Arjun runs a mango stall at a market. His name’s not actually Arjun, and his mango stall is really a luxury retail business, but it may as well be a mango stall, so bear with me. When Arjun hired a freelance writer, the writer quickly realised — to his dismay — that Arjun thought writing is about words.
“These mangoes are really ripe,” he would say. “Use your creative words and find a way to sell them fast.”
The writer tried to explain that creative words don’t sell things. Words — almost any words — are seen by people who buy things, sell things. If you’re not at the right place and time, it doesn’t matter, the writer tried to explain, whether you say “Come purchase our delicately hand-ripened tropical fruit” or “Mangoes for sale”.
But business owners like Arjun are able to hold two contradictory ideas. One, writers don’t do real work, so don’t need to be paid real money. And two, writers have dark magic in their complex brains, and are able to conjure secret combinations of words that make people do their bidding.
In Arjun’s head, the writer would string magic together today, and tomorrow, people would line up outside his stall to buy those ripe mangoes. In the writer’s head, a riot was being quelled before it spilled onto the streets outside. He knew there were no magic words, there was instead a magic time to send out an email newsletter that would get a good number of clickthroughs. He knew that a blog post had to be written, then tweeted about assiduously. The home page needed a banner, and Instagram’s gaping maw needed feeding. It was time to start writing by taking some photographs.
I recently did a technical writing course that taught me that “technical writers” are now called “technical communicators” to acknowledge how much non-writing work they are expected to do.
Graphic design, page layouts, photography, and even videography are now in the technical writer’s ambit. And certainly, if you join a small company as a writer, you’ll need to quickly be an online marketer. Our writer’s little secret is that he didn’t really understand what a hashtag was until he started writing about mangoes for Arjun. “It was almost as underwhelming,” he said, “as finally understanding what Twitter is all about.”
Retail, as I’m sure you’ve read, is dying. But you’ve also read about that figurative fashion pendulum as inexorable as Foucault’s, and when retail does swing back, I believe it’ll favour the small, specialised business owners.
It’ll favour stores where you can linger on sofas to touch, listen, feel, smell; the stores run by people who are passionate about what they’re selling, and offer curated experiences and custom suggestions. Sadly, Arjun understands none of this.
“When you write something, I need to see dollars,” he said to the writer. What this means then, is that every white paper blog post, every fun brand-building tweet, and that humanising section of the newsletter that talks of each employee’s favourite mangoes is a waste of time to Arjun.
In his mind, writing is magical, but also utterly stripped of magic. It was as if Arjun was asking to make a piece of writing funny by changing the font to Comic Sans.
The writer had run into many clients who were decidedly not people of letters, but Arjun’s utter naivete made the writer think of just how much we take for granted, how many truths we assume are, well, true.
If writing really was what Arjun thought it was, the writer mused, what a wonderful job it would be.
Gautam Raja is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles, US.
