The Case Against Writing for Other Writers

Why writers should strive for connection over impressing literary aficionados.

Paul Kinsey hosts a party during the second season of Mad Men.

Dear readers, I was out protesting over the weekends, so this week, I’m reposting this essay. I’ll be back next week with more forgotten historic tidbits. Also, please check out my interview in

Cold Caller Magazine

!

In an early episode of Mad Men, copywriter Paul Kinsey pitches taglines for Mohawk Airlines. 

“Mohawk Airlines: There’s a new chief in the sky,” he says, searching Creative Director Don Draper’s face for approval. Seeing none, he pitches another: “Most routes to Boston. Circle the wagons. We’ve got it surrounded.” 

Don, still unimpressed, asks, “What else you got?”

“Several more Indian puns,” Paul admits. 

Don’s advice: Stop writing for other writers. Don has a point. Writing for other writers has its limitations, and not just for advertising copywriters, but for fiction writers too. Before you say, “But copywriting and fiction writing are different!” I’m going to let you in on a little secret: No, they aren’t. (Once, I met a girl who said she’d tried copywriting but quit because she felt it “defiled” her talents as a fiction writer. Reader, I wanted to throw things.) 

While many people view copywriting as grunt work and fiction writing as some sort of mystical process, the truth is that the creative process — and the discipline required to get things done — is the same for both. I’m willing to bet that most writers who insist that fiction can only be written in a zen-like trance or that they only write when inspiration strikes either don’t write much fiction or aren’t very good at it.

In the show, Paul Kinsey is a Princeton graduate who got into the prestigious Ivy on scholarship. His air of pretension masks his insecurity over his working-class roots and, as the show eventually reveals, his lack of natural writing talent. He cannot resist showing off his academic bona fides, because they’re all he’s got.

But Don knows that the Mohawk campaign has to do more than amuse the tweed-wearing professors that Paul is still trying to please. The campaign has to make the client happy and to do that, Don has to show that it can attract the attention of as many would-be customers as possible. 

With that in mind, Don steers the conversation away from jokey taglines toward the idea of adventure — something that might strike a chord with people who will see the ad. Don wants people to picture themselves breaking out of their routines, leaving the day-to-day behind and coming home with suitcases stuffed with memories. Adventure is an idea that hits people in the gut and inspires them to buy plane tickets.

A pun, no matter how clever, is just…cute. It does its best work when it sits under a hand-drawn New Yorker cartoon, and even then, the reader may chuckle and forget all about it. It doesn’t engage the reader’s emotions or provoke deeper thought, and isn’t that what writers should be doing?

Writers often get caught in a cycle of trying to impress each other because they view writers’ groups and workshops as a necessity. Workshops can be great, and for the most part, I loved the ones I took part in as a college student, but they can also be breeding grounds for groupthink. As one Goodreads reviewer put it when assessing a critically acclaimed story collection, “Every story is so wound up in being this little jewel-like thing that you could present at a writing workshop that it forgets to have a point, a meaning, and worst of all, an ending.” 

Craft matters. Good sentences matter. Structure matters. But when your writing leaves people outside your workshop feeling cold, aren’t you missing the mark by not providing the meaning and connection many readers crave?

Speaking of meaning, a former professor shared a phrase that an unnamed student came up with: “A bulbous prolapse of unweather.” I’m sorry, whoever you are, but what does that mean? I’m confused, and as a resume writer who critiqued my CV once told me, “Confusion is never good.” A phrase like that might wow the snobs of the literary circuit, but won’t gain much purchase beyond it. (When I told a friend about it, he said pithily, “I don’t advocate bullying, but this person is just asking to be dunked in a toilet.”)

In another Mad Men episode, Paul Kinsey struggles to come up with an idea for Western Union. While chatting with the night janitor, Paul has a sudden flash of an idea, but then quickly forgets what it is. The next day, he laments his lost idea and tells copywriter Peggy Olson about a Chinese proverb: the faintest ink is better than the clearest memory. Later, in a meeting with Don Draper, Paul sheepishly says that “the dog ate [his] homework.” Meanwhile, Peggy brings up the Chinese proverb, and suggests that the campaign should be something like, “A telegram is forever.”

“You can’t frame a phone call,” Don says. It’s a solid idea: send a telegram when you want your news to become a keepsake. It gets right to the emotional core, which is something I try to do in my writing and hope to see in others’ work. 

Some pieces I’ve published here that have drawn the most responses from readers were stories about people who have passed away, including my dad, my friend Robert and my grandmother. Readers who had never met my grandmother felt like they knew her after reading my obit for her. After reading my story, “Final Notice,” about an 18-year-old girl living abandoned in her mother’s house, one reader commented, “What a punch in the gut!” 

Lyrical turns of phrase and killer similes are great, but if you can’t back them up with emotion, they’re just as forgettable as the big chief in the sky. People remember how you make them feel, and some writing that seems designed to elicit praise from other writers can leave readers confused and annoyed, like how I felt while slogging through Gravity’s Rainbow. 

I’m not arguing that you can’t connect with readers with sentences that take up entire paragraphs, by eschewing commas or stringing beautiful but ultimately meaningless sets of words together. Packing emotional power and being difficult to read aren’t mutually exclusive. However, inaccessible writing does, by definition, exclude people. And exclusion is the opposite of connection. 

Am I arguing that all writing should be in a highly commercial, mass-paperback style? No! But I am saying that there is a balance. There’s a saying that goes something like this: Pop has three chords and millions of fans. Jazz has a million chords and three fans. Errol Garner was a master pianist whose complex arrangements and extraordinary abilities yielded some of the best jazz recordings ever made. His rendition of “El Papa Grande” would never have shared airwaves with Britney Spears, but it’s even more danceable than any of her singles. It’s high art that doesn’t sacrifice a good hook.

Recently, on X (formerly known as Twitter), someone asked something like, “Why is it a bad thing that the only audience for lit mags is other writers? Isn’t it actually kind of cool?” Is it? I’m not sure. I think it’s cooler when I post here and get a response directly from a reader. When your audience is only writers, other people who might meaningfully connect with the work may miss it altogether. Writing for other writers is cool the way Paul Kinsey is “cool” when he hosts a party and spends the whole night walking around wearing an ascot and clutching a snifter of brandy.

By the fifth season of Mad Men, Paul Kinsey has washed out of advertising entirely. Peggy reports that last she heard, he was in-house at the A&P grocery store, implying that he’d gone into a downward spiral from pitching strategies for airlines to writing Sunday circulars, a development wonderfully foreshadowed by Joan Holloway when she mocks Paul for dating a grocery clerk (“The conversation must be so stimulating. ‘Lettuce costs a nickel!’”). When we see him again, he’s not even working. He’s a member of the Hare Krishna cult, and he’s written a spec script for Star Trek — an awful spec script that has no chance of impressing anyone at NBC. His former coworker gives him cash and begs him to skip town. It’s the last we ever see of him. 

Put another way, writing for other writers is great until it isn’t. Baroque sentences and literary tricks can sometimes mask shallowness. When all is said and done, if you can’t connect emotionally with readers, or tell a story, and are just falling back on a bag of tricks, maybe it’s time to throw the bag out.