It took learning to write junk mail to rid me of my lifelong habit of indulging my own personal amusement at the expense of my message.
I should clarify: it wasn’t junk mail. Not really. It was writing what were called “curiousity-based email swipes,” usually for affiliate brands that would send those emails to their lists. Those lists were made up of people who had opted in to communication from that brand and that brand’s affiliates. And my writing of such was, really, only for practice (although I did end up writing a pretty spectacular swipe about gut health, for a princely sum of $50, before graduating to e-marketing web pages.)
But what I did is an example of what I’m writing about today, which is: the bump.
To use my introductory paragraph as an example: I introduced a clause in my opening sentence — “junk mail” — because it was a) amusing to me and b) there is no b). It doesn’t need to be there; it is also not accurately making my own point. It’s just me being expressive and (as per usual) intensifying the statement for semi-comic effect.
But my doing this created a bump for the reader, for whom “junk mail” is a specific part of their lives, and (unless they’re psychotic) not a particularly welcome part. My use of that phrase leads my reader down a mental road of “wait, what, why was Lia Matthew Brown writing junk mail??” rather than down the road the sentence was intended to open, which was: I finally broke myself of my habit of throwing my reader off the track with my own personal eccentricities, in favour of being more intentional and intelligent about what I wanted my writing to actually accomplish. Except that, clearly not, I did not break myself of it. I just became aware of it.
Let’s start over, then.
It took learning to write sales copy to rid me of my lifelong habit of indulging my own personal amusement at the expense of my message.
Sales copy, particularly in email form, has to act upon the reader like falling down a flight of stairs. (See? There’s still room for personal whimsy even while accurately making one’s own point.) There’s got to be nothing stopping the reader — they are going down that flight of stairs, ass over teakettle, until they hit the bottom, which (structurally anyway) should be the call to action, and they should arrive at that call to action with no other thoughts or lingering uncertainties besides “oh boy, better click this.” (Which is where my stairs analogy falls apart, but you get the drift.)
One of the reason my copy coach tutored me on curiousity-based emails (the definition is in the name: they’re emails designed to make the reader curious enough about the issue presented that they compulsively click the link to the sales site, at which point in the funnel they are no longer the email writer’s problem) is this simple ruthlessness. They are extremely clear on structure, objective, and form. My coach had me writing, like, seven of them a day or some such (one of our exercises literally involved writing entire emails in seven minutes in a nearly-nonstop churn), to internalize the format to the point where I could do it in my sleep, wax-on, wax-off style. But also: she was doing that so that I would begin to self-identify, even before writing them down, my own tendency to compulsively insert bumps.
My own recurring sins in the art of bumping the reader tend to be:
- Throat clearing: prevaricating before I start the actual message of my writing, to pre-apologize for being there in the first place. Very Canadian of me.
- Inserting nuance that interests me (and potentially only me), personally. These usually take the form of “hooks” or “ways in” to the copy, ways that personalized my approach so I could get a handle on it before starting. Big ideas. Philosophical connections. These are fine as starting points; they’re basically useless in final drafts.
- Overwriting: holy holy lord, can I overwrite a sentence. If you’ve read this newsletter more than once, you know it: a gigantic block of text that reveals itself to be a single sentence jerry-rigged with an endless interlocking meta-structure of semi-colons, colons, ellipses and em-dashes. They’re everywhere. Honestly, half the reason I write this newsletter at all is so that I can still indulge some of that grad-school foolishness in a low-stakes space.
- And obviously, inserting jokes, whimsy, and signposts of my own personal eccentricity.
BUT LMB, THAT’S ART, THAT’S CREATIVITY, THAT’S WHAT SEPARATES US FROM THE CHAT GPTS!! you say, or something similar. Well, true. But here we get into the wider conversation of how to style and scale your form to your function, because there must always be a balance between them, even in the most outward-bound flights of fancy one could possibly put to paper. (I just cut The Last Alchemist down from 104,000 words to 99,000, only by trimming those overwritten sentences I mentioned.)
It’s not enough to just be daffy and creative. You also have to let other people in, by meeting them where they are, if you want them to participate in your project, your creativity, your whatever-else-you’re-doing.
In terms of finding the balance, I’ve realized in the course of my practice that there’s something very (with apologies to Lia Rain) male ego about all of it; the “no, I’m right!” impulse to include things in your message that are really only there for you, rather than for your audience, in service of your intention, in order to help you arrive at your goal.
Those other impulses, when indulged thoughtlessly, are all basically just a thin veil of saying “no, I just like this better because it makes me feel defiant, individualistic, special, or interesting,” none of which emotional gratification meets the needs of your message or the intent of your project. Or if they do, well, go with god; but I don’t wanna read it.
The Problem
Meanwhile, over in the Safecrackers spec screenplay, I’m cruising along on the third draft, based on my first-read feedback. I’ve hit the second half of the second act, and have (once again) stopped dead. It’s possible Act 2Bs suck generally; or that I’m just peculiarly bad at them; but that’s a subject for another time.
The good news is: I am really starting to like this part of the process; the part where I come upon “a problem” and have to deal with it as a problem.
I’ve had a wholesale revision of my thinking on the subject in the past two weeks, because it’s happened twice before while working on this draft, and in both cases, it netted out huge wins. I’m basically trundling along in my tractor, tilling the field, and suddenly wham, I hit a big subterranean root cluster that needs to be dug out of the field, and chopped into small pieces, and burned.
And if I might torture the metaphor for a moment longer, those burned bits are great for the soil. Or if I might torture it in a different direction: there’s something very mechanical, very real-world, about hitting these snags. They don’t get me in my head about anything. They get me on my hands and knees, working the soil. It feels good.
To borrow from Tony Gilroy — which I should probably not — it’s all carpentry at this point. It’s building a desk. The worldbuilding and character development and whatnot are all firmly in place; it’s all about communicating them to the audience (with as few bumps as possible, natch).
There are architectural pieces that have to be there, and when I hit a “problem,” and with a few minutes of not-in-the-screenplay thought, I can usually figure out what they are. I can write them down. I can put them in the right order. I can just keep asking myself questions about every single component until it’s really, really clean… and then insert the new module into the old script and voila, I’m moving on.
A bit more on bumps. Coming out of the second draft, there were a lot of them. The second draft is about as long as some of my self-indulgent, weird, made-up-word, ideas lasted. That’s fine. A lot of that is just the mental process of staking out the green space that allows one to find the story — the world, the tone, the rules, the sense of fun.
But everything that pulls a reader out of the script for any reason, now that it’s a real thing that has a productive purpose… well, it had better be there because I really need it there, up to and including word use. (One of my readers was like, “I have a Masters in English, and I had to pull out the dictionary five times.” Oops!)
Any other bump is just friction and/or needless setups for vagina jokes, which I’m realizing, happen regularly enough that I should probably have included them as #5 on the list of my perennial sins of bumping the reader, above.
The best thing about being on the other side of development on this idea is that, by and large, I know the characters well enough that the carpentry of re-plotting key points in the script sort of solves itself, even given that I have fairly substantially changed the objectives of at least two of my main five. The clarity and energy feels like it’s contained within the script; the script does a lot of the work for me. The pieces all sorta just click together. There’s an integrity to the thing that feels larger than something I made on my own, which is a splendid, slightly wondrous, maybe magical, feeling.
The Links
I’m writing this well in advance of the day it will go out; one of the disadvantages (?) of special series like the three newsletter installments I did on The Pitt is that it disrupts the regular flow of saying hello to you fine people in a less structured way.
In the plus column, it means I got to spend less time cherry-picking the (godawful, horrifying, soul-obliterating) daily news for things to recommend to you all. But here we are again! So let’s not lead with the premise that the world isn’t on fire.
Before continuing: the Epstein stuff sure has been fun, but it has also done a masterful job of keeping the fact that 2 million Gazans are starving to death out of the mainstream media. This is a crisis. Please take action. In Canada, you can email and call the Prime Minister’s office directly.
- “How much power it takes; how much power we are up against.” Since the first step of solving any problem is acknowledging that there is one, here’s a good discussion about how we got here, with the broad focus being “how did we go from 26 million protestors in the streets in 2020, to a fascist in the White House in 2025?” But it goes a lot deeper, and farther back, than that. (The Dig podcast)
- On the question of “how we got here,” if you prefer your ruminations in picture-book form, issue #3 of Assorted Crisis Events does it beautifully. (Image Comics)
I don’t want to navel-gaze too much on the horrible reaction to basic premises of human empathy that destroyed the most powerful empire we’ve had in a hundred years; just, I had some thoughts of my own recently, post-Andor, about what really being in the struggle means, and what is at the hot core of (my own) fatigue with keeping the struggle going. Perhaps I shall elaborate in a future episode. I’m not trying to be coy; just, brief and focused. Aware that that topic is not the subject of this issue.
- But if you’re gonna talk about evil — which I think is a critical part of the discussion we may have abandoned for fear of seeming immature — you can think about it like my old pal Scott puts it, in his new newsletter. (Some Like It Scott)
- And you could think about how Generation X — my generation — thinks about Superman, too, if you wanted to get going with this. (Genius Bastard)
See you next week!