Page 144 - Hypnotic Writing - How to Seduce and Persuade Customers with Only Your Words

the next project. Striving for perfection can stop you from achiev- ing any results. Go for results.
The more you do, the better you get. Quantity leads to quality. Ray Bradbury wrote 2,000 stories in order to get 200 that were clas- sics. Some authors write six books in order to have two that are worth publishing. Don’t judge your work as you write it, just write it! Crank out the stuff!
Again, I am not urging you to crank out crap. I want you to write spellbinding, unforgettable, Hypnotic Writing.
But too many writers spend too much time fiddling with their work. In the next section I give you some eye-opening ways to edit your work. Follow my suggestions, rewrite your work, and then let it go. Don’t dwell on it!
Look! Your writing can’t be perfect. Not ever!
Here’s why: If you’re writing something for an editor, that edi- tor is going to change your work. He or she will alter words, sen- tences, and passages; delete or add sections; change your title and more. You can spend all year beating your head against your com- puter screen, but no matter how much work you put into perfect- ing your writing, your editor is gonna change it. Trust me. As H.G. Wells said, “There’s no passion equal to the passion to alter some- one’s draft.”
The strange thing is, your readers will never know what your ed- itor changed! I remember sending a review to a major magazine. I polished that thing till its perfection blinded me. But when the re- view came out, the last two paragraphs—two entire paragraphs— had been sliced off! I thought the review was a mess without those last lines but no one ever noticed the change—except me. The readers simply accepted the published review as is.
If you’re writing something for the public, say a sales letter or a newsletter, you are going to have some people say your writing isn’t clear. When I wrote a sales letter on myself as a ghostwriter, some people wrote back with suggestions on how I could perfect it. One person went through my letter and highlighted—in bright yel- low—every time I used the words I or my. He suggested “I” delete those words! And when I wrote a newsletter for a client of mine,
A Case against
Perfection
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