Striving for the Great American 30 Second Spot
A guy writing a book for aspiring writers recently asked me this question: “Did your experience in advertising benefit your (fiction) writing in any way?”
Here’s the answer:
In every way you can imagine. The greatest challenge every writer faces is the blank page. Something has to get you to start writing stuff down. This can be extremely daunting if your only motivation is sheer willpower. When you’re a professional copywriter, there are plenty of 
people more than willing to relieve you of this personal responsibility. Clients, for example, and their proxies: creative directors, account executives and spouses interested in paying mortgages. So what you must learn right out of the gate is to write something quickly, under intense deadline pressure, that’s good enough to allow you to keep writing and keep getting paid.
Everyone has different ways of handling this torture. For me, it was an ability to slip into a delusional mental state that denied the existence of any of the above-described pressures. In this self-induced calm, my imagination had a chance to conjure and create, usually to fairly good effect. The same mental state seems to work well for fiction, and I think helps me stay productive.
Another basic requirement of successful fiction is a strong narrative voice. We’re taught in advertising to keep the copy conversational, to write the way people speak. Which is usually in sentence fragments. Grammatically iffy. But highly readable.
When writing radio and TV commercials, I wasn’t only drafting the copy, I was casting potential talent, framing out the type of people I needed to fulfill the spot’s objectives. So I needed to literally hear my characters’ voices in my head. This became a habit that easily transferred to fiction writing.
Writing to a fixed space or increment of time is another important discipline that copywriters have to master. In a print ad, what’s called the body copy usually exists in relation to a headline, visual, logo and mouse type inserted by the client’s highly imaginative legal staff. In the newspaper business, it’s called the copy hole. Art directors have been known to call it the grey area (the ones that give you an exact character count you’re supposed to hit). Copywriters call it the difference between continued employment and professional disgrace. So you have to learn how to express the required message in a preordained number of words. 
Or number of seconds. In TV it’s usually thirty. In radio, sixty. Give or take the sign-offs and disclaimers at the end. Of the two, I think radio is the best practice for fiction writers. TV spots are little movies, fictions for sure, but, as in the big movie business, the visual elements often dominate, and the writer on the set has the respect and authority only slightly above the director’s production assistant’s intern. In radio, words matter, and, like an adult book, there’re no visual aids. Both forms rely on manipulating the theatre of the mind, using language to engage and seduce the audience into buying into your artificial reality.
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