The best thing about writing TV commercials is that eventually the creative team has to go film them on location. Depending on the budget and client, you maybe stay at quaint little places like the Beverly Hills Hotel and Shutters in LA and Brown’s in London.

Early on, one of the funnier veteran creatives at J. Walter Thompson New York gave me the insider pro’s secret to writing for TV. “You need to write every script like this: ‘Open on powerful surf in Hawaii—cut to toilet being flushed.’” The key was to make sure the Hawaii scene was in the script. That way they would send you to Hawaii to film the surf. At least, that’s how it worked back in the Mad Men days.

At that time, Jess Corman was the king of radio at Thompson. One day, I was given some radio work and had to go meet him for the first time. I walked into a corner office and found a long-haired older dude along with two young copywriters—Mitch Silver, who eventually wrote a couple of novels, and Richard DiLallo, whose name you might recognize from some of our collaborations.

I looked at the older guy and asked, “Are you Jess Corman?”

And he came right back with “Why? Does he owe you money?”

I started laughing, and ever since, whenever someone asks me, “Are you James Patterson?,” I’ve been using that line: “Why? Does he owe you money?”

Anyway, I enjoyed going on film shoots—usually to exotic locales like Bismarck, North Dakota, and Flower Mound, Texas—but my absolute favorite thing about advertising was the music sessions. We would get some of the best talent in New York. Sometimes a violin section would arrive in the studio straight from Lincoln Center to do a ridiculous ten seconds in a thirty-second jingle. Tina Turner occasionally recorded commercial tracks. Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson were married songwriting partners. As Ashford and Simpson, they wrote “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (inspired by the tall buildings Nick noticed as he walked along Central Park West when he was a struggling young performer) and “I’m Every Woman.” They loved to work and were always fun to be around. So was Barry Manilow. When Michael Bolton was singing on a session (he sang on some Kodak tracks for me, courtesy of my music-producer friend Susan Hamilton), a lot of women from Thompson, and some men, would show up just to watch.

Not just listen—watch.