by Kelly Ryan Harriger
 
 There’s a popular belief among writers that if you want to write well, write every day.
 
After working over fifteen years as an advertising and marketing copywriter, I’d amend that to say: If you want to write well, write every day, and then let an editor or creative director rip it to shreds and make you rewrite it. Not once, not twice, but over and over until you lose track of your rewrites, and sometimes yourself.
 
Sounds harsh, I know. And it is, for a while.
 
But once you embrace this unique grind, you’ll discover one thing very quickly. It makes you a better writer, because you’ll come to realize that if you want your work to be the best, then you must learn to look at it with a cold, critical eye, and remove all your personal attachment to that work while it’s still in the construction phrase.
 
If you can do this, you’ll be able to reduce it all to basic elements, a necessary step in building a sound piece of work. Treat every word as a brick, every sentence as a wall, every paragraph as a room, taking care to place each one properly, to the best of your skills, until you find yourself with a carefully constructed building built upon a very solid foundation.
 
Any piece of writing not built this way, with lazy phrasing, poor word choices, and careless construction will be difficult to read, difficult to comprehend, and won’t succeed at getting your point across. In advertising, this generally means the product or service didn’t catch on, and you’ll be fired from the account. Advertising is a harsh climate. It can be glamorous when it goes well, and a bloodbath when it doesn’t.
 
Although I grew up wanting to be a writer, I didn’t think to get into advertising as a copywriter. When I was young, I loved art, and had a knack for it. I studied advertising design in college, and got a degree in Communication. My first job in advertising and marketing was as a graphic artist. I only drifted into copywriting because I found myself making suggestions to the writers I worked with, and then watching them use my ideas and taking credit for them when successful.
 
I asked my creative director if I could get involved in not only producing the graphics for ads, but also participate in the writing elements. She immediately liked what she saw, and within a week I was promoted to copywriter, and replaced one of the writers who’d used my suggestions without credit. This writer was moved to a home mortgage account, which was as exciting as writing about dirty socks. As I mentioned earlier, advertising is a harsh world, and your fortunes rise and fall with your latest win or loss.
 
Within a year, it became clear that my strong point was “long copy,” a phrase we used to describe anything that wasn’t a snappy headline. In big agencies, writers were generally lumped into two categories. You were either a snappy headline person, someone great at coming up with catchy phrases, or you were a body copy writer, who wrote all the stuff that followed. While I liked the idea of catchy headlines, I really enjoyed writing all the stuff that followed, because I felt like I was writing something of substance.
 
I also knew that the snappy headline folks were on the front line, and it was typically their work that received the most scrutiny from clients. When writing got shot down in a client meeting, the first thing to go was the latest snappy headline. Body copy was scrutinized, but rarely attacked violently in client meetings.
 
The process was fun, to a point. When we’d first get an account, it was all creativity. The entire group assigned to the project went into full creative mode, and there’s nothing more exciting that being with a group of creative people during the brainstorming sessions. We were given a lot of leeway to come up with ideas, and the sessions often lasted beyond work hours and often involved creative stimulants, legal or otherwise. In these sessions, surrounded by other creative people, we built our own little pressure cooker that forced good ideas out into the open. Nothing was off the table, good or bad. Often, we’d hear a bad idea, but the bad idea triggered a good idea that we could run with, and make into something. Most of what I learned about writing—particularly for advertising and marketing—emerged as a direct result of those sessions. So what did I learn? Little things, detail things, important things.

I learned that leading with a question instantly engaged a reader, even if they weren’t looking to be engaged. I learned that the shorter the phrasing and the smaller the words, the easier it became to keep the reader engaged. I learned that when you write a three-sentence paragraph and start each sentence with the same phrase, you’ll focus a reader’s attention.

I learned that. And a lot more.

But there was just one problem, and it was a common one among copywriters. We all thought we should be off writing screenplays, poems, plays, great journalism, and the Great American Novel. We all had this vague, queasy feeling that we were somehow prostituting ourselves by being copywriters, and we didn’t like it. Every copywriter I’ve ever worked with had dreams of writing outside of work, and only a handful ever really broke away to work on their own projects.

There’s something to be said for being good with words, and being paid for it. For many (perhaps most), copywriting became an end in itself. It was a compromise to be sure, but at least they were writing and checks were coming in. It was an uneasyalliance formed at the intersection of commerce, creativity and common sense. I came to like it, and found time to write about things that mattered, using all the tools I’d learned while writing about things that didn’t matter. But there’s something to be said for writing every day about things to which you have no personal attachment. You
come to realize that it’s not the reader’s job to comprehend what you’re writing… it’s your job to write something clearly understandable, something that engages them and communicates your idea.

Copywriting allowed me to see words, sentences and paragraphs as simple building blocks, as individual elements in something greater. To create something greater, you had to choose your building blocks carefully, without emotion or personal attachment. In that daily practice, I learned to identify an objective, plot a path, choose my tools, and carefully arrange them to get to my destination as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s a path I’m happy to have taken, even while having doubts along the way. Henry Miller, in his book “The Tropic of Capricorn,” refers to advertising as one of the great evils of American culture. It operates by manipulating the two most powerful emotions in humans: Fear and Desire. He’s not wrong, but you can do the job with a clear conscience if you do it honestly. I know I always did my best to do it honestly.

The end of my career came suddenly, with the crash of the tech market while I was working as a senior copywriter and lead content writer for a financial services dot.com startup. The layoffs hit the entire industry, and jobs were nowhere to be found. I was in my early forties, and within that industry, I was an old man, and no longer employable. I did what many of my colleagues did… I packed it in and took off for a less stressful
environment.

And now I’ve found myself in western Pennsylvania, finally doing what I’ve always wanted to do. I’m writing whatever I want, whenever I feel like it, and not worrying about making money doing it. I’m thankful for the copywriting career I had for most of my working life, and for the tools it gave me, tools I’m still using daily. I’m finally writing for myself, and for the first time in my adult life, I might even be mildly happy.