copywriting

starting back in august, i started doing some copywriting at work. it came about because my boss, the creative director (and our only copywriter at work), was going on vacation for a week, so we were trying to set things up for copy while she's out. we hired one freelancer to work on this one monster article. we hired another freelancer to work on a couple of launch campaigns where copy needed to start the week she was out. and i was supposed to handle everything else (i.e., the more technical stuff that was really just copyediting and writing headlines and subject lines).

yeah. this was also back when i was doing traffic work, too.

but i did it. and, i don't know. i kinda liked the copywriting. but also, i think it meant a lot to me that the creative director trusted me with writing copy.

back when i worked at this agency the first time, our then-vp of creative services always said i was a great copywriter. and i'd tell him he was full of it. and he'd say "but you write great e-mails explaining to the client why their changes are grammatically incorrect." and i'd say "yeah, and that's not something that's read by thousands of people, and account services has to clean out my cursing."

anyway. so now, in the past couple of weeks since i moved back to the creative department, i've been doing more copywriting in addition to my copyediting/proofreading. and, in typical mando fashion, i'm starting to doubt myself. and of course, it's a trust issue, and we all know how i am with trust.

so yes, while i'm sure the creative director means it when she says i did a great job on the copy i've written, i don't believe it. well, i part believe it, but then i think to myself, you know, she's just buttering me up so she's not the only copywriter anymore. i know my copy was shit, but she's saying it smells like roses.

this also goes back a long way. i've never been comfortable with my writing skills. i've never thought i was a good writer. and it probably stems from my last stint in college, when i applied for the same internships as some of my co-workers at the school paper, and they'd get the internships, and i wouldn't even get so much as a rejection letter until midway through the summer when i knew the internship was already going on. back then, i tried to convince myself, ok, i'm not getting these internships because i've already worked at a newspaper, so obviously they want to give preference to people who haven't had that experience.

(of course, this theory was disproven a year or so ago when this guy i used to work with at the harlingen paper who quit said job to go back to college got an internship at a major texas paper.)

i'm trying really hard to not think this way. i really want to believe that my boss thinks i'm a good writer. i really want to believe that me writing isn't an imposition to anyone in the company. (i also feel like i need to do something other than copyediting/proofing since i kept my rather large salary even though i moved to a lower position in the company when i switched departments.) i'm trying really hard to be optimistic, but i can't help but feel like the outsider in the creative department again.

i will say this, though; i have gotten a couple of puns in. ok, so maybe they were a little on the subtle side, but still, they were approved by the client, and went out to thousands of people who probably also didn't get the pun. but tens of thousands of people have seen a pun that i wrote!

it's the little things, i suppose.