A client asked me to write a special piece once - an important thought leadership article.
They chose me for the assignment because I was their best writer. They knew I would deliver high value and meet their specific style requests. I’m not saying this to brag, but because it matters to the story's end.
Anyway, I loved the challenge.
So I closed the door of my home office, put my headphones on, and started reading, conceptualizing, and writing. For four days, I lived and breathed this article.
A third of my time went into collecting headlines. I came up with over a hundred and presented the ten best to the client.
Another third I invested in creating three different lead-ins, each based on a distinct concept.
I knew this client had a thing for ledes. They always changed it, no matter what. I figured, presenting three options would diminish the temptation to come up with yet another one.
3 Lede Concepts
There are many ways to raise the reader’s curiosity in the opening paragraph. I chose these:
Challenge the reader and a common belief about the topic.
Ease the reader into a pleasant image that resonates with them, then create an analogy to the topic of the article.
Present the reader with contradicting arguments on the topic and create a question that the article resolves in detail.
They chose the third option.
To be more precise, the second editor did (the first was SEO). She also removed the other options, reinstating the temptation I had hoped to quash.
Killing Me Softly With Their Tweaks
The third editor - who had nothing to choose from anymore - changed one word, slightly altering the meaning of the contradictive arguments, and added tiny tweaks.
The fourth editor also made minor tweaks.
By the time the fifth editor received the piece, she was editing edits.
To the sixth editor, the concept was lost, and she gave it the final death kiss with just one more minute tweak. She removed a three-word sentence - one of the contradicting arguments.
I don’t blame her. How can you uphold what you don’t know is there?
The original idea had already gone down the drain.
I have to hand it to them, they were good editors. It was beautiful how they cooperated and reviewed each others’ work. But there’s a point where improvement becomes excessive and starts damaging the outcome.
If too many people add their colors to a mutual painting, what do you end up with? Brown. Nothing more than boring brown.
End of Story
If this was a fable, it would end with the moral: even if the client acknowledges your skills, it won’t prevent them from tweaking your work into a muddy brown word-soup without concept.
But it's not. I'm just sharing my experience, hoping it may comfort other writers with similar stories.
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