I've just been reading a blog post from last year by writer/artist Austin Kleon. It's entitled 'Writing: it doesn’t get any easier' and talks about the late David Rakoff, who'd described the challenge of writing as being like "having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food".
That's enormously reassuring
Back in spring 2011, when reading 'The Writing Life' by Annie Dillard, I suddenly realised I didn't know how to be a copywriter. I could do it... but I couldn't really explain how I did it, so wasn't sure if I was doing it 'right'. Perhaps there was a better way.
In the movie of my life, this would be the part where Nicolas Cage (who's playing me) sees a beam of light shining through the bedroom curtains. He leaps from his bed and runs to his well-stocked library, scrabbling to find copies of advertising classics; dog-eared editions by Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, Drayton Bird and Philip Kotler. He pulls them from the shelves and sits on the floor reading them as the sun rises outside.
In the film, Nicolas Cage would find some kind of revelation and would walk off into a warm orange sunrise with a mug of coffee in his hand. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised he'd be missing the point.
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