Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

The Post-COVID Social Protocol: How not to ruin our first year of freedom

03.03.2021 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

I spend my time doing a lot of dumb things, like composing eulogies in my head for people who are very much alive, that I may (or very well may not) be asked to give.

These days, I worry a lot about this: When COVID breaks, everybody’s going to be mad at everybody else for not traveling to see them first.

“You went and saw _______ before coming to see me? After a year and a half. Seriously?”

I’m pre-eminently banning that. I’m demanding that we all follow what I used to call “The Guy Rule,” until I realized long ago that guys don’t actually follow it any better than women do.

But The Guy Rule holds that you’re simply not allowed to act butt hurt about being overlooked, about not being invited to a thing, about not being chosen for this or included in that.

That doesn’t mean you are not, in fact, occasionally upset about same. But life is too short, drama is too dumb, people have lots on their minds and you know you ought to have been too busy with your own amazeballs life, to notice. So pretend you didn’t notice, and move on.

This is going to be tough, after COVID. Before COVID, the most common sentence exchanged between family and friends was, “We never see each other enough!” And the second most common we, “It’s been too long!”

Well now it’s really been too long, and it will be impossible for all of us to ever quite catch up.

So please don’t take an inventory of other people’s priorities in their impossible efforts to catch up with the people they want to see, the places they want to be and the air they want to breathe.

Please don’t tell someone she should visit her family before taking a sailing trip with her buddies. (That goes for you, too, sailing buddies, if she bails on the trip at the last minute to go see her brother.)

Apply The Guy Rule.

In fact, let’s rename The Guy Rule.

Let’s simply call it the Post-COVID Social Protocol.

And let’s please, please, please not ruin our first year of freedom by making it a referendum on how much everybody matters to everybody else.

It’s not a contest, as my mother used to say.

And if you make it one, everybody’s going to lose—and you might just lose everybody.

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Communicators, our book is out today!

03.02.2021 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

An Effort to Understand is available for immediate purchase—on Amazon, or anywhere you buy your books—in print, in Kindle and as an audiobook, narrated by this guy.

For radio interviews and book talks, I’m having to explain briefly to a general audience exactly what it is that writers like me and you have to teach non-writers, about communication.

What writers have, I’m beginning to tell these interviewers, is a habit of mind that involves taking temporary leave of one’s own attitude-packed head and putting oneself into the empty head of a random reader who is stumbling on your subject innocently. Or even better yet, into imagined head of a specific reader who greets your communication with a clear point of view of his or her own.

That’s what communicators do. That’s what everybody must learn to do.

My writer parents’ favorite story was one my dad would tell, and I tell it in my book:

One morning on vacation in Florida, my dad stood on the hotel balcony, gazing at the ocean.

He spotted a young boy, walking down the beach alone.

Below my dad on another balcony, another unseen boy called out to the boy on the beach.

“Jake!”

The boy on the beach looked over briefly, but kept walking.

“Jake!” the boy below repeated.

But the boy kept walking.

“Jake! Jake! Jake!” the boy below cried.

Finally the boy on the beach stopped, turned squarely toward the hotel, reared back and yelled, “Can’t you see, I’m some other kid?!”

I’m some other kid! I can still hear my dad repeating the line at the top of his lungs, over my mother’s roaring laughter.

The kid was a pure communicator. His natural skill—to see the scene from the other kid’s point of view—that’s a skill every well-intentioned American citizen needs to cultivate, if only to understand others well enough to make ourselves understood, to them.

Alas, most of the professional communicators I’ve surrounded myself with over the years haven’t had the luxury of our young friend not-named-Jake, to be pure communicators in the middle of a beach. Their work is more complicated, and its results often far less clear.

I write in the Acknowledgments:

Finally, I have to thank the late Larry Ragan. My lucky writing apprenticeship came at his little publisher of trade newsletters for people in public relations. That may sound dreary. But the company was a menagerie of obscure but serious writers just like the founder who had collected them. These writers—and also many, many of their readers—wanted to do more than make a humble living hacking out readable words. They believed they could make a better society by exemplifying and promoting clear, candid, moral communication. … Three decades later—as head of the Professional Speechwriters Association, and publisher of Vital Speeches of the Day and ProRhetoric.com and as a daily blogger at Writing Boots—I am surrounded by such people, thousands of them—all doing the best they can, despite sometimes crushing bureaucratic resistance, to use communication to humanize the places where they work and live, and brighten the relationships with the people they work and live with. These communicators believe in me, which they have proved to me by pre-purchasing many copies of this book in advance and promoting it as if it were their own.

It is.

And that’s why this book is dedicated, “To the Communicators.”

This life, too.

Categories // Efforts to Understand

Monday Morning Invitation

03.01.2021 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

If you’ve got nothing going on tomorrow night, now you do.

I’ll be in conversation with this guy, who introduced a guileless Ohio jamoke to Chicago people like Paul Engleman and Eddie Reardon—not to mention Studs Terkel and Rick Kogan—who eventually made this city seem to me the way it always seemed to Tony: “a tiny town.”

And Tony Judge and I hope to be in conversation with you, too.

The event is free, but you must RSVP, by emailing words@bookcellarinc.com, with the subject line “David Murray RSVP.”

See ya there?

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Out March 2, available for preorder now.

An Effort to Understand

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David Murray writes on communication issues.
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