In partnership with
{{first name | friend}}!
A client sent me two drafts of the same story last week and asked which one to send.
Draft one was airtight. Clear structure, three points, clean close. I read it and forgot it by the time I opened my next email.
Draft two was messier, she'd basically just typed out what happened, no real shape to it. I read that one twice.
Here's how that happened, best I can explain it: draft one was all frame, no feeling. Draft two was almost all feeling, barely any frame.
Neither one was actually finished. But draft two was closer, because you can always add structure to something true. You can't add truth to something structured.
Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Viktor.
Your creative brief is due Friday. Viktor wrote it Tuesday.
Tell him the campaign. Viktor pulls last quarter's performance from Meta and TikTok, scrapes competitor ads, drafts the brief, posts it for review. You edit, he ships the creative requests to your designer. Inside Slack.
3 things about that ratio:
The human part has to come first. Structure doesn't create the feeling in a story, it just holds the feeling once it's already there. Try to engineer emotion through structure and you end up with a template wearing a costume.
The 30% still matters. Pure feeling with no shape just rambles. Structure is what turns a real moment into something a reader can actually follow to the end without getting lost.
Most people build it backwards. They open with the outline hook, three points, tidy close, then try to sneak the humanity in near the end, usually as one soft sentence before the sign-off. By then it reads like decoration, not truth.
2 lines worth stealing:
"Feel real. Then guide."
"You can add structure to something true. You can't add truth to something structured."
1 question for you:
Look at the last thing you wrote. What percent of it was actually true to what happened, and what percent was just there to organize it?
Stephen
P.S. If you sent me your last draft right now, I'd bet money it's closer to 70% structure, 30% human. Most first drafts run backwards. Worth checking before you hit send.
