I love to write. Blog posts, website articles, newspaper features, press releases, magazine features, whole magazines - as long as it requires my brain to engage first gear and fingers to put pen to paper (or to keyboard), I love what I do.
Recently, I discovered part of the reason why. A time-management expert, whom I shall shortly be endorsing on LinkedIn, told me that I struggle with planning, organisation, tidiness and ‘To Do’ lists largely because I’m primarily a ‘right-brained creative’ person.
This is as opposed to being a ‘left-brained logical’ person, who is detail-oriented and strategic. Although we are all a combination of both, most people lean more to one side than the other.
It may not astound you, then, to learn that while HR people, accountants and lawyers tend to be mainly left-brained, the writers, musicians, designers and marketing people among us tend to be right-brained.
As I often say if I’m following one of the former in doing a 40-second pitch at a business networking event: “He/she does the numbers, I do the words...”
And words are what I do. The average 80-page edition of British Naturism magazine contains between 70-80,000 words; I probably write about 15-20 per cent of those while I certainly read (or certainly should read) about 90-95 per cent of them. I proofread roughly another 5,000 words every Saturday night for the sports pages of a newspaper in Birmingham. I’m about to embark on a fascinating new project, ghostwriting a book on business coaching, which will be 15-20,000 words long.
I recently completed a contract for a client who wanted 30 500-word articles for a website which he was having redesigned. I ghostwrite a 1,200-word weekly sports column for the aforementioned newspaper; thankfully, the columnist can talk for England, which does help my cause.
I am discussing the possibility of working for an acoustics expert, who may be great at his job but admits that explaining it on paper/the internet is a completely different matter.
Words, then, are my life; wordsmiths are my heroes. In no particular order, AA Gill, Robert Crampton, Hugh McIlvanney, Martin Samuel, Alan Lee, Giles Coren, Christopher Martin-Jenkins are the people I wish I had become. In 25 years in the words trade, I’ve worked with a lot of very good, some great, reporters - but very few great wordsmiths.
Three come immediately to mind, but I won’t name two of them, because they may well be reading this.
The other was Michael Blair, long-time rugby correspondent of The Birmingham Post in the days when that newspaper was even more widely-admired and poorly-read than it is today.
Blair, a Welshman of the beer, rugby and poetry persuasion, could write columns of jaw-dropping brilliance. He was vehemently against the professionalisation of rugby and is probably apoplectic at the thought of England turning out in purple shirts.
He could make 800 words on Moseley v Coventry read like Dylan Thomas and the sub-editors on the sports desk would fight among ourselves to have the chance to handle his copy.
He would laugh you out of the saloon bar for saying so, but he was the ultimate ‘right-brained creative.’
He was magnificent and knew he was. It would be instructive to learn just how many people read The Post purely for Blair - I know I did, when my dad bought home a copy from work every day.
Great wordsmiths like that make newspapers - these days, they also make blogs, websites and any other of the myriad ways in which we consume words in this technological age.
I don’t think I am anywhere near as good as any of those named above but I’m increasingly coming to realise that being ‘right-brained creative’ makes me very good at what I do - and the number of people who have recently lined up to endorse me on LinkedIn for related skills such as writing, editing and blogging proves it.
The basic human need to be admired by your peers is a whole new blog post in itself, but recent events have given Martin Warrillow Publishing Services Ltd (as we now are), a big lift.
As 2012 nears its end, I’m hoping that the new year will be the biggest and best yet for MWPS - whatever happens, rest assured that I’ll be writing about it here.
