: Re: How does one become lucid in Copywriting? I am an Advertising Undergrad and wish to become a copywriter. My writing skills are above average but I can't seem to regularly create the same quality

@Ann1701686

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One good way to answer the question is to cite how I billed for, say, a freelance print ad. I would quote a blanket fee excluding any hourly rate. The reason is I may have the headline in five minutes or it may be five days. Creativity, in short, can't be rushed.

I would encourage you to adopt a process I got many years ago from a Depression-era (I think) book written by James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas. Write down any and all words connected to a product or service. Go to an extreme in this. For instance, when I wrote copy for bacon, some of the words went beyond the obvious from "fat" and "from pigs" to "red and white," "streaky," "wavy when fried," etc. What I was doing was feeding my subconscious.

The one thing I added to Webb's idea was to write in one sentence the unique selling proposition of the product. This can be tricky as some products are no different from others. I did a campaign for pickles one time, and basically a pickle is a pickle. The unique proposition, however, was that children influenced the brand their mother bought. Hence, an animated tv spot and accompanying print drawing on cartoon characters. A previous campaign had called a pickle a "dilly," which, of course, went on my list of words and from that came "have a [brand name] dilly daily" which is a take off on "dilly dally." An idea, by the way, are two unrelated things being related as in dilly dally and dilly daily.

Good luck.

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