On communication, professional and otherwise.
At the end of last week’s staff meeting with Pro Rhetoric, LLC, I heard myself deliver a Seussean pep talk:
“Well, we’ve got a lot to do. And we’ll do it, that’s what we’ll do!”
As my old man would say: Couldn’t you just thank God for leadership like that?
Chicago pals, save the date for a conversation/launch party for my new book, the week of its publication. RSVP not required, but encouraged, through this link.
As a writer, I look at other writers closely, and askance.
Especially the way they accept good fortune, and praise. Disaster, writers greet like old friends: “Rejection seeks me out and finds me,” a writer pal frequently laments. But triumph is a distrusted impostor to whom writers dare not tell the truth.
Happy occasions: The newly published writer takes the obligatory “unboxing” pictures—or worse, video. Of course we only see Christmas morning. Never the immediate and inevitable Christmas afternoon, when the writer asks, like even the most gift-showered child in a sea of wrapping paper: Is this all there is? And just an undefinable weirdness that makes a writer forget how to smile, or something.
Media attention: “Thanks so much for having me!” the writer shrieks at the end of the interview. Gratitude is good. Pathetic gratitude is sad. The line is fine. Terry Gross didn’t have you on because you needed an ego boost. She had you on because she thought you might have something interesting to say. That’s also why people listened to the interview. So don’t lose your breath thanking her as if she stopped to change your tire on the side of the road. Thank her graciously, and tell her it was a pleasure, if it was.
Critical praise: These folks have been writing a book for however long, searching for an agent or a publisher however doggedly and behaving however egregiously, as I put it in my first “Sales Mode” piece last year, “like an ever-more rabid, psychotic, hungry, horny wolverine, whose raging compulsions can only be sated by sales of a book, for $14.95.”
But now, every time they share a new endorsement, they’re suddenly amazed and humbled. None of them, after decades of writing, hints at what’s also on their heart: “It’s about goddamn time.”
I know it’s ungracious to say how you really feel. Except you’re a writer, in which case you’re supposed to be paid for saying how you really feel. Would Scotty Fitzgerald have asked Zelda to film his unboxing of This Side of Paradise for Insta? Oh, I guess he probably would have, and would have grumbled to Hem that Scribner’s put him up to it.
All to say:
A recent endorsement for my forthcoming book Soccer Dad did actually make me feel amazed and humbled. Well, not me, exactly. My inner seventh-grader, who believed (and still does) that some of the very best American literature in the late 20th century appeared in articles in Sports Illustrated, by Frank Deford, Dan Jenkins, Gary Smith … and Alexander Wolff, who was a staff writer there for 36 years.
“A gem of a book,” Wolff went on to call it.
Amazed. Humbled.
And about goddamn time.
(And amazed and humbled!)
(And about goddamn time!)