Questions You Might Have

“What do you do, exactly? And why are you starting now?”

I write, and I write well (not to toot my own horn).

I’m an aspiring copywriter who has spent more time than I wanted to in banking (which was zero years, zero months, zero weeks, and zero days). I fell into it because I needed a job after graduating, and I was able to grab positions at BNY Mellon and Barclays that allowed me to edit and tweak financial documents. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was a start.

Recently, I landed a job at a small book publisher in Midtown, Manhattan as a Fulfillment Account Specialist (a fancy term for customer service representative) and am learning a lot about the publishing industry! Here, I’ve been able to flex my writing skills by contributing to internal procedure rewrites and edits, helping not only myself but future coworkers who will need to train off those procedures to succeed.

Yet, I crave more creativity. More projects. More writing. It’s time for me to water my drying roots.

“Why copywriting?”

I didn’t realize until recently, but I’ve actually been practicing copywriting for a long time! In addition to writing novels, I create additional pieces for context and story development. These include:

  • A welcome email and roommate questionnaire “from” the Director of Residence Life

  • A handbook for a boarding school in the Vermont mountains—including rules, regulations, and a complete academic overview

  • A heartfelt letter from my protagonist to her best friend detailing her thoughts and emotions during the night of her (best friend’s) murder

  • A satire on a novel I wrote and completed when I was fifteen years old, complete with humorous commentary, criticisms, and critiques on my amateur writing and horrible plot and character development

  • An advertisement for a food court opening for a boarding school aimed at hungry students with rich parents

If I write copy for fun, that’s surely a sign I’d enjoy it professionally. Now, don’t get me wrong: I am fully aware that copywriting, as a career, will not always be fun. There will be projects I’d rather fling out the window. There will be pieces I dread writing for one reason or another. However, I know for sure my heart and soul will be planted in each piece I write. I was made for this. I want to do this.

“How did you learn to write?”

I just happened to enjoy writing more than some others, so I wrote a lot. As a kid, I read a lot of books. My favorites growing up were the Junie B. Jones series by Barbara Park, the Clique series by Lisi Harrison, and many of Mary-Kate and Ashley’s New Adventures series.

Eventually, I moved from writing micro-fiction in elementary school to short stories in middle school to a full-length novel in high school (my pride and joy, despite being horrible!). The cliché is correct: to become a better writer, you have to write.

“What’s your background in?”

I have a Bachelor’s Degree in English with a concentration in creative writing from SUNY New Paltz. There, I took lots of fun, challenging courses such as Craft of Fiction, Craft of Creative Non-Fiction, and Practical Grammar.

I received a professional certificate from Coursera in Foundations of Digital Marketing and E-Commerce in early 2024 and am now working on obtaining a copywriting certificate.

“Do you have any real work samples?”

Not yet, but I’m working on that! That’s why my portfolio contains all conceptual pieces to demonstrate what I’m capable of. Check it out!