I received a call at work today, and it was really short. It went along the lines of "I have a writing assignment for you. It is on very short notice, but it pays very well. Do you want it?"
Obviously, an offer like this is a trap, because people like me never ever hear the catch in the sentence. All I hear is the part about it paying very well and I'm sold. I'm a whore that way.
So this was how I ended up trying to find 50 different ways to describe the same thing, because the client is paying me a good sum to take about 50 similar profiles and write them differently. Unfortunately, we are not like the eskimos who have a hundred words for snow. Even the best thesaurus you had would struggle to give you more than 15 alternative words for any one word you can think of.
Add that to the fact that I have a very short timeframe, this is really just a recipe for a huge headache, as well as trying to hide the fact that I am using my full time job to do my part time job. A job within a job. Jobception!
My colleague asked me what the pile of paper on my desk was and I told him it was some paperwork I brought from home. Like who the hell brings paperwork from home to work. My brain was so fried I was giving horrible excuses.
So I started writing it. And I thought I was doing a pretty good job, given the brief. You see, the client wants me to write profiles. Profiles are about people, and they are about quotes. But there was one major problem. All the information supplied to me consisted of third person testimonials and lists of achievements. Nowhere in those profiles was there a single quote from the subject at hand. Why did it not occur to their corp comms people to ask their subjects for quotes if they wanted first person profiles?
With what they are asking, it basically means that I'm supposed to take a statement like this "John is a model worker, always hardworking and ready to give his best..." and turn it into this "I have a real passion for my job, and it motivates me to do my best" knowing full well that my subjects are nowhere near likely to say things in that manner.
If the subjects read their own quotes I think they would cringe. No, actually it would be their friends and colleagues who would. And I feel sorry for them, because the people I am writing about seem to be genuinely nice people, based on their profiles. But I don't care enough because I'll be enjoying the payout by then. The sad truth about hiring disaffected freelancers/mercenaries to write your stuff for you.