A woman recently contacted me. She just won a creative writing contest put on by a local newspaper and now envisions herself making money from writing – copywriting no less. At the risk of sounding like some self-important nabob who owns secret knowledge about the Zen of writing, I am discouraging her from joining the “field†– and I do this as a reflection of my own long, sad, and insignificant career.
Offering encouragement to enter commercial writing makes me think of one addict showing another where to put the needle. The bulk of my product is bland by any comparison. I have taken some short trips into creative writing, but nothing has stuck mostly on account that I have trained as a commercial writer. Now it’s a bad habit – an addiction from twenty plus years of ends meeting means. Not comforting in the least is the idea that had I not been such a fucking “accidental†novice I may have penned as many as five novels by now. What is even more pathetic is that I know their titles. I feel like a lonely mother who remembers the names of long-dead children. Of course, had I done so I probably wouldn’t have gotten married to the most wonderful woman in the world and had two really terrific kids. But I constantly wonder about my other life… what I could have been… the stories I could have told. The drawer is filled with dozens more that have never been given enough oxygen to grow and thrive.
I implore all writers who may be thinking about taking that all-important first leap into commercial writing to turn their backs and forget about it. From personal experience, I can tell you that it’s not a dream job and it can be a living nightmare – especially for those of us who are gifted enough to have the ability to do something else with their talent; something other than adding to the heaps of advertising crap that’s produced every day.
Aside from my “lost children,†I also think about the writers who escaped the temptation of “easy money†and went on to succeed as authors: JK Rowling who toiled as a single mother with an hourly wage and went on to write a stunning series of books based on stories she told her son; Patrick O’Brian who was a researcher almost all his adult life until one day he began writing wonderfully detailed and artful stories about a Royal Navy captain and his surgeon; and Frank Herbert who at age 47 had the balls to give up being an advertising executive to write a fantastic tale about a revolution in a distant galaxy. The list goes on… hundreds of writers who went on to be successful authors… and any one of them could have stayed home with their simple, safe occupations and failed to pen much more than titles for books never written.