A Day in the Life of a Copywriter

Read this as the cynical piece of fiction it is. I love all God's creatures on both sides of the ad biz. That's right; AEs are people too!

[From 2002]

Been up since 5:30 and 9:30 seems a lot like 3:00 except that it isn't blessed with the same proximity to 5 in the PM. By this time, I have already worked out and fallen asleep at my desk twice on average -a full day by any standard. Of course, once I get lulled into this routine, I will be assailed by some beastly workload for two weeks and nary see the sun. There really is little attention paid to the idea of pacing in the ad biz. Copywriters are either bored or near manic.

Luckily, I take prison-grade meds so I really only ever get up to “moderately concerned.” That's like DEFCON 3 or 2.75 in this industry. 

At this point, I think of my dad, the programmer of something called “UNIX”. He is probably typing a never-ending stream of lines of enigmatic gibberish like "body,td,a,p,.h{font-family:arial,sans-serif;}" 

What is that crap? And why is there a smiley face at the end of it? What does the "family" unit have to do with Google.com? Looks like the Pythagorean theorem exploded or something. 

Anyway, at least when I type my three hundredth variation of "More [insert benefit], Less [insert a cost or expense], I know what I typed is English and so will a wide range of people outside the weezing-porn-mongering-basement-dwelling-computer-programming community. I am communicating and that is a start.



Side note: One could make a good living as a copywriter creating taglines by the "more of x = less of y" formula. The true sign of a hack is the old "more this/less that" line. Or even the dreaded super stealth reversal "Get [Insert: receive, desire and so on], Pay Less. You can mix it up too with something like "All the [Something good], none of the [Something bad]. 

My boss missed class that day it would appear. Then again, maybe they don't touch upon that high-minded type of thing at East Central Agriculture and Figuring College....I know it was something like that.... Never lived or worked outside of this area. Ouch! What an awful fate. But, is not my lot to wonder why but simply to do and die. If I were meant to do really good work, I would have been born with talent anyway. 



Back to the point at hand, which is….I should have one by now…Right! Day in the Life of a Copywriter! I knew I had a theme here. 

So now it is about lunchtime. I will drive the three miles to my house bitching about traffic totally unaware of how silly that must sound to people in a real city. Once home, I will try to milk every second out of my obligatory 60 minutes of mid-day freedom. Then I will get back to work 15 minutes late. Nobody will care because everyone else will be about 30 minutes late getting back.



I should take some time here to define some terms.

“Late” is a term that conjures feelings of fear and dread in the hearts of the average cubicle-dwelling office stiff. Not so for the creative professional. “Late”, for us, simply means not on time and “on time” means what “30 minutes late” means to the office lackey. When creatives are late, nobody goes looking for us or writes us up. No, account “people” and other noncreative types just nod their heads and lament the fact that they can’t get a normal/mentally stable human to do our jobs…which they can’t. 

All creatives ,by nature, are mentally unbalanced in some way or another. I am no exception. As I said, I take enough meds to sedate a silverback gorilla on a meth binge. Otherwise, I would surely have sent more than one account executive flying off this mortal coil and numerous pieces. It is our madness, however, that feeds our drive to create. You are basically stuck with us as we are. Don’t question it. Just understand that, though we do get paid to be smartasses and we rarely have to observe most company policies, we do, in fact, suffer for our art. The only reason you talk to us at all is because you can’t see in our minds. If you could, you would run screaming to the nearest church to be sure.


Though all fairly dangerous, the most depraved and menacing of all creatives are the copywriters. Whoa unto he who attempts to tame one. Oft times you’ll find one of our number working covertly – wearing a tie to work and playing nice with the suits. Don’t be fooled, even the domesticated copywriter is debauched beyond redemption. 

Our minds are filled with billions upon billions of obscure pop-culture references to be called up and inserted into our work to amuse only other copywriters. The things that make us laugh generally fall somewhere between slapstick and macabre.

When a group of copywriters is happened upon or overheard by a junior account executive, 9 times out of 10 the words “blasphemy” and “evil” are used by that AE later to recount the encounter. Salty, old-school copywriters often boast of the account managers he/she has sent into therapy as though he/she were gabbing about some woodland creature shot during the last weekend’s hunt to be have its head mounted on his/her wall. (A truce of sorts has been declared in recent years and a cold war has thus ensued.)



It is not as though we view corporate types as the enemy (though sometimes we do and attempt to terminate them with extreme prejudice but only the ones who “have it coming”), we just find them amusing and enjoy confusing them. If sometimes one or two are permanently damaged, we apply the “eggs to make an omelet” metaphor and move on. After all, we are only being true to our nature. Would you fault a snake for eating a mouse? 

It would appear that my day-in-the-life theme has degenerated into a glimpse-into-the-world-of-a-copywriter theme. That happens.

Another thing about copywriters; we cannot be expected to write more than 300 words without completely losing sight of the original idea. If you need somebody to write you a damn book, call an out-of-work journalism grad. They need the work and bad. We write four to five words at a time. As for grammar and punctuation, we have a proofing department for that.



On the topic of other “writers”, let me say this, “Suck it.” If I had a dime for every time some “real” writer told me that what I do is the work of the man or that it was not writing at all, I’d put those dimes in a sack and beat the next out-work-author I met to death. I would not have to lug those dimes around long either. You can’t throw a rock without hitting a struggling “writer”. Unfortunately, you can’t go to a Starbuck’s without running into 20 of them writing about the cosmic significance of being hit by that rock either. Like roaches they are.

By the way, I make more than three newspaper writers put together and twice as much as the average freelance writer. While most writers languish in some crap job waiting tables while they talk about writing the next great-American novel, I am well paid and generally content with all things (because of the meds I can now afford) while I talk about writing the great-American novel. 

Copywriting is a good gig all around but you are born into it. You can’t fake this kind of weirdness. The requisite disturbing family history and mild mental illness are not things you wish on people but it seems to be the formula for a good copywriter. If you want be a copywriter, you either are one already and just haven’t figured it out yet or you are headed for a brief period of humiliation and aggravation followed by a prompt change of careers. The Great Wind takes care of things that way. 



Now if I could only figure out what mix of nature and nurture spawns account executives, maybe I could nip that in the bud and save us all some headaches. Something tells me they would just come back stronger and less interesting. After all, that’s really what madness is – interesting. Who needs sane people anyway?



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