In Part 1 of this series, I ended by asserting the first step toward writing good junk mail is learning to listen to the customer. Books and seminars refer to this as getting to “know your market.” In other words, who are you trying to convince to do your bidding? I should probably interject here that marketing studies outpace science in terms of understanding the human psyche, not the other way around. Salespeople teach behavioral therapists what works and what doesn’t. That’s because they have been trying to get into other people’s brains since before Freud was born. Someone recently asked if I would share a bit of advice with a young man who wants to learn ad copy writing. My first response was simple. Then the more I thought about it, the more complicated it got. That’s my chief skill: turning simple things into complications. In order to understand the stages I went through before I was able to emulate “Buy this great thing now!” I had to break it down into building blocks. The first block was learning to listen. The second block is understanding the product. When my father was studying to be an attorney, he developed the habit of reading a case from California Jurisprudence before he fell asleep and then explaining it to either my mother or me as he stood at the bathroom sink to shave his beard stubble in the morning. Our attendance was not optional. One of us had to stand there and listen no matter how bored or disinterested we were. And we had to pay attention because there was always a test at the end of the lecture. My father believed that the real sign of whether a person understood a subject thoroughly or not was the ability to explain it in such a simple way that a kindergartner would understand the basic concept. Further, he wouldn’t let us leave until we were able to repeat the concept to him in our own words. As a result of these morning lectures, I developed the habit of taking a long time to get to the point. My apologies to my children and readers. Next came writing assignments in school. Some genius teacher made us jot down everything we wanted to include in our essays as separate thoughts on separate notecards. Many an evening saw our living room floor turned into a giant game board for Composition Monopoly. The person who could arrange the cards in a logical progression of ideas and then use them as cheat sheets for their written essays got to pass Go and collect $200. Fast forward to my first job where I had to write things instead of being on a phone or in a store selling things. It started with letter writing. My boss was fabulous. He began by handwriting an entire letter for me to then type. Since I was a lousy typist, this took six or seven iterations, but he was a patient man, bless his soul. Eventually I began to memorize his patter and all he had to scribble was “Dear…you can expect to…we look forward.…” I knew the fill-in sentences. This helped build my confidence and left me with the obsessive habit of ending all business correspondence to this day with “I look forward to your reply.” Then came the software and hardware development geniuses who expected me to write their summaries of meetings and proposals. It started out as a cataclysmic failure. One boss, let’s call him Einstein, was sitting atop the back of a chair with his feet on the seat, staring at a computer screen. He called me over to take dictation on a computer keyboard. I’d never sat before a computer in my life. It went like this: “You. Come over here and enter what I say.” Me, sitting precariously and nervously in front of his feet. “Yes sir.” “The ancillary effects….Why aren’t you typing?” “I don’t know how to get the letters on the screen.” “Move the cursor to that line.” “What’s a cursor?” “Get somebody else over here.” Not a smooth start to a sterling career, but he later forgave me. Einstein’s business partner, let’s call him Tesla, walked over to my desk one day and said, “Do you know if I wore shoes to work today?” “Yes. You did.” “Where are they?” “Under your desk.” “How do you know these things?” His face mirrored astonished awe. “I can see them from here.” I was then promoted to chief note taker and forced to sit in on all technical meetings. Once a week the entire staff had to attend these meetings. Einstein sat at one end of the table and Tesla sat at the other end. In between were accounting, production, office, and purchasing managers. Within twenty minutes their foreheads would be nestled into their folded arms on the table and they would be snoring. Einstein and Tesla never noticed because they were too busy bouncing ideas back and forth. I stayed awake because my head was whipping left and right like a tennis match spectator while desperately trying to write down sentence clips I heard but didn’t understand. Later I would feed these bits of data into WordStar. (Yes, I figured out how to use a cursor and yes, it was that long ago that WordStar was our word processor.) Then I would stare at the screen and try to extrapolate words that resembled English. The screen would look like this. And create a story A logical sequence I was able I’d create one line for a single Then I’d try to find To recombine to them Moving bits around Sentence or word This became a starting point In other words, note cards on a computer screen. A little judicious rearrangement and I would present to Einstein and Tesla my version of their technobabble. “This is brilliant! How did you come up with such a clear explanation?” “I wrote down what you said.” “Really? I said that?” “Yes. I just rearranged it a little.” They promoted me to marketing manager. Note cards and my father’s endless monologues about legal cases were the tools I needed to string nonsense together into a logical format that made sense to the people who invented computer networking. This, in turn, led me to decode their gobbledygook into marketing materials that were rated as “competent” by professional copy writers. I could live with “competent.” A few typos and you get “compliment.” And that, folks, is how I learned Junk Mail Step Two. If you’re really want to sell it, you should make an effort to understand it so well you can explain it to a kindergartner.