“all stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies.” – Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey

I have always been a writer.

My mum has a poem I wrote about my family, age 4, complete with crayon illustrations, in a clip frame in the family home (downstairs toilet, last time I saw…)

I wrote poems called things like ‘Shrinking Violet’ and short stories about suicide, songs (about Barbie), plays, comedy sketches, diaries – my god, the diaries – throughout my childhood and my adolescence.

Predictable.

Clichéd?

Yes.

But, none the less, that is me.

Unlike many teenage girls, with me it stuck.

One of the only constants through my life. Words. A love of them.

I studied writing at University. And I loved every minute.

18, naive, adolescent, I would sit with my fellow students smoking roll-ups, writing poetry, reading Harold Pinter plays and drinking cheap Merlot. For my coursework I wrote short stories about teenage abandonment and teenage sex and had a strange ‘quirky’ obsession with bananas. I dreamed of my future novels – literary fiction as likely to sell in any significant volumes as a detailed biography of my own little toe.

Commercial? Forget it.

So why am I talking about this now?

You’re right, I should get to my point. After all, one of the rules of great writing in any form is to capture the reader’s attention quickly, and with blogging I think this is more true than ever.

I will try. I have a bit of a stream of consciousness thing going on today though, it must be the reminiscing.

I was finishing a email marketing promo this morning on a product I have written about extensively. I have written pieces of email marketing for this same product, going to the same prospects (regardless of the churn-rate of the list – the demogrpahics stay static)… for 4 years.

And, this morning, it struck me that I have figured out a formula.

A formula that increases response rates by roughy 213.6%.

Thinking about this, and trying to find a new lead approach for the latest sales pitch, I remembered an essay I wrote as part of my screen writing work at university.

It wasn’t an essay actually, It was a ’screen veiwing journal’ – a peiece of work we were asked to write over a term to record and comment on everything we were watching. We were told to do this at the same time as studying Christopher Vogler. The Writer’s Journey.

I don’t remember everything about my viewing journal, but I do remember expressing more than an hint of anger at the situation I found myself in as a result. Seeing a formula in everything. Everything I read, watched. When you study a ’science’ behind them you start to pick up patterns and those patterns shape the way you percieve the words, the images, the stories you’re consuming.

And that, in turn, shapes your writing.

To me, then, being introduced to that world was as acceptable as subliminal messages to kill being placed in Dora the Explorer.

I remember writing, in BLOCK CAPITALS, and, quite probably, BOLD and with an EXCLAMATION MARK!! or 2, I HATE CHRISTOPHER VOGLER!!

How ridiculous.

Because, although reducing the work of many theorists – such as Joseph Campbell, and indeed writers themselves, to the level of a formula perhaps oversimplifies and therefore leads to a book that, in my opinion, lacks substance; the message and the heart of Vogler’s work (which apparently started as a 7 page memo to the film industry) is very important to me now.

It’s about recognising the patterns and using them to aid your creativity – not to stifle it.

If I was ever going to succeed, commercially, as any sort of writer, I needed a revelation.

So having served up a pretentious and much mulled-over dissertation on ‘The rise of accent as a social symbol in 20th century British literature’ and a literary ‘novel’ documenting every meal eaten in the duration of a relationship between a couple called Sally and Pete (400 short stories and imaginatively called ‘Dinner with Sally and Pete’) for my final ode to youthful artistic ignorance – yes, thanks a student loanful – I set out to get a job.

A few months later, in a long story for another time, I met an amazing, inspiring lady who ran a yoga centre in Liverpool. She was all about Zen and organic smoothies. She was old. She was ditzy. But she was one of the savviest marketers I have ever met.

She introduced me to copywriting.

And I fell in love. In love with words all over again. In a brand new way.

The revelation came.

That, in life, in my life, art had to meet commerce. No question.

And I do not do anything by halves. On the start of a journey in to writing to sell, I wanted to learn about business.

And so I did.

It was something about the emergence of Web 2.0 that really cemented my desire to be a marketing copywriter. That constant speed of ideas, that ever shifting and emerging and changing and dying world… I wanted to know it inside out and to change with it. But I still wanted to write.

Lucky me, though. Because if you have a voice, a vision, a point of view and express that artistically – new technologies mean you now have extraordinarily rich tools for producing your statements.

And businesses have extraordinarily rich tools for delivering theirs too.

Meaning I have a job.

I am very much part of this world now, somewhere in a triangle of creativity and commerce and the internet. It is where I am happiest.

Who knows what my 18-year-old self would say to now to me, sitting here writing this nine years on.

Yes. I feel comfort in those formulas.

But we have to see them. The patterns.

As writers, as marketers, formulas, analysis, they are our life-blood.

They help shape what to do next. And they shift uncontrollably from month to month, but they are there. For any writer they have to be there.

And what about creativity?

On a personal level true creativity comes from being able fuse together my left and right brain thinking to recognise quickly what works, identify why, form ever-shifting patterns in my head (or in endless streams of emails to colleagues) and then use those patterns to my ultimate advantage in writing with true freedom. The ‘lead’ on those pieces, the sizzle, putting my reader in a picture, whatever I may be doing, comes from being a creative individual.

And being truly creative, a true ‘imaginative’ writer, is something that you will not be taught. Not by a university degree, not with Vogler’s book or anything else.

You are born with it.

And I feel very lucky that I was.

Of course, I still indulge my inner adolescent, who doesn’t.

The other day my partner and I were re-watching Lost in Translation and he, quite rightly, howled loudly when Scarlett’s character said:

‘ I tried taking pictures, but they were so mediocre. I guess every girl goes through a photography phase. You know, horses… taking dumb pictures of your feet.’

… hmmm…. take a look at my personal blog…

A part of me will always be that naive 18 year old. And I wouldn’t be here without her.