How to write that one good line
You need a good line. A pay-off, a call to action, or just a big, in your face WHAM BAM THANK YOU GOOD SIR bit of copy. A one-liner can be the best thing for your brand, but just how do you write a good one? And what stops it floating off into the breeze like a regrettable fart?
I’ll write several goodish lines to tell you.
DISCLAIMER:
I realise I am setting myself up for failure with this blog. What if I don’t write one good line? What is all the lines I write end up being bad? What if you just hate every single word I write and doubt the validity of my entire point?
It’s a problem we’ll deal with when the time comes.
Why do you even need a good line?
A one-liner is, in my opinion, the copywriting equivalent of an orange creme in a box of Quality Street, i.e. it is the best one.
You might dispute my choice of chocolate, but you’d be mistaken for reasons I won’t go into now.
While I always love a bit of long copy, and while if I can find a way to force a poem in I absolutely will, a one-liner feels pure. It feels clean. It feels holy. Some of the world’s most memorable ads have just used one line to get their message across, and they’ve done such a good job that they continue to bounce around in people’s heads.
Say McDonald’s to someone and they’ll say they’re loving it.
Say Dr Pepper, and they’ll ask what’s the worst that could happen?
Say Boots Opticians, and they’ll say you should have gone to Specsavers.
If you get a good line on the go, it can make your brand brilliant. But often writing less is much harder than writing more.
So how do you do it?
Start by figuring out what the hell you’re trying to say
You can’t write a good line if you don’t know what your line needs to say. So sort that out, quick. Figure out the point you’re trying to get across. Maybe you’re flogging a bank with a great mortgage deal, or a house with extra windows, or a new kind of zebra with stripes that glow in the dark. Whatever it is, find the USP and dive deep into it. You need to understand it as well as you understand your own bowel movements.
Only then can you unlock the power of the one-liner.
Ideally you’ll have a beautifully written brief that tells you a lot of this, but we know that’s not how life always works. In those situations, you’ll have to do some research yourself. Go beyond the client’s website and look at how their product actually impacts real lives. How does that zebra play into the audience’s everyday? What are the benefits of its floating stripes? Find out, sharpish.
Write loads about the thing you now understand
You can’t write a good one-liner without first writing a lot of other lines. Go hard on it. Write big paragraphs, an essay, a potentially best-selling short story. This is your chance to get all the fluff out of your head and to stretch your idea to the limits. Don’t think too hard at this point, just write. Be free, be flowing and be frivolous. If there’s a spark of something in your head, get it down on paper and run with it until you can run no further and the ink in your pen runs dry.
From this bumph, your good line will come.
Dissect your nonsense
In front of your eyes now you’ll see loads of unusable rubbish. That is a good thing. Go into it and find the stuff your brain spat out that wasn’t utter wank. Your brain’s good at that when you start pushing it. It will think of the best ideas when you least expect it, when you’re thinking of anything else, when you’re playing around and surprising it. When your brain won’t think of anything good is when you’re doing nothing, so don’t do that. Was that even a sentence? I don’t know, it’s hard to write loads of good lines one after another.
Read through the crap you’ve just written and highlight the good bits. Pull out strands, good words, or even just an essence of something and write that up. Come up with three or four decent sounding thoughts and see what you can make with them.
Hey, there’s a line in that
Take your three or four decent sounding thoughts and write them up as headlines, or thought leaders, if you want to be like that. Under each one, write some other thoughts. Break them down, make them longer, make them shorter, make them haikus. I’d absolutely make them haikus. Milk the idea until you’ve got a big vat full of other ideas, and if you’re feeling frisky, do the same thing with them too. Basically, this is a case of pushing words as far as they can go until they make some sort of sense, and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
It’s a practice that, for me, started out when I didn’t know what else to write.
Now it’s something I use every time I get a brief in to write that one good line, and it works every time.
All I need now is a brief for loads of shit lines, because I’ve got notebooks heaving with them. Any takers?
I’d like a good line please, Ash, where can I get one?
Well as you asked so nicely, you can email me at ash@ashbillinghay.co.uk or fill in this very handy contact form. I’ll write you loads of good lines to make whatever you’re selling sing.