The documentary was about a writer who thought he was an amazing writer when he was young. He interviewed famous writers to find out what "good" writing was. In doing this, he found out that his work wasn't all that great. I think the message the filmmaker was trying to communicate is the fact that writing is so complex. When starting out, you will have bad work and that's normal. Your first piece will never be your best but you shouldn't give up. Sometimes you will hate what you do, other times you will love it. Still don't give up. Also, writing can't be taught. The style of writing can be taught but writing has to be personal and come within. Basically, the main point of the documentary was to show different writers perspectives on what they do and what advice they would give a writer starting out. The point of view was simply "what is writing". It was a broad point of view but that pretty much sums up the documentary.
If you read my live blog on the documentary, I listed the most important aspects to me. The fact that you may not love what you do 100% of the time was an important message to me. I feel like I don't love advertising all the time but now I know that's completely normal and as long as I really love it at least some of the time, I'll be happy with my career choice. Another thing that was important was how they mention how reading improves your writing. Now, this isn't the first time I've heard this but I thought it was more to improve your vocabulary. If you come up with interesting words, your writing will be good. Now I don't think this is true. It's more about you read what you like and you learn what's good and what's not. You get an insight to what people want to read as well as create your own style. I listed many other things in my live blog but these two really inspired me.
I think many of the tips and insight from the documentary directly relate to writing copy in the advertising world. Like I said previously, it's frustrating and we may not love it all the time. We talked about this in class as well. When first starting out in copywriting, we think of all the puns first and we think they're great. However, later we look back on these and realize they were terrible. Reading books will help up figure out our style. Even though writing an ad is way different than writing a novel, we still need to have a distinct style. This way we can be recognized. Copy is just as important in an ad as the visuals. The visuals way be great but if the copy sucks will people take the brand seriously? Probably not. One thing that I thought related most to the advertising world is the fact that bad writing is considered being stuck in the writers head and no one else understands. I feel like we do this a lot in advertising. We come up with these crazy ideas that only make sense to us and the client looks at us like we're crazy. That's why is nice to have an honest partner. There were several points in the documentary that apply to writing for ads. To me, writing for ads and writing a novel is the same thing, only different lengths of complexity.
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