The fact is, any kind of pathway into writing will stand you in good stead for a fruitful career in crafting copy for businesses, big and small.
Here are a handful of skills I gleaned during my time as a freelance music journalist, which have since proved useful to my career as a self-employed copywriter:
Interviewing
Now, I don’t mean ‘interviewing’ folks for a job role, rather interviewing folks in order to extract quotes for an article or two. It’s a serious skill – and one that, when I first started out as a freelancer, I was probably pretty pants at.
It takes time and experience to hit upon how, what and when to ask the right questions – and it involves plenty of patience and the ability to build up an unbeatable rapport with all kinds of people.
As a music journo, you aren’t just required to speak to the musician(s) themselves. On top of this, you’ll be liaising with the bands’ PRs, music management, and editors and fellow freelancers at the magazine or newspaper you’re writing for.
Often, deadlines can be tight and the chance to bag an interview with a household name or two can be hit and miss.
You need plenty of resilience, as well as being a people person who knows how to glean the right info for the right audience. For example, NME readers may want to know different tidbits of info than, say, those who devour content on the BBC site.
It all comes with experience, though – and great interviewing techniques can be a fab skill to carry over into copywriting. Why? As a copywriter, a big part of your day-to-day life is extracting info from business owners, in order to get the details needed to craft some winning website content.
Storytelling
It isn’t enough to be a good listener and interviewer. Neither is it enough to be able to write well.
To be a good writer, you must be a good storyteller – and with the best will in the world, some folks are fair writers (as in, they can string a sentence together and know a few long words to slot in here and there), but can’t tell an interesting story. Can you?
Great storytelling is, I think, an unofficial prerequisite for a job as both a music journo – and a copywriter. People don’t just want to know that such and such a band has a new album out. They may also want to know what led them to releasing said album – and were there any challenges on the way? A good example of this is Stereophonics’ rise to fame.
While it wasn’t a story I had the fortune of penning myself, I remember learning how frontman Kelly Jones pretty much sent a demo tape a day to big-name record companies, before they were eventually signed.
