I Started Writing for One Reason. I Keep Writing for Another.

Spent New Year’s with a dear family friend who has found fame as a popular podcaster. She was lucky enough to live in obscurity until she knew her insides well, and understood that the numbers of her listeners—or even the volume of their cheers—would have exactly nothing to do with how she felt about herself. And that fame, and the power or money it might generate, is not a reward in itself—only a spud bar, to unearth bigger stones.

A lack of this wisdom is why most child stars lose their minds. (And of course these days, every young person can suffer from this syndrome, trying to fill their souls by throwing likes into the Grand Canyon.)

I wanted to be famous when I was young. I remember telling a girlfriend that I would consider my writing career a success if I got on the David Letterman show.

My writing has brought me something I could not have imagined then: a loosely connected community of readers, many of whom have read my writing regularly over many years and know my mind—seen my best instincts and my worst, through private and public tragedies and triumphs large and small. You can rely on me to try to tell the truth, and I can rely on you to tell me when I don’t, and do.

Obviously, I love notes I get from strangers who have just discovered my work and appreciate it. And when such people tell me in detail what makes my work meaningful to them, that’s great.

But I get more nutrition from people I know.

For instance, over the holidays I got an email from Andrew Tonachel, one the most thoughtful and bookish of my remarkably thoughtful and bookish Sunday baseball mates. Andrew reads Writing Boots posts in batches that he refers to as his “homework,” so we can talk about the stuff during lulls left centerfield. In his holiday email, Andrew made brief remarks on a half dozen of my recent posts. Thanking me for both my writing and my go-for-broke style of baseball, Andrew concluded with a wink, “You improve my quality of life, and I look forward to you continuing to serve me in 2025.”

Also nourishing was a note I got from one Charles McNair, also over the holidays. Charles, an Alabama-born southern scribe who writes books and exquisite articles from his home base in Bogotá, Columbia, is one of the very best writers I know personally. He reads Writing Boots faithfully and whenever he praises a post, I immediately reread it to see what I managed to do right, in hopes that maybe I can do it again. Charles is cool-looking, too!

Charles finished my 2021 book over the holidays, and emailed:

I’m writing to lay it on thick about An Effort To Understand, which I’ve finished just in time for Christmas, a shining gift you didn’t know you’d give me, but one that’s very important to me. 

I knew you were a fine writer and a fine communicator. The needle moved to GIFTED with this book. ORACULAR. I mean it. Schools should teach this, D, if schools still teach books. It’s fine and smart and loving and tough and what the world needs now. And yesterday. And tomorrow. 

Over and over, I’ve turned these essays to the light to see them sparkle. There’s so much good sense here. Even wisdom. 

You generously included pieces from other writers too. Here’s one that sticks with me ever since I read it, credited to Ron Shewchuk:

“Each organization has its own government, religion, education, economy, and family. Many corporate leaders ignore this and think of their businesses more like a plow that can be endlessly dragged through the ground rather than a society that needs to be nurtured and maintained.” 

For years and years, I’ve been trying to articulate the value of employee communications. This is the absolute best way of thinking about that job that I’ve ever read. Thank you again.

Here’s my thanks, yet again, for this important work. It’s a legacy and a landmark. Important. I mean it.

Of course I share that here not to brag or encourage you to buy my clearly still-resonant book …

… but to ask you rhetorically: How many Amazon stars or even royalty dollars are worth that one full-throated compliment by a writer I revere—not written for a cover blurb or a juice-pumping Amazon review (for which I have also been grateful), but four years after publication, on a darkening late afternoon in the doldrum between Christmas and New Year’s?

And then there was my wife, of all people. On a long car trip home from the in-laws’ after Christmas, she finally read the manuscript for my next book, a short memoir about how we raised our daughter in the strange world of big-time youth soccer. She had resisted reading this for months. She is natively skeptical about the very thing in which I (and all writers) must hold total faith: That the writer’s experience, well and honestly rendered, will be interesting and edifying to others. What makes you so special? she is always asking. Nothing! I am always thundering back. And that is just point!

Since this story involved her, she was worried she would hate it, in which case we would have a problem.

She turned over pages as I drove through the rain (and our daughter slept in the back seat). I snuck straining sidelong glances to see where she was in the story. She made no comment, didn’t audibly laugh at the funny parts, didn’t ask a single clarifying question. She occasionally made notes in the margin. With perfect timing, we were getting off the highway and onto Western Avenue in Chicago when she turned to the last page. At the last line, she blew out a whistling jet of air.

“What?!” I asked, before looking over and seeing the tears. With which came some choked-out enthusiastic praise for the book, and then a very hard thing to get, this far into a marriage to a girl to whom you once confessed you hoped to be on the David Letterman show someday: “I’m proud of you.”