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.
