Bard of Bray

In 1994 my play ‘Sketches in the Dark’ won the National Student Playwriting Competition and sold out at the Edinburgh Festival, and in 1997 ‘Bookends’ was published by Samuel French. Bookends has been performed (amongst other places) in London, Edinburgh, Australia and New Zealand, and translated into Dutch, though not by me. It's still going – there were performances of it in both the Midlands and Yorkshire last year.

BOOKERS AND NUNS

More background: I am a graduate of the Creative Writing MA founded by Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia, and run at the time by Andrew Motion, the ex Poet Laureate. Its graduates include many well-known authors, including Booker prizewinners Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Take that with a pinch of salt, however, since the UEA have also produced several dropouts, eight taxi drivers and a nun.

COMMERCIAL APPLICATION

I never imagined any of this would have a commercial application. It does. As it turns out, drama couldn’t be a more appropriate grounding. Compelling storytelling, the ability to get into the skin of organisations and readers, the instinct to sense and adopt the right tone of voice. Vital business skills.

Since 1999 I've worked on around 350 commercial copywriting projects, from one-man-bands to global conglomerates, across all manner of sectors.

LAZY

Look at someone flap through a newspaper. Eyes darting. Watch someone reading a menu. The same.

See the glazed eyes of people overloaded with e-mail, tweets, ads, texts, threads, blogs and walls. We are a world of bad readers, lazy, more impatient, more judgemental than ever. Our eyes are remote controls, flicking on and on, and on again.

So, if you want someone’s attention, you’d better be good. If you want to keep it, you'd better be better.

SLOPPY

But frequently conventional business communication isn’t good. Often it’s the sloppiest around. It is characterised by arrogance, by the misguided assumption that the bare facts will stand up alone, without craft or thought. Words that alienate and objectify us, like ‘value-added’ and ‘best practice’, dot the landscape like skulls and crossbones. Who invented them? Who responds to them? No-one. They batter us. All they communicate is that nobody has taken the trouble to find a way to express their message disarmingly, differently, beautifully. Should we really do business with someone that takes so little trouble to interest or reach us, and takes us so for granted? Best practice? Best be off.

TRASH

This is what happens when the words don’t work: they are thrust into hands the world over, often beautifully presented at great expense. Then they’re clipped into briefcases and spirited silently from view. Then they’re dropped into wastepaper bins. Glanced at and discarded. Online, you don't even have to bother with the bin: a click will do it. Corporate literature is the most colourful trash heap in history.

Try not to join it.

TROUBLE

You cannot take too much trouble over the words.