How a journey with the “wise men” can give your writing new depths
How do we ensure our skills, our art, or our products stand out in a crowded market? All markets are so crowded these days, thanks to the barrage of content currently available and continuing to be created. How do we either make a message heard or make our services seem different enough to earn the trust of a new client?
As with fiction, so with copywriting. There are only a set number of stories to be told and it is in the telling that customers are won over.
The secret, therefore, is to find new ways to tell/sell the same old same old.
I was at the airport in the early hours of Monday morning meeting my eldest daughter off a flight from Cyprus. As I left the house I grabbed a slim paperback to slip into my pocket so I would have something to read while I waited; however well timed my arrival at Gatwick I knew that there would be the inevitable wait while bags were delivered to the relevant carousel.
The book I grabbed was Eliot’s Selected Poems. I have a soft spot for Eliot and for his poem Journey of the Magi in particular. It was by reading this poem aloud that I won a reading prize back in school. Of greater note was the fact that this marked the one and only time I beat my friend Tony — who came second in this instance — in any competition that could remotely be considered academic.
What’s this got to do with the initial premise of this post? Eliot tells the story of the nativity through the voice of one of the wise men — one of the magi. In fact, although the birth is the reason for the journey, it is mentioned in the end almost as an aside. This is about the journey and how the journey puts into context the previous lives and mores of the men making this journey. Eliot is selling the nativity but he’s telling the lives of the customer first and foremost.
Eliot skilfully welds the exotic with the mundane to convey a miraculous event — if you believe in that sort of thing — with an almost realistic description of the trials and tribulations of any traveler at any time. Here are my favourite lines:
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation,
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky.
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
There is nothing here that doesn’t speak to me of any trip I have made to the Alps, say. Eliot is making this universal. Previously, though, we have heard of camels and ‘silken girls bringing sherbet’; that situates us squarely in an imagined eastern world. He also feeds us phrases that speak directly to a shared knowledge of the Gospels. For instance, at a tavern, we discover ‘six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver’. We haven’t experienced the birth but already Judas has been invoked.
It is a relatively short poem — only 43 lines — but it is a masterful exercise in how to refresh an old tale. By ignoring well known events and concentrating on the story of the almost anonymous wise men affected by the events in question, the whole nativity is given a necessary and generous human aspect. At the same time, he refuses to describe the nativity scene at all. This is a masterstroke. This really is putting benefits before features.
I marvel at this, not as a Christian — which I am not — but from the point of view of a copywriter always seeking the new angle to breathe life into the same old marketing messages and make a reader believe they are hearing them for the first time.
It is a lesson, then, in stepping back and picturing the less obvious route to description. It is also an exercise in empathy. Eliot doesn’t make his wise man focus on miracles and how the world is changing. God is never mentioned. Eliot makes the event momentous because it occurs within the limits of a normal human life.
The best writing — the best copywriting — describes our lives and shows how the subject (the product) fits into those lives. This is not just benefits over features but about imagining fully the effect of those features and understanding prospective clients so well that the benefits described sell themselves.
T. S. Eliot was not only a poet. He worked in a bank while writing poetry until he became an editor at Faber & Faber. He was no stranger to business and knew the importance of words when making deals for his publishing firm. Had he been so inclined, he may very well have been a brilliant copywriter.
