Write from September

You can read the season a brief was written in.

The autumn work is being written now, in June, by people who are half out of the door, and it shows in the pace first. The sentences run longer. The offer takes a while to arrive. The launch date is described as though there were a great deal of room between here and it. The customer in the brief is imagined at leisure: browsing, considering, open to a story, in no particular hurry.

Then the work lands in September, in front of a person standing in a kitchen at seven in the morning, with a uniform to find, a school gate at half past, three sets of term fees just paid, and a phone held in one hand.

Those are two different readers and only one of them exists.

This is the part of the job I think is genuinely hard, and it has nothing to do with sentences. It is the imagining. A writer is a person inside a season, and the season leaks into the work: what feels urgent, what feels far away, how much patience a stranger seems likely to have. June is generous with attention. September is not, and no amount of editing fixes a draft that was addressed to the wrong month.

So the discipline is small and mechanical. Before the first line, I write down what the reader will be doing on the day this reaches them. Not their age, not their segment. The hour, the room, the thing they are already late for. Then I read the draft back as that person, and most of it goes.

A brief written in June that cannot picture a Tuesday morning in September has described a customer who will not be there.