What I'm about to say is a lie.
Ready?

I’ve always been a writer. Ever since I was a kid, I've been churning out effortless stories and witty takes.

Now for the truth...

“I’ve always written” is a tired trope, and it ignores the work writers do to improve. Reading helps. Good teachers help. But we all start from zero.

For example, the first story I wrote (aged 6) was about the 1960s singer, Sir Cliff Richard, blowing up a fish and chip shop. I believe it ended with an innocent diner enquiring, ‘Why is there a grenade in my fish and chips?’

Talent is nonsense, and most young writers get stuck pumping out stuffy essays until they can graduate, get a job as a corporate drone, and start pumping out stuffy reports and insincere emails. Actually, the most creative aspect of my job in advertising was finding the right statistics to sell billboard space to other London-based media twonks.

It was at this job that I started writing an industry-insider blog about how much of a circlejerk advertising is. The blog was called ‘Executive Summary’, and it was absolutely terrible. (I still have access to it, but I don’t want you to see it).

They say you have to write a million words of crap to learn your trade. Well this blog was 100+ posts full of thinly veiled outrage, half-baked stories, and poorly drawn characters. I even used the company photocopier to scan in ‘bad’ classified ad examples I wanted to dissect.

There was an anonymous column in ‘Media Week’ at the time (2008-11). I dreamed of my secret blog getting picked up by The Evening Standard or the London Lite, so commuters could chuckle at the bile and wit in my columns. Three things stopped this from happening:

1. I didn’t know how to attract readers.
2. I didn’t know how to approach a publisher
3. The blog was terrible.

I assumed there would be thousands of ‘cubicle farm tales’ or ‘boardroom secrets’ blogs out there, but I struggled to find them. No writers’ community. No readers. So, even though I wrote an ‘anonymous’ column, I told everyone in the office about it (omitting the fact I wrote it on company time).

This actually got me into a bit of hot water, as the PR manager at the firm called a meeting with me and suggested I not rib the director’s mates so viciously.

“It’s a personal blog,” I said. “I don’t use real identities or company names.”
I went straight back to my desk to work on a new post.

Two lessons there:
Always stand up to censorship.
Framing words as fiction stops you getting censored.

Blogging in the 2000s was great. It truly was a little secret club of terrible writers who had figured out that they could publish, and no one could stop them.

I learned a bit about formatting, the web, and how difficult it is to get readers as an anonymous blogger.

My final post (April 2011) reads as follows.

“Hi all,
I have decided to move on from my position in advertising to bigger and better things. Essentially, I wanted to halt my progress towards becoming a fully blown media wanker.”

Then I logged off and went to live in Buenos Aires.

#unphiltered