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Getting Past It: Five Creatives Face Adversity . . . I’m happy to update you that today, my new eBook of this name has become available online!
Saskatoon designer and artist Kat Bens and Toronto based designer Oliver Sutherns have collaborated with me to produce an electronic collection of interviews with five Creatives who have battled adversity in their lives.

One interviewee faced nearly certain death from a heart attack brought on indirectly from faulty cancer treatment. Yet he moved on with painting, doing business and travelling . . . .

Another responded to the trauma of losing jobs by teaching herself HTML and volunteering “tens of thousands of hours” on a far-reaching anti-domestic abuse network for women . . . .
And more . . .

The phrase “Getting Past It” refers to the losses, traumas and other challenges that these people have “gotten past,” as well as any assumption we often make that life ends (i.e. we get “past it”) at age 40 or 60 or 100.

The issue is not whether these creative people dealt with adversity, but how, and the extraordinary achievements they’ve made, along the way. The stories are compelling and may inspire others in our community to facing adversity in similarly quiet, unsung lives.

The collection makes a great holiday gift or stocking stuffer!

The eBook, the first in a series to come in the future, is now available for purchase on the home page of my website at elizabethshih.com

I hope to hear from you and Happy Holidays 2015 to all of my readers!

I can recall a couple of separate occasions as a freelance copywriter when I have not “won” a contract, because my style was refused in favour of what Montreal copywriter Nick Usborne calls “blunt force trauma” (i.e. very short, punchy copy) . . . .

A couple of months ago, Nick blogged on the importance of recognizing that “really good copywriting is also really good writing.” He cited the example of Susie Henry, a copywriter in the UK during the 1970s whose style was conversational and as attentive to “flow and pace [and] rhythm” as “a good sonnet . . . [or] a great novel.”

Nick observes that the finely crafted copywriting of a genuine writer “sadly . . . seems to be falling out of fashion.” He describes the “blunt force trauma” approach and style that has recently begun to replace it as “attractive, because it tends to deliver results faster,” with its “Buy NOW!” and “FREE!!” and “Don’t miss this opportunity!”

Marketers who claim that the conversational approach doesn’t work forget that writers like Susie Henry have written copy that has been highly successful for the companies she wrote for.

Here’s Nick:

“If you are at a party or in a bar with a group of people, who do you REALLY pay attention to . . . the loudmouth or the really interesting person who speaks so softly you have to lean in to hear what she is saying?” He asks: which “brand” (either conversational or trauma-centred) would you trust and follow? And, “who would you invite back to dinner at your home?”

If, like Nick and me, you’re a conversational (copy)writer, or someone who hires us, never fear! The blunt-force approach doesn’t work in all contexts or in all times. There are many contexts in which less garish, in-your-face marketing wins the day.

Marketing legend Seth Godin implicitly agrees. In his November 8^th (2015) blog posting, he writes that “the simple way to get better at business writing” is to “write like you talk.” He says that “effective business writing” won’t say “effective January 1, 2015, we have ceased operations. For further information, correspondence should be addressed . . . .”

Instead, it will say, “We closed this store last year. Sorry for the hassle. Please call us if you have questions.”

Similarly, the effective business writing Godin refers to won’t sound like “ATTENTION SHOPPERS! We’re now CLOSED! VISIT OUR WEBSITE to ORDER . . . . Don’t miss out!”

Advertising legend Bill Bernbach’s philosophy (and David Ogilvy’s, too) was, as Nick Usborne says, that “good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.”

As you decide how to market your services or products over the long-term, which approach to writing will you use (or will be used by your writer)?

Trying to distinguish between the correct grammatical rules for hyphens and dashes can be mind-boggling. Two brief (and excellent) computer editing tips from Timothy McAdoo for the APA Style Blog have brought order again to my editing work . . . . (And thanks to Wilf Popoff to sending me links to McAdoo’s work).

The APA Style Guide says that hyphens are NOT dashes and shouldn’t be used interchangeably. There is a subtle distinction between them, McAdoo clarifies, and dashes can take various forms.

First, what is an “em dash?” Em dashes are “used to set off an element added to amplify or to digress from the main clause.” The em dash appears as a “longer dash” that creates a sense of physical separation between the phrases. It’s perfect to use for text “that you want to stand out.” It is not to be confused with hyphens or “en dashes.”

An “em dash” can be used to set off a phrase at the end of a sentence (“writing well—but not deeply. . . .”). Or they can set off a phrase, “midsentence—as a technique used for emphasis—“(adapting McAdoo’s examples). This use of an “em dash” allows for digression or interruption of thoughts.

But “overusing an em dash . . . weakens the flow of material” (Publication Manual of the APA). So inserting them infrequently is best.

To complicate things slightly, there is no keyboard button for an “em” dash. So on a PC, you must hold “Control” and “Alt” keys together and then type the minus sign on the far right side of the numeric keypad on your keyboard.

+++ Continue reading “Dash it Anyways! “Em” and “En Dashes” in Today’s Blog Posting . . . .”

In a recent blog posting, marketing guru Seth Godin shared the following comments:

The power of fear

Fear will push you to avert your eyes.

Fear will make you think you have nothing to say.

It will create a buzz that makes it impossible to meditate…

or it will create a fog that makes it so you can do nothing but meditate.

Fear seduces us into losing our temper.

and fear belittles us into accepting unfairness.

Fear doesn’t like strangers, people who don’t look or act like us, and most of all, the unknown.

It causes us to carelessly make typos, or obsessively look for them.

Fear pushes us to fit in, so we won’t be noticed, but it also pushes us to rebel and to not be trustworthy, so we won’t be on the hook to produce.

It is subtle enough to trick us into thinking it isn’t pulling the strings, that it doesn’t exist, that it’s not the cause of, “I don’t feel like it.”

When in doubt, look for the fear. (Godin, October 17, 2015 blog)

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Continue reading “Seth Godin and Elizabeth Gilbert on Fear and Creativity”

This week, I’m revisiting a posting from last February that addressed marketing guru Seth Godin’s own blog of February 18 (2015). With the world news so filled with tragedy and suffering, we may be tempted to think that what we do in communications and marketing (and business) doesn’t matter or can’t make a dent. I want to re-assert that we can and do.

Godin raises the crucial issue of politics in marketing and communications or in any kind of cultural work.

My comments will follow this long quotation from Godin, after the crosses, below:

“Kicking and screaming (vs. singing and dancing)

Unfair things happen. You might be . . . demoted for a mistake you didn’t make, convicted of a crime you didn’t commit. The ref might make a bad call, an agreement might be abrogated, a partner might let you down.

Our instinct is to fight these unfairnesses, to succumb if there’s no choice, but to go down kicking and screaming. We want to make it clear that we won’t accept injustice easily, we want to teach the system a lesson, we want them to know that we’re not a pushover.

But will it change the situation? Will the diagnosis be changed, the outcome of the call be any different?

What if, instead, we went at it singing and dancing? What if we walked into our four-year prison sentence determined to learn more, do more and contribute more than anyone had ever dreamed? What if we saw the derailment of one path as the opportunity to grow or to invent or to find another path?

This is incredibly difficult work, but it seems far better than the alternative” (Godin, February 18, 2015).

+++++ Continue reading “Revisiting Seth Godin on the Politics of Creative Work . . .”