Essays

By Gary McKeone

It’s late in an April afternoon
as my memory walks beneath the arches of the Mezquita,
between the Juderías white walls,

thinking how in this architecture
an affection warms and billows
along the streets’ short emptiness.

Chalk Farm: After Reading a Translation of Ibn Zaydun
                       
Paul Wilkins

Holy Thursday, 1992.  Five of us are packed into a Ford Orion heading out of Derry, on the road to Dublin. The car is struggling with the weight.  From Dublin we will fly to Seville, then on by train to Córdoba and Granada.  It is a pilgrimage of a kind, a small act of homage to a country and a culture that we are each in our different ways absorbed by.  In the play Translations by Brian Friel, set in Donegal in 1833, one of the English soldiers asks the old hedge-school master if he has heard of the poet Wordsworth.  Hugh replies magisterially, 'Wordsworth?... No. I’m afraid we’re not familiar with your literature, Lieutenant.  We feel closer to the warm Mediterranean.  We tend to overlook your island.’'  A quarter of a millennium later, five of us are drawn to that warm Mediterranean once more. 
    Just outside Aughnacloy, the exhaust pipe gives up the unequal struggle and clatters on to the road.  If you're going to lose an exhaust pipe in Northern Ireland on a Holy Thursday, best let it happen in a little Protestant town where there's half a chance of finding a garage open.  Half an hour’s welding later we're back on the road, leaving behind the red, white and blue kerb stones and the tattered Ulster flags that bedeck every lamp post. 
    I wish I could claim that I began to study the Spanish language out of a sense of cultural adventure but the truth is it had more to do with self-preservation than intellectual curiosity.  I was thirteen, choosing O’Level subjects.  The choice was Spanish or Irish and the latter, the native tongue spoken by fewer and fewer natives, meant a priest who was not averse to bouncing heads off the classroom wall.  It wasn’t a tough decision.
    All I knew of Spain at the time was the Costa del Sol.  We had been fortunate enough to go there on family holidays, in the days when people smoked on planes.  I remember clearly the wall of heat that hit us as we stepped on to the tarmac at Malaga Airport, the different taste of milk,  newspapers that were always a day late, the blur that was the Spanish language, all gesture and noise.
Gradually, Spain became a fixed point on the compass, drawing me back time and again. It was there, a small transistor radio held to my ear that I heard a Spanish newscaster announce the death of Lord Mountbatten, blown-up off the coast of Donegal.  A long time later, it was in Spain that I watched the planes fly into the Twin Towers while our baby son Jack took his first faltering steps beneath an orange tree outside, a harrowing elision of public and private worlds.
 On one of those early holidays we somehow fell-in with a family from Córdoba.  Marie José was my age.  Suddenly this language I was learning took on an urgent relevance.  We became pen-pals (does that happen any more?).  I can still see the blue airmail envelopes and her careful handwriting.  Now there was a living, breathing point to all this grammar and vocabulary, those glimpses of another culture that filled that small classroom at the end of a corridor.  
    The literature came later, contemporary literature even later still.  At school it was La Familia de Pascual Duarte, Cela’s bleak, violent, rural tale, just the ticket for teenage readers; or Carmen Laforet’s Nada, a very different proposition, with its eccentric cast and its evocation of post-Civil War Barcelona.  There were too the plays and poems of García Lorca, especially Romancero Gitano, even more especially for our all-male A’Level class, his poem La Casada Infiel (The Unfaithful Wife), ‘her elusive thighs like startled fish’. We knew nothing of Lorca’s life at this stage, only his death; Ian Gibson’s wonderful biography was still some years away but in Bob McKimm we had an inspired teacher, a man whose quiet passion for Spain led us carefully out of our insularity, this was the north of Ireland in the grip of the ‘troubles’, and showed us that there was indeed a world elsewhere.    
    He is in that car that has just crossed the border at Aughnacloy.  So too is the poet Paul Wilkins, Willie McLaughlin, teacher and incipient Hispanophile, my brother Cormac and myself.  On our last night in Granada we will return to the hostal to find Paul, a stranger to the Spanish language, in striped pyjamas and new, blister-inducing trainers, suffering a tirade of incomprehensible abuse from the owner who is demanding payment before our early departure.  But that is all ahead of us.
By nightfall we are in Córdoba where the rooms I had booked turn out not to be booked at all.  In desperation, I lead the party on a late-night trek through the streets of that city in search of the house where Marie José lives, even though I haven’t seen or heard from her in twelve years and what exactly am I going to do if we find it?  Thankfully, we don’t.  La Judería defeats us with its intricacies, its narrow, balconied streets.  The night tour of Córdoba, locked out of the Mezquita, locked out of the Cathedral, locked, not unreasonably, out of everywhere ends in the train station where my brother has managed to get on the wrong side of the Guardia Civil by sleeping on a bench.  Suddenly the RUC start to look like nursery school teachers. This is not quite the start to the pilgrimage I had envisaged but soon it is daylight and we are on a train to Granada, changing at Bobadilla where a shepherd steers his herd of goats past us as we wait for the connecting train.
    Late afternoon, the city, even in Holy Week, quiet in the heat.  Only an occasional motor-bike, like a stone thrown into a pond, ripples the silence.  We take refuge in the Cathedral; perhaps it is a surfeit of sun, more likely too much tinto, but in the Capilla Real the Carrara marble figures of Ferdinand and Isabel appear to move.  Ireland went through a craze for ‘moving statues’ not so long ago.  All over the country, various saints, alabaster, bronze and whatever, were kicking their heels in the air.  It can’t have reached Spain too.  Beside the monarchs, their daughter Juana la Loca and her husband Felipe el Hermoso seem, even in death, one of history’s least likely couples.     
By night, the processions.  We listen to a saeta sung from a balcony above an ice-cream parlour and watch shadows thrown by flaming torches dance on the Cathedral walls.  The processions, usually starting in a local barrio, move slowly, almost funereally through the streets and squares of the city.  The floats are elaborately decorated, the statues of the Virgin swaying gently as the carriers, the conquered Moors, bear their burden through the watchful crowds. Somehow, there is in the noise and colour and movement a sense of recognition, an awareness that the grammar, the literature, the desk-bound hours in those classrooms have led almost inevitably to this moment of immersion.  It is a baptism of sorts, perhaps even a kind of homecoming. 
    For all its beauty, its architectural intricacies, its music of fountains and birdsong, the Alhambra is as much a state of mind as an actual place.  Before we go there the next day, we gather in a small city-centre bar where we are to meet Ian Gibson, author of The Assassination of García Lorca and, of course, the later biography.  The bar, one of the oldest in Granada, claims Lorca as a past patron.  It is small, more a kiosk than a bar, but the manzanilla is crisp and we have a wonderful day ahead of us, not to mention somewhere to sleep that night.  The maître’d of a nearby restaurant hunts us out to say that he has had a call from Senor Gibson whose car has broken down.  Half an hour later, we are gathered on the street, looking under the bonnet of a tired Volvo which is hissing and steaming like a launderette.  What is it with cars on this trip?  I begin to wonder if our friend from Aughnacloy might have any unlikely Spanish relations. 
Our paseo through the palace is magical and memorable; the presiding ghost is Lorca and we are acutely aware of those photographs of the poet at the Carlos V Fountain or in the Patio de las Damas with Juan Ramón Jiménez.  We stop in the Plaza de los Aljibes where the famous cante jondo competition took place in 1922.  Could there be a more evocative place to host such an event?  The Alhambra is a place of myth, a palimpsest.  As Robert Irwin has written, ‘… there are very few facts about the Alhambra that are securely established and agreed upon.  It is a sunlit place of many mysteries.’ There is one fact, however, that is indisputable; Lorca loved Granada and the Alhambra and was taken to his death from that city, causing Antonio Machado famously and furiously to write, ‘The crime was in Granada, in his Granada!’  Lorca’s biographer, meanwhile, is such a celebrity in contemporary Spain that at one point he is asked to autograph a serviette.
Spain.  What started as if by accident in a classroom has become part almost of my DNA.  It begins with a language, the nuts and bolts, the gradual piecing together of a way of writing, reading, talking and thinking.  The transformation, the epiphany, that indefinable shift to something that has infused the life, happens later.  It comes through the literature, the history, the newspapers, the architecture, the people, through the very atmosphere of the place.  It is in the mix of a thoroughly modern country with history at every turn.  In Andalucia, remembering, perhaps mis-remembering, a golden age when Jew, Muslim and Christian approached a tolerance, you sense that here might be the place where a new harmony can emerge.
We end our day and our visit a long way from Derry, Dublin and Aughnacloy in La Castaneda, at the foot of the Cuesta de Gomérez.  It is a place of dark wood and beveled glass, waiters writing tabs on the counter with chalk.  Outside, the city is throwing off the siesta, readying itself for evening. 

By Elise Valmorbida

By Guy Tomlison & Tim Arnold

By John Simmons

Laughter, tears, sheer joy: Leonard

He’s funny, uplifting and makes me feel that life is wonderful. Yes, I’m writing about Leonard Cohen. Has any other singer/songwriter been as misunderstood as Leonard Cohen? For 40 years he has been dismissed and ridiculed by many as writing songs “to commit suicide by”. How can you be so wrong?

I’ve loved Leonard Cohen for all those 40 years. For me he’s just a hero, one of the great figures of my life. The prospect of seeing him perform at the age of 73 brought me to a state of childlike excitement. I had last seen him fifteen years ago when he had described himself as “just a kid with a crazy dream”. Now, having been defrauded of his money, here he was back on the road again, and in front of an enormous crowd at the O2 Arena.

His voice is deeper than ever, his hair is greyer underneath a trilby hat that he doffs shyly to acknowledge applause, and he cracks self-deprecating jokes born out of deep experience. But it’s the songs, the songs; the songs are as beautiful as ever. No one else writes songs with words like these. The joy is in language used playfully, imaginatively, intriguingly, musically. If you don’t ‘get’ the joy of Leonard Cohen, I’m sorry, you’re missing one of life’s greatest pleasures but I’ll never be able to explain it.

“There’s a crack in everything
It’s how the light gets in.”

Luckily for all of us, he’ll be back in Europe later in the year by popular demand. You’ll have chances to see him in London, Glasgow, Birmingham, Cardiff and a few other places – but be quick, tickets are on sale already. And this might be your last chance.

By Mark McArthur-Christie

Imagine the scene...

Opens on a smart, glass-walled City lawyer's office.  Two people sit facing each other over a meeting table.  They are lawyer and client.

Lawyer: "Now, Mr Client.  Here's the contract for the transaction.  We've spent the last week working on it and it's pretty much perfect.  You'll get the company, the buildings and the staff. They get £3.5m over five years, that's what we agreed."

Client: "Thanks - that's great Mr Lawyer.  Where do I sign?"

Now.  Imagine another scene...

Opens on a smart, glass-walled design agency's office.  Two people sit facing each other over a meeting table.  They are designer and client.

Writer: "Now, Mr Client.  Here are the designs and copy for this year's annual report.  We've spent the last week on it and it's pretty much perfect. You'll get..."

Client (interrupting): "I don't like green.  And it’s too negative."

Writer: "Sorry?"

Client:  "I don't like green.  And we need a bigger picture of the product.  And the copy isn't 'salesy' enough. And... AAARRGGHHH!!!"

SFX: Agency bludgeoning client to death with a cafetiere.

We have seriously thought about introducing a £50 fine for each time a client says "I don't like it."  I don't actually CARE whether clients like or dislike the work we do (although it's personally flattering when they do - which is very dangerous indeed).

What I care about is whether or not our work sells for our clients.  I care whether or not it's appropriate to the target market.  I care whether or not it gets their message over clearly, simply and effectively.  But I don't give a stuff whether they like it or not.

Why? 

Not because I'm an arrogant, stroppy 'creative', (not always, anyway) but because I give a damn about my clients' work and its effectiveness.  We spend all our time thinking about our clients' markets, reading what they read, understanding how they think and interact with websites, printed material and visual media.  I'd like to think that, after (blimey!) nearly twenty years doing it we're quite good at it. 

We don't have a codified set of principles to fall back on in the same way lawyers can.  I can't tell my mythical client that green is perfectly appropriate for thirty-three year old Lexus buyers in Penge.  Perhaps that's a mistake - but I think not.  After all, human nature and communication is too complex to codify.  But people who write copy and design for a living should be able to cast a net around this complexity and understand how to communicate it clearly, powerfully and effectively.

And clients should be happy to let them - whether they like it or not.

Mark McArthur-Christie is a director of creative communications consultancy Freeman Christie

By Robert Mighall

I’ve just published a book about Sunshine. ‘What about sunshine?’ you’ll probably say, if you’re like many I have told. If the sun is shining, I’ll gesture to the rare spectacle of English men and woman out of their castles and shells enjoying life in the open. If it’s not, I merely point to the huddled up hordes sludging through the elements, their faces as grey as the skies. That about sunshine, I say; and the difference it makes to our lives. I’ve tried to scrutinise, anatomise and historicise why we love the sun and the impact that this has on us. Between biology, history and cultural association is a tangled skein binding us to that distant star. I’ve tried to unpick it.  Bizarrely this is the first book to attempt to write a cultural history of that upon which all creation depends, and our language reveals a lot about this relationship

The sun is everywhere, once you notice it. Symbolically central, because so often  physically absent. It’s there in pub signs, in trademarks (more of these use the sun in the UK than the cross, the crown or the flag), and in the lyrics of pop songs. I’d say one in five pop songs uses weather imagery to convey the highs and lows of love. It’s the perfect emotional barometer in our culture, and has been since at least Shakespeare. His sonnet ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ is really a metrical moan about our weather (as befits the national poet), disguised as a love lyric. And it’s everywhere in our language. Try using the language of emotion, of enlightenment or spirituality without revealing a leaning towards the light. And try explaining the relationship between sunshine and happiness using English without getting lost in a metaphorical hall of mirrors.

The problem is the word sunshine actually means happiness. After the literal meaning of sunlight not obscured by clouds, the Oxford English Dictionary defines sunshine as ‘a source of happiness or prosperity; a favourable or gracious influence’. I also found that the first uses of the word in The Times Digital Archive, from the early 18th  century were all figurative. The first literal use was in the Victorian period. This association survives today. I searched under ‘happiness’ in the Getty Picture Library, and the majority of images used or referred to sunshine to convey the emotion. Unhappiness yielded the opposite. I asked people to draw a symbol for happiness that was not a smiley face. Fifty-two per cent drew the sun, and it was the only serious contender. I do explain why in the book (even attempting some science); as well as the story of how we went from avoiding the sun to basking in it and then back again (officially); and lots more besides. But there’s no room for that here.

Being a 26er I’m talking about language, and what this reveals about our relationship with the star that rules our days. Of course this all goes way back.  Since God said Let There Be Light, nearly every culture has paid homage to its source. Yet, there were significant differences across time and latitude. For a start, whilst in French, Italian and Spanish the same word is used for both heaven and the sky (ceil in French is also a beautiful shade of blue), our word derives from the Old Norse for cloud. I find that fact rather depressing, but also revealing about our outlook (in all senses).

But then there’s the other side of our relationship enshrined in the fact that most northern cultures still name their sacred day after the sun, while the southern Romance cultures have re-branded it the Lord’s day (Domingo, Dimanche, etc.). You only need to witness those same northern nations locked in fervent devotion on the beaches of the Med to understand how pagan adoration is alive and well from Stockport to Stockholm. And whilst Romance languages tend to use the same word for time and the weather – suggesting something you can depend upon - even our word sounds like a question. Weather permitting. Truly, it could be our national catch phrase.

I must say talking about a single subject, however multi-faceted, over nearly 300 pages did rather tax my powers of expression. And I did begin to wonder how a copywriter for a holiday company manages to vary his or her copy when selling the sun. Sunshine is a commodity, a highly prized one, and over 70% of leisure travel from this country is in search of it. But how do you differentiate when the same sun shines on the Maldives and Malibu, Marbella and Margate (sometimes)? But then, this is one area of commerce where we are happy to be sold clichés.

Paradise is a cliché, but it doesn’t stop us day dreaming of it in glorious Technicolour. Give us azure sea and skies, palm trees and golden sands and we couldn’t be happier. And who can resist a sunset? Certainly not the 2 million who flocked to bask under the industrial scale SAD lamp that was The weather project at London’s Tate Modern back in 2003. The biggest footfall for an exhibition there then or since.

Many things draw us towards that star. Sunshine is the result of my quest to explain them.

By Jonathan Holt

The readings, literary walks and other events of Free the Word! brought world literature to London’s South Bank on the second weekend of April. Members of 26 were there, gathering ideas, images and inspirations, many of which have appeared on Free the Blog!, a 26 project inspired by the festival.

Free the Word! set out to show what we may be missing in world literature. Many of the authors involved write under threat of censorship, imprisonment or even execution, while others simply write beautiful books that deserve more attention from the English-speaking world. No surprise then that the blog has been filling up with stories of renewed urgency and awe.

There’s still time to contribute.

f you attended an event and were moved to write about it, the blog is a good place to promote or publish what you’ve done. Even if you couldn’t make it but have something to say about translation, censorship or the power of words, send your photos, videos, poems or other remarks (up to 400 words) to 26.bloggers@googlemail.com by 1 May. You can also comment on what others have said.

In early May Free the Blog! will be sealed off to new content, but it will remain live for readers until at least this time next year.

By Chas Walton

Do you fancy yourself as the next Matt Groening or Nick Park? Even if your drawing's rubbish and your plasticine models look more like Wensleydale cheese than Wensleydale cheese-eaters, you can probably wield a scriptwriter's pencil better than most.

If so, you may be interested in a potential 26 collaboration with students at the Birmingham Institute of Art & Design.

The collaboration would be similar to the one we did for the children's books. In this case we'd be working with animation students to write scripts for short (30 seconds max) animations. You team up with a student and create whatever comes into your heads – a cartoon, a gritty documentary, a horror story, or an ad for your pet political cause.

It's early days yet, which is why this is just a fishing trip. If enough people say they're interested, we can pursue it further. Having said that, there is potentially a real project here. My friend and neighbour, Mario Minichiello, is Chair of Visual Communication at BIAD, and he's keen to make it happen if there are enough enthusiasts on both sides.

If you like the idea, email me and I'll start the ball rolling.

By Tom Lynham

Editor’s note: Every month, members are kind enough to send in their recommendations for events, films, books, exhibitions and websites. Submissions are always very welcome. This month, Tom Lynham sent in an extended review which is worth giving in full...

Strange Fruit - Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an early cry for civil rights
by David Margolick

In 1936, Abel Meeropol was teaching English at a high school in the Bronx. He was a political activist and closet communist, and responded to gruesome press reports of a double lynching in the Deep South by writing a poem which appeared in an educational newspaper. He subsequently set it to music and under the pseudonym Lewis Allan published Strange Fruit, a damning indictment of racial violence. This is angry writing, but instead of hitting us over the head with aggravated polemic, he gently seduces us with spare beautiful language while rubbing our noses in the shit. He uses metaphor to juxtapose the fecundity of pastoral harvests with the pointlessness of a meaningless death. The intoxicating fragrance of magnolias is contrasted with the stench of burning flesh. The wholesome symbols of good husbandry, Southern hospitality and the innocence of the elements are corrupted with the brutality of mob rule.

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear a strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

The song was performed in liberal New York circles and particularly Café Society - a political cabaret and jazz club in Greenwich Village. Café Society was the Manhattan multicultural venue from the late 30s to early 40s. Influenced by the radical review bars of Paris and Berlin, it held political and fundraising events, advertising itself as the wrong place for the right people. Many mainstream clubs were happy to make money out of popular black performers but didn’t welcome black customers. Café Society actively encouraged fraternisation and became a magnet for artists such as Paul Robeson, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Tatum, Sarah Vaughn, Lena Horne, Zero Mostel, Lester Young and Billie Holiday who sang Strange Fruit in public there for the first time.

The journalist David Margolick has written a remarkable biography of Strange Fruit. It’s the story of a song and its journey from obscurity to a global anthem in the words of people who knew Billie or saw her perform it. Billie was child born into conflict and poverty; granddaughter of slaves, rejected by teenage parents, farmed out to indifferent relatives, raped at the age 11 she became a teenage prostitute and sang in bars to survive. Her adult life was pitted with abusive relationships, alcoholism, drug addiction and depression, but she had a way of interpreting songs that could move mountains. Billie had an intuitive, intravenous relationship with her audiences because she sang between the lines. She transformed trite lyrics into experiences that everyone could identify with. She bent, twisted and manipulated the syntax. She turned slick phrasing and contrived rhyming into something intensely human with all the hesitations and uncertainties of real life. Tin Pan Alley music publishers reserved the best material for the society orchestras and white crooners, but Billie breathed an edge into the bubble gum ballads and trashy romantic love songs she was given. Strange Fruit elevated her to a completely new level. It became her swan-song, her finalé. Serving staff were silenced to add dramatic effect. She didn’t do encores. She left the stage and that was it. People talk of her resilience, defiance, exuberance and shrewdness and the perfect horror of the experience. Her delivery was languorous, unflinching, exhilarating yet excruciating. Audiences felt paralyzed, half strangled and gasping for air. One report describes the eerie sound of two thousand people sighing. We were stunned, immobilized by the intensity of emotion. Everyone in the hall just stood with their heads bowed. Billie became a phenomenon.

Although her record label Columbia refused to release Strange Fruit, it was eventually issued by Commodore in 1939 and attracted a huge following. But reception was not wholly favourable. It was contentious, challenging, controversial and uncompromising. Radio stations banned it (including the BBC) and so many clubs felt uneasy about it, Billie had to specify it in her contracts. Right wing hawks accused the song of being nigger-loving propaganda. Left wing critics thought it patronised and victimised blacks. During the McCarthy witch-hunts, anti-Communist politicians regarded the movement against apartheid as a Stalinist plot. Meeropol was hauled before a committee for Un-American Activities (sniffing out reds-under-the-bed in the public school system) alleging that royalties from Strange Fruit were used to fund communist activities promoting equality. Meeropol denied dissident sympathies, but did go on to adopt the children of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed for leaking atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

As the drink and drugs took their toll, Billie became increasingly dislocated from real life. When she wasn’t high on heroin, she could be wilful and belligerent. She increasingly walked out of gigs and castigated audiences who failed to give undivided attention. Sycophants and hangers-on sold stories to the press and stole her money. Her most reliable friends were the pushers who supplied the fixes. Margolick quotes a telling encounter between the writer Maya Angelou and her 12 year-old son Guy who met Billie a year before she died.

"Billie talked and sang in a hoarse, dry tone the well-known protest song. Her rasping voice and phrasing literally enchanted me. I saw the black bodies hanging from the Southern trees. I saw the lynch victims’ blood glide from the leaves down the trunks and onto the roots.

Guy interrupted, How can there be blood at the roots? I made a hard face and warned him, Shut up Guy, just listen. Billie had continued under interruption, her voice vibrating over harsh edges.

She painted a picture of a lovely land, pastoral and bucolic, then added eyes bulged and mouths twisted, onto a Southern landscape.

Guy broke into her song. What’s a pastoral scene, Miss Holiday? Billie looked up slowly and studied Guy for a second. Her face became cruel, and when she spoke her voice was scornful. It means when the crackers are killing the niggers. It means when they take a little nigger like you and snatch off his nuts and shove them down his goddam throat. That’s what it means.

The thrust of the rage repelled Guy and stunned me.

Billie continued, That’s what they do. That’s a goddam pastoral scene."

Buy on Amazon: Strange Fruit

By Mark McArthur-Christie

Marketing communications are the least of most companies’ problems. They hire agencies and pay their fees to research and write their sales material. Most marketing communication is, by and large, OK. The problem comes once the customer has bought and falls into the communications slough of ‘Customer Services’.

Sales and marketing material is usually written by agencies. But who writes the customer service communications?  The scripts (may your god help you) for the call centre operators to parrot? Who designs the account statements?  It’s Sherillee, that middle manager in Customer Services, isn’t it? Go on – admit it.  Your marketing budget runs to six figures – yet the job of retaining that customer you fought so, so hard for is delegated to Sherillee.

Sherillee’s a top administrator; she cares a lot about customer retention.  But she knows less than the square root of nothing about communications.  Worse than that, if you’re a plc, you’ve probably passed her letter through three or four senior managers, a couple of product managers and finally, the compliance department.  What started out as a badly written, somewhat convoluted letter is now a dense mass of sub-clauses, riders, disclaimers and faux-Dickensian English.

Your customer will not read beyond line two and if she does, she’ll think you’re useless.

Why should that bother you?  So what if Mrs Buggins from Leamington doesn’t read the letter that Sherillee has so carefully crafted?  Because Mrs Buggins is going to get a whole lot of other stuff, from other companies, that want to sell her something.  Creative agencies will have spent hours trying to poach her from you with neat, well-written, propositional direct mail offers.  They’ll have invested time, money and effort in taking her away from you – and you’re relying on Sherillee’s misbegotten, malcrafted standard letters, statements and scripts to keep her.

OK, I’m over-personalising to make a point, but most businesses – even plcs – spend a fraction of the time they should on their customer service communications.  And this applies just as much if it’s ISAs you’re selling, insurance or pony nuts – Mrs Buggins wants to be treated like she matters.

Of course, my mythical Sherillee isn’t that dreadful. She can sling a few words together and make a (usually) literate sentence. Problem is, that’s not enough anymore – people don’t have time to wade through dense prose to find the meaning buried in paragraph three.

When they’re not writing faux-Dickens (“…we trust this is of assistance to you.”) corporate scribblers seem to have dug deep for their words in the bullshit heap. This note from BT turned up in yesterday’s post. “At BT, we’re committed to giving you a high quality service so that you can concentrate on meeting the ever increasing needs of your customers, which is why we have introduced BT Business Plan.” Sorry chaps, I know you’re actually concerned with whacking your share price as high as it can go.  You won’t give a minute more to spend on my clients, so don’t try to kid me you will.  The writer of this flowery, irrelevant, poorly thought-through tosh was selling snake oil.  And if BT is committed to giving me a high quality service, how come all their operators are always ‘busy on other calls’ when I ring?

This raises another point.  Don’t lie to your customers.  They know when you’re lying because they’re not stupid and they’ve already bought from you.  You need to be honest when you communicate, or at the very least you need to manage expectations.  It would make a world of difference if BT said, “When you ring us, you may have to wait a little while before an operator can pick up your call.”  But no, they’re too busy drafting customer letters with more puff than magic dragon soup.

The Sherillee Syndrome doesn’t just apply to customer letters.  In most businesses, the communications aspects of customer retention hardly get thought about.  How many times have you had to fill in an app form where you’ve had to write the same information three times?  Or used a website where, once you’re a customer, you can’t find out anything useful? Or tried to call the customer telephone number where you’re kept in eternal ‘on-hold’ hell?

It’s so simple for customers to walk away nowadays. They’re used to finding deals; they know its part of the process. They know they get a better price if they’re promiscuous. They’ve got the whole web to look around. They’ve got your competitors bashing on their door asking for a chance. So you need to keep them. That means investing as much time (although not necessarily money) in communicating clearly to your customers.  It means making their lives easier – not harder – when they’ve bought from you.  For most businesses that’s not newsletters and fancy stuff, it’s just getting the basics right.

Spend some time and money on sorting out your client letters, your application forms and your call centre scripts.

After all, are you really happy leaving your customers to be looked after by Sherillee?

That was the aim when 26 member Mike Reed took the helm of design blog Noisy Decent Graphics for a week in December. There’s no doubt that the gap between writers and graphic designers remains much more of a gulf than exists in advertising, and the invitation to write ‘for the other side’ was a terrific opportunity to get the two sides talking.

As you may remember from last month’s newsletter, Mike asked designers and writers to email him with the things they liked and loathed most about working with the other side. There was a pretty enthusiastic response, and it was genuinely exciting to see how much many designers really do care about the written word.

However, Mike says, ’Not many writers took the chance to pitch in, which seems surprising when so many of us grumble about how our design partners don’t understand us. I had emails from five writers in total. Maybe everyone’s much happier about the status quo than I thought.’

Still, the debate was pretty lively, as you can read in the NDG archives. There were even mysterious contributions from a Richard Madeley imposter, which added an unexpected bizarre twist to the week.

If you’re wishing you’d spoken up, why not add your voice to the comments sections? There’s no reason the debate should end here.

As 2007 draws to a close, 26 members name their most memorable piece of writing of the year. (That’s as in memorably good, or memorably bad.)

Ben Afia



I scanned this ad from the Guardian recently. I love it, not just because it reads nicely. And quickly. I love it because it takes a theme, then weaves a bunch of ‘benefits’ into it without it becoming the hotch potch clients usually try to force on you, saying “oh, but we’ve got to say that, and this, and…”.
 
Tim Rich



Text reads: "THIS IS A LONG ESTABLISHED BUSINESS WITH YEARS OF EXPERIENCE. WE DO NOT BOTHER WITH PAINTING OR APPEARANCE, POLISHING OR DUSTING, BUT WE HOLD LARGE STOCKS AT THE RIGHT PRICE."

I don't feel the need to say anything about it other than it is a shop on the Roman Road.

John Simmons
The most memorable bit of writing I've come across this year was a line from Shakespeare's King Lear spoken by Ian McKellen playing Lear in the RSC production. Lear is dying, having held his dead daughter Cordelia in his arms, and he speaks this line;

"Never, never, never, never, never."

It was heartbreaking, each speaking of the same repeated word opening up new possibilities for meaning. One simple word can be made to mean so much. I'll never forget hearing those words spoken.

Roger Horberry
My nomination is a Peugeot 407 print ad currently doing the rounds in the colour supplements. It's a double page job - the left side is a complex flow diagram detailing the sort of tortuous mental process a potential 407 buyer might go through before whipping out his/her cheque book; the right is simply a shot of the car itself. Implication: one look is enough to make a decision and silence any internal debate. Genius.

Jim Davies
The good:

A couple of hardy perennials…

In case you don’t know it, Howies is a clothing company trading from Cardigan Bay in Wales, which tries to make a difference. From the inspirational catalogue (which I always keep), to the occasional short-but-sweet emails, to the labels in the jeans, Howies speaks simply, truthfully and occasionally playfully. You can’t fault it. The secret of Howies’ writing is it doesn’t try to hard. Even to sell you stuff. The tone of voice is never too jokey or too worthy – always right on the button.

Word magazine (subtitle ‘Intelligent life on planet rock’) has a wonderfully self-deprecating tone and a penchant for music-based wordplay. I’m constantly amused and impressed by the sweet turns of phrase and consistent standard of writing. As a subscriber, I get a short monthly letter from the publisher (along with the magazine and a superb compilation CD) – even this unassuming piece of white A4 is wryly amusing and beautifully honed.

The bad:

Not that I’m looking for gainful employment, you understand… but I happened upon a job ad for a senior copywriter on www.mad.co.uk the other week, which had an it’s instead of an its, and kept slipping into different tenses and persons – one minute it was ‘we are looking for’, the next it was ‘they are looking for’. A humble recruitment consultant might be an easy target, but there seemed a certain irony given the context of the ad.

The ugly:

‘4 in five new jobs go to migrants’; ‘Freed early to murder’; ‘How much worse can it get?’; ‘Diana: five lovers named’; ‘Illegal immigrants: the home office cover up’; ‘Rapists who can laugh at the law’; ‘The migrant jobs fiasco’. Yes… it’s the Daily Mail.

Amanda Folkes
This one is from The Four Seasons at Langkawi in Malaysia. For me, it perfectly summed up the lovely approach of the hotel and the people who worked there. It was a small sign delivered with room service trays, which were typically set up al fresco.

'Our resident monkeys are very cute. However, we would appreciate it if you'd try your best not to feed them.'

I liked it as they could have just written 'Do not feed the monkeys' but that wouldn't have been quite the same, and for me this was a rare example of brevity not always being the best approach. I also felt that taking a more engaging tone made the reader far more likely to comply, and I personally did not feed the monkeys, despite their cuteness!

Mike Reed
This isn't exactly hot off the presses, but my most memorable read of 2007 was Great Expectations. It's long been a source of shame that I haven't read a Dickens novel. I blame the fact that we were told to read David Copperfield in about the second year at school, and given dense, dusty old black copies of the book written in fine, tiny type on thin, whispery pages. Having read Great Expectations at last, my shame has turned to frustration - why has it taken this long? A cracking story, peopled with beautifully drawn and memorable characters, there's nothing remotely fusty or difficult about Dickens. (Which comes as no news at all to most, I imagine.) Pip himself, the hero of the book, is a friend for life: alive, complex, passionate and deeply flawed (of course - his flaw is the heart of the book). Wonderful, wonderful stuff. 2008 will see my shelves gradually filling with Dickens.

John Simmons
Here's a late entry from the President himself, with a strong supporting cast. This really has to be seen to be believed.

By John Simmons

When I was a student at university I tried whenever possible to insert a reference to Bob Dylan into my weekly essay.  Not much has changed then.  Here I am 40 years later with a title taken from a Bob Dylan song.

Is there a point in this?  I guess what I was trying to do originally was to say that a modern writer – like Bob Dylan – could shed light on a writer from an earlier age – like William Shakespeare.  But now I’m simply saying that great writing has an enduring relevance for every age – and for every age group.  Shakespeare is forever young.  His relevance continues and each new generation discovers something new and unexpected for itself.

It comes down to writing itself.  Through Shakespeare we rethink the purpose and possibilities of writing because no writer has been as ambitious or achieved as much.  He continues to make us think – about words and their meaning, and the possibilities for meaning contained in words that are put together in combinations that challenge us to think and see things in a new light.

Shakespeare’s continuing relevance today is his ability still to make us think.  He makes us think by using words.  So we should think what lessons Shakespeare’s use of words might have for our own use of words in the twenty-first century – 400 years after audiences in the Globe were first hearing those words.

That was the main premise for this book The Bard & Co.  As you can see, the sub-title is Shakespeare’s Role in Modern Business.  Some people here tonight might think it almost sacrilegious to associate Shakespeare in any way with the world of modern business and with business writing.  Because this book is a collection of essays by contemporary business writers.  And what do we think about the quality of writing in modern business? The generally held view is that it’s appalling.  It’s full of jargon.  It can be dishonest.  It muddies meaning.  It’s vacuous.  It misuses words while choosing them from too narrow a vocabulary. This is on a good day…. It’s like linguistic junk food whereas Shakespeare’s language represents a rich and healthy diet.

That’s true, of course.  But it’s not an argument for a separation of these two kinds of writing into separate ghettos.  Far from it.  For me it reinforces the argument that modern business writers should be looking at Shakespeare to see what they can learn to improve their own writing.  And that is exactly the challenge we set with The Bard & Co.  After all, Shakespeare himself was a hired hand, and he made his living from writing.  I should explain how this came about.  I’ve known Patrick Spottiswoode for many years since he first showed me around the hole in the ground that was then the Globe in a state of pre-construction.  I was working with a design company and we were helping Patrick tell the wider world about the plans for the Globe and its vital education programme.  Because the Globe has always been keen to reach out and bring Shakespeare to new generations.

It reminds me too of a story that Patrick told me about showing the Bishop of London around the building as it was filling with people. We must remember our churches as you have remembered the Globe. The reference there was to Hamlet’s father as a ghost calling out ‘Remember me’. Shakespeare, as usual, had at least two meanings in his head and it’s a good example of the ability of his words to spark a thought that is absolutely relevant to a modern but universal situation.

A year or so ago I met up again with Patrick and I was telling him about 26.  26 is a not-for-profit group of writers – mainly professional writers for business – who have set themselves the somewhat daunting task of trying to improve the quality and status of writing in the world of work.  26 is a membership organisation – we have some 250 members drawn mainly from the disciplines of marketing, branding, advertising, communication.  And we also have poets such as Simon Armitage and novelists like Ali Smith involved in our work.  Because for all of us writing is more than something we do for a living.  We care for the way words are used and we want words to be respected and valued more than they often seem to be.

Anyway, back to the meeting with Patrick … Patrick wandered off for a while.  He came back into his office with Shakespeare’s First Folio – as you do, if you’re the Globe’s Education Director – and he showed me the page that listed the ‘principall actors’.  I knew I ought to count them – just to make sure – and of course there were 26 names listed.  Shakespeare, Burbage, Hemmings, Kemp and many lesser-known names.

So it seemed inevitable that we should collaborate on a 26 project.  The idea was that we would pair 26 of the writers from our group with one of Shakespeare’s plays and one of the original actors.  And in making that connection between writer-actor-play, simply set the brief to explore what the play – and possibly the actor – might mean to the modern writer.  What light does this play shed on business writing today?  How relevant is Shakespeare’s language to your own writing?  Do his ideas change your ideas?  If so, how?

Along with Jim Davies and Rob Williams, I was the editor of the book and its 26 essays.  I also wrote the Introduction for which I was assigned not one of the plays but the Sonnets to consider.  It put me in the privileged position of being able to read and occasionally help along the writing – and also to stand back and draw some conclusions.

That process of drawing conclusions continued long after the book was published.  As always with Shakespeare he provokes thought and he keeps coming back with new thoughts.  Certainly what happened with my own writing – and with that of all the participants, I suspect – is that you feel challenged.  If ever it was a temptation, the thought that “oh well, that will be good enough” was banished.  As I put it in the Introduction:

“Challenge yourself.  Use Shakespeare as the ultimate challenge.

In the business context, when I use the word “writer” don’t think too narrowly.  I mean anyone who uses words at work.  You might be the logistics expert, the marketing manager, the chief executive, the financial director, the independent chairman, the HR specialist, the commercial consultant.  You all use words.  Words are your opportunity to gain power.  Seize them, seize it.

What Shakespeare shows us is simply this.  Language is everything.  Ignore it and you’re lost.  You cannot operate as a business without a deep understanding of the power of words and their potential to change our attitudes, our hearts and our behaviour. You cannot get your business right until you get its words right.”

For tonight I’ve challenged myself to look into some of the specific lessons that I and the other writers have drawn from this immersion in Shakespeare.  If our main gain from Shakespeare is a greater awareness of the possibilities of language, a greater respect for words, a love of their potential to change minds and organisations, then what are the writing principles that we can apply to our own everyday craft?  Perhaps the next time that we write an annual report.  Or a label on packaging.  Or an advert on the tube.  Or an investment proposal for the board.  Or an email to a client.  Can we use Shakespeare to make these examples of writing more engaging, more dramatic, more effective?

I believe we can.  So I’m going to suggest ten principles that we all might apply to the writing we produce at work – whatever kind of work we do, because we all use words.  And we can all choose to try to make them better.

My first principle is this:

Be inventive with your words

It’s perhaps the most obvious lesson we can take from Shakespeare.  He invented thousands of new words.  Or at least the example cited from Shakespeare often represents the first recorded use of a new word or new meanings of words.  There are two chapters of The Bard & Co I’d like to draw on here to explore the principle.

First there’s Stuart Delves’ chapter, the first in the book.  Stuart was paired with Shakespeare himself and with Macbeth – appropriately enough as Stuart is based in Scotland.  Stuart runs his own copywriting agency and he’s also a poet, storyteller and playwright.  A description that starts to show that stereotypes of the business writer as a jaded hack might not have much validity.

Stuart’s approach was bold.  He decided to write his chapters as if written by Shakespeare in his diary on the evening of the first performance of Macbeth.  It’s an act of almost Marlovian ambition to try to adopt the voice of Shakespeare 400 years on – or at least to plausibly enter his mind and put down words as if from Shakespeare.  But Stuart has tried and, I believe, succeeded.  This is no pastiche.  He finds a tone that sounds credibly Jacobean without resorting to “thou”s and “hast”s and without a trace of “hie  thee to Gloucester, saucy Worcester”.

For example, listen to this:

“But Macbeth’s line is scrunched in a child’s tomb on some holy skerry in a ferocious sea.  The Stuart line is my concern.  In the politics of the play at least.  And it is too distant a history for even James to take great heed of.  But my greater concern is with the globe within, where all life’s threads tangle in their fateful weave.  Drayton quipped that my Macbeth is more like the son of death.  But no.  The fruit of life is raw potential and just as nature swings from storm to June dew, so we must make what we will of that nature which is ours.”

I think that’s a fine piece of writing.  There’s a rugged rhythm in the  language and an enjoyment of the sound of words that is inspired by Shakespeare but certainly no parody of Shakespeare.  With its alliteration of unusual words like “scrunched” and “skerry” it suggests, without needing to say so, that we too often deny ourselves the pleasure of a wide vocabulary.  The language is inventive but for a purpose.  It is not about applying cosmetics it is about exploring content.  We get to deeper levels of meaning through this inventiveness with words.

And, as Roger Horberry explores in another chapter, Shakespeare is famous for inventing new words, for neologisms.

“No, they cannot touch me for coining, I am the King himself.”

The quotation is from King Lear, the play that Roger was paired with.  And Roger chose to delve into Shakespeare’s ability to coin new words.

Let me put up this list of words.  Many of them were first recorded in use in Shakespeare.  Anyone know which of these words are originally Shakespearean, which not?

blanket
dislocate
divest
to elbow
epileptic
flawed
immediacy
noiseless
numb
profit
radiance

In fact there’s a good case to be made that that they are all Shakespearean in first recorded usage in their present day meaning.  Most of the list are words first given an outing in King Lear.  Perhaps the least Shakespearean of them is ‘profit’, that quintessential word of business.  Yet when Shakespeare was using this – and others from the modern business world like ‘manager’ and ‘management’ – he was certainly (in modern jargon) an early adopter.

The point is – and it’s the point that Roger Horberry makes in his chapter – that our language lives in a state of constant evolution.  We could not freeze it if we tried.  And why would we try?

We get great pleasure from inventing and using new words.  New words are invented for a reason – to express a thought that cannot be adequately conveyed by the existing stock of words.  We’ve become very sniffy about this in modern times.  Roger gives the dictionary definition of that 1960s origin word “buzzword” as “a neologism gone fad”.  The dictionary editor obviously does not approve but Roger makes a good case for buzzwords as adding to the richness of our language.  As Roger asks, if you don’t use the word “outsourcing” how can you convey the thought without using an excess of words?

And it’s in this sheer playfulness with invented words that Shakespeare is most ‘young’.  I know that over the next ten years thousands of new words will enter the language – and they will probably be introduced by people who are now in their teens and younger.  Much of it will be driven by technology, as it has been by email and texting in recent times – but there are new forms of technology to come and the young will find the words for it.  So I welcome this and repeat as my first principle

Be inventive with your words

Just as a coda to this, I was reading John Stubbs’ wonderful biography of John Donne. In a letter, writing about why he had been less than honest to his father-in-law about marrying his daughter, Donne wrote: “I knew that to have given any intimation of it had been to impossibilitate the whole matter.” So when we wonder why some neologisms stick and some don’t, we might consider that there are a few principles to bear in mind: how useful is the word because there is no other word that will do? And, importantly, what does it sound like? Does it just sound too ugly, like ‘impossibilitate’?

But let’s move on, because there is much more that Shakespeare has to tell us about living and writing today, and that leads neatly to the second principle.  Here is my second principle

Speak and listen

This is from Lin Sagovsky’s chapter on Love’s Labour Lost :

“As babies, we put things in our mouths to find out what they are.  We play with the physicality of sound in order to discover it for ourselves:  to own it and inhabit it…  Putting Shakespeare in your mouth takes you inside the heartbeat of powerful words.”

In her chapter Lin tells the story of working with a businessman on a Shakespearean speech – and helping him to experience the energy in those words.  For her it’s a complete physical experience, which we might not all be able to share.  But there is an electricity in the sound of Shakespeare’s verse that we can all respond to.  We can listen to it, we can feel it when we speak it.

In writing the Introduction to The Bard & Co  I was using The Sonnets as my main point of reference.  For many years now I’ve been running workshops to encourage business people to write more expressively.  It has always been vital, in those workshops, for people to speak and listen.  To read the words they have written out loud and then to listen – and to allow us all to listen.  The sound of the words always tells you a lot.  That the thought is clear – or not.  Interesting – or not.  Confident – or not.  At a basic level, speaking and listening is vital to help you edit your own writing.

Because he was generally writing for the stage, Shakespeare always heard the words he was writing.  This was true for The Sonnets as well as the plays.  As part of my Introduction I drew on an exercise I had conducted as an experiment during a writing course in Spain.  I gave people the first twelve lines of a Shakespearean Sonnet, then asked them to write a final couplet to complete it.  The idea was not to improve on Shakespeare but to get more accustomed to the potential of rhythm and rhyme to inform our everyday writing.  Also to think about the way a couplet both provides a conclusion and demonstrates the poem’s themes.  In other words, there are skills we need to apply in our writing for business – so let’s learn from the way Shakespeare does it.

I think we all learnt something from doing that exercise.  Indeed we did it again with a new group on a second course a month or so ago.  It’s very hard but very rewarding.  And it’s all about speaking and listening to improve your writing.

Where do you speak and where do you listen?  It’s certainly a question to ponder if you go into as many soulless corporate environments as I do.  I believe a writer can write anywhere – but I also believe that the right space will help the writing process.  This leads to my third principle

Find the space

Shakespeare has been sometimes criticised for being so ordinary.  Tolstoy was offended that Shakespeare should depict Lear as old, decrepit, insane and still expect us to see him as a heroic figure.  Attitudes to Shakespeare often seem to involve an element of snobbery – how could this ordinary man from the midlands have written such plays?  But the plays, in all their details, reflect Shakespeare’s connection with everyday existence rather than an aristocratic sensibility.  Stephen Greenblatt draws attention in Will in the World to the everyday detail that runs through all Shakespeare’s writing.  He highlights the use of an ordinary handkerchief as the central object on which the tragedy of Othello hinges.

Going back to Stratford at the end of his life, it is the mundane details of money, land and property ownership that occupied Shakespeare rather than anything spiritual or philosophical.  Shakespeare saw buildings as places to live in and, perhaps more interestingly to him, to invest in.  We know little about Shakespeare’s working methods as a writer.  There’s no evidence that he had a favourite writing place.

And yet… there is a magic to the space that represented his livelihood.  The theatre itself is special for Shakespeare, this wooden O, this cockpit that could release the ‘vasty fields of France’ in the imaginations of those who crammed within it.  There is the extraordinary story of the overnight dismantling in north London and almost instant recreation of the theatre that became the Globe here in Southwark.  Shakespeare knew the magic possible in this space.  But I suspect it was less the physical space, more the space released in the imaginations of himself, actors and audiences that mattered to him.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”

What mattered was the human ability to conjure up a dream – and through the magic of theatre to share those dreams.

There’s a magic in the collaboration of writing when it involves another writer, such as John Fletcher, or other actors such as Shakespeare’s 25 listed colleagues – or perhaps most importantly the collaboration that comes from the connection of a writer with the thoughts of an audience.  A connection that creates something new at every performance across the centuries.  And indeed The Bard &  Co is another example of such collaboration.

And that’s what Alastair Creamer explores too in his chapter based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Even though Alastair made for a real place – a barn in the Sussex woods – what he found there (along with his seven hardy companions) was less to do with building materials and layouts than dreams and stories.  This is the space that Shakespeare gives us, guides us towards, settles us into.  Even though physical ‘magical spaces’, as Alastair puts it, can ease that process along.

But it’s the connection – and the attempt at connection – that matters.

One way we find that connection is through the empathy we feel, and are made to feel, by engaging with the humanity of characters.  The fourth principle I suggest is this

Writing needs character

We paired each of our writers with a member of the original company.  Sometimes the ‘principall actor’ listed was only a name – we know nothing more about him than the name.  But other characters in this cast list live on after four centuries.  And some of the most revealing writing in The Bard & Co comes from the development and bringing to life of characters about whom we know a little – yet next to nothing.  But now, spurred by this name on the list of actors, we have some words to make us think, imagine and simply enjoy the playful process of characterisation.  Try Laura Forman’s modern take on Willow Sly as she delivers a business workshop on Titus Andronicus.  Or Jack Bradley’s equally sly and funny take on William Eccleston launching a new motor car in a Caribbean Tempest.  The pairing of writer and actor leads to much puzzling over issues of identity.  This all becomes appropriately farcical when writer Nick Asbury, paired with A Comedy of Errors, meets a contemporary Shakespearean actor also called Nick Asbury.

You need characters to tell stories.  Businesses need to tell stories.  So do brands.  So modern business writers can learn much from Shakespeare about characterisation.  The chapter in The Bard & Co that explores and explains this most is Jamie Jauncey’s on Romeo and Juliet, having also been paired with Will Kemp.  Kemp is one of the original company about whom we do know something.  But Jamie Jauncey brings him to life as even larger than life again in his chapter. This is how it begins, in March 1599:

“Damn that egghead Shakerags.  Damn him and his mincing troupe of tragedy-mongers.  A pox on their lofty ideals, their playing to the gallery.  Damn their Globule too, verminous rackety pit that it is.  They can keep it.  I want no share of it.”

Of course, Will Kemp gave up his share of it.  Shakespeare and his main shareholder-colleagues gained an extra percentage of the profits as a result.  So Jamie takes this basis of a wild Falstaffian character and brings him into the 21st century and a corporate environment.  The modern Will Kemp takes a group of Scottish & Newcastle HR and communication people off into the characters from Romeo and Juliet.  The journey involves a fog-delayed flight to a performance in Stratford, where they each explore their modern equivalents of the Montagues and Capulets.  It seems every company has them – there’s a Nurse, a Mercutio, a Paris, a Tybalt in every company if you just dig deep enough.  And by the end of the exploration there’s Jamie Jauncey/Will Kemp having to give Shakespeare his due – “some seeds of enquiry, expansion, perhaps even enlightenment” have been sown.

It slides effortlessly into the next principle

Tell the story

At least two of our writers have taken their characters from the plays rather than from the original company.  They have then set those characters down in corresponding situations in modern business life.

Based on King Henry IV, Andy Milligan tells the story of Harry Bolingbroke V, the young CEO of Angleland plc.  There’s a notorious Field Sales Director called Jack Fivebellies Falstaff.  But I think you can anticipate that Jack might be nearing the end of his privileged business career.  The important thing, of course, is to defeat hostile takeover bids from the Percy Group and the Welsh Glendower Group.  But what really makes Harry a winner in the boardroom battle is “he understands the value of talking plainly and simply”.

Gordon Kerr takes the story of Coriolanus and sets it A World Elsewhere, away from ancient Rome and in corporate England.  From the opening scene of a traffic-jammed exodus from London, Gordon takes us from a brush with domestic tragedy into the ruthless business world of Guy Marks.  This corporate hero is about to be sent into involuntary redundancy, banished for reasons he just cannot understand.  Do we sympathise?  Do we sympathise with Coriolanus?  If characters live there needs to be a recognition of common humanity.  And Shakespeare perhaps tells us most of all, that we feel that humanity by engaging with a story.  There’s a lesson there for every business, every brand.

What these two interpretations show is that Shakespeare’s stories are not for their time but for all time.  The universality and power of storytelling is explored by Liz Holt in her chapter based on The Merchant of Venice.  It’s certainly true that any story is seen differently in the context of a particular time. 

“Plays had to be politically expedient; the power of stories was feared.  Today in many countries, writers of all types still live in fear of telling stories in all their forms.”

It’s a truth that 26 understands well, particularly as we put our minds to work on a new project to help International PEN and take up the causes of writers whose human rights and lives are threatened.

And here too, with The Merchant of Venice is a play that has prejudice and oppression at its very heart.  The story of The Merchant of Venice is perhaps one where we feel some discomfort today – it seems alien, of its time.  Yet it is also a story, a fundamental archetypal story, such as we know and understand today as readily as Shakespeare’s audience or audiences a thousand years earlier would have understood.  We understand that really there are only a limited number of basic stories that we tell and retell in different ways for different times.  Liz examines the power of mass storytelling today, particularly in the form of advertising, and her main conclusion is that the power of narrative remains there to be used – and perhaps misused by some too.

As that might imply, the essays in this book examine the moral dilemmas that writers face.  The writers here generally earn their living by writing for businesses.  Sometimes they are outside those businesses – freelance writers – sometimes they are inside, employed by the firm.  Shakespeare might have felt some sympathy with both situations.  In such a political and divided age as his Elizabethan and Jacobean times, he had to tread carefully.  He knew how to maintain a balance between writing to meet the needs of the client – particularly the monarch – the needs of his audience and his own personal integrity.

Nothing much changes. It’s the same ground we have to cover today.  It leads to my sixth principle

Be true to yourself

Mark Griffiths was paired with what he claims is the deep and dark play Othello.  As you read his chapter you feel Mark grappling with inner demons and, as he admits, perhaps not cheerfully,

“After thinking and talking about it more, rewriting and rewriting, it has made me question why I’m a writer and understand my battles with writing in the marketplace.”

Mark and I used to work together so I know that these agonisings are genuine.  As a writer for business myself, as a writer who believes, perhaps foolishly, that it’s important to have principles and to try to stick to them, I’m proud to have Mark speaking for me in this chapter – and speaking for other writers too.  Mark once talked to me, when we both worked for a large brand consultancy, of the everyday battle against meaninglessness.  Here the battle continues but perhaps his target has sharpened a little, come more into focus.  Mark explains his battle now as being with cynicism.  And I’m absolutely with him.  We live in a desperately cynical age in which it becomes harder and harder to assert a belief in optimism, in values, in honesty, in public service.  All these demons are brought out in Othello.

“Writing for business is all about service.  We writers are doing the will of others.  Yes, we have a choice with whom we work and for what we work – for money, for meaning, whatever.”

Mark then goes on to say that if all the characters in Othello were business writers

⎯    Othello would be the professional consultant brought in to do a job… Damned good at his job.  But a loner.
⎯    Iago is the failed hack turned in-house communications manager… He stirs things up while keeping his corporate mask on.
⎯    Cassio’s been with the company for years.  He’s loyal but no match for Iago’s manipulation.
⎯    Roderigo is the junior copywriter – never going to set the world alight.
⎯    Emelia’s the PA, the support, the brave whistleblower.
⎯    But Desdemona would not be a writer but writing itself.  Loved by Othello until told she is no good.  Destroyed by Othello.

“But, unlike Othello, we can destroy our first drafts and start again.  We have to improve on it, remain true to our passion.”

All this brings me – and I think Mark takes me here – back to that principle.  Be true to yourself.  It’s all any of us really have to cling to.

“How do I reconcile my values with the client’s values?  This is a question we have to answer every time we pick up a pen.”

It’s not easy, though.  Perhaps you’re even more compromised when you work inside a company, an employee not a freelance.  It’s the issue facing Katherine Penaloza who was paired with Twelfth Night.  The dilemma for all of us is stated baldly in the first line.

“I am Malvolio.  But so are you.  There’s a bit of Malvolio in us all, for deception is endemic in human nature and human relationships.”

In particular, we deceive ourselves, for that was Malvolio’s real deception.  Katherine explores the idea of deception and self-deception in modern business.  She lives and works in Singapore, a city that revolves around business.  She tells tales of office politics and hierarchies, the importance of visible signs of rank, the possibilities of miscommunication and misinterpretation.  A Singapore office block becomes uncannily like Illyria, the world of Twelfth Night.  She concludes:

“So when people or companies talk of integrity, rather than taking it at face value, perhaps we should consider it as, at best, a statement of intent.  One company’s mission statement prided itself on four key values: respect, integrity, communication and excellence.  That company was Enron.”

The only way to stand against this, as a writer, is to say:  be true to yourself.  Even as you recognise that there’s a bit of Malvolio in all of us.

Of course, the next principle might, in one sense, seem almost a contradiction of that.

Share your thinking

But I’m not saying ‘share your thinking’ while losing the sense of your own individuality or personality.  The creative industries – design, marketing, branding, advertising – are natural collaborators.  That’s simply the way they work.  And the collaborations usually revolve around words.  Often they directly involve a writer.  The classic creative team in advertising brings together the copywriter and the art director, words and images.

Even though Fraser Southey in his wonderfully funny chapter on As You Like It writes it as a diary – speaking to himself – there is a real sense of others being involved in his meditations.  We get scenes of Fraser reciting passages to his wife and children, getting dressed up for a family performance, discussing the play with a friend in the pub, even engaging in some kind of internet competition with Shakespeare and Robert Armin.  He talks out loud to share his thinking.  It becomes a creative partnership with the reader.

That’s a difficult, and still brave thing to do, because we all have some reluctance to expose our thinking to scrutiny.  Just in case someone tells us we’re talking rubbish.  Nicola David, writing about Measure for Measure raises the stakes by using the play to explore the idea that we all have an incompetence threshold, that we all must accept judgement as we judge.

It’s a principle that you need if a real creative partnership is to work, as Emma Lawson suggests in her chapter on Much Ado about Nothing.  Seeing Beatrice and Benedick as a duo who strike creative sparks off each other, she draws lessons for the kind of creative partnerships that are needed in, say, a design company or advertising agency.  There’s part of me too that wonders whether this kind of partnership was welcome or not to Shakespeare himself.  Perhaps we romanticise the image of Will sitting alone at a desk, quill pen in hand, handing down unblotted masterpieces for the company to learn and perform verbatim.  I suspect Shakespeare was subjected – even when he wasn’t in an active collaboration with another writer – to the editing and revisions brought about by performance.  He might well have endorsed Emma’s advice to creative partnerships

1.    take risks
2.    keep your imagination well fed
3.    share your ideas
4.    go for the Aero moments
5.    stay open
6.    exercise your right to delete …
… and don’t forget your audience.  As if he ever could.  The great thing that the Globe makes clear, and has re-established for us, is the creative effect of an audience.  Awareness of the audience sharpens all our writing.

Think what is not said

is my eighth principle.  In performance this becomes clear.  We watch the actors and we read their thoughts from their faces, body movements and gestures.  Because words, although all-powerful, have their limits.  Even when, as David Varela analyses, a character like Richard III is able to use words to persuade in seemingly impossible situations.  David talks about Shakespeare giving Richard a “serpentine ability to make anyone believe anything”.  It’s a “masterclass in persuasion” – David is writing about that scene when Richard woos Queen Anne who knows that Richard killed her husband and father-in-law – and this wooing takes place at the funeral, so the pain and grief are fresh in her.

The scene is brilliant, one of the most compelling in Shakespeare.  Of course it’s because of the words but it’s also because we imagine what Anne must be thinking, perhaps should be thinking, when Richard talks to her.  As an audience, we’re complicit in the deception.  Loathsome as Richard is, we are on his side – on the side of immorality – to a degree that surprises our rational minds.  But it shows that we are not rational creatures, we are swayed by emotion not reason.  Just as advertising works on our minds too, a point David draws out with the use of advertising slogans as his cross-headings.  Just do it. Think different. Pure genius.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that this principle – Think what is not said – was prompted in my mind by the chapter written by Rob Andrews.  Rob’s a designer and he’s written about Julius Caesar.  And Rob has a complaint directed to Mr Shakespeare.  Where are the clues?  Where are the stage directions?  Where are the twelve camera angles if you press the red button?  Because at what he feels is the crux of the play, as Brutus moves towards a resolution to kill Caesar, well, does he?  Or doesn’t he?  Everything is left ambiguous.  All is in the imagination of the audience, perhaps led by the interpretation of a particular actor and director.  And, as Rob riffs on these thoughts and questions, weaving in and out of his working life with corporate identity and brands, the chapter becomes a confrontation with issues of honesty and dishonesty.  Whatever our own particular conclusions to the moral dilemmas raised, the chapter is valuable in helping us –through the medium of Shakespeare – to face up to them.  That is what Shakespeare constantly does, why he is forever young, he enables us to think about what is right and wrong, what is said honestly or not, and to see below the surface meaning of words.

Make connections

Perhaps my favourite quotation, and a very succinct one, is not from Shakespeare but E M Forster.  Only connect.  Our minds have the ability to make connections where at first none seem to exist.  Perhaps it’s what we really mean by creativity.  We don’t interpret the world literally, we don’t just go from facts and figures, we work from feelings, we join the dots and make a new meaning out of what might have seemed meaningless.

Robert Mighall’s chapter on Timon of Athens is fascinating because it is based on a single word in the play.  The word is ‘fortune’.  Robert describes Timon of Athens as “Shakespeare’s least read, least produced and most unusual play”.  Those first words in Robert’s chapter had me leaping to Timon’s defence.  But then I realised I hadn’t read the play for forty years and have only seen it performed on stage once.  It’s a play about delusion, particularly the delusions of wealth, but it’s also a savage rant of a play.  It seems as rough and brutal as Timon himself when he banishes himself to the woods.  Yet, as Robert explores, it achieves amazing subtlety through this single word ‘fortune’ that was on the cusp of moving from one established meaning (to do with fate, luck) to a new meaning that is all about money.  And in a sense, if we’re prepared to work at making the connections from this single word, the whole meaning of the play can be explored from countless angles.

It’s Shakespeare’s ability to make us think that means that he is forever young.  He can help us to see the universal in a detail, to make the connections between the specific and the general, to see similarities between seemingly dissimilar situations.  His language is metaphorical, but so is his effect on our minds.  We see a play like The Taming of the Shrew and Ezri Carlebach is able to explore the ins and outs, not of marriage, but of corporate mergers.  And why not?  It’s what keeps Shakespeare alive for us, this constantly changing ability to make us reinterpret the world for new times and new situations.

How does he do it?  Simply through words.  Because that is really the only tangible legacy Shakespeare has passed to us through four centuries.  We know little about his life.  The little we know is a matter for constant dispute by historians.  Even the authorship remains in dispute by some.  Who was Shakespeare?  Was he Bacon, or an aristocrat, rather than the glovemaker’s son from Stratford upon Avon?  In the end it doesn’t matter, all that matters is what we have, Shakespeare’s words.  And so I suggest as a tenth principle

Words are life

This in the end is what Shakespeare comes down to.  He shows us – as modern users and writers of this language, English – that it is the most precious gift we have, the gift of language.  Through language we understand and explain the world, and we share that understanding  imperfectly perhaps – with others.

This is what Elen Lewis (Winter’s Tale), Dan Radley (Antony & Cleopatra), Lu Hersey (Henry V), John Bolton (Hamlet), Brian Millar (Troilus & Cressida) and all the authors in the book come down to. Shakespeare’s great gift to us as modern writers is that he shows us how to love words and, by loving words, to love life.

The one chapter I haven’t yet mentioned is the one that expresses this most clearly and openly.  Writing about Richard II, Elise Valmorbida points out that language is at the heart of the king’s Englishness.  Faced with banishment from England, the thought of not seeing, smelling, touching the beloved land brings tears to the eyes of the banished.  But the thought of losing connection with the language brings a much deeper level of anguish.  “How long a time lies in one little word!” laments Bolingbroke, hearing that his ten-year exile has just been commuted to six.

We need to keep seeing Shakespeare in fresh ways that are right for the different times we live through. To see that Shakespeare is forever young and to understand that it’s language that provides the route to fresh insight. Above all, Shakespeare teaches us to cherish, nurture, sustain, love this resource of language that we all too often take for granted.  If ever they were tempted to be indifferent about words, the process of engagement with Shakespeare’s language has sharpened afresh the value of words for this group of writers.  It’s a shame that we need to rediscover that truth.  But that is the reality of life.  It constantly changes and we see it differently from one day to the next.  Words are everything in that process.  We need to care for them even more, and they will repay us for the effort.

So I have one final thing to do to conclude this lecture.  Out there in the audience there are ten Dark Angels – people who have been on one of my writing courses where we explore words and writing over the course of several days in a remote location.  I’ve persuaded these 10 people - conscripted volunteers – to help me string some final words together in a collective effort.  With luck – and completely without rehearsal – these words will all come together in a way that sums up the main points of this lecture.  And I felt that to end, I needed something that was both at least a nod towards performance and Shakespeare.  So here we go …

Sonnet with 10 different people reading one of the principles embedded in it

Forever young

O be inventive with your words, new life
Enlivened by your voice, be proud they speak
And listen to the sounds of joy or strife
That rise on lips – but find the space you seek.
All writing needs character, start with you,
So tell the story, strike the spark inside
That leads to fire, the flame that burns be true
To yourself, you have the choice to flare or hide.
It’s best to share your thinking, set the spread
Upon the board, then feast your eyes, lend ears
And breathe more deeply; think what is not said,
Just make connections between your hopes and fears.
Now act the good husband, be the good wife,
Words are your children, raise them, words are life.

There you have it.  A sonnet.  Thank you.

Most of us are happy to show off our finest work at the earliest opportunity, but the nightmare jobs seldom get talked about. We thought we’d put that right by asking 26 members to share their darker moments. Join in the discussion on the message board if you feel like adding to the hall of shame.

“One of the worst was writing a brochure that explained how laser eye surgery worked - including writing descriptions of what was happening in the graphic pictures. I was nearly sick.”   Liz Burnell


“A 48-page A5 booklet on data mining techniques. My origination was a series of 1-2-1's with a man known as 'The Father Of Data Mining’.  Nice guy, but he spoke advanced geekish, acronym version. Taking his stream of consciousness and trying to translate it into plain English was a trial and three quarters. Still not sure I know what ‘regressive heuristics’ are. Unsurprisingly, it never became a New York Times bestseller.”   Ken Munn


“I’d nominate a Daily Mail small ad for Woody’s Wagons (don’t ask), but after some hesitation, I was man enough to turn it down. So without naming names, any job where a client thinks they can write, or I have to claim something’s fantastic when it clearly isn’t.”   Jim Davies


“I have a friend whose job was to walk around Tunbridge Wells wearing a sandwich board promoting golf sales and all-you-can-eat buffets. At parties he used to tell people 'I'm in advertising'. He left to throw dead chickens over a wall on a kibbutz.

I can't compete, although being goosed by OAPs wasn't the best part of being a waiter. My worst writing job started out full of promise. A glamorous international business who 'wanted to do something really special with the words'. Everyone agreed the first draft really did have something special about it. But... but... Slowly the requested changes started to strangle what was good.

By draft seven I had lost the will to live, a feeling no doubt shared by anyone who had to read it. A number of conference calls took place to 'gain the input of others in the organisation'. Someone in sales asked why the company was referring to itself as 'we' and 'our'. By draft nine I was drinking a lot of coffee and listening to Joy Division between phone meetings.

I think draft ten was 'done in house'. For draft 11 another writer was brought in, briefly. It was then broadly agreed that draft eight had been pretty good. So I heard draft 12 was a lot like draft eight, but with some additions from the Canadian office. And liberal use of the serial comma.

That was nine years ago. I learned some important lessons about process, payment and caffeine. As for the client, I'm not sure what draft they're on now.”   Tim Rich


“When I first went self-employed, I met someone through a local chamber of commerce who ran a machinery hire company, and wanted to do a direct mail campaign for a particular piece of equipment – a hole boring device. It's not clever, it's not funny, but – the letter was headed 'An end to your boring hole problems'. It's not the worst job I've had, but probably the most toe-curling.”    Anita Holford


“Not sure if this counts as the worst or best job I’ve ever done. But I was once asked to work on the launch issue of a customer magazine for a big retailer. I supplied various articles which all went down well. Then they asked me to tackle one last thing – the horoscopes section.
 
I pointed out that I wasn’t entirely qualified in this department, but they didn’t think it would be a problem. Oh, and would I mind adding in a few positive references to the retailer? 'Thursday will bring a burst of positivity – why not head out and get that new outfit you’ve been promising yourself?' That kind of thing.
 
I wrestled with my conscience and decided that, as all horoscopes are a load of nonsense, why not join in?

I’ve kept it quiet ever since. Typical Scorpio.”   Nick Asbury

“Once upon a time you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”
Bob Dylan, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’

Proof that ‘Once upon a time’ is still the best way to start any story. Of course, what makes it brilliant is not just the line itself, but the famous opening drumbeat. Bruce Springsteen described it as “that snare shot that sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind.”   Nick Asbury


“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.”
Graham Greene, ‘Brighton Rock’

It’s actually quite a clumsy sentence, because Greene wants the punchline at the end. But talk about setting a scene. It’s so immediate and visceral, a real spine-tingler.   Jim Davies


“I was minding my business/ lifting some lead off/ the roof of the Holy Name church.”
The Smiths, ‘Vicar in a Tutu’

How could you not be desperate for the next line, for the story to unfold. Which it does, like a beautiful old cassock in the hands of a sarcastic altar boy.   Tim Rich


“I don’t believe in an interventionist God…”
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, ‘Into My Arms’

Press play on the CD ‘The Boatman’s Call’. A few piano chords fall out of the ether, and then Nick Cave’s plangent bass voice croons the words above Well, that’s not something you normally hear on a pop music record, is it? It is a line of grandeur and almost impossible profundity, at once startling and moving. And funny too. Where else would you find a theological teaser that you can sing along to? It pulls you in, not just into the rest of the beautiful, optimistic song, but the whole of the album. I retain an idle daydream that it will be played at my wedding one day.   Rishi Dastidar


Tess. Tess. Tess. Tess
Raymond Carver, ‘A New Path to the Waterfall’

This isn’t a first line, even: it’s a dedication. I picked this book up while browsing idly in a bookshop many years ago. Reading the dedication was enough to make me want to buy the book. I knew nothing about Carver at the time: about his struggle with alcoholism, or how his marriage to fellow poet Tess Gallagher had helped him escape the booze and experience final years of what one of the poems in this book calls ‘pure gravy’.

I didn’t need to. The dedication takes you straight to the core of this story, to the urgent, overwhelming nature of this extraordinary love affair. The book is dedicated to Gallagher, of course.

Never mind a story in six words. Here's a story in four. Or rather in one, but that repetition turns the word into an invocation, a song, a poem. Even the punctuation pushes the meaning home. There's no full stop on the final 'Tess'. This is no static, relfective dedication. It's current, pulsing, ongoing. It's past, present and future. And there is nothing else: just Tess.

It was all I needed to know: I bought the book.   Mike Reed


“Forget everything.”
Bob Gill, ‘Logo Mania’

Bob gave me a copy after a long talkative lunch in New York last month. I hadn’t seen him since he taught me at the RCA 25 years ago, but he’s lost none of his steam, wit and scathing contempt for sloppy graphic design. A sprightly 76, Bob is still thinking radically about how ideas happen. This particular thesis – amongst many we chomped our way through – was that design solutions are increasingly meaningless and driven by style, and to find something truly interesting to say about anything we have to start from scratch. So throw out your software programmes, abandon your image banks, junk your brand onions, burn to your mood boards, donate your D&AD annuals to the Oxfam shop, stick all that lorem and ipsum through the shredder, and buy yourself a nice new pointy pencil.   Tom Lynham


“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
LP Hartley ‘The Go-Between’

Ever since I first read the book, I haven't been able to get his haunting first line out of my head.   John Simmons


“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
Samuel Beckett, ‘Murphy’

Along with “Call me Ishmael”, from Moby Dick, this is actually the only first line I can quote from memory, but it’s a classic. There’s wit, world weariness and poetic rhythm all in there, and a huge sense of anticipation. You have to read on, and you’re not disappointed.   Martin Lee


“ ‘It may only be blackmail,’ said the man in the taxi hopefully.”
Margery Allingham, ‘The Tiger In the Smoke’

Mid-20th Century detective fiction is my escapist literature of choice. I love the elegant turn of phrase (in fact, I borrow them) and almost forgotten slang. Give me an Edmund Crispin, Josephine Tey or a Freeman Willis Crofts and I’m quiet for hours. Marjory Allingham is my favourite and ‘The Tiger in the Smoke’ is probably her best. For me, this line promises adventure.   Sarah McCartney


“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” Anthony Burgess, 'Earthly Powers'

An old chestnut but still an absolute corker - longevity, homosexuality, exoticism,
religion and the unexpected, all in 28 words!   Jamie Jauncey

By John Simmons

He's a bigger employer than General Motors and can still teach you a lot, says John Simmons

Sunday June 3, 2007
The Observer

It's been a big year for Shakespeare plc. It is still a growing enterprise, as the publication of a new complete edition of his First Folio shows. But you could say that every year for the past four centuries has been big for Shakespeare. No other British cultural icon receives such universal acceptance. He keeps more people in employment than General Motors, and is effectively a global brand. Surely he deserves some serious attention from the business world?

A new book called The Bard & Co: Shakespeare's Role in Modern Business aims to give him that attention through the eyes, ears and pens of 26 leading business writers. Each has used a different play to explore Shakespeare's relevance to modern corporate life.

These writers are more used to grappling with financial reports and advertising copy than with iambic pentameter and sonnet sequences. Yet Shakespeare himself was a hired hand, one of the King's Men troupe of players. He became skilled at heading off objections and corrections from his powerful clients. And he became a successful businessman. It was his shareholding in the Globe Theatre, based on his dramatic activities, that enabled him to take early retirement home to Stratford-upon-Avon.

What, then, are Shakespeare's messages for modern businesspeople? It seems to be less to do with inspiring leadership skills than to paying proper attention to the value and currency of language; you cannot get your business right until you get your words right.

Modern business is all about a company or brand trying to persuade us that we should buy from them, rather than from a competitor that seems to be offering something similar, but perhaps cheaper. What makes the difference? Brands express themselves through visual means, but increasingly they know words are what count. Here are business writers making that point, using the nation's greatest writer to show the way.

It's not only about words, though. Intriguingly there is a chapter, drawing on The Taming of the Shrew, about marriage as merger, developing an analogy between the rough wooing of Katherine and the company takeover bid. This is intriguing because it's written by Ezri Carlebach, who works in communications at Barclays (although it was written before ABN Amro became a public gleam in Barclays' eye). It explores the merger and acquisition process as a courtship leading to marriage, but with lots of ups and downs along the way.

In another chapter, writer and musician Jamie Jauncey takes a group of internal communication specialists from Scottish & Newcastle breweries off to Stratford to see a performance of Romeo and Juliet. Each of the group has been given a character in the play to study, then has to relate that character back to their own working situation. It seems that inside any modern firm there lives a cast of characters who first lived on stage as Montagues and Capulets.

Shakespeare gives people the spur to think and the luxury of a place to think in. Alastair Creamer took a group off to the Sussex woods to explore A Midsummer Night's Dream. Creamer's working experience at Unilever had involved the establishment of creative opportunities for executives to 'think outside the box'. More and more companies claim they want to 'dream', 'imagine', 'innovate', and they seek new ways to do so. Sometimes that involves wholesale redesign of working environments. Often, though, cynicism takes over: 'Entropy sets in. The flip chart reasserts its need to exist. Chairs and tables come back to roost.'

The chapter explores the nature of 'magical' spaces and whether it is possible to create and sustain such things in a corporate environment. Tents and a barn became the space for Creamer's new 'mechanicals' to rehearse their ideas in. But space is not necessarily place: whether or not businesses have physical space, they need to create the mental spaces where employees can develop ideas.

As Emma Lawson puts it, drawing conclusions about creative partnerships from Much Ado About Nothing: take risks, keep your imagination well fed, share your ideas.

And the very act of taking a Shakespeare play - reading it, listening, watching - enables your brain to engage in a different way. Four hundred years on, there is still magic at work.

· John Simmons is co-editor of The Bard & Co: Shakespeare's Role in Modern Business, published by Cyan Books, £12.99.

Boardroom Bard?

Rich only to be wretched, thy great fortunes are made thy chief afflictions.

Timon of Athens

You speak a language that I understand not.

The Winter's Tale

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

Julius Caesar

Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Hamlet

Common chances common men could bear... when the sea was calm, all boats alike show'd mastership in floating.

Coriolanus

To business that we love we rise betime,

And go to't with delight.

Antony and Cleopatra

Defend your reputation, or bid farewell to your good life forever.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

By Sarah McCartney

Our Wordsworth survey was completed by 63 members, which goes to show that it can't have been that hard. Thanks to all of you for making it statistically significant. (Note to the unscientific: this means that we can safely assume that it represents the views and situation of writers around and about the UK at the moment.)

Who are we and how do we work?
57% spend all their working hours writing.
30% spend most of their time writing.
Another 13% spend less that half their time in the wordsmithery trade.

Two thirds earn 100% of their income writing.
Another 20% earn 50-80% of their income from writing.
Which means that 10% do a load of work which isn't writing but don't earn any money from it.

Other sources of income include music, marketing, PR, consultancy, going to meetings, teaching yoga (that would be me), managing events, education, coaching, training, brand consultancy and “runing a business”. (We're guessing that this was supposed to be running not ruining).

70% of us who responded are self-employed. This probably indicates that people who have to decide what to charge have a greater interest in taking part in the survey than those whose employers decide for them. 27% are in full-time employment and there was one solitary part-timer.

50% of us said we've been wordsmiths “for ages” and a further 25% for 5-10 years.

How did we get here?
60 people told us how they got into this line of work. Three stumbled, one moved, one fell, one jumped and one jostled. One met someone at a party. Many started as journalists. Some of my favourites:

“Tea making led to work experience, work experience led to paid work, paid work led to freelancing, freelancing led to full-time employment, full-time employment led to setting up own company.”

“Took a chance after my previous business was sold. No experience but plenty of self-belief.”

Fewer than 10% did relevant training at the very beginning of their careers.

40% of respondents subcontract or employ writers. Of these, just over half pay on a daily basis, 19% pay per 1000 words, 24% by the hour and 24% by project.

What do we say we do?
20% of us say we are copywriters.
20% say we are writers.
Here are some of the others:

“My card says ‘Poet and Wordsmith’”

“‘Writer’ (if I'm brave), or long-drawn-out explanation about marketing background, now specialising in written comms (if I'm not brave)”

“It changes. At the moment, ‘writer, editor, web consultant’”

"Poetry activist"

Now the big one: what do we earn?
Highest: £100,000-200,000 a year
Lowest: £15,000 (We're ignoring the smarty pants who claimed to earn 32p.)
Mean: £44,500

Take this figure and take off the percentage you added on to make yourself feel better and you'll have the real average.

Our rates (these are not mutually exclusive categories so they aren't supposed to add up to 100%)
93% of freelances charge by the day.
High: £1,500
Low: £50 (not including the free work)
Mean: £373.50

60% charge by the hour.
High: £150
Low: £20
Mean: £60

32% charge by the thousand words (standard for the press).
High: £1,000
Low: £200
Mean: £444
(One respondent wrote "Never – it undermines the value of words", which is great in theory but tricky when you're negotiating with The Independent.)

35% charge by project.
Generally estimated by calculating how many hours or days it will take and grossing up those rates. One person gives a 5-10% discount on projects of 10 or more days.

15% charge by other means.
Including half days, translation fees, Equity standard rates.

How do we decide what to charge?
Only one respondent reported that he or she never varies the rate for individual clients. Of the other 44 who answered the question, a typical answer would be:

"Horses for courses – top rate for banks etc, much less for small companies, nothing at all for some charity projects."

Things which influence our decision include:

"We consider what the value of the project is to them. So, strategy and branding we charge more for than copywriting."

"A long-term contract will get a discount. Crisis management will be charged at a premium."

"The less I want the job, the more I char