Wow! I just realized that January 2, 2022 will be the 15th anniversary of my career as a professional copywriter! How exciting!!!

Although I’ve been a published features writer since January 1969, thanks to my beloved mentor (actor DeForest Kelley), I didn’t hang my shingle and decide to become a full-time professional writer until fate conspired to “make it so.”  This is the sage of how it happened.

After a four-year career  at the Animal Protection Institute in Sacramento California from 1981 to 1985, where I wrote countless articles for their magazine, MAINSTREAM, and other pieces (speeches, newspaper editorials about animal welfare, etc.)  and received a kindly kick in the butt  from Creative Services Director Ted Crail (who told me “Get out there and set the world on fire. You’re a terrific writer and shouldn’t just be writing for us!”) and a 13-year career at Warner Bros/Time Warner as an executive secretary (where I also wrote lots of pieces for various newsletters and won a “Carrot Award” from the Human Resources Department and a thousand dollar bonus for writing the content of their intranet website; Bugs Bunny runs da joint, you know!), I returned to Washington State to be nearer my sisters and their families. (So much happened while I lived and worked in Hollywood that I wrote several books about my time there. You can find them here.)

When I got back to the Pacific NW I was 53 years old, so finding suitable work commensurate to what I’d done in Sacramento and Hollywood was hard to come by. I landed a few jobs at much lower rates ($10/hour, half what I made at WB): receptionist/shuttle driver/activities director at King’s Manor, an assisted living community in Tacoma; secretary/ administrative assistant to pastor Ken Ecker at Church for All Nations; brief sojourns as a secretary for an insurance agent (which lasted about two weeks because he was a twisted micro manager whose desk was about four feet from mine), an in-home care agency representative, and several weeks of working for a temp services agency.  I applied for secretarial positions — literally hundreds of them — all during this time trying to land something that paid better, but I was getting no real interest; as soon as they called me in to interview and saw that I was over 50, my prospects plummeted to zero.  So, I was one unhappy camper, feeling underutilized and unceremoniously rejected!

But I kept seeing a craigslist ad for a copywriter at an on-hold production company in University Place, which wasn’t far from my then-home in Lakewood.  I passed on it for months, thinking there was no way they’d even consider a newbie in the copywriting field. But as time went on and nothing else materialized in my favor, I finally decided, “Dammit, I already don’t have the job, so I have nothing to lose by trying to get it!”   I didn’t know if I’d like copywriting, but it was writing, which I did love, so I read three books on the subject, figured out I could do it, and picked up the phone and scheduled an interview.

When I got there, I was put through a series of writing and editing tests. After finishing those, the owner of the business called me in, said I did a great job on the tests, and asked me if I’d ever served as a copywriter before.  I told him, truthfully, that I hadn’t, but I felt confident that I could do the work. He thanked me for coming in and sent me on my way, saying he had a few other people to interview and someone would get back to me soon.

So I went home. Not long after, the phone rang. It was a lady from the on-hold company calling to tell me that although I had aced the tests, because I had no in-the-trenches experience as a copywriter, they had decided to go with someone else who had experience.  I understood, thanked her for the update, and hung up.  I felt good about the experience since I had aced the tests, though.

A few hours later the phone rang again. When I picked it up, the same lady was on the other end of the line. She asked if I was still available!

I said, “Yes…”

So she said, “The gal we wanted to hire only wants to work part-time, and we need a full-timer. Are you available to work full time?”

Again I said, “Yes.”

She asked, “Can you start on Monday?” (which was January 2, 2007.  This call took place the Friday before the 2nd.)

I said, “Yes.”

She said, “Great We’ll see you at eight, then, on Monday!”

I hung up, thinking, “What just happened?  I got the job!”  (It paid $14/hour to start but I quickly got a raise to $15/hour and health insurance benefits paid for by the employer!)

Needless to say, I went to work on January 2nd praying I’d measure up “in the trenches” and that I’d love copywriting as much or more than I loved features and content writing.  (Copywriting — sales writing — is a decidedly different animal, but I felt well-informed about how to make it work by then.)

When I arrived, I had another sit down with the owner of the business, who told me I shouldn’t expect to be turned loose for at least two months. He wanted me to shadow his two other copywriters, listen to the way they interacted with the clients, and start writing a little (under close supervision) to be sure I wouldn’t shoot them in the foot when they finally turned me loose to serve their clients. This company was the granddaddy of all on-hold businesses, with a stellar reputation, and they didn’t want to risk their standing. Totally understandable, and I was glad they wanted to do it that way, because as a newbie I felt I probably had a lot to learn.

But within two weeks, the other copywriters and boss felt I had everything well in hand so they turned me loose to reach out to as many as fifty clients every day to see if they needed new or different copy for their on-hold massages than they already had.  Many of them did, so I wrote hundreds of five, seven, eleven and fifteen second blurbs for them.

And the clients were all thrilled, accepted what I’d written as the first presentable drafts of their messages, and so they all got sent on to the production team, which consisted of well-known professional voiceover actors and technicians who would put various types of music behind the spoken words to create welcoming, warm informational on-hold messages that upsold additional services or just offered a virtual warm cup of coffee while people waited on hold.

One of the voice actors, very well-known as the voice of one of the television and radio stations in Seattle, commented to the production manager, “That new copywriter you have is terrific.”  The PM let me know this, and I was blown away. This fellow had been voicing scripts for decades and to hear something like this from him made my month!

Long story short, the last two quarters I worked there (I was there for just a week over a year), I earned their Employee of the Quarter awards for outstanding service.  I had rewritten most of their library of messages to improve them by then, in addition to serving the clients I called on a daily basis.  We parted company only because, as a small business, they said they couldn’t afford to raise my wages (the other two men were still getting the same amount after years of working there, too) so I realized I would never be able to work my way up to a decent wage there.

I left to hang my copy/content/features writing and editing shingle at Elance (now Upwork) not really knowing if I could make a go of it there, having no portfolio beyond short on-hold messages to show as a body of work plus letters of recommendation from Ted Crail at API (whose book APETALK AND WHALESPEAK had been nominated for a Pulitzer prize) and the two copywriters with whom I worked at the on-hold company.  (The owner of the company had promised me — in writing — a stellar letter of recommendation, too, but when I applied for unemployment after we parted company, he didn’t follow through because it would have negated the reason he gave for letting me go — as did the two awards I won. The Employment Security Department ruled in my favor when shown the documented facts of my service awards and the owner’s email saying he would give me a great letter of recommendation.)

I worried quite a bit that I might not be able to deliver top quality, longer-form copy that  equaled the on-hold messages I had written, so I waited a long time before hanging my shingle at Elance. I tried finding other work in the meantime (a condition of my unemployment benefits), but no one was biting, so I finally decided to throw caution to the wind as I had done when applying at the on-hold company, and in no time at all, I was getting five-star reviews at Elance for the work I did there for other clients.  And the rest is history!  I have been a copy/content/features writer and editor ever since. I love it. I have two great long-term clients who pay what the work is worth (which is a near miracle in itself) and I love what they do and who they do it for, so I’m happy as a clam.

This is a long saga, but I wrote it to underscore the necessity of going for what you want, even if you don’t think you qualify, because every time I ever have (at Warner Bros., at API, and  even with my 30-plus year friendship with DeForest Kelley),the result was AMAZING.  As Carolyn Kelley, De’s wife, so often told me, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get!”

It’s true.  You have to reach for the brass ring to get it. It doesn’t come to you; you have to proactively go after it!