Coping with post-dramatic stress

 Last fall I completed the post-graduate corporate communications and public relations program at Centennial College, an intense educational experience that engendered a feeling of accomplishment and hope for future employment. We all know what happened after that.

Well before I became officially qualified to do what I had been doing for 25 years, I launched into a daily job search routine. Every morning for two years, I poured my first coffee, fired up my PC and began to scour the dozen or so job boards bookmarked on my browser. Almost every day, for months, I have tweaked my renovated resume, composed and customized cover letters and filed applications for employment. At first, I tried to send off at least 10 per week, but by December 2008, prospects of any interest to me and for which I am qualified, dwindled down to three or four per week. From the dozens of applications I filed, the many business cards I exchanged and the few real leads I followed up on, I have received precisely two interviews.  Two interviews in six months; to say the least, not very encouraging.

Thanks entirely to friends, fellow Centennial students and instructors, I have gleaned some freelance work this spring. Though not enough to keep the wolf from the door, it is a tonic for my underemployed ego.

Last weekend I had coffee with an old friend who is happily employed at IKEA Canada. After hearing about my efforts to find work, she said, “So you wake up every morning and the first thing that happens is that you feel defeated?” Well, duh. I had really never thought about my job search that way. With infinite tact, my friend suggested that I cut my job hunt down to two or three mornings per week and that I spend the other mornings doing tasks that yeild immediate rewards: writing, gardening and home repairs.

Just hearing this sane advice I knew that she was right and this week, despite the heat, I feel lighter. I am finally coping with my situation in a positive way. Thanks Maureen!

Final notes

We are days away from the end of classes in the Corporate Communications and Public Relations program that began in January of this year. There are eight weeks of placement in the field ahead, though not all of us will complete that course this September. There has been surprisingly little attrition, with 28 “survivors” out of the original 30, gasping toward the finish and about to reap our rewards.

In this second semester, we have been weaned away from classwork and constant group work, as well as from the cafeteria, the closest thing to a hearth at Centennial College’s Centre for Creative Communications. I think we have missed the noisy gatherings there – the joys of communal eating.

An experience like this – seven months of intensive learning in an environment that is as competitive as it is collegial – is going to stick. At this moment, I think most of us are happy to bid adieu to most of our fellow classmates. Yet, I do not doubt there will be a lot of fond feeling when we think back on this particular group of characters and the crazy things we did just to get through the program.

When I applied to the program, I thought that the emphasis would be on communications and not public relations. Not so. Whether because of the mix of instructors, imperitives in the market or student priorities and demands, PR is the reason for this program’s existence.

I have avoided PR. There, I said it. Here’s one reason: I have known a number of journalists in both my personal and professional life and I can honestly say that not one of them – good, kind, intelligent people all – ever had the time of day for my opinions. I cannot deal with lack of respect in the workplace.

I wished for a placement at Harbourfront Centre, a place where I might employ my knowledge of literature (the Interational Festival of Authors), theatre (the World Stage Festival; the Premiere Dance Theatre); contemporary visual art (the Power Plant) and even gardening (the Music Garden.) As a communications intern at Harbourfront I will be kept busy marketing and promoting any combination of the 4,000 events that are hosted and produced by this cultural hub each year.

I wish all of my fellow students well and will miss a handful of them very much. But where there is a will – or a networking opportunity – I am certain we will meet again.

In defence of generalists

The big picture

Full-time or freelance, by definition a professional communicator comes across a lot of information and jargon on the job. My experience has been broad: I started in theatre and was an performance artist in the late ’70s; leveraged the theatre experience to make money in corporate communications (ah, the ’80s); became a mother and writer, then as part of the “sandwich generation” – this definition is for those who think that all Boomers are privileged – I took on the pay-free social work of caring for children and elders in the ’90s; and finally, I returned to communications for a not-for-profit.

Throughout, I have read and researched widely: history, psychology, psychiatry, linguistics, philosophy, geopolitics, musicology, science, economics, medicine, biology and, most of all, essays and fiction from every corner of the world.

The autodidact

Reading is not a hobby for me, but a necessity. Reading has kept me more-or-less sane. It is surprising how often people remark on this habit, as if, outside of academe, it is a frightful waste of time. People ask where I find the time to read; do I steal time from employers, my family, friends, my dog? No. I read in the interstices between appointments and events. I read while doing other things like traveling, waiting, stirring food and having a bath. In the morning I scan the news and bookmark items of interest. Or used to, as now I receive RSS feeds, Google alerts and consult my del.icio.us links. I still carry reading material throughout the day. I read in earnest after dinner and before bed, for a couple of hours on Saturday morning; I listen to CBC radio and pick up the New York Times Review of Books every other weekend and I generate reading lists from these and other sources.

I also belong to a book club – a group of high-powered arts administrators, all women my age who read for pleasure and to keep on top of cultural matters. Six times yearly we eat Vietnamese soup and talk, sometimes about books I might not otherwise read.

All this plus my love of research has made me, as a writer, a generalist.

What PR professionals want

Since January, we have had several guest speakers come to our various communications and PR courses. Among others, we met blogger Maggie Fox, whose company, Social Media Group, has recently taken off; independent practitioner Barb Sawyers; and Bruce MacLellan, founder and CEO of Environics Communications. I made sure to ask each of these seasoned pros the same question: is there room for generalists (writers) in the field, or do you prefer to hire specialists? Only speech writer Jamie Manov answered that general knowledge is an asset to the writer and his/her employer. The others said that they prefer writers who specialize in their clients’ businesses: health, technology, politics etc.

Though it did not surprise me, the response struck me as knee-jerk and stodgy, especially in light of the easy access to information we all possess and the idea that it is a communicator’s job to learn the clients’ business and find the language with which to express it. On any given business project, we do become specialists, if only for a time. There is a difference between technical writing, where specialization is a necessity, and communications writing, where, I believe, flexibility is an asset. Unless it is a hold-over from the 1980s, when specialization functioned as both business model and mantra – a glut of MBAs and academics preached the gospel of specialization – I do not understand the negative attitude toward people like me who think big.

The defence

In crafting communications messages, I have learned to distill information and make it palatable for various audiences. In my creative writing practice I use everything at hand to tell compelling stories. My most effective writing draws on knowledge from many sources, in a process that connects the dots and discards the inessential. And just as very specific stories have universal appeal – how different, really, are we from each other? – broad and varied knowledge can find its very specific uses.

For the past two years I have worked on the development of a new opera with Queen of Puddings Music Theatre and composer James Rolfe. I was first consulted on the project when UK playwright and librettist Paul Bentley read a long essay I had published in Fuse Magazine. Bentley contacted the artistic director of Queen of Puddings and asked if she knew me, as he wanted to consult with me on the story and have me translate the English text into Portuguese. The story is based on an old Portuguese legend and set in 1960’s Toronto. The song form that inspired the project – fado, or the Portuguese blues – was sung by my mother, who once aspired to do so professionally, and was a staple in my family home. My essay was about immigrant Portuguese culture in Toronto from the 1960s on. The AD and I had become fast friends when I worked in the very small field of new opera development. The fact that I, a writer of Portuguese heritage, had participated in an intensive libretto writing workshop was an extraordinary coincidence. Thus, my varied background and proclivities as a writer made me the ideal candidate, if not the only candidate, for this very particular project.

Conclusion

Perhaps I will not always need to defend myself as a generalist; or perhaps the communications world will come around to the notion, recently adopted by science, that it is no bad thing to access creative resources beyond one’s specialty. In any case, I have no choice but to keep on trying to convince, in word and deed, those who would equate generalists with hacks or know-nothings.

ABCs of best practices online

‘A’ is for:

• Aggregation

Subscribe to and combine feeds from multiple web sources and receive them on your desktop or your inbox. RSS – really simple syndication – makes it possible to monitor media: blog entries, articles or entire publications as frequently as you wish. The CBC and BBC offer the best news feeds online under vast arrays of subject matter. This is a way to have a daily digest, made up of as many subjects and from as many sources as you can stand, custom delivered. A great way to filter and organize information.

• Audio

For decades, I have wondered why even the best and most expensive consumer video cameras have lousy in-board sound/microphones. I pestered Sony on this matter for an entire year. Still no answer.

When vlogging, interviewing or podcasting, consider using a unidirectional mic. For very little money ($25) you can vastly improve the quality of your recording and, hence, the playback. This way, you can also avoid irritating background noise (cats yowling, toilets flushing etc.) while making your voice as clear as possible.

To improve your speaking ability on- or off-camera, try exercising your mouth muscles, tongue and palate with the same vocal warm-ups that actors and singers use.

This one is easy to remember. Sing through the vowels in alphabetical order, first slowly and one at a time: A-E-I-O-U. Make sure to stretch your mouth around each vowel. Repeat twelve times. Then break up the vowels into staccato sounds and speed up, pushing each breath out from your chest: aaaaaaaaaaaa-eeeeeeeeeeee-iiiiiiiiiiii-oooooooooooo-uuuuuuuuuuuu. This will sound like panting or throat singing. Repeat twelve times and don’t forget to breathe in at regular intervals.

• Attribution

Always provide citations for quotes, images and information borrowed from other writers. Not to do so constitutes plagiarism.

• Awareness

Always read the terms of service, usually in squinty-print. Know what you are giving up, in privacy and content, before you sign up.

‘B’ is for:

• Blogs and blogging

Originally known as the web log, the blog has become the online self-publishing tool of choice. A website of one’s own or a shared repository for people with common interests, the blog can accommodate text, comments, widgets, audio and visual files.

A blog like this one, from WordPress or Google Blogger, offers open source code, so you can make frequent changes to the content and design. Proprietary blogs, such as Typepad are corporately owned. They are more flexible and generally look better, but they come at a price.

• Bookmarking

Social bookmarking, that is. It goes hand in hand with blogging and allows readers to find your posts, and you theirs. It is a record of websites that you can share according to mutual interests. These are identified in the tags you create and associate with each URL you bookmark.It is easy to create a del.icio.us account and begin identifying and posting your bookmarks.

‘C’ is for:

• Content

It’s chaos out there: spiralling galaxies of thought and deed in an expanding universe of words and images. The signal-to-noise ratio of content online is enormous. Don’t add to the noise.

Like all good writing, good writing for social media adheres to some basic rules and tenets, with a few twists. Melanie McBride’s 5 tips for (better) social media writing is an excellent, concise place for the Canadian communicator to begin. For more indepth advice, complete with interesting background information and references, check into Jakob Nielson’s notes on web writing.

Regardless of the medium, take care to guard the quality of the content you post. Edit, edit and edit again, for spelling, grammar, style and tone. If you have nothing to say, don’t post.

• Camera-readiness

There are lots of make-up tricks you can use to make yourself look your best on-camera. With just a few bits and pieces, you can slim down your nose, highlight your cheekbones, widen your eyes and keep your entire face matte and cool looking. Ladies Who Launch Magazine has a few.

Pose yourself in a not-too-cluttered background in adequate, even light and position the camera so that it tilts (slightly) up to your face. This is a flattering angle. You want a head and shoulders shot, a medium close-up: not so close that your features are distorted, nor so far away that they don’t read. Rehearse!

From Fiction to Fact: Borrowing from the Arts for Business Writing

Researching an article, a speech, a script or any piece of business writing is a lot like researching a character in a play or a novel. You start with a few basic questions: where or with whom does the piece originate and why does it need to be written or spoken? Then, you take a good look at your audience and determine how best to craft messages that will speak to them.

My writing career began in theatre, where I collaborated on original productions and studied the masterworks of Shakespeare, Chekov and Williams. When I began to write fiction, I found myself using acting techniques to get inside my characters’ heads and hearts. I call this “method writing”, after the Stanislavski System or Method, adopted and made famous by Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler at the Actor’s Studio in New York. This is very useful for writing natural-sounding dialogue, but it works equally well for writing speeches, or coming up with convincing quotes for media releases.

Fiction, drama and screenwriters build stories around a basic dramatic structure, the dramatic arc. Sometimes, to add tension or expose details, a “false climax” is introduced between the intro and the climax. You can recognize this highly effective method of storytelling in the tragedies of Aeschylus, the comedies of Neil Simon and the novels of Ian McEwan. Try applying this structure to, for example, a short donation letter and see if it works for you.

Effective business writing contains other elements found in fiction, drama and poetry. Establish a consistent theme, and don’t be afraid to use metaphors, irony and humour to enliven the driest subject.

Finally, a marketing presentation or voice-over script must be “performed”. After you have drafted a speech, test it for impact and adherence to the dramatic arc. Choose three colours of highlight markers, representing three emotional states: blue for “cool”; yellow for “warm”; and pink for “hot”. Go through your script and mark up key sentences or phrases according to the corresponding colours they evoke. When you lay the pages out horizontally, you should see a progression from “cool”, to “warm”, to “hot” and back to “cool” near the end. Especially in a long piece, it’s a good idea to “spike” the dramatic arc with “hot” phrases that help to hold your audience and presenter’s interest.

Share the above technique with your clients. If they are delivering your material, the highlights can help them vary the pace of the presentation, emphasize the right points and bring your writing to life.

Boomsday Book

Boomsday is the title of a 2007 novel by satirist Christopher Buckley, best known as the author of Thank You for Smoking. It is a hilarious, elaborately plotted cautionary tale centred around Cassandra Devine, a young Washington PR flack whose nightly blog ignites an intergenerational, political battle. It is set in the present, just before the US presidential race gets under way. 

Buckley takes one of the worst fears of Gen Ys (how are we going to pay for the care and feeding of the huge, spoiled Boomer generation in their interminable old age?); he pits it against the primal fears of Boomers (the young will storm our gated communities, drag us into poverty and/or make us into Soylent Green!); and literally spins out an absurd, almost believable, solution to a pre-election budgetary crisis. En route to the satisfying epilogue, we trip over a cast of evil and dotty politicos, a horribly self-involved father, an eccentric senator and a bombastic, evangelical presidential candidate. 

Throughout the novel, Buckley critiques and tracks the role of PR and the media at every stage of power acquisition – from grooming and schmoozing, to information mismanagement; from truths and lies, to national catastrophe. Despite its hyperbolic overtones, there is something uncomfortably true-to-life about this narrative.

I recommend this book as a form of aversion therapy for blogophobes. For everyone else, it’s just good, ironic fun.

The accidental blogger

That, perhaps, is what I should have named this site. I have been an accidental librettist and an accidental curator, so there is a precedent for the moniker.

My name is Anna Camara and I am a Toronto-based writer and communicator.

In November 2007, I wound up the last of the half-dozen assignments I had taken on after leaving my long-time position as director of communications for a small arts organization. Contract work found me, unbidden, but neither my CV nor my professional network were generating job interviews for full-time positions. I tend to stick with people and projects for a long time and was in search of the next place to land, possibly for five to ten years.

There was a hole in my resume under ‘education’ – great as it was, theatre school in the 1970s did not confer credibility on a 25-year career in communications. During the pre-Christmas panic, I rifled through my teenage son’s college brochures and rushed to meet the Humber and Centennial College application deadlines.

So here I am, into the second and final term of the post-graduate Corporate Communications and Public Relations program at Centennial College’s Centre for Creative Communications, a few city blocks north of my home in Riverdale. (Not exactly by accident.) Our online PR instructor, Melanie McBride, has provided a context for this foray into social media and I am happy to explore its possibilities.

That said, I have always been a bibliophile. I visit my local public library three or four times a month, read three or four books a week and try to make 25 per cent of my reading non-fiction. No amount of blogging, tweeting, or e-mailing will replace my passion for writing and reading – on paper, from paper.

As a learner, I am a curious and skeptical autodidact – a lifer. I learn by reading, observing, questioning, listening and talking. This forum offers the opportunity to learn in the way that suits me best: dialectically. If I can have an evocative exchange – or share a good joke – with only one person here, I will have learned something valuable.

For me, process is almost everything – there is no part of my personal and artistic life that does not inform my writing craft, so this blog will be open-ended and, if it evolves, will do so organically.

I’ll end this post with a quote from an essay called The Art of Immemorability by American poet and critic Charles Bernstein, found in a favourite book, A Book of Books:

“I want to reiterate that one medium does not conquer another. It is not a question of progress but rather of a series of overlays, creating the web in which our language is enmeshed. Technology determines neither art nor politics and art is never free from the effects of technology. Technology informs, but it does not determine.”

What do you think?