Yo,
by Greta—Age 52—Freeland, MI
I have spent my professional life as a writer, but it’s not like you think. I am a copywriter, writer of brochures, trade ads, direct mail, radio spots, billboards, posters and Powerpoint presentations. Marketing communications, we call it. Marcom. The Ad Biz.
One of the most charming men I’ve ever met, a gorgeous Englishman named Alan, was also a copywriter, a writer-for-hire, a spinner of words designed to cascade convincingly from the mouths of inarticulate corporate executives whose natural idiom is profit, not prose. We were both expert at the lucrative practice of transforming half-formed ideas into inscrutable blather. Neither one of us was especially proud of it, but we did it well.
I explained to him that in the U.S., black people sometimes greet each other with “Yo, nigger,” and, before he was killed, Gianni Versace was said to greet his gay friends with “Yo, bitch.” I admired these combinations of affectionate greeting and denigration-by-shared-demographic. I convinced him we owed each other no less, and thus “Yo, Copywriter” was born.
It’s not that writing copy for commercial purposes doesn’t have its rewards. Although the intent is almost always persuasion, the work itself can be interesting and gratifying. Inside the ad agency, one’s colleagues are bright and talented. Copywriters and graphic designers by day, most secretly harbor the wish to write poetry or novels, paint or draw. Unless they are hopelessly cynical, their inner artists propel them to seek truth and beauty in the daily grind, always trying to elevate the mundane sales argument into something more subtly nuanced and visually compelling. The clients, though generally averse to too much creativity, are well-mannered, well-educated and well-groomed. Compared to long-distance truck driving and fiftieth story window-washing, it’s not a bad way to make a living—as long as you don’t let it go on too long.
A few years back, Alan left copywriting and his family behind and traveled to South Africa and who knows where else. I, too, am in the process of relinquishing my identity as copywriter and moving on to other choices.
Yo, copywriter. Affection plus denigration equals intimacy among peers. The difference, of course, is that, blackness and gayness are not choices. Copywriting is. The other choice, to take a chance on being a real writer with no guarantee of success—that is the road not taken. Not yet anyway.
Yo, writer.
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