Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Fear and Loathing, on the virtual book tour: The trouble with talking about my writing

03.18.2021 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

I’ve been wondering why all these radio interviews and podcasts make me so uptight, and why I sound borderline hysterical on the air. (Not terrible or clumsy, I don’t think—just on the verge of hyperventilation. Or as I call it, “lively.”)

I think I’ve figured it out.

Follow me:

Yesterday I thanked my high school English teacher for telling me maybe I could be a writer someday.

A writer needs to be told that by somebody credible, because deciding to become a writer takes gall.

Any number of jobs are just as difficult as being a writer. But it does not take gall to declare you are going to school to become an electrician, or a CPA.

As a writer, you have to answer a question that others will ask of you, and that you must ask of yourself: What makes you so special?

As a young writer, I thought what made me so special was my great big original ideas that the rest of the world could benefit from absorbing. The more I wrote, the more I realized that what I really do better than the average jamoke is illustrate ideas, tell stories and portray this American life vividly and subtly.

I do that after lots and lots of rewriting and editing, which I do by going away from my work and coming back to it … and by reading my words through the imagined perspectives of a variety of known friends and enemies and carefully rewriting them to acknowledge as many different points of view as I know myself.

And here comes a friendly radio interviewer or a podcast host, asking me to describe and reproduce the effect of essays I’ve sweated over literally for years—constructing, rebuilding, planing, sanding, fine-sanding and polishing—off the cuff, before an unseen audience of untold numbers or composition!

It’s guaranteed spectacular public failure is what it is—the other day among many clumsy things I said recording an interview for Cleveland’s NPR station, I blurted out the word “fart”—and the only reason I agree to any of these interviews is that we’ve paid a publicist to set them up.

Also, because I enjoy the rush.

This is what I look like as I calmly lay out to a public radio host the wisdom from my new book An Effort to Understand, which everyone absolutely loves and is available at Amazon, or wherever you buy your books.

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David Murray writes on communication issues.
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