Copywriting is rubbish (or, why you should look closer before joining the club)
For most careers I can think of, television is a poor recruiter. Or rather, television is a spectacularly effective recruiter, just not a very honest one.
As a boy, I was desperate for a career in the police force, based almost entirely on an unhealthy love for ‘Columbo’.
I saw myself bumbling genially through largely mansion-based murders before springing an unexpected and utterly brilliant denouement – leaving the overconfident killer with no option but to make a startled confession on the spot and rather compliantly submit to arrest. I did not anticipate a reality where I would spend Saturday nights getting chinned by inexplicably trouserless drunks, carrying plastic kebab cartons filled with their own sick.
Like police work, copywriting has also been the victim of a decidedly polished TV portrayal.
‘Mad Men’ is 33 per cent handsome brooding, 33 per cent immaculate tailoring, 33 per cent workplace drinking and whatever’s left is tossed grudgingly to the job itself.
Nevertheless, for many people it did the job without, as it were, doing the job. A generation of discerning TV viewers now suddenly saw their future lounging around a plush, over-furnished office, puffing out ingenious slogans in-between smoke rings.
And, like all the very best games of our youth, someone is obliged to come along and ruin it all. In this instance, playing the role of hard-faced, timber-thighed, bell-wielding dinner lady, is yours truly.
Copywriting is not magnificent suits and flawless hair. It is not conducted from a mostly horizontal state. It is not delivering an unforgettable monologue to an awed room of obsequious directors. It is rubbish*.
(*Well, it isn’t, but big parts of it are not quite as fulfilling as you may expect.)
If we’re embarking on an exercise in balloon popping, let us jab our pointiest knitting needle into the flabbiest amongst the bunch. Writing ceases to be a pleasure as soon as you are paid for it.
That’s not to say pimping your gift for words isn’t still a pretty marvellous way to pay the gas bill. It’s just to say that writing to someone else’s ends will, by its very nature, lack the joy of expression that may have first lured you in this direction.
What it does pose is a very different, but perhaps no less rewarding, sort of challenge. It becomes less an exercise in your own imagination and more a test of your objectivity and agility – an examination where the sole aim is to entirely inhabit a different set of aims and beliefs. Embrace this and very soon the capacity to write fluidly within restrictions will be more fulfilling than scribbling without shackles.
Tellingly, a hurdle that often strikes many new copywriters in the pelvis is the fact that they are writing without freedom. Many writers, myself very much included, enter the profession believing they were exchanging their own inky genius for the pennies of people who don’t know the difference between an apostrophe and an epistrophe.
The reality is that you will indeed be exchanging your ‘genius’ for those very pennies – except that the recipient of your words is under no obligation to treat them with admiration, gratitude or even comprehension.
It is around this point in the burgeoning copywriter’s career that they feel a unique chill – an icy realisation that their skin is thinner than a moth wing.
Yes, you have a talent for writing, so much so that others are willing to pay you for it. And now you must do an alphabetical dance for people who no more value the paid services of a copywriter than they do the vending machine that provides their mid-morning Twix.
Copywriting is largely a matter of getting it right and then hearing, often rather sniffily, why you actually got it wrong. It is a profession laced with scrutiny, judgement, ambiguity and prejudice – and one where you should expect no deference to your expertise or efforts.
Now, admittedly, I’ve made it sound awful. And it isn’t, it’s actually a rather joyful, fascinating, peculiar way to spend your awake time. But it is not, and never will be, a basilica to your creative brilliance. It’s a place where you learn to compromise, come to terms with your occasional impotence and toughen the hell up.
Perhaps I should have stuck to murder solving after all.