Writing Life

he written word preoccupies me. Always has. Maybe that’s because I don’t speak all that well. In fact, I stuttered as a child, and certain consonants can still slow me down. The imperative to quickly find work-arounds for words I knew I was going to get stuck on surely helped to develop my vocabulary. But ultimately, perhaps, it was just easier to express myself in writing. It remains my first choice.

I am not an English major

Somehow, I did not turn into an English major. I studied cultural anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, acing the essay exams and nearly failing statistics. The day after graduating with my B.A., I set off alone for three months in Europe with a journal, a pen that lit up at the tip so you could write in the dark, and a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. I would have taken a thesaurus as well, but I needed room in my backpack for my trusty Nikon.

It was actually the Nikon that led me to journalism. I interviewed at the Brattleboro Reformer, a Vermont daily, in hopes of landing some photography assignments and was asked instead if I could report on an important town meeting that very night. I said, yes, of course I can do that. The next day my story appeared, virtually unedited, on the front page. That was when I got it. Hey, I really can do that, I thought. Next thing I knew, the paper had hired me to cover two towns and the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

Marketing apparently skips a generation

News journalism led to copyediting and freelance writing. I copyedited dozens of books for publishers in Chicago, Boston, and New York before joining the staff of Disney’s FamilyFun magazine. I never imagined I would end up in marketing. But when it was time to change direction again, I realized that the storytelling aspects of journalism and the precision of copyediting came together very nicely in copywriting.

Marketing is in my blood as well. My grandfather was a big deal at Leo Burnett, the famed Chicago agency, in its early days. My mother swears he had a hand in creating the Marlboro Man (there’s some bad karma for you!). Among his accounts was Kraft Foods, and as one story goes it was he who suggested putting holes in Kraft’s then newfangled processed Swiss cheese.

Those holes must have looked good on my grandfather’s resume, but frankly, I wouldn’t want them on mine (sorry, Granddad). Today, the holy grail of marketing is authenticity. And it’s a good thing, because newspapers are dropping dead all over, and I don’t think I could have make the leap from writing about homelessness and AIDS—as a reporter in Provincetown in the 1990s—to spinning fake holes in fake cheese.

> Contact me: laura@lauramackay.com or 413-585-9975

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Copyright by Laura MacKay, www.copywriter-editor.com