Copywriting is still writing

Going to work on a slogan ... Photograph: David Levene

The life of a full-time writer, as we know, is very rarely one of luxury. Work is sporadic, pay (if it comes) low and each new month sees the start of a desperate new hustle. For the self-employed writer, benefits such as pension, insurance and paid holidays are replaced by paranoia, insecurity and the various vices that self-employment allows.

Personally I've lived from week to week for nine years now. And though for the most part I love it, when the taxman comes a-knocking (as he always does in January) I know I'm not the only self-employed writer who finds themselves biting the bullet and chasing the buck. Now, everyone knows unless you're John Grisham or JK Rowling there's little to be made from writing fiction. Journalism brings in an average part-time income and poetry pays - almost invariably - nothing.

Instead, struggling writers have often turned to what is often perceived as the last resort of creative authorship: advertising copywriting. Many writers have churned out lines to help companies sell their wares, especially since consumerism went into overdrive in the 20th century.

The best known example is probably Fay Weldon, who before becoming one of the UK's most successful female authors enjoyed a successful career writing corporate copy, including being involved in the creation of the slogan "Go to work on an egg". "Advertising was the only thing I could do in order to earn a decent enough living," said Weldon.

I can sympathise. When your only skill and experience is in writing, you'll use it any way you can. Recently I've found myself doing corporate copywriting. And though the accelerated worlds of sales and branding are not places you want to linger, copywriting can be as valid a literary discipline as any.

Coming up with a 10-word slogan to lure customers to spend is little different from writing a short poem about love. Both require the writer to be deft and convincing, to communicate as economically as possible. Naturally it helps if you believe in what you're selling, though unlike poetry, it is not a prerequisite. Top copywriters should be able to sell the proverbial coals to Geordies. Perhaps - and this is just a theory - it was corporate copywriting that refined the linguistic dexterity of Salman Rushdie, who spent large parts of the 1970s writing copy, or Peter Mayle, who successfully sold the "concept" of rural life in France to the English middle classes in his biographical book A Year In Provence.

Further research reveals many more authors who have been closeted copywriters and/or advertising executives - Joseph Heller (whose phrase Catch-22 has like the most effective slogans entered the language), Meg Rosoff of this parish, Don DeLillo, William Burroughs, Dorothy L Sayers, Ogden Nash, Victor Pelevin, Dashiell Hammett, Antonia White, Augusten Burroughs and - pleasingly - Frank Zappa.

Perhaps, then, a copywriter is no worse than an author? Whether it's a "revolutionary" new razor with quadruple-blade action, a running shoe or a romantic thriller set in Tuscany, the writer's job is to make a fantasy world seem tangible, to make something out of nothing. The main difference is the copywriter may not believe in that something, especially if, like me, they despise all advertising and will opt for the "no frills" option out of spite to the brand-happy marketing men.

It's only when you consider the years of meetings, focus groups, demographical pie-charts, power lunches and all-round "blue sky thinking" that they must have had to endure that you understand not only how - but why - they became masters of fiction.