Wednesday To Tuesday: One Week Of Wanting To Slap A Client

I exaggerate – I didn’t spend the whole week wanting to slap her. But there certainly came a point when I would have dearly loved to smack some common sense and yes, good manners, into her pretty little head.

How did this farce go? Well, it started with a typical small-scale publicity contract for a company, let’s call it Lampshades Limited – obviously this is neither the company’s real name nor its real industry. The contract was directed by a good client of mine, Company X, and one of the components was an advertorial article in a major daily paper. So Company X subcontracted the writing of the article out to me – a Q&A-style story about something new and interesting that Lampshades Limited was doing. And the week went as follows.

Wednesday

I head down to Lampshades Limited to interview the founder, let’s refer to him as the CEO, for the story. Also present are the account manager from Company X, the marketing manager from Lampshades Limited and the external brand consultant hired by Lampshades Limited.

My immediate observation is that CEO and Marketing Manager have not been interviewed before, and they’re not too sure what to say – lots of points being repeated, very little actual subject matter. So I walk them through the story question by question, coax their input out of them bit by bit, eventually get what looks like enough material. In the process, I observe that CEO is genuinely passionate about his business. I feel there is potential for a real story – not just an advertorial – in this. I begin considering how to pitch this company to one of the C-suite magazines I write for.

Thursday

Lampshades Limited has another journalist to talk to on Friday, a full-time one on a major daily’s payroll rather than a nice accommodating freelancer like me (this difference is important!) Having noticed that CEO and Marketing Manager are not experienced with the media, I hurry up with the copy of the Q&A text and send it off so they can use it for reference during the next interview.

Friday and Saturday pass without incident. Note the time lapse.

Sunday

In the middle of Sunday afternoon, Account Manager from Company X (my client) calls me in a state of some agitation. Marketing Manager from Lampshades Limited (client of my client) has called him and made a fuss about the story having something unspecified wrong with it.

Now, I have to be somewhere else in one and a half hours’ time and I need to run some errands first. But I try to be nice to my clients, so I tell him that Marketing Manager can call me directly to explain what’s wrong.

And I spend half an hour on the phone with Marketing Manager, going through the story paragraph by paragraph and making changes as she points them out. Marketing Manager, I have observed, is 25 years old and doesn’t seem to be entirely sure what she’s doing. So I make allowances for that and display great patience.

After I’ve put down the phone and am making some final adjustments to the changed copy, Account Manager calls me. I get annoyed, because I’m already late for my appointment and he’s going to slow up what I’m doing. So I brush him off, finish the copy, send it to Lampshades Limited and leave the house at a run.

Two hours later, while I’m in the middle of this other business I have going, Account Manager calls again. This time to complain that my work is not up to standard. This makes me extremely pissed off because I went through the thing practically line by line with Marketing Manager. And what’s wrong with her that she can’t call me to tell me in person?

Well, I can’t do anything about it right now because – OBVIOUSLY – I’m in the middle of something else. But I agree to make more changes if Lampshade Limited will be kind enough to email me what they want done.

So. I get home quite late to find that Miss 25-year-old Marketing Manager wants to go over the copy with me in person tomorrow. Fine. Her company’s paying for it, after all. I make the changes indicated by email and agree to meet her tomorrow morning. At least I don’t have anything too urgent on tomorrow.

Monday

I make my way down to Lampshades Limited and sit next to Marketing Manager with my netbook open for half an hour, going through the story line by line and making changes on screen right in front of her as she asks for them.

By now the copy lacks anything remotely resembling fact. It has turned into a large powder puff, what some people refer to as “PR fluff” or “PR puff” or just “corporate bullshit”. But if that’s what the client wants to pay for, that’s what they get, so I nod, type, save, leave and later, email the changed copy to Marketing Manager with the note that tomorrow, I will be attending a full-day conference and thus not available.

Well, that should be the end of it. Wait, what? It’s almost 10pm and Marketing Manager has dumped another round of changes in my inbox. Didn’t we finish with this earlier today? And I need to get up very early tomorrow!

All right, whatever. I make the changes, send the copy back and go to bed, turning off my phone.

Tuesday (Morning)

Up early covering conference. Interesting subject matter and some very good speakers, a number of whom I make a note to interview later. At some point in the morning, my phone does its silent buzz buzz thing, which I ignore until the coffee break. I call back, expecting a quick conversation after which I can spend the coffee break hunting down people for soundbites.

Oh. It’s Account Manager. What the hell does he want NOW?

Oh. Marketing Manager has expressed dissatisfaction with the copy AGAIN. I am facing away from the coffee break area and in a glass panel nearby I can see a perfect simulation of rageface. I try to explain to Account Manager that I am in a conference and this is the coffee break, and that the story should be finished by now because I MADE THE GODDAMN CHANGES RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER YESTERDAY DAMN IT.

He natters on for half an hour, by which time coffee break is over, all the people I wanted to interview have disappeared and I haven’t had a chance to eat anything myself.

I want to kill something.

Anyway, I go back into the conference, kicking the whole Lampshades Limited rubbish under a mental table where it belongs so I can pay attention to some genuinely important things.

Tuesday (Evening)

Back from conference. I get my notes in order and open my email. What do I see? A note from Marketing Manager:

…An interview should not be written in a reporting style. It should sound positive and inspiring, a copy that gets the reader going.

…If you wish to meet, my branding consultant and myself will be available tomorrow at 4pm in town.

Sparks shoot from my eyes. My hair stands on end and bursts into flame. I’ve done more interviews in the last three years than this freshly graduated little brat will GIVE in the next TWENTY. What the hell does she know about interviews? And what does she know about reporting style? And WHAT PART OF “I WILL BE IN A CONFERENCE ALL DAY” DOES SHE NOT UNDERSTAND?

I desire very much to pick up the phone, call her and tear her face off. This is something I can do with impunity, because in terms of this particular project, I am not answerable to anyone. They are not obliged to use my work if they don’t like it. In return, I’m not obliged to keep on working with them.

However, I am deeply conscious of my real clients’ face. I am solicitous of Company X’s need to retain its own clients, and the pressures faced by Account Manager. Therefore, I write down everything I want to say to Little Miss Marketing Manager in a polite email, which I send to Account Manager with the note that he can choose not to pass it on. Then I go to Facebook and post the following status:

“An interview should not be written in a reporting style. It should sound positive and inspiring, a copy that gets the reader going.”

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh, I’ll get you going. I’ll get you going. You don’t want a reporting style? THEN DON’T HIRE A FUCKING REPORTER.

This post subsequently gathers quite a number of likes from my friends.

Account Manager tells me that he suspects Little Miss Marketing Manager is taking the advice of her brand consultant too thoroughly. He asks me to excuse her inexperience, which I agree to do purely for the sake of my real client – Company X. He then puts his foot down and tells Little Miss Marketing Manager this has to be the final copy.

Meanwhile, in a fit of loathing, I churn out a disgusting piece of fact-free, saccharine, bombastically flowery corporate bullshit.

Whatever Account Manager has said, Little Miss Marketing Manager seems to take it seriously. She accepts the bullshit – with one more piece of annoyance. She wants one sentence changed. She asks me to change it.

I think to myself, one bloody sentence. Change it your bloody self. But because I have care for my real client, I do it and then value-add a little by running a final grammar and house style edit on the whole piece of puff.

And that’s the end of the story.

Some Time Later

Yes, that’s the end of the story. For real. I have shelved the idea of pitching this company to another publication. I don’t want to be unfair to them, because they do have a good story to tell. But I’m not at all keen on working with Little Miss Marketing Manager and her brand consultant again. In any case, a company of their standing will be noticed by someone else.

I, meanwhile, am out of there. Ideally for good. Oh – and I didn’t slap her.

That’s good.

Take Your Passion For Writing And Stuff It

This evening I told a young lady studying at my alma mater that writing is a profession where passion must take second place to skill. I hadn’t really meant to take that stand. It was simply that, as I considered the literary profession in the light of what I’m doing now and what I’ve been doing for the last three, six, twelve and sixteen years respectively, I came to the sobering realization that passion alone isn’t enough to sustain a career.

Perhaps it’s just me; like a short-tempered version of the proverbial married couple, I suffer what’s best described as the two-year itch. Give me two years in a line of work or study and I’ll master all the intricacies needed, then lose interest and start looking for something else to do. (I suppose this makes me the next thing to unemployable?) More distressingly, this applies to a lot of my hobbies as well, although the lifespan of those is rather more varied. After a while, something in my brain goes click, as if to say: Hey. You. You know as much about this as you need to. Time to move on.

For whatever reason, anyway, I found my thoughts suddenly moving to the concept of passion, and how cliched – or overrated – it can be when applied to certain types of work. Especially work that requires skill.

It may come as a surprise to many people that writing is an activity which genuinely does require a modicum of skill, or perhaps more. It seems very easy, after all, to sit down in front of a keyboard and flood the screen with your thoughts – because it is. (Note that I say keyboard and screen; fifteen years ago I would have said pen and paper.) But it turns out that there’s a reason for the quote “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure” (Samuel Johnson).

Because it’s not so easy to cast your thoughts in a way that your readers can understand and sympathize with (or react to). Because it takes effort to organize your argument such that it makes sense to people who are different from you. Because it’s outright difficult to come up with an argument in the first place, one that can be explained and supported and adorned with the decorative flourishes of narrative and style and tone. And before the fiction writers jump in to say that a novel does not require an argument, consider this: Tolkien never claimed to be making an anti-nuclear argument when he wrote ‘The Lord of the Rings’, but there exists nonetheless an undertone of great power equating to great corruption (among a lot of other things), and you don’t need the Fat Man to make that into a debate of its own.

There are many, many passionate writers out there, people who adore their craft and are willing to sacrifice time, effort, money, emotional turmoil and artistic distress for it. Among a lot of other things. And they will tell you that they love what they are doing, and mean it. But if passion alone could lead to success, Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t have ended up dead.

Which writers succeed? Well, there’s the American guy of whom it’s said that he could publish his laundry list and it would be a bestseller (hint: Pennywise.) There’s the English Bard who came up with the Montagues and the Capulets from the previous paragraph’s example, and I seriously doubt he was writing for passion alone, because he had to make a living off it – but four centuries after his death, people are still studying his works in the hopes of making a living off their studies some day. I greatly dislike the study of literature because in my opinion, it analyses too much – for all you know, a “poetic” passage was just some stream of consciousness trash spouted in an attempt to relieve an attack of writer’s block. But all that annoying analysis did show me one thing – that there is some genuine underlying technical and mechanical skill involved in writing of any kind.

With that skill, you can express your passion – and if you don’t have passion, you can fake it. Ask any sex worker.

With passion, you can do great things with your skill – but if you don’t have skill, what you can do is severely limited.

I am not knocking people with passion. Everything has to start somewhere. But I worry every time I hear someone say that they want to do/are doing something out of passion, and then go on to blithely reveal that they lack any basic knowledge of what they’re doing. If they can develop skill, good for them. But I’ve also seen a lot of people who never do bother to develop skill – in fact, who don’t even seem to recognize that they need to develop skill, and who go through life in the certainty that their passion will win out somehow.

I hope it does, because everyone ought to have a chance to do something that they’re passionate about. But at the same time, part of me looks through piles and piles of manuscripts (including my own) and shelf after shelf of  self-published books (also including my own) and page after page after page of blogs (again including my own) and that part of me thinks: take your passion and stuff it.

A Letter To Mr Tan Jee Say

Dear Sir:

 I will vote for you in the upcoming presidential election. I will vote for you not because I agree with the stances you espouse – I do not. I will vote for you not because I identify with your background and political affiliations – I do not. I will vote for you not because my mother worked under you while you were with the civil service – I couldn’t care less.

 I will vote for you because I believe that we do not need the office of president in Singapore. Over the past years, the presidential office has been of such low profile that no one has paid particular attention to it. Over the past months, the question has been raised of why a low-profile office draws such a high salary. Over the past weeks, the debate over the role of the president has exposed the contradictions inherent in the presence, the purpose and the relevance of the office.

 I respect that the presidential office-holders past and present have been worthy people of calibre, who have performed their duties as they felt befitted their constitutional authority. But this is no longer 1960 or 1980 or even 2000. We, the citizens of Singapore, want to see what we are paying for. The president, the elected president, is a holder of public office. He must be accountable in the performance of his duties. And the government that upholds the constitution that dictates those duties must be accountable for the scope and nature of those duties.

 In the debate over the role of the president, two sharply opposing sides have appeared. Either the president has the power to take a stance independently of the government and on matters of substance, or he does not. If the president has this power, then what are our Members of Parliament – our elected Members of Parliament – doing? If they are doing their job in the interest of the public, why do we need a president?

 If the president does not have this power – if he is dumb, as Mr Tan Kin Lian so concisely put it – then what is the purpose of having a president? Is the office merely a ceremonial rubber stamp? Certainly, other democracies have a ceremonial head of state. It is known as the incumbent monarch. Where there is no monarch, the elected prime minister – or the executive president – assumes the role of head of state. Why must the head of state be separated out from the executive function, especially in a politically and economically stable environment?

 No matter what side of the debate one chooses to stand on, the role of president emerges as redundant. Therefore, I will not vote for Dr Tony Tan, because he represents the status quo and the retention of a redundant role. I will not vote for Dr Tan Cheng Bock, because he, too, is close to the status quo. I will not vote for Mr Tan Kin Lian, because – my apologies, but I think this is true – he will not be able to capture enough of the popular vote.

 Therefore, Mr Tan Jee Say: I will vote for you because in my eyes, your entry into the presidential office is the most likely to lead to its eventual abolishment. Not just because you may or may not move to have it abolished, but because your presence has a high likelihood of goading the PAP into a serious relook of the office’s purpose and the necessity of having it. We have all seen that lobbying the PAP for change usually has no more than minimal and cosmetic effect. Put it this way: a fire lit under the seat of someone’s chair is more likely to make them stand up than a roomful of people cajoling them.

 I’ll vote for you. Now go light that fire.