Better a ‘People Person’ Than a ‘Word Nerd’: In (Self-) Defense of The Extroverted Writer

Back in the 1970s, young people seeking jobs in PR and sales brightly claimed in cover letters, “I’m a people person!” 

At which writers like my parents sneered and jeered, of course. A writer must maintain a sardonic streak. From a journal my mother kept when I was growing up:

Tom says: “Keep that boozing and smoking up, and I’ll take up sky diving and hang gliding.”

“Do what you have to do,” I say.

He gives me a Look. …

Tom singing: “Whoopee! I’m a country boy!” How can I light a cigarette with him singing like that?

My parents were both fine writers. Am I better? “It’s not a contest,” my mother would sardonically say.

I think I am more versatile, let’s say that. I can write about a lot of different subjects from a big variety of angles and in styles flexible to my purpose, message and audience. So I can write more kinds of things than they could.

Why?

Goddamnit, I think it’s because I’m more of a people person.

I know a lot more people than my parents ever did. Beyond their families and a few dozen colleagues and a small handful of personal friends, my parents were both pretty reclusive. Every time my mom would get invited somewhere, she would complain about some mysterious beasts that beset her that she called “the shy bears.” My dad couldn’t bear to give a simple book talk, for fear that his readers would expect more than the reserved man behind the prose could give them. Look how much fun they’re having on a rare night out!

Between my work as a journalist and a convener of professional writers, my three decades of life in Chicago and all the other friends I’ve found and held fast to over a lucky and enthusiastic life, I love more people than my parents ever knew, and I know more people than my parents could fathom Frank Sinatra knowing.

I say all this not to brag, though bragging may be a happy byproduct. I am proud of the people who I call my friends and who call me theirs—and amazed and overwhelmed by their number. (And sometimes really stressed out; my parents didn’t prepare me for this kind of life and I literally don’t know how I do it.)

I say this to justify a contrary bit of advice that I think I’d give to a young woman or man who wanted to be a writer. Introversion, a love of solitude—these are revered by “word nerds,” who think the first, best and last key to writing is reading. People like my parents, who hated “small talk,” and who agreed with Jean Paul Sartre’s dictate, “Hell is other people.” Who think good writing comes from solitude, loneliness, quiet and total concentration.

Some great writing comes from that, surely; and some kinds of writing probably demand it. But how much writing, really? Are you trying to write Ulysses? If not—if you’re trying to write essays that resonate, stories that relate or even social media posts that people love to hate—it helps to know lots of people. And I don’t mean just for gathering “material.” I mean well enough to intellectually dance with.

Every writer knows that the very strongest stuff she or he writes are not scattergun screeds aimed vaguely at the general public, but serious love letters or critiques or rhetorical sniper attacks on one single person. So whenever I’m writing a thing, I have learned to pick one person to write it to. I actually don’t pick them, anymore; they come into my head while I’m writing, and volunteer.

Because I know a lot of people well, I have a lot of volunteers. Sometimes it’s a pair of people—one person to write it for, another to write it against. Depending on the subject, I’ll pick the most sympathetic reader I can think of, and the most antagonistic. And I’ll try to please the former and bring the latter along, in hopes that the thing holds together for pretty much everybody in between.

I have a lot of people, so I have a lot to write. These are less essays than correspondence: open letters to anonymous recipients.

In short, I’m a productive and occasionally provocative writer, because … I’m a people person!

And somewhere, my mother is trying to light a cigarette.