Zestful Blog Post #243
Earlier this year a friend called to see if I’d be
interested in writing some marketing copy for a product line she was working
with. The money was attractive, the work wouldn’t take a lot of time, and I felt
I could produce quality copy, so I said sure. (Not gonna mention product or
company, cuz confidentiality.)
“We want to be edgier than we’ve been up to now,” she said. With
that in mind I wrote up a few ideas. After she reviewed them, my friend seemed
concerned that the material was too
edgy.
I said, “Well, you don’t really know where the edge is until
you go over it and have a fail.” The concept wasn’t new, but I felt it worth
mentioning. “Therefore,” I went on, “you have to be ready to accept and
tolerate a failure. Then you know.”
Push through to failure, learn from the fail, let the fail
suggest and help shape the next thing—early humans were doing this before they
could paint horses on cave walls. But I got to thinking about writing, and
being in the writing biz. For us as for almost everybody, it’s easier to avoid
risk than court it. If a story succeeds, why not just write that same one—essentially—over
and over? Imitate what others are doing. If you see something that looks like
an edge, pull back. Why not watch and wait, and let somebody else go over it
first?
Because if they find an air current and start to soar, you’ll
be standing there wishing you’d had the guts. If they plunge down onto the
rocks, you might feel relieved, but sooner or later you know they’re gonna crawl
back up to the top. They’ll be wiser, plus they’ll have a tale of survival to
tell…and perhaps monetize.
[Where are the edges here? Hm, maybe they depend
on one's point of view… [photo by ES]]
The edge isn’t in the same place for everybody. And there
are different classes and categories of edges, if you think about it. And hey,
a scary edge could turn out to be false when you really get close, and you see there’s just a little gap that you
can leap easily, or build a little bridge with yonder log. We all know these
things deep down.
What’s the definition of edge, for the likes of us? It’s the
place beyond which your end users will not go. The place where you start to
lose more readers than you gain. That might be OK, depending on what you want. Edges are there to tempt us and teach us.
Have you ever known anyone to live a fail-free life?
Can you have fun testing an edge?
Is this all metaphor, or is it real?
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