Hello.

So I have decided to make a conscious effort to write. Being that I started the first sentence with ‘so’ and this one with ‘being’, I can tell that it’s already going well.


This is me.


I want to be a writer, in any capacity.
But the problem is that no one wants a writer these days. It’s a dying [dead?] skill, one that is constantly being taken for granted.
Sure, everyone can write, one might argue. But everyone cannot write well. Perfectly normal people in every other capacity have trouble putting together a cohesive sentence. It seriously baffles my mind. And it's not only poor grammar, a complete disregard for punctuation, and hideous fragments, but also a complete lack of originality and structure. But it’s okay, we can just use pictures to express everything...






THE TRUTH IS, WORDS ARE DEAD.

I thought that being copywriting in advertising would be the ultimately cool career choice for me because I could essentially get to write whatever the hell I wanted, creatively and without boundaries. But also, I would get paid. So with these threads of knowledge, I set out to become a copywriter.

As it turns out, advertising writing has a very specific form and meter. There are certain ways in which you have to write, certain errors you have to inherently know how to avoid, and then there are the errors which you must commit. There are sentence fragments and run-ons, made up words (which I have no problem with) and most of all, a subjectivesubjectivesubjective view of each and every one of these components. Ads today focus on saying as little as possible with actual words. Why use words and make people go through the arduous task of reading when they can just look at a pretty picture?

Sure, I’m creative. Sure, I can think outside the box (blah blah blah). There is this other box, though, that I am trying to climb into but can’t quite fit. It’s not that I am too large, but I have a lot of rough edges that need to be smoothed out. Because it’s actually not a box at all, but an odd shape of which I don’t even know the name. It’s the advertising box. It’s where the speak, the lingo, the inside track resides.

Thinking outside the box (which is by the way the most trite and overused “creative” phrase out there, one that I have been hearing since I was in kindergarten) implies that you are the architect of your inventions, that they can soar to whatever heights you wish to take them. But sadly, as I have come to learn, that is terribly terribly untrue. You simply have to learn to think and express yourself in a certain way to succeed in the business of advertising. Or the business of whatever you might be doing.
Even Sylvia Plath was a rigid conformist to meter and verse in poetry, even if she invented her own; she stuck to it rigidly and is now revered as one of the genre’s technical masters.


As a side note, Blackberry Pearl Flip is the stupidest thing I have ever seen.


At first I was mad about the touch screen blackberry, but this is the worst.

And closing thoughts...

"Timing is everything. That's really cliche. Now. But if I would have said that a long time ago, it would have been really original."
-Demetri Martin.