The Write Way To Success

Way back in 1984, fresh out of university with an excellent degree in English and Art History, and determined to be a writer, I got my very first job as a freelance copywriter. And although it was not exactly what I had in mind, it paid off in spades for the rest of my life.

That first job was working for what became McCann Erickson, one of the biggest advertising agencies in the world. It was there that I learned so much about what being a writer entailed. For a start, I learned about the importance of knowing what type of person exactly constituted my target audience.

In fact, if the account executive responsible for managing the client account had done his or her job properly, the brief you were given would have the target audience very precisely detailed. Whether they were male or female, what social group they belonged to, what occupational fields they worked in, and what their life aspirations and spending habits and preferences were.

The idea was to at least meet, even better to exceed, the target audience's expectations, to underpromise and over-deliver whatever product or service you were trying to sell.

I also learned to work to very tight deadlines. The great thing about deadlines is that there is nothing better for focusing your attention and concentrating the mind.

In time, I had made such a good impression on the competition, in the form of other ad agencies, that I was headhunted, not once but three times. The third time I was headhunted was by The Manchester Evening News, the biggest newspaper outside of London. And it was there that deadlines really were demanding in the extreme. Now, instead of being given a week to come up with a solution, I was given a matter of only hours and minutes, if I was lucky.

I well remember more than one occasion when I got a call from the newspaper typesetters at three o'clock in the morning when I was at home, tucked up in bed and fast asleep. The city was forty miles away, and they gave me just 45 minutes to get dressed and rush to the city, to sit and write two pages of the newspaper somebody had forgotten needed writing.

The printing of the entire newspaper depended on me getting a massive amount of copy written on the fly in time for the typesetters to set up, and start the printing process for hundreds of thousands of newspapers. That my friends is pressure. The upside was that I was able to fully justify charging the newspaper a pretty penny for my efforts.

Like the process at the printing works, I became a very well-oiled machine. I was able to produce masses amounts of text at the drop of a hat, with very little by way of a briefing to go on.

The important thing to remember is that by being super efficient, you can become prolific, which means you can potentially make a great deal of money.

One more thing you have to do to be successful is to be able to come up with what is called that One Big idea. Try to think about how an ideology works, such as conservatism, capitalism or even communism. Let me try to make this a little easier for you.

Back in the 1980s, the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher came up with the idea that Great Britain had to be run along the lines of a corner shop. And what is a corner shop? It is above all, a small centre of profit.

So the big idea was that no longer was a hospital a place dedicated toward helping sick people to get better, but was now a center of profit. A school was no longer a place that was dedicated to giving a nation of schoolchildren a good basic education, again, it was now a center of profit. That was the Big Idea that permeated British society at all levels. Everything was a vehicle dedicated to that which Capitalists idolized, making a profit.

How does that work in writing? Easy. Are you going to write a political tract masquerading as a novel, like Robert Tressell's Ragged Trousered Philanthropists? Or write a Hollywood screenplay for an epic blockbuster to promote, or criticize, American Imperialism. One example is the highly successful film franchise Avatar. And are you going to dedicate all of your writings to that One Big Idea?

One more way of explaining the Big Idea is by the use of what is called Fractals. What is a Fractal? A perfect example of a fractal is what is called the Mandelbrot Set.

What you can clearly see in the above image is how each protrusion is a perfect copy all of the other smaller ones. A basic shape that is capable of being scaled up or down.

Another thing I learned in those very fruitful years was the importance and the benefits of having an eclectic mindset. Yes, you can be very successful by developing a niche. However, my forte was in being able to write about a very wide variety of subjects. And to this day I still avoid the trap of writing about only one subject area. If you take eclecticism to your heart, you will never get bored or go stale by forever writing about the same old thing.

One more thing I learned was how to deal with writer's block. There were a few times when I was so hard at work writing, I would suddenly freeze up. Some people talk about brain fog, I got the odd acute attack of brain freeze. I just did not know what to write next. To make matters worse I had a pressing deadline to meet. I then did something that appeared totally counterproductive to trying to meet a deadline. I got up from my desk and went out for a walk. That is what you have to do, get up and walk away from it.

***

Now, at the age of almost seventy, that commercial writing career is far behind me by some forty years! Yet once you learn the type of things I mentioned above, you never lose them. I am now retired and working on my writing harder than ever. I am in fact a full-time creative writer, once again chasing the ace, that One Big Idea across a very wide range of topics and styles.