When I started my writing business, Full Court Press, my newly hung-out shingle essentially read like Paladin's business card: "Have pen, will travel." I would take any sort of writing job, from spiffing up an individual's résumé to deconstructing jargoned computer manuals into English to cutting and pasting someone's 400-page dissertation, hustling from alpha to omega to put dinner on my dinner plate.
I found a fair amount of work in writing copy for brochures, flyers, and advertisements, as well as a species of text known as "advertorials," the linguistic equivalent of those half hour "infomercials" about hair care for men and vacuum cleaners that suck up bowling balls. The word "copy" aptly captures the essence of the work: it doesn't have much originality, since it has to fit within prescribed demands, and it can be duplicated without amendment, like photocopying. But because nothing in life pulses completely AC or completely DC, writing copy often had its own odd charms, and when it worked well, its own brand of power.
At first I thought it wouldn't be hard to do. As an English teacher I had often taught students how to recognize the subtle and blatant persuasions of the adventures of a copywriter, and I thought knowing the principles would make it easy to write the copy: just plug in the jargon and the copy would appear, like a photographic paper in developer. Not so. For one of my first assignments, a local realtor asked me to write brochure copy for a weekly mailing he did. He gave me a spec sheet about the property he wanted to sell, and from dimensions, abbreviations, and a murky xeroxed photograph, I had to write up an appealing description of 200 to 300 words. Easy, I thought -- just gum together some real estate buzzwords and I'd be done. But then the property stepped in and refused to be foreshortened. It had a distinct presence with its own theme. I had to find the property's "feel" that would convey its tangible value. In short, I had to really write and not just simply collage some real estate lingo into complete sentences. I worked on that single page of prose for three hours before I got a take I liked. (And as if to cement the message, I couldn't, in good conscience, submit an invoice for all that time, so my client got two free hours out of me.)
I don't know why this should have surprised me. For years I'd told my students that all writing was creative and that every writing task required imagination. But in my arrogance I assumed that writing copy was a step below "real writing," when in fact it required all the approaches associated with so called "legitimate" writing: developing a thesis, supporting it with facts, and packaging it in a persuasive and distinct way. Sometimes I had a particularly hard time weaving the hook through the text. In one job I had to write about a new townhouse development that would offer "affordable" housing to middle-income people. These people would be selected by certain criteria set by the management; the development would have several playgrounds and occupy seventeen acres just east of downtown. Nothing set it apart from the dozen or so other developments flaring up around the city except for the rents.
I had to write copy that would somehow make this solid but unexciting construction project attractive, but only within certain limits: I couldn't mention the word "affordable" because the client felt that that would give the development a déclassé feel, and I couldn't reveal that the management would employ selection criteria. The project manager gave me the specs for the property and sent me on my way.
I did what any good writer does: when the facts can't march off in one direction, then march them off in another. "Affordable" became "reasonable." The selection criteria became "surrounded by neighbors successful in their professions." The houses, done in the usual and cost-effective saltbox style, became "dwellings with a New England flavor." I took the raw data of the architects' plans and turned them into a series of headlines, each prefaced by the phrase "Imagine this" and ending with the tag, "All this within minutes from downtown in one of New Hampshire's fastest growing cities."
Stretching the truth? Not at all. I could verify every statement on the page. Selling a bill of goods? Not so. The purpose was to attract customers; no one was going to force them to rent if they didn't want to. More importantly, not once had the brochure asked them to open up their wallets.
I would go so far as to say that what I did as a copywriter on that job, and what every copywriter who pens a memorable phrase does, is create poetry. In writing poetry the poet aims to give the reader a "re-vision" of the ordinary through innovative word play and form, hoping to get the reader to see something uncommon in the common. Hack work -- puff pieces for local business people, simple statements of fact with just a touch of sparkle -- resembles the knock-offs of the old poet laureates, mini-quilts made of remnants for occasions no one will remember, what my friend calls "writing for bread." But good copy has the same powers of arrest that a good poem has. An ad done by one of the big electronic firms for a camcorder sports a picture of a cat knocking over a fishbowl. The water is caught mid spill; the copy says, "Technology so advanced it can freeze water." Common phrases, sifted through the pen of the copywriter, take on new meaning: "Give once. And for all." Or the writer can suggest several levels of meaning, even with Biblical overtones, as with the old Honda Civic commercial: "The shape of things to come."
To be sure, none of this will be remembered in the same way as "April is the cruelest month," and the Norton people will never compile an anthology, but that's not the point. Just because copy is words put to capitalist use doesn't dilute the inventiveness, wit, and surprise that good the adventures of a copywriter can display. It can't be shrugged off as a simple mechanical process -- some of my poetry has come to me more easily than trying to make a profile of a boring mundane local business person come alive and flatter without inflation. Perhaps the adventures of a copywriter is not haute and may never be considered part of the writer's craft by PEN, but it has its discipline and, when done well, its moments.
So the next time you chuckle at a particularly inventive line or actually stop to read the copy of a magazine advertisement, remember that there is an "ink stained wretch" out there somewhere who has, however briefly, made contact with you. And enjoying this nameless person's work offers you a small opportunity for a bit of subversion: taking on the awareness that an actual human brought these words to life throws a small wrench in Madison Avenue's master plan to subdivide the real estate of our collective subconscious. In other words, recognizing the poetry of the adventures of a copywriter recognizes the humanity of the people who write it -- and the more we do this in any endeavor in our lives, the better off we will all be.
(October 1995)