The Writer’s Life…A Couple Billion Keystrokes And Counting

I  can’t speak for all writers, because I’m only this one and that’s really all the opinion I am entitled to.

For the past 55 years, all I have ever really known myself to be is a writer. And one of the things I learned about myself as a writer, was that my mind gravitated to all kinds of different places in this particular universe.

At first I began writing little bits of fluffy blank verse poetry. They were mostly observational, and light hearted. But then again I was very young and my experience in the world was fairly  limited.

But very early on, I realized that my writing, in addition to being a way to capture my thoughts, was also a journal of my life. I consider myself fortunate to have realized this when I did, because it gave me some perspective.

My writing also paid. It won me a scholarship to Glendon College, where I lasted the better part of only two years, after being advised, and not maliciously, to get out into the world and make my mark, so to speak, and that any degree I received in the arts would only actually qualify me to teach, and the person who advised me knew I was not built that way. I was a doer.

After leaving college, I knocked around in the retail business, and wrote at night. This is a habit that has stayed with me my whole life. I like the idea that while everyone was asleep I was toiling away in the world of words. There was something romantic about it, and as it turns out, also quite addictive.

Not long after that I left school I discovered that I had an affinity to advertising. I liked the cleverness of the better advertising I saw and was pretty sure that I could emulate that.

As it turned out I could. And so I did whatever I had to so to get myself into the advertising business, starting with a small mom and pop agency that had another writer there who was a lot older than me and who taught me all the basics of copywriting. This was definitely an eduction I would never have received in any school.

Three years of this allowed me to jump to one of the biggest agencies in the country at the time, where much to my delight I encountered a couple of Americans who saw that I had the basics and taught me how to put the icing on the cake, so to speak, and develop ideas that would penetrate the resistance of the average consumer. This led to a 20 year career in the upper echelons of the worker bee class of advertising writer in Toronto, which meant winning awards and having account guys in the agency bring you ads that needed a great headline, because you were the guy.

Once I had gotten the hang of advertising, I started to experiment with other kinds of writing. I was still writing a lot of blank verse poetry and would have been perfectly content to keep on doing that if it hadn’t been for people like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell (all of whom I have actually met), who showed me the real majesty of rhyme and rhythm.This led me directly into lyric writing.

At first I emulated my idols but thanks to Terry Clemens, one of the guys in Gordon Lightfoot’s band, I was able to turn that corner and get away from the derivative stuff and find my own voice, so to speak.

The funny thing was, however, that I really wasn’t seeking a career in the music business. It was just another form of writing I loved to work in. If I could write a lyric and sing it to myself in a couple of different ways, that was all the gratification I needed.

I had been around the music business for quite a while, as my wife was in it full time for a number of years, and saw just what a circus it was, and that you would have to devote both body and soul to it if you were going to achieve anything. Over the years I hooked up with a couple of great musicians like Gerry Mosby and Greg and Dave Fitzpatrick and we made some great little songs. But it was never gonna be my career, even though it was theirs.

My interests were too varied for me to want to specialize in any one genre of writing. So I just kept messing around.

I think it was seeing the movie Chinatown that got me interested in screenwriting. I had always been a huge fan of great screenwriters, like Quentin Tarantino, William Goldman, Shane Black, and Robert Towne. But there was something about Chinatown that really intrigued me. Perhaps it was the desperation of some of the characters coupled with the intense and often self destructive curiosity of others that drew me to it. It was all pretty extreme.

So I began a new phase, that lasted on and and off for a good twenty years. I even took a trip to Los Angeles with Heather to scope out if it would be a good place to live, because back then, and for at least the first ten years of your screenwriting career, that’s where you would have to live.

But to us both LA was basically way too spooky a place. The heat which seemed to permeate everything and the creepy stillness of the nights there just gave us a very dark vibe. So I let it pass.

I left the advertising agency business after about 20 years of what, in retrospect, was a hell of a lot of fun, and went on my own. I had all the intellectual equipment, the attitude, the skill sets in strategy and execution and the easy confidence to make people comfortable that their advertising would be in good hands with me.

And I realized, shortly after I went on my own, that all the other kinds of writing I did: the 13 screenplays, the 400 lyrics, the ton of reviews I did for my Couch Potato Chronicles emailers, all of this was just a bunch of hobbies, because each area was a world unto itself and in order to really achieve success you would have to stay focused on just one, get inside it, figure it out and eventually conquer it.

And when I realized that, I finally understood that I had already done all of that in advertising. And I continue to do that, and support my hobbies right up to this day. In fact, Over the past two years I even have added a new hobby, which is short story writing. I started by transposing and updating my screenplays, then I created new stories from scratch. These have turned into short novellas. And since I am, for the most part, free to develop these ideas, I will be doing more.

It’s funny how you can spend pretty much all of your adult life looking for the thing that gives you the most pleasure, and it turns out that you have been actually doing it all along.

I’m not sure what it's called. Perhaps a paradox of some sort. But nonetheless. I have had 50 plus years of being able to learn, and I think, master several different kinds of writing, all of which, at the end of the day make up a whole life spent, tap, tap, taping on the keys.