I didn’t set out to become a copywriter. I set out to survive being a teenager.
Journaling was my lifeline back then — the one place I could be honest when everything else felt like static. From there I tumbled into fan-fiction, posting stories on Wattpad to a small but mighty fanbase who showed up chapter after chapter. And now? I’m deep in the trenches of my first fantasy novel, The Twilight Sun.
Here’s the plot twist nobody warned me about: every one of those “just for fun” writing years quietly turned me into a sharper copywriter. Not despite the storytelling — because of it.
The Myth We Need To Bury.
There’s a tidy little lie floating around the marketing world: that creative writing is the soft, dreamy stuff, and copywriting is the serious, strategic stuff. Fluff versus function. Art versus sales.
Personally, I think it’s nonsense.
Great copy and great fiction are doing the exact same job — they’re making a stranger feel something strongly enough to act. A novelist wants you to turn the page. A copywriter wants you to click the button. Same muscle, different gym.
A copywriter wants you to click the button. Same muscle, different gym.
And if you’ve spent years building that muscle in the world of stories, you walk into copywriting with an unfair advantage.
Skill #1: Tension & Resolution (a.k.a. why people keep reading).
Ask any fiction writer the secret to a page-turner and they’ll tell you: tension. You open a loop, you make the reader ache to close it, and you don’t hand over the resolution too soon.
Sound familiar? Because that’s the entire architecture of good copy.
The headline cracks open a problem. The body deepens it — yes, this is exactly what’s going wrong, and here’s why it’s worse than you thought. And only then does the solution arrive like a held breath finally released.
“Name the pain, sit in it just long enough, then offer the way out.”
Resolve too fast and there’s no relief to sell. Resolve too slow and the reader leaves. Storytelling is how you learn to feel that timing in your bones.
Skill #2: Character & Empathy (a.k.a. actually knowing who you’re talking to).
You cannot write a character readers love without crawling inside their head — their fears, their wants, the thing they’d never admit out loud. Fan-fiction trained me hard here. Write for a fandom and they will tell you the second a character feels off. You learn empathy as a survival skill.
Write for a fandom and they’ll tell you the second a character feels off.
Turns out that’s the whole game in copywriting too. The “character” is just your customer now. Their fear is the problem keeping them up at night. Their character arc is the transformation your product or service promises.
When you write copy like a novelist writes a protagonist you stop writing at people and start writing for them. That’s the difference between copy that gets scrolled past and copy that makes someone whisper, “this is exactly me.”
A tiny before-and-after.
Watch what happens when you swap a sales-brochure sentence for a storyteller’s one:
Before: “Our planner helps you stay organized and manage your time effectively.”
After: “It’s 11pm. Your to-do list is a graveyard of good intentions. This is the planner that finally makes tomorrow feel possible.”
Same product, but one states a feature and the other sets a scene. Names a feeling, and opens a loop your brain wants to close. That’s fiction sneaking into the room and doing the heavy lifting.
Try It Yourself.
Grab any boring line of copy — a brand’s, a random product description. Now rewrite it using one fiction technique: set a scene, or open with tension, or speak to one specific person’s secret fear. Just one. Watch how fast it comes alive.
