As you may have seen already, this manual is dedicated to my former English teacher at Marion High School in South Australia, Mrs. Durney (or was it Gurney? – fifty years is a long time) who first encouraged me to write. My top three subjects at school were English, Geography and Physics and those subjects seem to have dogged me throughout my life. I went to Adelaide University, studied Science/Engineering (subjects that in the sixties were deemed more useful than writing and map reading) and when I was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake a Ph.D., the engineering side fell away.
For my postgraduate years I moved into a university college (Kathleen Lumley on Finnis Street or "Mum Lum" as we affectionately called her) and enjoyed the student life to the full. Many of my friends came from the Zoology Department and a life transforming experience occured one evening when they returned from the bush with a dead emu in the back of the departmental ute. They had run over it in their vehicle some miles north of Adelaide (that at least was the story). "What to do with a dead emu?" was the question being tossed around and the obvious answer came from one of our number who asked rhetorically "I wonder what it tastes like?" For the next week, the dead emu was strung up in the men's shower block "to cure" much to the consternation of those among us who were not "in" on the background to the story.
One week later, on a balmy Adelaide Sunday evening a group of us gathered in the college courtyard, donned our dinner jackets, fetched our escorts and sat down al fresco to eat the slow-roasted emu. It was a memorable evening for two reasons: firstly it kindled in me a love of cooking—a passion that has stayed with me thoughout my life— and especially well-tempered dinner parties with fine home-cooked food, good companionship and copious amounts of red wine to lubricate the occasion; and secondly because my date that evening was a beautifal young woman, a nurse from the Adelaide Hospital by the name of Roma Carboni. Roma was a striking young woman of Mediteranean extraction; quite tall with beautiful long legs that she displayed to advantage, jet black hair that flowed down to her waist and piercing eyes that made her the look like the younger sister of Nana Mouskouri. At last, she had consented to go out with me. Yes, it was a memorable evening, but the rest I will leave to your imagination for a while.
The point in starting this book with a story is simply to stress that there are such stories in all of us. Many of them will never be written down or passed on. What a great pity. In this age of e-mail, voice-mail and Twitter, the art of writing anything beyond a shorthand message "CU L8er" is slowly passing from many of us. Yet, being able to marshall our thoughts and write something that will be both informative and pleasurable for the intended readership is, like cooking, a skill worth cultivating; especially for those of you studying at (or for) college and called upon to write term papers, academic reports or thesis dissertations; or for that matter, those of you in business where you may be the member of your team tagged to draft the annual report or corporate compliance document. Learning to write is a skill worth cultivating.
With the power of modern word-processing programs, especially Word 2007 which is a writer's dream (I'm a computer program and Word 2007 was my idea) writers and editors now have high quality tools at their disposal to help them in organising, writing and tracking their work. My own experience as an editor suggests that few authors realise the full extent of the tools they now have and use their computer keyboard in much the same way as they did the typewriter of old. Breaks at the end of each line instead of allowing word wrap to do its job and indents using the tab key or space bar are very common and it was traits such as these that first gave me the idea that many writers may need help.
But I have digressed somewhat and must first finish telling my own story. During my final year at college and no doubt because of my culinary skills and ability to quaff Coonawarra Claret (as it was then called) by the bottle, I was elected President of the Adelaide University Postgraduates Association. Aside from getting to carry the ceremonial mace at the annual graduation ceremony, my chief role was to nag at the government in Canberra to give more money to postgraduate scholars. I must have been a pain in the neck because I was deemed good public service material and was invited unexpectedly to apply for a trainee diplomat position with the then Department of Foreign Affairs. Out of 1500 applicants they took forty that year and I was one of the lucky ones. I spent a year being retrained as a political and economic analyst before being shipped off to Vienna to learn German and work with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Subsequently, my diplomatic career took me to Hong Kong to spend three years as a China-watcher. Those were the days when the China Daily (or Xinhua Times as it was then called) carried banner headlines such as "Chairman Hua Guofeng urges cadres to firmly grasp electricity" and the other memorable one that I saved for many years "Chairman Hua Guofeng urges Xiangzhi peasants to go all out to promote rape".
I well recall my first visit to China when I was taken to watch a local Shanghai ballet by my minder
(... I mean "tour guide") and sat three hours in agony through a concert which was titled "Vigilently kill all American imperialists and their capitalist running dogs". If this was not enough, it was performed entirely by a group of precocious 10-year olds carrying rifles and wearing uniforms of the People's Liberation Army. How times change.
No, actually the incident above was the second most excrutiating experience of my diplomatic life. The very experience was in Budapest on a consular visit during my Vienna days where I was kindly given VIP seats to the Budapest Circus by the protocol department of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry. How they took their revenge on the West at that time!! Dear reader, never sit in the front row of a circus especially if you are within touching distance of a herd of performing elephants each one experiencing flatulence from their last meal of fodder as they posed on one leg for the crowd. The occurrence was excrutiating and, in my entire life, I have never held my breath as long as I did during that performance. And all throughout, for the honour of Australia, I kept a smile on my face. If anything was worth an AO I reckon that was but the letter never came.
After Hong Kong, I spent almost four years in Seoul, Korea. For one year I was a language student and for the other three I worked as Counsellor and Deputy Head of Mission at the Australian Embassy. I was the best Korean speaker in the embassy for much of the time and was judged to be an "intermediate speaker" by my language school. The truth finally came rudely home when I was about to leave and at a farewell dinner hosted by some good Korean friends, the wife of the host turned to me and said in perfect English: "Dr Clancy, you try so very hard to speak Korean and we admire you for that. But, I have to tell you, you speak it like a four-year old." At that point I decided I was not a linguist and had better stick to English as my medium of communication for the future.
In 1988 I decided to strike out on my own. I had been smitten by the dynamism of Asia and the transformation that was occuring on Australia's doorstep. It was an exciting place and the region where I wanted to be. Had I stayed in DFAT I reckoned I was overdue for a stint in deepest Africa or worse as the consul in Los Angeles ("The Ambassador to Disneyland" as the post was called).
So I parted ways with the Australian Government and became master of my own destiny. I spent ten years in Taipei, Taiwan—a place I had often overflown but never been able to visit and which I thought was little understood by Australia. With the opening of China I saw Taiwan as crucial to North Asia's future. Alas, I had overlooked the even greater potential of Shanghai. Business went well for a while although as Shanghai boomed many of my clients left town. It is a place I remember with affection but the beginning of the end came for me on 30 June 1997 when a group of us assembled on the roof of the Ritz Landis Hotel on Min Chuan East Road to bid farwell to Hong Kong as we knew her. At that gathering one dear Canadian friend of mine, in introducing me to a newcomer to the town, turned to me and said to the newbie: "... and this is Mike Clancy, he is one of the old hands; he will never leave." Thank you Lee, you gave me another of my life-changing epiphanies. The following day I got up, made coffee and started to plan my exit strategy.
My business at that time was primarily in the area of market research and risk analysis and I had done some work for The Economist drafting specialised EIU reports related to Taiwan. Through that connection I had been approached by the Butterworth Heineman Group out of Singapore to write a "Business Guide to Taiwan", an assignment I accepted with alacrity. It took almost a year to write but was another formative experience—it opened me to the world of publishing.
Writing that first book required a lot of background research as well as data entry and with one of my friends from Sydney days now resident in the Philippines I opened a small office there to process data and key in all the spreadsheet information I needed for my book. That gave me the idea to relocate from Taipei to Manila, a transition that was two years in the making. I actually arrived in Manila in January 2001 on the same day that the Philippine Senate, investigating the shenanigans of then President Estraa voted not to open the Jose Velarde envelopes. It was a short-lived victory for the Estrada camp and one that quickly backfired. Less than a month later he was deemed to have resigned the presidency. So began a rambunctious decade living in Southeast Asia.
I stayed in the Philippines for more than eight years, met and married my second wife and became friends with some of the most generous and wonderful people on the planet. Sadly, however, it is a country bedevilled by politics and can never quite get ahead. It is either a country you love to hate or a country you hate to love and I was one of the latter. Our business prospered there in a quiet sort of way and for the last four years our small company was the local franchisee of Corporate Network, a business-to-business service of Economist Intelligence Unit. I continued to write my monthly newsletter on Taiwan that I had started in 1998 and in 2001 added to it a similar newsletter on the Philippines. Both of these I publish to the present day through NewNations.com an online NGO dedicated to democracy and transparency, especially in the emerging economies. Having been infected with the bug, I now find the discipline of writing to be quite therapeutic.
Our company included a small team of research analysts whose work I supervised and edited. Aside from producing a business guide to the Philippines as well as regular business reports for our members, we also founded the Philippine Business Review, a journal dedicated to showcasing the best of the country. I also began writing and editing under contract and that allowed me to develop my own exit strategy. In 2008 I left the company behind me and struck out on my own once more as an independent writer and editor with contracts from the Asian Development Bank and the International Labour Organization.
My life has come full circle. I now live on the Gold Coast, Australia with my wife of eight years and after a lifetime of learning geography the hard way, I am now making my living as a writer and editor, specialising in scientific and technical subjects along with political and economic analysis. Having worked over the past eighteen months full-time with authors whose first language is not English, and finding some of them quite suspicious of editors (we are not as bad as we are made out to be) I saw a need for a handbook written by editors for authors.
If i learned one thing from living in Asia, it was never to confront a person directly with criticism; rather make your point indirectly. The first handbook on effectrive writing, prepared for the Manila Office of the ILO in 2009 was the result of that approach to dealing with problems. Now back in Australia, I have been encouraged to "Australianise" the original piece and develop it as a course that can be used to train people in the art of writing—or at least give them some ideas to think about. So in the final quarter of 2009 I sat down to start the rewrite. Since the ADB uses US English and Chicago Style while the ILO uses British English and UN style; as a good editor, I used this as an oportunity to reaquaint myself with Australian English and learn about Australian style. I also reengineered the material somewhat so that it could provide the basis for a short course in effective writing.
So it has taken me four pages, about 2,500 words and forty years but that is the story of how I came to write this book. We all have our stories. I hope I can encourage you to tell yours.
Michael Clancy
Mermaid Waters, Queensland 4218
January 2010
PS. Emu meat is quite strong but tastes very good; alas Roma moved on to greener pastures and I did not see her again.
No comments:
Post a Comment