Shannon Fletcher
Literary Copywriter Spotlight 8/24/2020
Welcome back to the L.C. Copywriter Spotlight where I feature professional writers and copywriters with literary pursuits. This week I interviewed Shannon Fletcher, a powerhouse of a writer with marketing and literary chops. As a poet and academic, Shannon knows how to bring the magic and critical analysis to all her projects. She’s a copywriter at SixSpeed and founder of Err, an artist collective/DIY arts zine/variety show featuring up-and-coming writers, artists, and musicians of all genres.
Let’s hear from Shannon!
L.C.: Tell me about your writing journey. When did you first realize that a.) you are a writer, and b.) you want to make a living off of your writing?
S.F.: I was always a bookish kid. I devoured a lot of fiction, and remember being a mixture of impressed, intimidated, and mystified by the idea of something becoming a “classic” and remaining in print for a long time. I grew up in Minnesota and loved reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. If not for 120-some years, Laura was me. A tomboyish girl in Minnesota with school, chores, family shit, and brutal winters to deal with. Being inside the head of a person who lived on earth long before I did was MAGICAL. It’s time travel. It’s witchcraft. It’s a mutual experience with someone you’ve never met and could never have met if not for their writing. I was enthralled with this phenomenon in a spiritual way, and I aspired to speak to future readers of my own through my writing.
Later during high school and college, I fell in love with poetry, which felt like not only being inside the head of another but being in their soul too. It became my primary creative writing pursuit and remains so to this day. This interest led me to become an editor at the undergrad literary journal at my university. There, I met some of my best friends, taught myself how to typeset a magazine, and drum up interest for it. This included papering campus with cheeky posters encouraging students to submit work and read the magazine. We never called them such, but these posters look a lot like my first ads now.
L.C.: Please describe your copywriting career. How did you get started? Who are your ideal clients.? Do you freelance or work for an agency?, etc.
S.F.: As a college student, I turned a very sharp, analytical eye to the act of writing, majoring in Comparative Literature with a Critical Theory focus. I fully expected to go on to earn a Ph.D. I would live the professor’s life, which sounds glamorous until you meet a modern one. (Most younger humanity-focused American scholars today live in or near poverty. They sacrifice so much for their work and have so little power at their institutions of employment. THIS IS NOT OKAY!) As my graduation date got closer, the reality set in that the kind of life that pursuing a Ph.D. entailed was not for me. So, I graduated with a lot of skills and passions, and no plans about what to do with them. Good times!
My parents supported but never fully understood my studies—but they did understand the business world. They had both been effective salespeople in their early careers, and then later started a salesperson-centered business together. In my directionless state, they sent me to speak with the few of their friends/former colleagues who’d managed to make a living off of their creative skills. These folks all worked in marketing or web development. During one of these meetings, a family friend put the word “copywriter” in my mouth for the first time. I did some reading, as one does. It sounded like a lot of fun, exercising the one muscle I had that was totally JACKED: my divergent, yet analytical brain. After a few more informational interviews, and a successful summer internship, one of those friends offered me my first copywriter job. It wasn’t a super creative gig, but it was a job where I got to do a little bit of the writing witchcraft that I admired so much as a girl. I got better at it every day.
In the following years, I freelanced, worked on an in-house creative team, and at a couple of ad agencies, too. I just began working at SixSpeed this summer, a pretty damn cool agency in Minneapolis. I’m thrilled to be on the team there and know we’ll make some cool stuff together. My ideal client is anyone with a people- or planet-centered purpose beyond just making a buck. My favorite brands are those that understand gratitude and feel a duty to give back to the world that helped them succeed.
L.C.: I love supporting copywriters who are also hard at work on a creative, personal project. This could be a novel, memoir, poetry collection etc. Tell me more about what you’re working on and what you hope to gain from the experience (book deal, more publications, career change, personal growth, etc.). Feel free to share how you balance work, life, and writing. It’s okay, if you’re struggling with this. It’s all part of the process!
S.F.: Earlier, I mentioned the undergrad literary journal I helped publish in college. Well, the editor in chief of that magazine turned out to be my work wife for life and dearest friend Hanna. Hanna went on to become a bonafide literary powerhouse at a hybrid publisher in Minnesota. She, myself, and a few other pals founded Err in 2014. Err is an artist collective, a DIY arts zine, and a monthly variety show featuring up-and-coming writers, artists, and musicians of all genres. In 2016, we published a huge anthology of our community’s work, designed and typeset by myself. That same year, I wrote and self-published my first poetry collection, Here Lies Salt. I billed it as "a collection of verses for the salty ex."
My passion for local artists and book design/arts has brought me some pretty cool self-publishing side projects throughout my career. I designed The Music of the Soul Lives On by Henry Mackaman, Richfield Poems by Trevor Simmons, and most recently SPECTRA: Poems of Growth as Told through the Chakras. I’m currently working on a short story collection with a talented writer and musician friend of mine, Daniel Patrick Rosen. AND, slowly but surely, I am writing more poetry. I have loose plans to publish a companion to Here Lies Salt. It’ll be about love, the complex history of sugar, and life’s small, infinitely sweet moments.
"Work/life balance” is such a loaded concept. Life itself is an artistic work, in my opinion. But having healthy boundaries between myself, employers, friends who pay me to help them publish their work, friends who don’t pay me to help them publish their work, my Err comrades, my work wife, and other artistic collaborators is vital to getting anything done with a smile on my face. And I have a nice smile, so I make these boundaries a priority.
L.C. Writers are needed but often undermined/unappreciated. Especially those of us with literary goals in mind! If applicable, could you speak to how you’ve faced/overcome challenges in your career? It’s okay if these challenges are ongoing (they often are). Feel free to share any words of wisdom you may have from mentors, literary heroes, etc.
S.F. I treat my job as a copywriter like a pro athlete treats team practice/gym time. I lift weights and do sprints of headlines, brainstorms, blog stories, pitch decks, and whatever else my team needs. I take feedback, swerving back and forth conceptually at any whistle blow from my CDs. I play with and pass the ball to teammates. I hype them up in the locker room and cheer them on from the bench when they amaze me. I get stronger, quicker, and more agile as a writer every day. I get paid to show up and sweat. This is a privilege. In the end, I walk away with skills that I couldn’t get on my own. Skills that I bring to the bigger game: my poetry.
One day, after making enough money in advertising to comfortably do so, I intend to retire and go back to school for a poetry MFA. I hope to transition to a slower life. A writer’s life. I could see myself teaching creative writing part-time, but other than that, I just want to live in a “little house in the big woods," practice poetry magick, and sip tea by the window until my time here is up. More books are definitely a part of this dream. If a more professional, non-DIY book deal or two comes out of those years, cool.
L.C.: Say someone much younger than you says, “I want to be a writer, but I’m afraid I won’t succeed.” What would you tell them?
S.F.: They don’t tell ya this in school, but it’s YOUR life and YOU get to define what “success” means in it. Tailor your definition to when and where you’re at. “Today, success is reading for one hour.” “This year, success is getting published in an online magazine.” Etcetera. Set yourself an attainable bar with a reasonable timeline. Reach it, rinse, and repeat. For me, this often turns out to sound like: “today, success is writing a poem that I feel better after having written it."
P.S. Everything in life worth doing comes with the “but what if I don’t succeed” thought. Get used to sitting with that thought. Constantly. Befriend it if you can, and pursue what you want with it by your side. (It will keep you humble when you start killin' it.) In YOUR life, it can and should be okay to fail. That’s how you learn.
More from The Literary Copywriter:
L.C. Spotlight: An Interview with Laura Messer Jackson
A Guide to Publishing in Literary Magazines
Use Your English Degree Like a Writer
Your Friend in Craft,
Emily