Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Good mornin’ America, who are ya?

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When I tell the average American what my wife does for a living, they get a glassy-eyed look of reverence on their face and immediately say that it's so awesome that my wife is a schoolteacher.

When I add that my wife teaches in the city, the reverence turns to exaltation—ohmyGodthat'ssogreat—and I fear if I don't change the subject soon, the American will begin speaking to me in tongues.

And change the subject is exactly what the American wants me to do, because when you talk about teachers, the subject of education could follow. And despite the fact that every American says education is the most important blah blah blah in the blah blah blah of the future of blah blah blah, no one—no one—likes to talk about education. (Ken Robinson is one of the world's leading experts on education, and he confesses that when someone brings up education in a cocktail party conversation his first reaction is, "Oh, why me?")

So, to sum up, the American thinks teachers are totally amazing, that teachers who work in the howling ghetto are even more, like, heroes, but that education is to be talked about little and thought about even less.

And, meanwhile, the average American seems to be be convinced that many teachers, if not most, are bums and burnout cases who, without their creepy unions, would have no jobs at all.

If there's a job harder than educating the American child these days, it might be communicating about education with the childish American.

What was your happiest moment as a communicator?

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The United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, gives more speeches per year than I do, and I'm counting the ones I give to my daughter.

Four writers help with his speeches. They all sit a one row of cubicles, with two assistants right around the corner. I spent time with them last week before my talk. A more congenial crew I have never met. Three men and three women, all sophisticated, thoughtful, hard-working, funny, candid—and, apparently, happy.

Actually, more than apparently. I actually asked a couple of them them. Yes. They are happy. They each can rattle off the particular strengths of the others, and though I'm sure they're aware of one anothers' weaknesses too, they don't seem at all inclined to dwell on them. The work itself means too much to them to waste time infighting. And the work—which occasionally involves all-night writing sessions on trips around the world with the Secretary General—is demanding and usually stimulating too.

"Everybody," said David Simpson, whose (wonderful) title is First Officer of the Speechwriting Unit of the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, "is on top of their game."

The whole thing almost—almost—made me want to work in an office again.

More importantly, it got me thinking about times in my career when work has been play.

But there were a few stretches at Ragan: When I took over as editor of the weekly Ragan Report, after years as an understudy. And then I became a managing editor there, thrilled to teach the young kids all the skills that I'd learned only a few years before. I was happy when I went off on my own and found myself writing communication commentaries one day, reporting magazine stories the next. And these days, come to think of it, as I write and speak about communication, saying and writing things that could only have come from a son of my writer mother and adman father, I'm pretty happy too.

There have also been down years in there, of course. Times at Ragan when I wanted to leave but couldn't figure out where else in the world that eccentric place had prepared me to work. (Happily, the answer was, "anyplace.") Times later in my freelance career when I realized with great anxiety and sadness that some of the journalism that I once felt privileged to do, didn't even stimulate me anymore. And times all along the way when I allowed myself to think: Goddamn, this world demands a lot of energy from its workers. And wonder, about that energy: Do I have enough?

This is all a way of asking you to tell me: What was the best stretch of your career? And remembering how good you felt then—how might you go about feeling that way again?

Your best day working

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It's an old saw on the golf course: "Your worst day golfing is better than your best day working."

For me that's never been true. My worst days golfing are bad, because I feel like I'm wasting my time, and my best days working are fantastic, because I feel at one with the universe.

There are dreary days at the keyboard, but exhilaration happens every week: a far-out story idea is accepted, an interview turns out better than I thought, a story (finally) goes to bed, the issue comes out, something I write generates an unexpected conversation among strangers.

But how many truly wonderful days have I spent working?

Those, in my experience, happen about once per decade.

It's November 1995, and I'm lying on the sofa in Larry Ragan's office at 3:00 a.m., trying to grab a few hours sleep before the graphic designer comes in to lay out the memorial issue I've been working on in the days since he died. I'm using all the skills my mentor taught me in order to honor him. As I try to sleep through the coffee buzz, I think of the line in a James Taylor song, "No one can tell me that I'm doing wrong today."

On a wintry day in 2002, I'm riding in a rusty GMC Jimmy with a struggling standup comic I'm profiling for the Chicago Tribune's Sunday Magazine. We're headed for a two-night gig at a Holiday Inn in Eau Clair, Wis. I'm inhaling the fumes from his Nicorette gum, asking him how he prepares beef stroganoff on a hot plate, and thinking to myself that my competition is exactly no one, because I'm the only asshole in the world who thinks this is heaven.

In spring of this year, I'm holding my first "speechwriting jam session" at a speechwriters conference in Phoenix. I'm playing great speeches and watching the eyes of the writers in the audience fill, as my own eyes fill, as I remember my dead writer dad, who agreed with all of us that communication and love are the same thing.

What was your best moment at work? Communicate it to us.