’t even realize it. It’s the creature that turns every profitable project into a total loss. And all of you have had this beast feed off your business at one time or another.

It’s called scope creep.

How Scope Creeps Into Your Business

I love using examples. Today’s will be a 350-word page of website content. Your client tells you what he’d like you to write about, you research his industry and business, you write the content, and you fire it off to the client, knowing it’s great.

You are done.

A few days later, the client comes back to you. “Hey, thanks for that content. That was awesome, and it’s great stuff. I just want to change the style a little bit. Can I get a revision?”

Sure thing. That’s part of your work policy, after all, and it won’t take too long to tweak the content. Plus, it’s good customer relations and the client likes what you’ve done anyways.

So you tweak the content, then fire it off again.

You are done.

But the client comes back to you and says, “Hm. I had a closer read today and I’m not entirely sure the wording in the second paragraph is accurate to my business. And I’d like to tone down the style a bit. We’ll be good after that.”

So you tweak the content, then fire it off again.

You are done.

And the client comes back and says to you, “This is great. I just want to make sure the call to action at the end is as strong as we can get it – oh, and I created an ebook I’d like people to download, so can we work that into the text? Last one, promise. We’ll be good after that!”

Well. You’ve already done one revision free of charge, and you’ve tweaked it again, and yes, you do mind but if you say no, you’ll look bad. And if you ask for more money, you look bad. And you want to keep those good client relations, and the customer’s a nice guy, and he did say this was the last one…

You’re in trouble now.

Your profit margin is shrinking, you’re not sure this project is going to end soon, and if this keeps up, you’re soon going to be losing money.

Worse, you’re conditioning your client to come back with more tweaks and revision requests – you’ve already said yes to two. It’s the foot-in-the-door syndrome, and when that door has a foot in it, that scope creep creature has a chance to crawl right in.

How did this happen?

You didn’t stick to what was agreed upon: one 350-word page of website content with the option of one major revision and one minor tweak. Nowhere was there any mention of two tweaks. Or additions. Or changing tone and style.

You’ve broken your own agreement – and you let scope creep happen.

Sticking to What YOU Agreed Upon

Let’s change the scenario around a bit.

The Client: “This is great. I just want to make sure the call to action at the end is as strong as we can get it – oh, and I created an ebook I’d like people to download, so can we work that into the text? Last one, promise. We’ll be good after that!”

You: “Sounds great. Since we’ve already used up all the revisions we’d agreed to in the original scope of the project, I’ll send a PayPal request for $50, which will cover these tweaks, and I can have the revision back to you by Thursday of this week.”

Now that scope creep door is shut. There’s no foot propping it open. No beast can come suck away at your business and drain you of your profit margin. It’s all up to the client to decide if his requests are important enough to him to pay an extra $50.

If they are, he’ll pay, and you’ll both enjoy a mutually respectful work relationship. If those tweaks were just a flight of fancy and really not that important at all, the client will say, “Ah, okay. We’ll leave it here, then. This is perfect.”

He won’t be mad. You won’t be drained. And you’ve walked the talk by sticking to what’s been Agreed Upon.

Oh, and you aren’t losing any money to scope creep. Hey, you might even make yourself an extra $50!

Another rockin' post from the Men With Pens! Copyright 2009 - All Rights Reserved


How to Kill the Scope Creep Beast

Now, I know your company is neither squalid nor soup-like, and I have no fear of offending you. I am, in fact, sure that I will offend you, but I embrace this honor with open arms and live not in dread.

Come now! We shall discuss the ineptitudes of others! (For I am sure that you do not do any of these things, and if you do, I am sure you will not admit to them until you have safely remedied them quietly behind the scenes.)

So. You need a professional email address.

This may seem obvious to some of you, but trust me, it continues to be a problem for many a freelancer out there. People that I have taken semi-seriously on the phone instantly lose my respect if I find out their email is something silly, or if they have a free account from one of the more commonplace (read: non-business-oriented) providers out there.

And I am a pretty easygoing person. I am down with it if you want to cuss on your promotional materials or show a picture of yourself on your website throttling a giraffe because it stole your Diet Coke. (In fact, if you do both of those things, we should definitely have coffee sometime.)

However, a bad email address is like that robot that was always freaking out on Lost in Space. “Danger!” it goes. “Danger, Will Robinson!” And even though my name is not Will Robinson, I KNOW DANGER WHEN I HEAR IT.

I am going to tell you a story about a woman who wanted to be my client some years ago. In her email address, she not only had a silly made-up email name from AOL. (I won’t tell you what it is, but the made-up equivalent is a lot like babybatshereyelashes2001.)

You know how, when you receive an email from someone, their name appears right next to the subject line? Okay. Her name began with “Jedi”, and it ended with a name that is a made-up name on the level of schoolgirls who like to pretend they are Sailor Moon’s companions or whatever it is kids are into these days.

This woman was trying very hard to convince me that I should give her discounted copywriting because she was so good at what she did in the web world that I would recoup my losses very shortly and she would only ever use me as her copywriter in the future.

A few points I would like to make here:

I was a friend of the Jedi. I am a strong supporter of Yoda and his kith and kin. I despise and fear the Dark Side of the Force, and I think that the Death Star was startlingly creepy for essentially being a gray ball with a bite taken out of it. I am ALL FOR THE JEDI. If this woman had a tiny sentence at the end of her bio about how she was a Star Wars nerd, we would likely be swooning over Han Solo together to this very day.

But it was in her EMAIL. DUDE.

Now, I’m sure that most of you are not actually doing this. I am sure you do not refer to yourself as Jedi Stronginthearm or whatever in your email account, and I am sure that the email account itself is not dirtygirlswoohoo@hotmail.

However.

Even if it is not such a glaringly terrible violation of email protocol as that example, is your email professional? And how do you know?

Here is your priority list for email addresses, people. Listen up:

First and best: Get an email address that is your web URL and your name or a common business-y type summary for the whole company. For example, you can email us here at info@menwithpens.ca. Looks very nice. Very professional. If you want to put your first name or last name in there instead of the “info” that works great too.

Second and still pretty good: Get an email address that is a well-known business email provider, and your full name. Since you are obviously not going to get andrew@gmail.com (no, seriously, you’re not going to get it. Or any other first name. And you don’t want to.), get your full name. Your full name is much better anyway because it adds an extra measure of professionalism to your address.

Do not use email addresses from the following providers as your official business email. I know they’re perfectly good providers in general, but they simply do not have the business credibility: AOL, Yahoo, and especially Hotmail.

To give yourself an idea of when the name thing is appropriate, think about business cards. If you met a guy who didn’t have an official company but who freelanced under his own name, you’d be cool with that, right? So you no longer think of that guy as James over at Men with Pens (I’m picking on James today, just because I like to). You think of that guy as James Chartrand, Freelance Copywriter.

(He wanted me to add Extraordinaire. I wouldn’t let him.)

However, if that guy handed you a business card that just said James – Freelance Copywriter, it’d be a little weird. If you’re going to trade on your name alone with no business name to go with it, use your full name when choosing an email address. I suggest putting a little period between the two, because otherwise it looks all mashed-up. john.smith@gmail.com works great.

Alright, people, confession time: How does your email measure up? Is it as professional as it can be?

Another rockin' post from the Men With Pens! Copyright 2009 - All Rights Reserved


Is Your Email Address Losing You Clients?

I recently wrote about how and why arTEESTes piss me off, and I used the example of an average guy I called Joe, who doesn’t really know why one copywriter or web designer should be worth more than another. He chooses the lower-priced freelancer out of sheer practicality.

It’s simple: Two guys do the same job. One of them does it for cheaper. If that were all the information I had, I’d go with the cheaper guy, too.

So what does it take to convince Joe that he should plunk down three times as much for your copywriting instead of hiring the guy off Elance who can’t punctuate properly?

You really need to explain yourself. That’s simple too.

I discuss this all the time with clients of mine who want me to write their website copy. I ask, “Can you tell me more about the benefits of people hiring you?”

“Well, we’re awesome!” they answer.

“No, no,” I say. “Of course you’re awesome. But you have to explain to site visitors how your awesomeness benefits them. That’s how they’ll become your customers.”

This usually gets me some blank stares, but here’s how it goes:

Joe has two freelancers trying to get his attention. One says, “I’m awesome, and I can write your website copy for $25 a page.” The other guy says, “I’m even more awesome than friggin’ awesome, and I can write your website copy for $250 a page.”

Joe looks at these two options and thinks, “You know what? I want awesome. Awesome is good for me. I don’t think I need even more friggin’ awesome. Just awesome is fine. I’m not Nike or Coca-Cole, after all.”

And Joe makes his decision. The high-priced freelancer loses.

Okay, now try this on for size:

Joe has two freelancers bidding for his attention. One says, “I’m awesome, and I can write your website copy for $25 a page.”

Now the other guy says, “I’m awesome. But what’s more important is that my awesomeness is going to make you lots of money. It’s going to convince your potential customers that your business is more professional and more credible and better than your competition. You see, most people only look at a website for about two seconds (literally) before they decide whether to stay. I make them stay, I keep them there, and I make sure they think you’re so awesome they want to give you their money. Does that sound like something you’d like?”

“Um . . . yes,” says Joe. “Yes, it does. This… sounds awesome.”

So the freelancer says, “You can have that, Joe. It can be yours, and for only $250 a page, you can have your customers staying on your site, deciding to do business with no one else but you and put their money right in your pocket.”

Joe looks at these two option. He can go with the first guy who promised him generic awesomeness, or he can choose the second guy who clearly knows the impact of great copy on a customer and presumably also knows how to execute that project to get the best reaction out of Joe’s customer. That second guy seems very confident.

On the one hand, the first guy is cheaper.

On the other hand, if the second guy brings in even ONE of the new customers he claims he can, Joe has recouped the price of the website copy.

Joe may still decide to go with the cheaper freelancer, but he’s going to think about it a lot longer and a lot harder.

If – and only if – the second guy, the one with the higher rates, explains himself.

Another rockin' post from the Men With Pens! Copyright 2009 - All Rights Reserved


Want More Clients? Explain Yourself.