Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Walter Payton, you should have started a blog

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Andy Rooney signed off 60 Minutes Sunday, but said he wasn't retiring because writers never retire. (My writer dad would have muttered at the TV that Rooney was more of a typist than a writer. Writers never retire, but they do get grumpier with age.)

I'm grateful to be a writer because retirement sucks, especially for people who like their work. Were you surprised by recent revelations that Chicago Bears legend Walter Payton was depressed and sometimes suicidal after his playing days?

I wasn't. And you know what I said to myself as I read the stories?

"Oh Walter. You didn't know what to do with yourself, did you? Why didn't you come to me? I would have told you to write!"

Foolish, I know. But it was my first thought neverthless.

No matter what happens to me, I can always write.

(And the worse it gets, the better the material.)

Eat your heart out, Derek Jeter.

Make a string of words, tie a knot and hang on

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Lewis Lapham recently retired his longrunning "Notebook" column in Harper's magazine. In his last one, he explained his reason for writing:

The more interesting questions are epistemological. How do we know what we think we know? Why is it that the more information we collect the less likely we are to grasp what it means? Possibly because a montage is not a narrative, the ear is not the eye, a pattern recognition is not a figure or a form of speech. The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that within the wind tunnels of the “innovative delivery strategies” the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three months or three years ago. Unlike moths and fruit flies, human beings bereft of memory, even as poor a memory as Montaigne’s or my own, tend to become disoriented and confused. I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

People who don't write: How do they even keep their heads screwed on?

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.