…and one of these lessons for copywriters is not what you might expect.
Today, February 7, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens…
…widely regarded as one of the greats in English literature.
Author of classic novels such as Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations…
…Dickens remains hugely popular to this day. In fact, his novels and short stories have NEVER gone out of print.
Highly successful in his own lifetime (his very first novel “The Pickwick Papers” was wildly popular), Dickens was also known as a philanthropist and crusader for social reform. His novels often drew attention to the plight of the urban poor and he was an outspoken critic of slavery in the USA.
Copywriters (marketers too) can learn a great deal from Dickens about influence and persuasion.
Firstly, of course, Dickens was a master storyteller and had the knack of captivating his audience…
…you might even say they were “spellbound”!
Stories can be a powerful tool to use in copy. A story-based lead, used properly, can slip “under the radar” and bypass the understandable defences people put up when they suspect a sales pitch is coming up.
Stories create a kind of hypnotic effect…
…without the reader having any idea of what’s going on.
Think about your own experience when you’ve been engrossed in a good book…
…or captivated by a movie…
…and you can realise the power of storytelling.
So, well worth taking a look at the work of Dickens and his storytelling technique.
Another interesting feature is that many of his works were originally published serially, in monthly instalments, a format that Dickens helped popularise.
This gave his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by “cliffhangers” to keep the readers looking forward to the next instalment.
People would hang on tenterhooks waiting for the next chapter. There are stories of people meeting the ship fromLondontoNew Yorkjust to shout up to the crew asking for news of their favourite characters! What happened? Are they alive? Dead? Did they escape their dire situation
People have an almost insatiable appetite to discover “what happens next?”…
…and you can use this in your own stories and copy to keep attention.
Dickens also, in effect, made use of embedded suggestions in his work…
…when he highlighted misery and circumstances that many preferred to ignore.
He didn’t need to overtly preach from a soapbox…
…it was much more effective to let people draw their own conclusions from his stories.
Similarly in copy, it is much more persuasive to present a case and let people draw their own conclusions…
…rather than “tell” them in a preachy way.
Or put another way…
…”Show, don’t tell”.
Finally, in these points of note, for copywriters…
…Dickens was an unashamed self-promoter.
“Charles Dickens: Our first and favourite literary superstar”
“When the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton was going through his papers, late in life, he appended a page of notes to the letters he had received from Charles Dickens. His old friend, he wrote, “has been fortunate in escaping the envy of fellow writers – & has aided this good fortune by a very skilful care of his own fame – watching every occasion to refresh it – he understands the practical part of authorship better than any writer”. He went on to say that Dickens was “certainly, on the whole, one of the greatest geniuses in fiction the World has produced”.
This week marks the 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth, and Lytton’s assessment still feels exactly right. Dickens was not just an incomparably great novelist, but an astute manager of his own genius, with a brilliance for self-promotion that made him the first truly modern literary celebrity.”
Note “the practical part of authorship”.
The “practical part of copywriting” is winning assignments and getting paid. For some odd reason, many copywriters are terrible at marketing their own services. There’s no need to be pushy or obnoxious about it, but you do need to do it!
It’s probably not stretching the point to suggest that if Charles Dickens hadn’t been such a successful self-publicist…
…the 200th anniversary of his birth might have passed without great fanfare.