Ayn Rand of Atlas Shrugged fame used one of her Bold and Heroic characters to declare this universal truth:

“All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal.”

This fine Sunday morning, I’m riffing off that quote to support one of the greatest Content Tenets around:

“All COPY is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal.”

Allen and I have spent the last 36 hours grinding out a sales letter — the heart of which has been writhing like a hobbled cheetah in Allen’s brain for the last three years.

It’s the formalized declaration for “The Rumsfeld Diaries,” a calculated, satirical, pseudo-fictitious account of the torrid relationship between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein, set against the backdrop of real historical events of the last 25 years.

After a couple reckless drafts, we came to realize we were committing a writer’s act of treason: We had been trying to write a bunch of information around our subject WITHOUT launching each word, phrase and idea from one unified GOAL.

Various copywriting and story experts call this goal by many other names — “Margin Mantra,” “Through Line,” and “Controlling Idea” are some that come to mind — but whatever YOU want to call it, just be sure you understand its beef.

Whether you’re someone who lives to write or you’d rather scrape gravel on your eyeballs than get your thoughts down on paper, you’ll save yourself MUCH angst, frustration, time, and ink if you BEGIN with your goal in mind — then write every word to support your mission.

Yes, it’s a struggle — but at least when you’re done, your mental acrobatics will not have been done in vain!

-Lani

P.S. Happy birthday, Rumsfeld! And by the way, we’re coming for ya!

P.P.S. If you want to find out more about “The Rumsfeld Diaries” or get on the notification list so you’re the first to know when it’s released into the wild of this fine nation of ours, shoot Allen an email at Rumsfeld@EpiphaniesInc.com!

Posted in All About Content |

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 2:00 pm and is filed under All About Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.