How to write in the 3rd person

ON BEHALF OF YOUNGBLOODS AUSTRALIA, FOR GABBERISH: THE SELF PROMOTION ISSUE, DEC 2021

In my first year of advertising I was made a finalist in a film competition. When it was announced, Joe, my colleague and competition partner, asked why I hadn’t shared it on the corporate hellscape that is LinkedIn yet. 

“Because that’s lame”, I said.
“You won’t succeed if you’re good in secret” he enlightened me.

Stef Sword-Williams, the author of F*ck Being Humble, worked in advertising before launching her book and business that explains, among other things, that women are less likely to promote themselves and this is holding them back. As a fan of hers, Joe believed that alongside underlying prejudices, inflexibility for working parents and the harassment driving women out, it might be yet another reason why we don’t see as many women at the top. Having watched female creative partners and friends be all but apologetic about good ideas, I thought, sure. Women are less likely to promote themselves. 

But being Australian only complicates things further. 

Like many Aussies, I’ve been brought up understanding that the best way to conduct yourself is to sit down, be humble. And I’m still not entirely convinced that instruction is wrong. In many ways, I relish in tall poppy syndrome; our weird guerrilla enforcement of egalitarianism. It ensures not all our heroes are the wealthy and powerful. 

However it also ensures that, as an Aussie, you’re allowed to be successful and talented, but only if it’s by accident. 

It’s a truth I learnt early. Throughout my teens, ‘are you smart?’ was a question that plagued my friends and me as a result of attending a selective high school. There was no good way to make it seem accidental. ‘No’ was an obvious lie. ‘Yes’ was so overconfident, you could be lying. And shrugging it off with jokes was an arrogant show of quick wittedness that confirmed you were not only smart, you were also a dickhead. 

I now work in an industry that doesn’t appear to share the same anxiety about their successes. Rather, we share everything.

LinkedIn has become an unlikely host of creative inspiration, where based on the sea of work on show daily, we judge what agencies are doing well, where you want to work next, or who you want to work for. Good work is made visible, and sure, maybe it makes us all aim higher. 

But it’s not enough to simply show our work, we also rank it. We gather, vote, and immortalise which is THE BEST on little stainless steel trophies, every year, for every impossibly specific category. And then, we put those rankings on show too.

It feels completely at odds with the secretly successful person our Australian culture tells us to be.

Unfortunately, our solution can’t be to opt out. Unfortunately, awards have a function. While egos are on show throughout, awards do serve to show clients what’s possible, what’s successful, what has made money. Awards have become a currency that proves an agency’s, and a creative’s, worth. 

So, for my first toe dip into this anxiety pool, with all this in mind, I reluctantly gave in to Joe’s advice. I shared our finalist film with a two sentence caption that took more than an hour to craft: ‘Good news for Joe and me. Our reluctant star, Dad, who saw our film on B+T after being assured nobody would, isn’t so thrilled.’

In two meticulously aloof sentences, I had admitted that we achieved on purpose. That we had tried. I had removed the distance between myself and my work. And I immediately felt that if people didn’t like this thing that I’d formed inside my brain, that would mean they didn’t like ME. 

So I changed my mind. The solution couldn’t be to opt in either.

When Joe and I won silver, I didn’t share the film. When my partner Katie and I won gold the following year, I didn’t share it either. I shared nothing good that ever happened. This way, nobody would think I tried, nobody would think I was bad, nobody would think I was a dickhead. 

In fact, they wouldn’t think of me at all.

Dammit.

So I looked around to see how everyone else is solving this impossible problem. 

One of my CDs evades the LinkedIn boast by making it news.
‘New work out’; ‘That work is up for awards’; ‘That work won all of them’. Cool, aloof, helpful. Just a journalist reporting the facts. He’s an art director – the perfect excuse for plain speak. Only he could pull it off.

An acquaintance I admire promotes herself with elite levels of subtlety. She doesn’t talk about her work, she talks about work in general. She creates side projects and then thanks others for getting involved. She writes articles. She speaks at events. She knows stuff. It seemed brilliant – but all I knew was that I didn’t know if I knew about anything.

A mentor of mine chooses to sing the praises of her colleagues and friends instead of her own work. It’s an admirable approach that seems to be catching on. I wondered if that could solve it; if we all just promoted each other, shouted loudly about our talented friends and colleagues and creativity broadly, maybe none of us would feel like dickheads. It promotes her for who she is; a selfless champion of good people and good ideas. Her work then speaks for itself. 

Many men I studied with post about every print and social ad they ever make. Pithy, excited commentary on a nice little line or clever art direction. Their joint websites brag politely in the 3rd person, boasting big clients and every award they’ve ever come close to winning. They came across as eager, ambitious and hardworking. Somehow, not nearly as annoying as I found my silent self.

There I was, damned every which way, while everyone else seemed to be getting by just fine.

The truth I’ve found about self promotion (and maybe life too) is that people will always worry more about themselves than they will about you.

Being creative often means your self worth is balanced on a knife’s edge between feeling unapologetically self assured, and completely, ashamedly inadequate. So, no matter how happy you are with your own work, the fear of what others think of it, and what they think of your pride in it, is what many of us act on. No kind of self promotion you choose will feel right. But it will have to happen in some way. Because what we all want is the same – the opportunities that only come from being known and seen. 

Remember, plenty of dickheads get good jobs. 

_____

Lizzie is a copywriter at The Monkeys and co-Chair of Youngbloods NSW. Lizzie realises that writing an article about avoiding self-promotion is inherently a kind of self-promotion. Lizzie loves irony. She wishes all young people in the industry good luck navigating the ick.

Mocking illustrations are the work of Lizzie’s talented creative partner Katie Kidd. 

Sorry Stranger

Poor bloke doesn’t even know he’s a murder suspect.

I am power walking up the second steepest hill in New South Wales. Glancing behind me, I notice the man reach for something in his backpack, and pull his hood up over his head. Just an observation. I know he most likely won’t kill me.

Maybe he’d just rape me.

Still, I conclude looking over my shoulder once in a while is acceptable. I mentally thank him for walking loudly.

Would it be better or worse to be raped?

I wonder if all my walks at night will be like this one. There’s not always men following me, of course, but I wonder if on any of the walks that do include men following me, I will ever feel fine? Or should resign myself to a life of minute but constant paranoia?

Have I already?

Behind me a car door opens. Then closes. I look behind me and the dark figure is gone.

I’ve escaped.

I remind myself I wasn’t trapped.

Technically.

As his engine starts behind me I remember another walk in the dark down a different hill. On this night a man stopped me, wanting to warn me about other men I was approaching. He’d seen a group yelling at a woman, and thought I should be careful. I’d chuckled internally – we’re always careful. The interaction puzzled me as the helpful man clearly knew the bad man inherently had more power than me. His warning indicated so. So surely he knew that he too, as a man, had more power than me. But he didn’t say whether or not he’d spoken to the bad man about doing the yelling. So, the onus was put back on me – like I was supposed to know how how to proceed. And while I appreciated the warning of potential danger, crossing the street wasn’t going to stop the bad man from attacking me. It was clear that the helpful man didn’t consider that maybe his words may have.

And I am now walking up the second steepest hill in New South Wales with a hooded man in a white van in hot pursuit.

My attacker is a cliche.

The car rumbles up behind me. It slows.

The car shudders at this attempt to stop on such a steep incline. He is paused beside me on the road.

He yells out the window. He asks if I’d like a lift.
“Oh no thanks, I’m half way up now!” I brush cheerily, like I am enjoying this assault on my calves.

The man looks at me silently in the dark, utterly peeved I’ve declined his offer. He shakes his head, as if to say ‘I didn’t even stab you and now you won’t even accept a friendly gesture’.

Without words, he rolls up his window and chuggs away again up the hill.

Sorry, stranger.

He’s right. He’s done fuck all but be a man in the dark. And if I were a man too, I’d have accepted his neighbourly suburban offer gratefully. I’d have slung my half-drunk body into the passenger seat and exchanged pleasantries about the hill until we reached the top of it. It’s still the most likely scenario to have eventuated. But I’ve read the news. It’s not a great time to be a woman – after 10pm. And if I’m going to make headlines, I’d like to be alive to read them.

I’d have loved a lift.

I pause on the sidewalk to exclaim this dramatically into the night. I feel a strange need to apologise. I want to let the man know I am thankful for the offer. How friendly, how nice! I want him to know it’s not him, its statistics, it’s my gender.

But that’s not true of course, it’s his.

No use though, he can’t relate. He won’t understand the non-story of not being raped or killed this time. He doesn’t know the feeling of not owning the body he lives in, and I’ve never known the feeling of owning mine.

Though, I imagine it’s a reassuring walk home.