Category Archives: Blog

my latest contemplations and ruminations. only occasionally gets me into trouble.

The Secrets of Success? Aye, Right.

hiding

Tell me, are there are really 12 million articles out there sharing the secrets of success, as Emer O’Toole claimed in her recent article for the Guardian? And be honest, what do you think about them?

I’ve been wrestling with this lately. If I air my opinions on the matter I risk offending many of my dearest friends, who try so valiantly every day to be a better person than they were the day before, and my cherished network of mompreneurs, which leaves no stone unturned in the search for better working practices.

But as the New Year approached, and the steady buzz of self-improvement mantras became a deafening rush of mindful imperatives, I found my hackles rising. There are only so many eye-opening new ways of thinking a no-nonsense Scottish person can take, before she battens down the psychological hatches and self-medicates with the age-old remedies of denial, alcohol, and doing things the way they’ve aye been done.

But avalanches tend to bury skiers who shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I do wonder whether I have willingly embedded myself in the very networks which regurgitate this stuff ad nauseum. Take LinkedIn, for example; what kind of Pulse article attracts the maximum attention? Let’s see, something about working, which straddles all the various professional fields, and offers to reward the reader for her trouble. Ah yes, let’s write about the secrets of success.

Then there’s my favourite go-to Facebook group, Amsterdam Business Mamas. I won’t hear a bad word said about it. 3,800 international mothers living in or near Amsterdam, led by the amazing Emmy Coffey McCarthy, support each other with high-level professional help and a wonderful sense of solidarity.

Inevitably, with such a concentration of working supermums, you will find many, many discussions on how to magic up extra hours in the day, and how to maintain razor-sharp focus when the teething baby is keeping you up at night. I, too, am in need of a time-warping miracle which will allow me to care for my children without guilt, while enjoying the professional freedoms I took for granted before they were born.

I have benefited many times from Amsterdam Business Mamas discussions; they pointed me towards Self Control, which helps me ration my Facebook usage, and to Toggl, for timing my various tasks. They impressed upon me the importance of valuing my own worth in monetary terms, something that doesn’t come easily to us Scots (“kent yer faither” – I knew your father – the ultimate Scottish put-down to keep you in your place).

So when I posted Emer O’Toole’s article, a light-hearted dig at the modern obsession with miraculous life-hacks, and it was met with offence from one member and silence from others – I worried that I had betrayed my allies, including those close personal friends who have made mindfulness and empathy their life’s work. I don’t want to betray them. They are good people, and the world definitely needs more of them. In fact, the more I see of the war-radicalisation-terrorism-war cycle, the more I see that empathy is the only way out.

So, I suppose my opinion is not as inflammatory as I thought it would be. There is a place for these discussions, from the practical productivity hacks to the all-encompassing life skills. But when it becomes a never-ending torrent of contradictory points of view, which all posit themselves as the only way forward, I think back to Doctor Spock’s wise words on parenting advice, and I know what to do:

“Don’t take too seriously all that the neighbors say. Don’t be overawed by what the experts say. Don’t be afraid to trust your own common sense.”

And one last thing: my heading is a classic Scottish case of two positives making a negative. If anyone ever says to you “Aye, right”, take note. You have just been taken with a massive pinch of salt.

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headshot15weeAbout Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

Looking for a copywriter to help you tell your story? Get in touch!

Dumping the Brain

car

Is it just me, or is this December especially crazy for calendar meltdown? I have deadlines coming out of my ears, social events all over the place, and sudden urgent meetings that are coming thick and fast out of nowhere and NEED to be NOW. I wonder if it’s because I now live in the Netherlands, where the financial year (and the Quick-Let’s-Use-Up-Our-Budget panic) ends in tandem with the calendar year, instead of safely out of the way in March, as I’m used to.

With so much to do, so many places to be, human cargo with a combined age of 14 to cart about, and way too much stinging rain attacking me sideways, I developed a desperate need, a couple of weeks ago, for a car. I’d managed for over four years without one, but in the space of a week (and with the excellent help of my engine-loving neighbour), I acquired my wee yellow banana, a 13-year old Suzuki.

Then things got even more stressful. Driving on the right. Bashing my hand on the door every time I reach for the gearstick on the left. Driving the wrong way into one-way streets because it was never an issue for the bike. Yikes.

My To Do list started to buzz around my brain like stinging wasps. It was affecting my sleep. I was rushing my work. I’m even rushing this (it was supposed to be a deeply-researched blog on gamification – sorry). I’ve barely even taken the time to tweak it (gasp).

Usually these days I like to go running to clear my head, but my schedule (and the weather) have been making it impossible. So I asked my friends how they clear their heads. These are their ideas, in no particular order:

  1. Brain dump – this involves writing down every single last thing spilling out of your brain, on paper using pen.
  2. Phone a friend – basically a verbal brain dump, hoping that your friend will empathise and reflect back what’s actually important to you.
  3. Eat chocolate – when is this not a solution?
  4. Drink wine – also suggested by the eat chocolate friend. I sense a pattern.
  5. Have a bath – always my favourite. I particularly like Radox muscle soak bath salts, which are sadly not available in NL. Please let me know if you know otherwise!
  6. Hae a dram – ie drink whisky. The Scottish solution.
  7. Dance to your three favourite songs. I particularly like the method in this madness. The exercise helps, your brain is distracted by figuring out its favourites, and you will laugh. I like to imagine the lawyer friend who suggested this doing it in her office.
  8. Sleep.

In the end I plumped for the classic wine-bath-sleep formula, with a little bit of Nashville thrown in. It definitely improved things. Next time I’m going to get adventurous and try the brain dump and the dancing. How about you? Do you have any great DIY head-clearing tips you can share?

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headshot15weeAbout Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

Looking for a copywriter to help you tell your story? Get in touch!

Tweak or Be Damned

Are you an eternal tweaker or the publish and be damned sort? I’m sure that at one time I was capable of dashing something off with the flourish of a self-assured swordsman, and dispatching it without a second thought. I’m sure I was. Almost certain. Alright, maybe that was in another life.

handcutoutNow, I seem to spend the greater part of my days tweaking. I read and re-read my hand-carved texts, taking just an extra sliver off here and perfecting the embellishment there. By the time I hit the “send” button, there isn’t a word that hasn’t been interrogated for its usefulness. And then I read it one more time, just to make sure.

I say hand-carved advisedly. As well as writing, I’m also a printmaker. I carve the lino surface down, slowly, hypnotically, and only those lines which are left untouched will ever see the printing ink. Eventually, there comes a point when the image is ready to print and that’s that; no more messing about (well, perhaps an extra cut or two after a quick proof).

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I used to write for newspapers, and that’s how it worked there too. Once you’d filed your copy, it was out of your hands, and the next time you’d see it was on the news stands. In the first few years I would read my articles faithfully every week in the paper. Eventually I learned to avoid reading them. If I had left in any mistakes – or as was more often the case, if the subs had inserted any mistakes – it was too late now to do anything useful about it.

Social media and DIY-websites have changed people’s attitudes to publishing. If you don’t like what you wrote, you can change it – even after it’s in the public domain and people have reacted to it. So the mistakes are legion, and the writing mostly loose and lazy. Speed is of the essence and – as they say with a wink in film production – “never mind, it can be fixed in post”. It never is.

Social media has also done something to me. Once I’ve worked and reworked my text, and finally pressed publish, the option to tweak is still tantalisingly available. It will be the death of my productivity. Back I go, and read it yet again, but this time, adopting the mental persona of various imaginary readers (or real ones who have shown an interest) in case it leads me to catch any nuances I hadn’t noticed before.

firstcut

Modern productivity gurus will gasp. “Never touch things twice,” they’ll say. “Never write an e-mail longer than five sentences.” Over-thinking is the ultimate modern sin, tossed into the same pot as religion and trade unions, deemed irrelevant to this fast-paced, throw-away, digital world. The under-thinkers are in the ascendency.

As Elaine Aron put it in her seminal book, The Highly Sensitive Child:

“Traditionally, sensitive people have been the scientists, counselors, theologians, historians, lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, and artists… But, increasingly, sensitive persons are being nudged out of all these fields due to what seems to be a cycle that starts with the nonsensitive moving aggressively into decision-making roles, where they… devalue cautious decision making [and] emphasize short-term profits or flashy results assertively presented over a quieter concern for consistent quality and long-term consequences…”

But the world needs its sensitive people, its over-thinkers, its tweakers. Things need to be touched twice if you want them to be as good as they can be, and not thrown away.

I was induced to do a timed test recently, for a job which was sold to me as copy editing (I’m good at that – I get paid to tweak to my heart’s content). I took their shoddy sow’s ear and crafted it into an elegant silk purse, and was not happy afterwards to be told that someone else had got “stronger results” than me. I pressed for more information, and as I suspected, “stronger results” turned out to mean: worked faster, quoted cheaper, and stuck to basic proofreading whereas I strayed into content editing. Good, I said. That’s exactly what I want to hear. I’m not cheap. I take my time. I make it the best it possibly can be.

If you’re a tweaker, like me, who will actually spend longer crafting an e-mail if you’re given a set number of words to do it in, then don’t despair. The world needs us. If we weren’t here, absolutely everything would be garbage.

PS, this document has been significantly revised since its first draft.

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headshot15weeAbout Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

Looking for a copywriter to help you tell your story? Get in touch!

Awe-inspiring, Unshakeable. The International Children’s Peace Prize

I’ve been burning the midnight oil this week, editing a report to be launched at the International Children’s Peace Prize award ceremony on 9 November in The Hague. The prize is awarded each year to a child who has dedicated themselves to fighting for the rights of other children. If you ever doubt the strength and resilience of human beings, take a look at the children who have won this prize. They are awe-inspiring. They are unshakeable. Their fundamental belief in justice is a light that shines on everybody around them.

MALALAEvery year I help to shape the prizewinner’s life story for printed materials. Sometimes the nominees are little-known outside their own communities, and I’m limited to a few privately sourced texts to work with. Sometimes – as with 2013’s winner, Malala Yousafzai, who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her heroic dedication to universal education – I have a rich pool of material to draw from.

The first life story I worked on made a particular impression on me. Thirteen-year old Kesz, from the Philippines, was the 2012 winner. At two, he was sent out begging on the streets. At four, he ran away from his abusive home. At five, he was pushed into a blazing pile of tyres on the dump where he lived, and was taken in by a social worker.

Cris-Kesz-Valdez

From his new life of safety, all Kesz wanted to do was help the children he had left behind. At seven, he bought flip-flops to protect their feet, in place of a birthday present for himself. By 13, through his own organisation, he had delivered 5000 gifts, 4000 toothbrushes, healed 3000 wounds and trained an ever-growing network of child volunteers in 48 communities to spread the news about hygiene, nutrition, gardening and children’s rights. All this, by 13.

nominees website.carrousel2

Standing up for children’s rights lies at the heart of the International Children’s Peace Prize, and is the raison d’être of the Amsterdam-based charity behind it, KidsRights. Over the past few years I have edited numerous reports published by the charity, and they are a constant reminder of how lucky my own children are. There was one report, about child sacrifice in Uganda, which I had to be persuaded to take on. It has permanently changed me. I will never forget the details, and I will never repeat them. It is unthinkable, what humans can do.

Technically, these things should no longer happen. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by every member state except for the USA, provides a global framework for protecting and promoting children’s rights. All of its signatories are obliged to implement its provisions in national legislation, and this is a work in progress.

But from all that I have learned so far about children’s rights around the world, one thing is very clear: enshrining the rights of the child in national legislation is an excellent start, but it is only a start. If it’s not coupled with a determination to change lives, it means very little to the scared little girl cowering on the kitchen floor, sold into slavery, or marriage, or both. Governments must apply themselves to implementing change, enforcing new laws, providing support facilities, ensuring access to justice, and shouting it all from the rooftops so that the children – and those who violate their rights – can hear it loud and clear.

The 2015 International Children’s Peace Prize will be awarded on 9 November in The Hague.

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headshot15weeAbout Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

Looking for a copywriter to help you tell your story? Get in touch!

The Slow, Horrible Death of the Scottish Newspaper

Waving a last bye-bye

AlbannachThere’s a lot of musical chairs going on in Scottish newspapers just now. Every time I log on to twitter there’s another batch of long-established writers, editors, production staff and photographers waving their last goodbyes. And judging by the youth of those who move to fill the very few remaining seats, the terms and conditions can’t be that attractive.

I’m watching this unfold from across the sea, having waved my own goodbye as freelance contributor four years ago. I probably wouldn’t have got much more work anyway, as they were already piling as much writing as possible – even the specialised stuff like my art reviewing – onto the desks of demoralised permanent staff.

All the time that I was freelancing in one of Scotland’s two big broadsheet stables, my father was freelancing in the other. Every time one of us had tales to tell about redundancies, efficiency savings and editorial hand-wringing, the other had identical tales to match.

Despite years of apparent immunity to cuts, my father has finally fallen too. Maybe that’s why, for me, this round of cuts feels like the last one – the final death knell for Scottish newspapers. In place of the weekly Gaelic page that he has edited since before I was born, they hope to cobble together something unedited, and fully paid for by Gaelic agencies.

“right now, the Scotsman is asking its freelance Gaelic writers if they will work for free”

That’s not news. That’s state propaganda. Why don’t they ask the government to sponsor the news pages while they’re at it? And they could get the galleries to supply art reviews of their own exhibitions. Hey presto! You have what the Dutch would call a sufferdje – a vacant free rag of a newspaper, paid for by advertorials and delivered through your letterbox whether you want it or not.

Sadly, we all know that newspapers are fighting a losing battle against endless free content online. There are the blogs, written for free, some of them adding terrific value (like Lallands Peat Worrier) and many just going through the motions, trying to get noticed (please tell me I’m not one of those). In fact, right now, the Scotsman is asking its freelance Gaelic writers if they will work for free.

Being paid is sooo last century, but food and electricity bills remain as urgent as ever. So writers like me are pushed into the world of paid commercial content, keyword stuffed and designed to convince you to sell your soul (or at least your e-mail address) by the end of 1000 words. “Would you like to know how much money you could make by getting to the top of Google for your chosen search term?” began an e-mail to me today, after I sold my own soul to an SEO training site.

It’s a sad state of affairs for Scottish newspapers. We are watching them wasting away to the bone. I don’t pretend to have the answers; I just know that something important is vanishing from this world. Writing that’s not built around keywords. Writing with no hidden sponsor’s agenda or a pithy call to action button at the end. Writing we would pay good money to read.

Anyway, that’s my tuppence worth on the matter. For free. Now read my bio and don’t miss my call to action on the way out.

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headshot15weeAbout Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

Looking for a copywriter to help you tell your story? Get in touch!

Lay Down Your Weapons

The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Jargon

Nobody likes to be accused of using jargon. You write with your eagerly learned vocabulary, your intelligent shorthand standing in for months and years of hard-won knowledge, and some fool comes along and dismisses it all as jargon.

It’s true: jargon is in the eye of the beholder, and almost never in the eye of the writer. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of smuggling it in myself, in the past. But when writing for a universal readership, I do try very hard to leave it at the door.

That’s because I believe that jargon is an armoury of weapons.

Willem_de_Poorter_-_Still-Life_with_Weapons_and_Banners_-_WGA18151
Willem de Poorter, Still-Life with Weapons and Banners, Haarlem 1636 (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Germany)

In the clumsiest of hands, it’s only a danger to its user. I remember in the first weeks of my art history degree, a private school boy with floppy hair and standard issue red jeans dropping recently learned big words into his sentences in class. Chiaroscuro was one of them, contraposto probably another. The thing is, despite his exaggerated swagger, he clearly had no idea what they really meant. In his hands, art historical jargon was a big old blunderbuss, and it was literally backfiring on him. Boom.

But jargon can also be a precision weapon. During my ongoing efforts to make myself professionally irresistible (how do I look?), I have browsed the offerings of other copywriters. Pssshhw, says an arrow called copy process development. Pthwang, says another called touchpoints. Thwuddewuddewudde says a third, narrowly missing me, called brand governance. I am buckling under a hail of jargon arrows (let’s call them jargows), feeling totally inadequate without a way to defend myself.

And that brings me to the third and most commonly encountered weapon of jargon choice: the shield. Let’s face it, jargon is a great way to hide. Wrap yourself in the language of your own army, cover up the weak spots in your raw core skills, and hope that you have done enough to deflect the arrows of those scary experts who have better aim than you.

I’m sure I haven’t been immune myself. For years I wrote art reviews in a national newspaper, and I know I was guilty from time to time of reaching for readymade art clichés to make life easy, for me and for my reader, and perhaps also to give the artist I was reviewing the benefit of the doubt. But in truth, these pre-packaged phrases would do nothing more than bridge the gaps in my understanding; linguistic empty calories expanding the word count without nourishing the brain.

But if I caught myself in the act; if I realised my words were empty, or a tangle of confusion, I developed a trick that I can highly recommend. I would take my hands off the keyboard, shut my eyes, and imagine myself explaining the concept to my mother. She’s an intelligent woman, open to new ideas, but not au fait with contemporary art terminology. She’d not hesitate to pull me up if I peppered her with bullets of artspeak. In every single case, within 30 seconds, I’d have it nailed. Do you know someone like that? Try it, next time you can’t quite find the words. It’s amazing how quickly your instinct to communicate takes over.

There’s another kind of discipline that has shown me the plain English way. It was, in fact, not speaking English. I was brought up speaking Scottish Gaelic as well as English, and like many other Gaels, my level of competence is just short of professional fluency. But one of the professional bonuses (and challenges) of speaking a minority language, is that you are gold dust, even without full fluency, in a media desperate for input.

So for a while there I was writing music reviews in Gaelic for another national newspaper. The language is laden with rich musical terms I could have used, but sadly, I didn’t know them. So I had to become very creative with the basic vocabulary I had, inventing little metaphors and stories to get my points across. Like, say… comparing jargon to weaponry.

I have, as a result, laid down my arms. Join me, please, in the march for unilateral jargon disarmament. Let’s write as we speak to each other, with honesty and respect. Let’s leave the weapons at the door, and make a real connection.
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headshot15weeAbout Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

Looking for a copywriter to help you tell your story? Get in touch!

My Jeans Fell Down

Shaping up for success

I put my hand in my pocket tonight and my jeans slid down off my hips. That was a nice surprise. Fortunately only my husband and children were there to enjoy it with me.

It’s been a month since I took up running. I never would have imagined I’d develop a taste for it. When I was in primary school I was the second slowest in class (the slowest of all developed diabetes by the age of 10). At high school my gym teacher struggled to put into words the strangeness of my running gait. But he was certain that it was, somehow, just not right.

So ever since, I’ve believed that running is not for me. Particularly after two babies in quick succession took its toll on my – well, anyway, not for me.

It’s not just your physical self-confidence that motherhood affects; it can also do serious damage to your professional self-image. I’ve always believed that I have what it takes to succeed; I’ve always been ambitious to make my mark. But I wound things down to start a family, somehow blissfully unaware that my main functions in the years to come would be more akin to dairy cow and domestic serf than omnipotent freelance superwoman.

Through all that, despite my decidedly sub-par performance as both dairy cow and domestic serf, I never stopped believing in my ability to succeed. But that belief, instead of driving me forwards, was driving me crazy. Especially when I found myself lifted from my home country, far from the path I had made myself. I had no idea how I would ever find my way; my carefully-laid trail of crumbs had dissolved in the ocean I had crossed.

But now, I see a clearing ahead. And I can’t quite believe it, but running has brought me to it.

I didn’t start running through choice. My daughter signed up for a race which required the accompaniment of a parent, and all of a sudden this clapped out old dairy cow was facing her very own Grand National. I ran a few times round the block to see if I could, and turned so purple that my neighbour expressed serious concern for my heart. But the next day I got further. And the day after that, right through the woods.

The race came and went two weeks ago: my daughter lost interest and dropped out in advance, but by that time I was hooked. I had become addicted to achieving the impossible. After all that time believing that I couldn’t run, here was I, dashing to the next village and back in a matter of minutes, no wheels involved.

I had discovered that I was capable of transforming myself; that my limitations weren’t as fixed as I had imagined. I had found to my amazement that step by liberating step, I could make myself fit for purpose. And this realisation fed almost instantly into my sense of professional self. It’s not that I haven’t been active through the dairy cow years, but a serious, steady income seemed all that time beyond my reach. I’ve done enriching work, and I’ve learned plenty, but the link between work and financial reward had somehow been broken for me. I had grown used to wandering around in circles, enjoying the view.

But the path is right in front of me now; I can see it clear as day. My first step is sorting out my LinkedIn presence: let me know what you think. The second is adding strong SEO knowhow to my copywriting and editing skillset – I’m pretty geeky, so that doesn’t scare me at all. And step three will be studying for the NT2 II exam, to bring my Dutch to a professional standard. All of these are well within reach, and will, I am sure, get me in perfect shape to attract high calibre clients who value quality content, professionally delivered.

I’m changing. I can feel it. The scales say I’m staying heavy and the purse remains light, but I know I’m getting fitter on both counts. My jeans fell down, remember. And just you wait, the work will come. I’m on the right path now.

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headshot15weeAbout Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

Looking for a copywriter to help you tell your story? Get in touch!

Damn, I Forgot to Charge

A Day in the Life of an Incorrigible Creative

This morning, I finally finished my emojis. My beloved little Blob character, hand drawn 80 times over, will go on sale through LINE, the Asian giant of mobile chat apps. It’s a collaboration with my friend Yoshie, who will do the marketing. We don’t get anything upfront, but we’ll get a few cents for every purchase. You never know: we might make our fortune.

Then I read some wonderful writing from 1920, for the introduction to my illustrated book of weird and wonderful Gaelic words. I received two generous grants to make the book, but given the acres of time I’ve so far put into this labour of love, I wouldn’t want to calculate the hourly rate.

This afternoon I will write the life story of this year’s International Children’s Peace Prize winner. I used to charge for this job, but after seeing the amazing winners in action I felt unable to ask for money anymore; so now it’s my annual contribution in their honour.

But before I get to that, I’m doing this. I keep hearing how important it is to get active on LinkedIn [where this post originally appeared], so here I am: doing another enjoyable task for nothing. Not sure how it will help me to sell my services, but who knows? It might.

11I clearly need the help. Making money doesn’t come naturally to me. Of course I do plenty of paid work too, but I often get the sneaking feeling that my prices don’t reflect my value. The client is always so nice. The cause is always so worthwhile. The challenge is always so enticing.

Agonising over my worth, I was referred the other day to a Dutch salary checking website. I wondered, when asked to fill in how long I’d been working, whether it was assumed that I had remained for 20 years in one narrow area of specialism. While I can see a definite thread of communication and storytelling running through my career, there are distinctly different boxes to tick for copyediting, political research, journalism, PR, art, illustration and animation production.

I remember tingling with pleasure some time ago, when an acquaintance called me Renaissance Woman because of the eclectic nature of my skills and experience; I love covering all the bases, and it’s perfect for running my own company, but at the greying age of 42, I’m still stymied when asked the simple question of what it is that I “do”. My elevator pitch works better on the stairs. Several flights of them, preferably.

The easy-to-define, conventionally-employed section of my career ended in 2001. I chose to become self-employed in October that year, just as my father took early retirement. We joked that we were retiring simultaneously, and it’s true that we’ve both thrived on the freedom, being prolific and varied in our output ever since. He’s an academic – making money doesn’t come naturally to him either.

The truth is, you only live once. I want my work to be creative and meaningful. I want to make the world a better place and to leave things behind that raise a smile. I don’t want to be a cog in some faceless financial machine, spat out all used up at the end of every day.

But then, beggars can’t be choosers. My husband’s employers have been fickle with him; they tempted him to this country four years ago, made a trailing spouse out of me, and Dutch kids out of our children, and now seem to have mislaid their purse. I find myself faced with the age-old imperative for work: the bills need to be paid and a roof kept over our heads.

That’s not the only reason I want to earn money though. There comes a point for most, I think, when being offered a significant hourly rate gives you a sense of legitimacy. I will always want to follow my passions and make the world a better place, but if I’m doing it well (and I believe I am), there is no reason why the world should not pay me for it.

So first I need to work out what it is I “do”. The world will want to know that. And then I just need to remember to charge for it.

Simple, right?

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headshot15weeAbout Catriona
I love to tell stories. My career has covered many bases, but communication has always been at the heart of everything I do. From journalism, politics and PR to art and design; from broadcast animation to published picture books and copy editing, it’s all about making people look and listen, and love what they hear. 

Looking for a copywriter to help you tell your story? Get in touch!