Ouch. My knees hurt.

Let me clarify. Several years ago I must have swallowed two tablespoons of ground glass. Ground glass is indigestible, of course, so each of my knees thoughtfully stored a tablespoon of ground glass behind each patella. The sound, the feeling, the grind…. it makes ME sick. My knees have grossed out ex-boyfriends at inopportune moments. I once made a general practitioner wince.

As I add more and more miles on in my marathon training, my knees get more inflamed. It makes me cranky. It makes me want to stay home and live on cupcakes and give up my running, my social life and sleeping, which is often disturbed when I turn over and hit a patella.

My knees hurt.

Yesterday I visited a sports masseuse, and he, a specialist in runners, said he had never seen anything like my knees. Sidenote: he also said I had a tighter ass than LaDanian Tomlinson, a star football player for the San Diego Chargers. The therapist said this was not a good thing, of course, but STILL. I’ll take it as a compliment, dang it.

At any rate, the pain I feel in my knees will not go away with the wave of a chiropractor’s wand. It’s a systemic problem. My knees are flawed. And someone probably has to rebuild them to make them work correctly.

How does this relate to copywriting? I’m getting there….

In the last two weeks, three groups have come to me with pieces they want fixed immediately. They want one trip to the copywriter to make all their marketing problems go away. But the problems the pieces have are systemic. I can’t just change a few words here and there and POOF — perfect, effective copy appears.

Example: A group is putting together a demo of their services. “We’ve gotten all the copy approved, and we’re in the final stages,” the coordinator told me as he handed the copy to me for the first time. Oh dear. This means that I can’t do what I do best, which is to organize thoughts, group topics, make recommendations on length, style, tone, etc. It means that I should change the president’s “its” to “it’s” and hand it back with a smiley face. I couldn’t do that. The piece was in big trouble, and I tore it up.

I feel their pain. They’re going to the expert (me) to make everything work right again. My clients know their projects have problems, but it’s up to me to tell them that their projects are intrinsically flawed. And this is painful for both of us.

If I didn’t care so much, I’d probably just throw the bandage on the copy, invoice and move on. But they will not have an effective piece, and they sure won’t keep using me if the copy I help them with is not effective. So I grimace and attack the copy with a fire red pen. And I go back to the client with justifications, apologies and a heartfelt request that they don’t undertake the next project until we’ve had a chance to organize it. And most of the time it works.

But then you get clients like me who get the news that their systemic problem is going to take time, money and patience to fix, and we pay our bill so we can go home and cry.

By the way, since I’m fighting through pain, cupcake cravings and sleepless nights, don’t you want to donate to my marathon fundraising? Click here, pretty please!