Before Salman Rushdie was a novelist, he was a working copywriter, and that job left a mark on how he writes fiction. The discipline is the throughline: deadlines then, deadlines now, whether the client was Aero chocolate or the five or six years it took to finish a novel.

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He writes the way he once wrote ads: on a fixed schedule, revising heavily, treating the page like a deadline he can't miss.
That habit traces back to roughly a decade spent as a professional copywriter, at agencies including Ogilvy & Mather, before Midnight's Children made him a full-time novelist.

The Copywriter Years

Rushdie's first attempt at advertising was a failure. In 1969 he sat a copywriting test at J. Walter Thompson in London and didn't pass it. He landed at a smaller agency, Sharp McManus, not long after. An early assignment there, writing copy for a cigar promotion, stumped him until the agency's creative director, Oliver Knox, showed him what the client actually wanted. Rushdie has said of that moment, 'That was my education in advertising.'

He moved on to Ogilvy & Mather, where he worked part time and wrote some of the slogans he's still known for: 'Irresistibubble' for Aero chocolate, and 'Naughty. But Nice.' for fresh cream cakes, a line the client rejected at first and later ran nationally. Most of his days at Ogilvy went to Midnight's Children, the novel that took him five or six years to finish and won the Booker Prize in 1981. He later worked at Ayer Barker, where he wrote 'That'll do nicely' for American Express, before leaving advertising to write full time.

That was my education in advertising.

Salman Rushdie, on his first advertising job, The Paris Review

See the full Salman Rushdie writing routine for how that discipline plays out in an ordinary working day.

What the Ad Years Taught Him

The lesson he took from a decade of client work was about behavior more than language. Agencies run on deadlines, and a copywriter who waits for the right mood doesn't last. Rushdie carried that straight into fiction, describing his approach as treating the work like a nine-to-five job and showing up whether or not he feels like it that day. He still writes first thing each morning, before mail, calls, or a shower, and stops only once he's got something down that counts as real progress.

The other carryover is a comfort with revision, treating a draft the way an ad goes through rounds of client feedback rather than treating a first attempt as sacred. 'Now I write much more slowly and I revise a lot as I go,' he's said of his current process, a shift from faster early drafts toward something closer to finished prose on the first pass.

Rushdie went into hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him in February 1989, and he lived under police protection for years afterward. He continued to publish novels through that period. In August 2022, he was attacked and seriously injured on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, losing sight in one eye. He returned to writing and public appearances afterward.

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