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.

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?