the creative process

When I was a cub copywriter burning the midnight oil on an assignment I'd gotten weeks before, one I'd just started with my partner (though it was due the next day) after many Happy Hour drinks and free food-like fried objects at The Rusty Scupper, I imagined how different things would be when I was grown-up writer, when I'd learned to master my time-management skills. But. Some things never change.

RIP Elmore Leonard, ex-copywriter

Elmore Leonard died today, at age 87 while working on his 46th novel. Leonard wasn't always a crime writer, he began as a copywriter, writing ads for cars and trucks in Detroit where his father worked for General Motors. He stayed in advertising for 10 years, getting up at 5 am to write, staying up late to work on his stories, until finally his first crime novel, rejected 84 times, was made into a movie. His mastery of dialogue and plot was legend. No matter what you're writing, your writing can benefit
from his rules of writing:

 1. Never open a book with the weather
2. Avoid prologues
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"
5. Keep your exclamation points under control!
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use dialect sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Same for places + things.
10. Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.

new interactive literary novel

There's a new interactive novel out today--not from a game publisher or vimeo artist, as you might expect, but from old-line, mainstream, behemoth publisher, Random House. The writer is the award-winning Marisha Pessl, author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Night Film is her second novel, a thriller that she's made into an immersive storyworld with website screen captures, old media clippings and photos that link to cyber content. But wait. How can a hardcover novel formidably grounded in the ILR world – the tome weighs in at a 600 pgs. and 1.75 lbs – be "interactive"? Yep, you guessed it – there's an app for that. In the back of her book, just before the acknowledgements, Pessl invites readers who want to continue the storyworld experience to download the free decoder app from itunes or elsewhere. The app is a scan app that lets your smartphone or tablet "read" a bird image that appears on some of the pages. Like a next-generation QR code, the bird jumps you to bonus content. Pessl isn't the first novelist to provide her readers with "extras" in cyberspace (ahem!) but she's the first one I know of to do so from the confines of an analog book. Kudos to her and to the Random House digital team for having the vision to do so and the chops to carry it off.

mad men reading list

It's a soggy Saturday where I am (Northwest CT) making it an excellent day to do what you never have time for anymore: reading longform. For Mad Men fans, I've compiled a list of books that memorialize those who fought in the Advertising Wars:

Jerry Della Femina's seminal ad memoir "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor" was first published in 1970 and made the ad business sound so enticing it inspired me (and many others) to go into it.

Yes, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a film but the novel is better imho, even without Gregory Peck's moving performance. Great writing, complex portrait of Mad Men-era office life and satisfying exploration of surprisingly contemporary theme of relative values of family vs. career.

And speaking of novels that are (way) better than films adapted from them, Revolutionary Road tells a dark story in Yates' stellar prose, the tale of a couple who buy into the American Dream of the 1960s and how it all unravels for them. She's a homemaker (of course) and he's got a thankless job in the ad industry (oxymoron?) The book resonates with vivid Mad Men-esque scenes like the one in a hospital waiting room, where everyone is smoking cigarettes.

Joshua Ferris was a copywriter in a cubicle in Chicago which gave him the chops to write a hilarious fictional sendup of the business Then We Came to the End. I defy anyone in advertising to read this without laughing. Out loud. Like I did. On a subway. So loud, the person next to you gives up the seat.

If there is a real-life Peggy Olson, it's Jane Maas who started at Ogilvy in 1964 and rose to be creative director and agency officer. With good-humor, wit and convincing detail, Mad Women tells the story of what it took to break into the mad men's club with award-winning work like the "I Love NY" campaign while raising two daughters you want to grow up to be normal.


I was freelancing at McCann when ECD Nina DiSesa's book came out and corridors were abuzz with alternating takes on the book: "It's brilliant!" "It's slander!" "It's her swan song before getting out of the business!"I immensely enjoyed Seducing the Boys Club which is not only the well-told story of how DiSesa herself ceiling-crashed to the top, it's advice to women in her wake on how to "Lean In" and grab those titles and agency stock-options.

I worked down the hall from John Kenney at Ogilvy and have long admired his writing, not just his elegant copywriter prose, but his humor pieces in the New York Times and the New Yorker which are LOL-funny. So is Truth in Advertising, a new satire on the business, which is alternately sweet and sad and hilariously on target. Gwyneth Paltrow doing a diapers commercial that has to stop filming because the baby cast to be hers turns out to be black? Only a veteran of the business could come up with that.

What are the odds that two ex-copywriters from Ogilvy would come out with a novel set in advertising, at the same time? From the same publisher? Another debut novel from Simon and Schuster this season is my own: Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue. It's a coming-of-middle age story about a woman and a business (advertising, of course.) It’s sort of like Mad Men thirty years later, from the point of view of an older, wiser, married Peggy Olson. One of the themes explored is technology, and the book offers readers opportunities to further explore characters in a digitally enhanced epilogue. Advertising, meet Transmedia. (Hey, where better to peddle your wares than on your own blog?)

Happy reading!

Matt Weiner reveals what Mad Men is really about

Wesleyan University kicked off a fundraising drive last night with a talk by its most famous '87 alum --Matt Weiner. The event was held in the Directors Guild Theater which enabled the event to open with a luscious, big screen sampling of all 6 seasons --up until S604. (No preview clips, natch.)

Some of the things that Matt talked about in (warm, relaxed) conversation with Wesleyan’s' president--a meeting of minds he presumably never foresaw when he was (by his own admission) a lackluster student in Middletown:

1. He actually wanted to be a poet. He wrote poetry in college and did a poetry thesis senior year which he brought to a poetry professor for feedback. The professor's response: We both know you're not a poet, don't we? "Actually, I hadn't known that," Matt said. "But it helped me enormously."

2. After graduation, desperate to live in New York, Matt took a job with a friend's mother, an interior decorator, who basically hired him to "stand around and make sure the workers weren't stealing stuff." After a while, he decided to move back to LA, where he'd grown up. "Because one day, standing in a room being decorated, I realized I'd be doing the same thing the next year. And the next."

3. Matt is fascinated by the late 50s "which actually lasted through 1962." He felt the same vibe played out when he was in college in the 1980s-- revival of diners, jazz, fashions, etc. He is not so fascinated with the Boomer 60s when "everyone wore the same thing and shouted, in unison, 'I'm an individual!"

4. He chose to set the show in advertising because "that was the glamorous job of that era."

5. On Don Draper's character: "Don is a person from rural poverty who is acutely aware of the fact that he ran away from death, in an act of cowardice. He actually killed someone, by accident, but never took responsibility for it. He is very interested in self-preservation. Fear was instilled in him as a child, by a hobo who told him that death was going to come looking for him, and that he should 'keep moving.' That was where I started the series."

6. Another thing that inspired the Mad Men story was the conundrum of expectations for men at that time: "They were supposed to be great dads and great husbands and work for the Little League and the PTA...but they were also supposed to drink as much, smoke as much and get laid as much as possible."

7. He's grateful for the creative freedom AMC provides, including the freedom to not to have to spell everything out. Like sex scenes. "I'm more interested in "the just before" and "the just after."

8. Don Draper is not an anti-hero. "It disturbs me when people call him that. Don't people have to murder someone to be anti-heroes? Don has his own code, his own moral center. But it is totally situational. Like most of ours. And that is what the show is really about."

9. And speaking of personalized moral codes: "Pete is my Democrat. He's right about everything, but he's from a screwed up background. And I do believe that you are the sum of your experiences."

[SPOILERS ALERT: Proceed at your own caution, if you haven't seen Season 6.]

10. When asked about heroism in the show, he said: "It's Don's support of Peggy. It's Betty going into town after that violinist. Heroism to me is any time you overcome your own weaknesses, push your own boundaries."

11. On Themes. The theme of last season (#5) was Success. One of the themes of this season is: How are you perceived by other people? "When Betty Draper goes downtown, people there make assumptions about who she is based on her weight and her hair and the fact that she knows how to cook. She resents that. "

12. "The show is not judgmental about human behavior, and that makes people uncomfortable, I think."

13. Don can't love the people who love him. He begins to emotionally withdraw from Megan when he sees she can't accept his 50s lifestyle.

14. "1968 was probably the crappiest year in the history of America. I have new respect for people who were there." When asked about how this will impact his characters, he was characteristically evasive about details, but said, “Bad stuff's gonna happen."

15. A question from the audience: Do you believe people can change? Tellingly, Matt paused a long moment before answering, "Yes. But I believe wanting to change, is a change." And we see where Don gets his remarkable ability to finely slice and dice the meaning of words.

soho in slomo

Some days, don't you wish you could just shift the world's gears, ratchet down the speed of everything going on around you, so that you could take a long, leisurely, languorous LOOK. That's what artist James Nares lets us do, for however long you choose to sit in a darkened room at the Met, watching "Street", his breathtaking "motion art." (Video is an inadequate word.) Nares recorded 16 hours of footage of people on the streets of Manhattan, while wielding an HD camera usually used to record speeding objects like bullets or hummingbirds. Then, he slowed down source material and created an hour of New York street life as you've never seen it--slowwwwwwww. Like still photography, this art isolates objects, giving us opportunity--and encouragement--for a closer look at what we'd ordinarily miss--the mole on a face, the hand in a pocket, a plastic shopping bag breaking free from doorway. Watch a preview here, or, better yet, catch it at the Met which will screen it continuously through May 27.

betty!

Forgive me, non-Mad Men fans, I have to talk about...Betty! [spoiler alert for those who haven't yet seen last night's S6 premiere)

First shock to me that the writers left her plus-size. (Does one of them have a grudge against her?) I thought for sure that her added weight, a (brilliant) cover for pregnancy during shooting last season--so she wouldn't have to walk around behind laundry baskets--would have been done away with, now that a cover's not necessary. Or is it? Are Xander's days as an only child numbered?

And then--the hair! Is her Marilyn-to-Jackie move an attempt to spice up her marriage? Clearly she's NOT good at pillow talk, given her awkward attempt to turn on a distracted, straight-edge husband by initiating role play using fantasy--of all things--child molesting! Or perhaps it's an attempt to prove to the world (and herself) that there's more to her than a strung-out druggie on St. Mark's assumes. Speaking of which--didn't that scene make you just want to reach into the screen and tell her to buy the building, it'll be worth millions someday!?

OK, now back to our regularly scheduled programming...