From Copywriter to Novelist: Exploring Creativity in a Post-Advertising World
According to the New Testament Apocrypha, as Peter fled persecution, he saw Christ coming the other way. “Quo vadis?” he asked. “Where are you going?” Christ replied, “To Rome, to be crucified again.”
If you ask a veteran advertising creative where the business is headed, they might echo the sentiment, only with more expletives and nicer footwear.
We’ve entered what could charitably be called a post-advertising era. Less charitably, I’d call it an apocalypse with still-somewhat-legible typography. What used to be an admirable craft of fresh ideas, clever writing, and 30-second miracles has burst open into a boundless sprawl of screens, scrolls, and self-made “content.” It’s like going from being a Michelin-starred chef to running a food truck in a city where everyone else also owns a food truck.
The Medium Was the Message. Now It’s the Entire Buffet
Marshall McLuhan, philosopher, futurist, and mustache enthusiast, famously said, “The medium is the message.” Advertising in the late 20th century built its kingdom on that idea. We told stories in fixed formats: a TV spot here, a print ad there, a billboard for good measure. Creativity was the spice; media was the meal.
Today, the two have fused into one incomprehensible stew. Ads bleed into content, content masquerades as art, and somewhere between the memes and mid-rolls, your toaster is trying to sell you optimism.
It’s not that creativity died. It just got democratized, digitized, and occasionally weaponized. Anyone with a phone is now a filmmaker, photographer, or if you’re my neighbour’s aunt, an influencer with opinions about sourdough. Spielberg competes with cat videos. Picasso competes with brunch. Welcome to the creative writing process in the algorithm age.
The Creative Mind: Still Two Rooms, Still at War
Inside every creative brain, two rooms exist in perpetual tension. On one side of the hall is the chaotic one. On the other, the organized one. In academic circles, it’s the Apollonian mind versus the Dionysian. Psychologists call it divergent and convergent thinking. I call it “The deadline’s miles off, so let’s play” and “Okay, let’s make something of this mess.”
Divergent thinking is that caffeine-fuelled brainstate where ideas tumble out like confetti at a funeral. No idea too wild, no metaphor too tortured. (Somewhere, a creative director’s ulcer throbs in sympathy.) Convergent thinking is the cleanup operation. It comes in calm, methodical, ruthless. It’s the part that turns all those mad scribbles into something that actually works.
In the golden age of advertising, these forces were separated by job titles. Copywriters diverged; account directors converged. Now, the modern creative mind, whether it’s making TikToks, writing fiction, or figuring out how to start writing a book, must juggle both at once. You have to be both Dalí and Sherlock, hurling paint and collecting evidence simultaneously.
The Age of the Multihyphenate
Once upon a time, agencies were filled with specialists. Copywriters wrote. Art directors directed art. Photographers developed photos in darkrooms. It was an era of defined lanes. Then the Internet happened. Then came AI.
Suddenly, everyone’s a generalist again. We’ve looped back to the Renaissance, only this time Leonardo da Vinci’s competing with Canva templates. The tools got easier. The access got wider. And the question changed from “Can you do it?” to “Can you do it well enough before lunch?”
Generative AI tools (and here I mean ChatGPT, Midjourney, Craiyon) now draft scripts, paint portraits, and generate ideas with suspicious enthusiasm. Some of it’s even good. (Some of it’s also terrifyingly mediocre, like being serenaded by a robot that knows every lyric but none of the heartbreak.)
AI can churn out an idea. It just can’t mean one. It lacks that particular human mix of insecurity and obsession that drives the creative writing process. Unlike you, it can’t learn how to write a novel for the first time.
Machines can imitate syntax, but they can’t fake subtext.
From Specialist to Synthesist
I won’t say it’s worse. It’s different.
Advertising creatives who will thrive in this new world aren’t necessarily the most talented. They’re the most connected. Not socially, but intellectually. The ability to see patterns across disciplines (to combine disparate ideas into something cohesive) is what separates innovation from noise.
This isn’t new. History is full of career pivots disguised as genius. Gauguin was a stockbroker before he was a painter. Van Gogh failed as an art dealer. Basquiat went from graffiti to gallery without a map. Jeff Koons traded finance for balloon dogs and never looked back.
The future belongs to those who can synthesize like that. Who can merge art, data, culture, and human insight into a single throughline. Whether you’re planning a campaign or learning how to write fiction or figuring out how to finish your first book, that’s the real work — connecting what doesn’t seem to connect.
The Renaissance Wasn’t a Job Title
If you strip away the nostalgia, advertising was always a form of fiction, short stories with budgets. It taught us pacing, voice, and the emotional economy of a sentence. Those same instincts now serve a different master. Be it the self-published author, the novice novelist, the newly christened writer trying to finish her first book.
This is the convergence of craft and commerce. Here self-publishing tips overlap with creative theory, and book marketing for self-published authors is indistinguishable from brand strategy.
The novelist and the copywriter share the same goal. Each wants to make someone feel something, and then act on it. One writes “Sale Ends Saturday.” The other writes “Chapter Two.”
The Patient Generalist
Of course, learning how to self-publish a novel is an act of logistics, not just a creative one. So, in many ways, it reflects the work of the contemporary advertising copywriter. You have to be equal parts writer, strategist, editor, and reluctant tech support. The trick isn’t to master every new tool. It’s to understand how they fit together. The systems thinker augments the writer. The dabbler-in-all-trades helps the expert.
Here’s the part of how to write a book that no one mentions. The best writing isn’t linear. It’s a messy collage of everything you’ve learned, borrowed, overheard, and badly quoted. Being a writer means embracing that mess. It means knowing a little about a lot, and enough about yourself to turn it into something coherent.
Call it expert generalism, or just curiosity with a mortgage.
Where Do We Go From Here?
It’s tempting to see the current state of creativity as chaos, as crucifixion by content. But I want to force myself beyond cynicism. So I’ve started to see it as something else. Permission.
After many fun years in advertising always searching for the next big idea, I’ve realized I’m not interested in exploring today’s mandate: the big execution. I want to make something of my own. I want to write stories that don’t need a client brief or a call to action. No more asking permission from clients who get younger every year. No more giving up evenings, choking back my own editorial responses on the other side of the one-way glass as self-dubbed experts who’re hurried in from the street and enticed by stale Peak Freans and a cheque for $40, eviscerate good work in focus groups.
So I’ve stepped away from being a(n advertising) creative (at least in that strangled-adjective-cum-noun, agency sense of the word). The job title was starting to feel like a well-tailored suit that no longer fit.
I’m exploring creativity on my own terms, through fiction. I’m writing a series called The Misjudgements of Andy MacKay. It’s about a man who, like most of us, means well but rarely reads the fine print on his own decisions.
It’s my way of testing whether all those years of writing taglines and brand manifestos actually taught me anything about about what people want (and don’t want). About writing. Or even how to publish a book. I’m not sure. Maybe it just taught me about deadlines.
The tools may have changed, and the timelines may still shrink, but the need for stories remains stubbornly human. And while learning how to sell your self-published book is a useful skill, the real victory is finishing one.
So where am I going?
Forward, I think. Maybe limping. Possibly ranting. But forward. This time, under my own byline.
Because if the future of creativity means being crucified again, we might as well enjoy the view on the way to Rome.
For more reflections on creative writing, how to write a novel, and the self-publishing journey behind my ongoing fiction series, The Misjudgements of Andy MacKay, visit my YouTube channel. Coming soon.