EVERY Copywriting Formula In The History of Mankind and Womankind

If you knew Joanna, or had taken one of her courses (and I have), there is no way you would say that.

- Rick Duris

PS: That post is gold.

Full disclosure: A few people have privately pointed out to me Joanna does the right thing and links back to my site for extensions of PAS as well as one of my VSL formulas.

Thx Steve,

Plenty formula here to feed the blind spot in any alchemical retina.

I had today free to fix up stuff for halloween and hit on moldy admin, but I guess now I gotta make like a fat gal to the honey spoon.

This ain't intel - it's abuse.

Hey

Now it's my turn to be confused.

Don't quite catcha.

Hey, Steve, I am so stoopid.

Evry time I see F I think of F right now. Thought you were alludin' to sumthin' kinko but it was only me.

So, yeah, I guess both CW F's hang on imagry. Filtered through narrative an' story, course, but image is all. Whoever controls the imagry runs the show. Whoever defines the narrative frames the argument.

Copy. Movies. Politics. Heart to heart with your best pal.

Back in the day, the church ran all the imagry, then we got Tarot, novels, movies, ads. Oral storytellin' morphed, but the essentials remain:

What is the picture I wanna slip into someone's head?
What vision do I want in there gonna seem so real that they feel on it, act on it?

Structure you deploy feeds that, an' it's always gonna need a tweak to ensure it has currency du jour, especially now info is speedin' up.

See? Momentum moves on already.

An' this is a timely point, Ray.

Buildings are where people hang out, and their structure shapes how the hoomans inside might interact an' play out their emoto-narratives.

Diffrent things happen in a high rise to a bungalow, but all the happenstuff is the work of people. Without 'em, you just got an empty building (which I could do with right now cos some fkr is shoutin' real loud outside).

I guess you have to see how it all rolls when you're on the receiving end, hooverin' on the world's perpetual infogasm.

Surrounded by ads, so you suck 'em up, notice repetitions, omissions.

Watch a movie, read a poem, mix it up.

Then alla the stuff in your periphery feeds in.

Gray day now. Rain. A bird. My stoopid cape for tomorrow flung over the back of a chair. Blisso loud guy vacuum. Taste of muffin glowin' round my chops. I can't blot it out an' I can't stop it mixin' around, an' it's all image, all story, all (if I think of how I might end this reply in a few minnows) fiction. A selective/selected clutch of shards from the available promptpool that my brain cannot help but run into meaning.

Lemme look again.

Still gray (slow burner). Still rain (but now I question the relative weight of its fall), bird is gone, jus' looked for a substitute animal but there ain't one, a car, cape (which i am now wearin' jus' to mess this all up), a quieter loud guy vacuum, less muffin -- hey that was a powerful promptpool 'cos I just spun on it again. Even so, it's diffrent from the first run, and I muse on this.

Take away the gray, the rain, the cape, the guy -- the stuff -- and what have I got?

Nuthin'.

I can't even punch the loud guy I never saw in the chops, which is annoying 'cos he had a beard an' I coulda smacked him harder than a regular rowdy *******.

How stuff is in time an' space right now is kinda accidental (apart from the cape, and regular fixtures like keyboard, monitor, lamp) yet it breathes the story of the moment. It IS that.

But it's only me sittin' here in a building, and though it's mostly accidental, all the pictures are workin' me right now, same as you.

Run copy, write a poem, shoot a movie, you load up with the imagry you want seen, then fix it up into an order.

The accident of that missin' bird, gone, but flappin' in my head still, becomes a deliberately beheld vulture, pickin' on flesh if I wanna.

Now, where might that play?

"Ripped off by your insurance company?"

Ha!

But that's runnin' stuff backwards.

Brief comes first, an' before yr through para 1, lions roar, airplanes fly, hunks flash meat, all kindsa stuff wings in on a prompt.

So you drop 'em in a pit an' watch 'em fight it out.

Some broad idea always wins out, some image to hang the story on.

That usually happens when I'm tidying stuff or shopping for pizza, an' I jot down phrases, an' build it up till it makes sense an' hangs together, an' tweaks on whatever CW Fs illuminate or dim the point needs makin'.

Then the client says, "hey this is a pile of crap" an' I go kick a dog.

Experiment: go find a bird right now.

Outta the window, Google, book.

Whatever project you're workin' on, throw it up big in your mind's eye, then hit on the bird.

Some of 'em sing real lousy but none stay truly silent.

Tucked away under the squawk gonna be a flicker of an image, the visual writhing of sumthin' plus sumthin', same as if you saw the bird anyhoo, without me askin' ya.

But now I told you to go see the bird, dropped her onya after alla this alla this writin' (finished in a minnow, an' mebbe what I oughta be doin' is sum' genuwhine hooverin insteada honeyspoonin' the fat gal of my procrastination/diligence) I figure it might sing somethin' different to the anyhoo bird, an' mebbe you'll see more of the image flicker now I've suggested ur gonna see sumthin'.

It's an accidental image drop, but also kinda deliberate.

If it sparks your project on some, I wld truly love that.

Hey, you asked real nice & I am a sucker.

Gotta figure Sylvia Plath mighta become a great life insurance saleswoman if she hadn't fallen foul of the villanelle.

Not sure about the adrenaline -- dispenser in the kitchen broke last week an' the guy can't come fix it till next Thursday.

A good read. I worked in Web Content as a writer , and there is a lot of temptation to copy ; however as a technical writer some things we must copy such as product information and specs.

Again , a good read.

Shapeshiftin' angels milkin' paradise to order has a cool ring to it also.

I figure Eat Skull have the appropriate lyrical edge, not to mention the "mass appeal" factor.

srsly, mood music is as sneaky a fit as words or images.

Wrong song = wrong message.

Blurred Lines never gonna sell a bank in a TV ad (yet).

Figurin' the right music to sell a bank is more pulsey than formulaic, an' mebbe words have the same power to hit on heart.

This don't mean formulums are bad, but like you said earlier, they gotta enable rather than restrict, like the squirt of icin' spellin' LUVYA on a birthday cake vs the the equally hoopy lasso throttlin' ur brain of oxygen.

Sounds obvious when u smack out the scale all big, but down dirty on the page the lines get kinda blurred sometimes an' the mechanics can show thru too easy.

The oscillatorials between formulum an' pulse can mebbe prise those tricko lines apart -- for me, at least.

(Dunno whether I've resurrected a post here or merely slid a flippant katana along the stomach of a beached whale, but yeh, that angel line should mebbe go in a song.)