Joe Nelms's Blog - Posts Tagged "billy-batts"
I Learned All I Know About Writing From Martin Scorcese, Vodka Soaked Creative Directors and Every Bad 90′s Cop Movie
(Or “Thank God my early bosses were nice enough to beat the shit out of me.”)
You know the movie scene(s) where the eager young rookie cop shows up at the station and gets assigned to work with the salty old veteran who tells him Everything you learned at the Academy is bullshit. You’re about to learn what a real cop does.
That was kind of how my career in advertising started.
Only no one actually told me my degree was bullshit. They just dumped a pile of fifteen assignments on my desk and said they’d see me in an hour. An hour! In college, I had three months to do twelve ads.
My job was to write. To start, I needed five to ten options for each headline. Good ones. And as a newly welcomed member of the real world, I knew that if I didn’t write, I would have been fired. And if I got fired, there was every chance I'd have to leave New York. And if I left New York, I didn't know if I'd ever get back.
So I wrote.
I wrote and wrote and wrote those headlines. Some sold. Some didn’t. And then I wrote and wrote some more. After a while I got good enough that someone started letting me write scripts for radio commercials.
So I wrote.
I don’t know the exact number, but I’d bet David Lubar’s trophy case that I wrote over a thousand radio spots in a few years time. Good ones.
Then someone let me write some television commercials. The pattern continued and, soon enough, I was running my own group and working with big directors and making good money.
But here’s what happened in the mean time.
My boss threw chairs at me. My boss told me I was worthless. My boss stole my ideas. My boss threatened to send my scripts back to my old English Lit teacher to show her what a horrible writer I was (those same scripts eventually sold to my client and got produced). All different bosses, same mentoring style.
The point is I took a beating.
When the words weren’t what my boss expected. When someone had pitched the same idea an hour earlier. When my boss was aggravated he hadn’t thought of the idea himself. When she was in a mood. Whatever. I took a beating.
For years, no matter how good I thought my scripts and headlines were, no matter how delightful my mother told me they were, no matter how impressed my girlfriend was with them, I got the bejeezus kicked out of me by bosses who would often offer no more advice than Go back. Do it again. But better this time.
So I wrote.
I wrote good commercials and print ads and tag lines and whatever else was needed and a lot of it sold to clients and that made me valuable enough to hold on to and beat some more.
The beauty of this system is that you very quickly come to the realization that if you really, really have to, you can write. If you’re looking at being thrown out of the agency because you don’t nail that Campbell’s soup commercial that’s due in seventeen minutes, you nail it. You write the script. You write the headline. You write the tagline. And then you write a few extras on the way to your boss’s office.
Goodfellas came out the year I graduated. Not sure if my old bosses were big fans of the film, but looking back, I can see where they might have gotten some inspiration. Me = Billy Batts. My boss = De Niro and Pesci tag teaming me.
Only my career didn’t get buried in an unmarked grave upstate. I lived. Because I wrote.
I’m not here to tell you what an amazing copywriter I was. I wasn’t. But I did discover a little secret that changed everything – Shut up and write.
Eventually, I left advertising to write movies and television shows and novels. And the legacy of my ad career is this: Zero writer’s block.
When I work on a screenplay, there is no such thing as I’m not feeling it. When I write a novel, there is no excuse good enough for me to not put my five hundred to twenty-five hundred words on paper every single day. No one is beating me up anymore, but the scar tissue that remains is maybe the most valuable thing I own.
Find your own Pescis. Be your own De Niro. Kick the shit out of yourself everyday until you can write on command.
I promise you if I can do it, you can.
You know the movie scene(s) where the eager young rookie cop shows up at the station and gets assigned to work with the salty old veteran who tells him Everything you learned at the Academy is bullshit. You’re about to learn what a real cop does.
That was kind of how my career in advertising started.
Only no one actually told me my degree was bullshit. They just dumped a pile of fifteen assignments on my desk and said they’d see me in an hour. An hour! In college, I had three months to do twelve ads.
My job was to write. To start, I needed five to ten options for each headline. Good ones. And as a newly welcomed member of the real world, I knew that if I didn’t write, I would have been fired. And if I got fired, there was every chance I'd have to leave New York. And if I left New York, I didn't know if I'd ever get back.
So I wrote.
I wrote and wrote and wrote those headlines. Some sold. Some didn’t. And then I wrote and wrote some more. After a while I got good enough that someone started letting me write scripts for radio commercials.
So I wrote.
I don’t know the exact number, but I’d bet David Lubar’s trophy case that I wrote over a thousand radio spots in a few years time. Good ones.
Then someone let me write some television commercials. The pattern continued and, soon enough, I was running my own group and working with big directors and making good money.
But here’s what happened in the mean time.
My boss threw chairs at me. My boss told me I was worthless. My boss stole my ideas. My boss threatened to send my scripts back to my old English Lit teacher to show her what a horrible writer I was (those same scripts eventually sold to my client and got produced). All different bosses, same mentoring style.
The point is I took a beating.
When the words weren’t what my boss expected. When someone had pitched the same idea an hour earlier. When my boss was aggravated he hadn’t thought of the idea himself. When she was in a mood. Whatever. I took a beating.
For years, no matter how good I thought my scripts and headlines were, no matter how delightful my mother told me they were, no matter how impressed my girlfriend was with them, I got the bejeezus kicked out of me by bosses who would often offer no more advice than Go back. Do it again. But better this time.
So I wrote.
I wrote good commercials and print ads and tag lines and whatever else was needed and a lot of it sold to clients and that made me valuable enough to hold on to and beat some more.
The beauty of this system is that you very quickly come to the realization that if you really, really have to, you can write. If you’re looking at being thrown out of the agency because you don’t nail that Campbell’s soup commercial that’s due in seventeen minutes, you nail it. You write the script. You write the headline. You write the tagline. And then you write a few extras on the way to your boss’s office.
Goodfellas came out the year I graduated. Not sure if my old bosses were big fans of the film, but looking back, I can see where they might have gotten some inspiration. Me = Billy Batts. My boss = De Niro and Pesci tag teaming me.
Only my career didn’t get buried in an unmarked grave upstate. I lived. Because I wrote.
I’m not here to tell you what an amazing copywriter I was. I wasn’t. But I did discover a little secret that changed everything – Shut up and write.
Eventually, I left advertising to write movies and television shows and novels. And the legacy of my ad career is this: Zero writer’s block.
When I work on a screenplay, there is no such thing as I’m not feeling it. When I write a novel, there is no excuse good enough for me to not put my five hundred to twenty-five hundred words on paper every single day. No one is beating me up anymore, but the scar tissue that remains is maybe the most valuable thing I own.
Find your own Pescis. Be your own De Niro. Kick the shit out of yourself everyday until you can write on command.
I promise you if I can do it, you can.
