What forest? What trees?

Trying to tell the/your story

A friend sent along this link to Ira Glass of National Public Radio's "This American Life" talking about the early days of his career and how he had to work through all the horrible, sucky stuff he had to do. Working through what is not necessarily great work. He sits there and critiques (what was I talking about?!) a radio show from his early days. The point is it takes a long time--maybe forever?--to figure out how to tell the stories you want to tell. And inasmuch as this is aimed at a 'creative' audience, writers, radio people, reporters, anyone trying to tell their own or someone else's story, I think it also applies to everyone--everyone! Because one big part of our common humanity is the need to tell stories. That's what we do all the time. All the time. You get together with a friend and say, "I have to tell you what happened to me this morning!" You're telling your story. But you don't think twice about it when you're telling it. We are speakers. Talk comes naturally to us. To then turn around and try to write that story is for some reason, an entirely different animal. Weird.

And then I see this review of Paul Auster's latest book, Man in the Dark, in The New Yorker. The final line reads: "The narrative juxtapositions and the riddling starkness of Auster's prose create an absorbing if mildly scattershot effect, breathing life into a meditation on the difference between the stories we want to tell and the stories we end up telling."

Why do these things pop out at me now? And connect? I suppose it's that I'm working with a friend who is trying to tell his story. A piece of his story. But he's run up against that issue of, "When I tell this story to friends at dinner, it's always interesting and amusing and unless they're lying, they say it's a compelling story, but when I try to write it down, it doesn't sound like me and I don't even want to re-read it." That age-old dilemma. We are story tellers as speakers. Talking is natural. But writing is not. And for some reason (that 8th-grade English teacher?), people get totally constipated about writing their stories. Perhaps it's just that gap between the oral and the written. Or perhaps it's just the fact that it takes a lot of practice to make that written story sound as good as the spoken one. Perhaps it's that we've been talking longer than we've been writing. Or maybe we spend a lot of time actually thinking about how we're going to talk our stories. I know that I might have some experience and before I actually tell anyone about it, I might think about how I'm going to describe what I experienced; try to find the right words in my mind that will convey what happened. And perhaps we all do that; perhaps our training as speakers is so innate, so 'within us' that we don't think about the oral practice that we do all the time.

Publishers and agents

The only reason I still have a dedicated fax line in my home office is because I work with publishers on occasion. They send contracts as faxes. Apparently they're not familiar with PDFs.

And just now I was trying to track down a literary agent in New York. Found his website, and here's what it says: "This site is under construction and will launch summer 2006." (Today's date is November 1, 2006. Summer long gone.) Clearly no one is paying attention to this unborn site. And that says a lot about the company itself.

Rocket crashes and English language suffers

A rocket crashes in the desert, bringing back to earth cremated humans who had hoped to spend eternity floating around the earth. Ah well. As the article claims, their form wasn't much changed in the crash. But the language suffered instead! This is how the mission director described what happened: "Because of an unexpected aerodynamic effect, the vehicle was short of its effected range."

Guess what? It IS your fault!

I had mentioned in a post a while back that I was thinking about that phrase, "It's not my fault." The worst thing anyone in the world can say, as far as I'm concerned. And I wasn't sure where I was going with this until William Swanson, CEO of Raytheon came along. He is the guy who's not getting as much press coverage for his plagiarism as is Kaavya Viswanathan, the young Harvard student accused of plagiarizing in her chick-lit book. (Note: I just read in today's NYTimes that her publisher, LIttle, Brown, will not now re-issue her book with revisions to those plagiarized parts. It won't be published at all.)

According to an article by David Leonhardt in today's NYTimes, the writer notes that Mr. Swanson--unlike Ms Viswanathan--had never apologized for his transgression. Mr. Leonhardt writes:

I pointed this out to Raytheon's top spokeswoman this week, and last night she called me to read a new statement from Mr. Swanson. This time, he did apologize — twice — and he blamed a staff member for the problem. [Note: this new statement does not appear at the Raytheon website.]

In 2001, Mr. Swanson gave the staff member a file of material to help prepare a presentation, and the file included Mr. King's book, according to the statement. Mr. Swanson didn't realize that so much of the finished product came from the book, rather than his own notes.

This may well be true, but it certainly isn't consistent with Mr. Swanson's previous boasts about how he came up with the rules. In the book, he wrote that they had come from advice from others and his own thoughts. In any event, he has failed his own integrity test. " 'Integrity,' to me," he writes, "is having the fortitude to do what is right when no one is watching."

So, yeah, when things start to go bad and people start pointing out inconsistencies in your story, blame the assistant! It works every time. How can you take this guy Swanson seriously anymore? He gives this un-named assistant a pile of notes (including the copied-from book by W.J. King) and then is surprised--surprised!--to learn that so many of his own--his own!--lessons came from this book. Baaaad assistant. It's not Mr. Swanson's fault. His name may be on this collection of "Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management," but apparently that doesn't require him to actually concern himself with where they came from. Oh well.

But why? Why blame the assistant? Why doesn't Mr. Swanson just own up to the fact that he made a mistake? He asked someone to do a job he should have done himself. If he didn't have the time to put together his own rules, he shouldn't have been handing out this collection with his name on it.

Well, you say, so many books are not written by the person whose name is on the cover, anyway. I know that. I used to work in the ghostwriting business and I'm aware of how many books are not written by the listed author. (That's one reason I'm a close reader of acknowledgments, since that is where the author or authors are revealed, at least if the "author" has any shame whatsoever. )

But if Swanson had actually written his own notes and had any familiarity with the W.J. King book and if he had bothered to read his own finished product, wouldn't he have wondered where all of his own material had gone?

It's not his fault, I guess. His name is on it, but it's not his fault that it's comprised mostly of someone else's words. I've got to wonder about all those Raytheon employees today who are held to those corporate values and how they feel about the fact that their CEO, their leader, doesn't have to comply with them. How many other people are going to be saying today, when something goes wrong, "It's not my fault."

Don't prepare, just show up

The title of this post is the subtitle of a book called Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up, written by Patricia Ryan Madson. I really like this book. It's a series of maxims about how to live your life using the lessons of improvisational theater. I had the pleasure of interviewing Patricia for the Cool Friend section at tompeters.com. In the book, she writes about substituting attention for preparation. Applying this concept to speech giving, for instance, she writes, "Real speech (improvised speech) will always be more interesting, attention-getting, and persuasive than its scripted sister." She goes on to offer some guidance in how to give a compelling talk:

You can improve how you give a lecture by using he principle of improvised speech. Instead of writing out your notes in precise language, try writing questions to yourself. Then, answer the question using natural speech patterns.

I was reminded of this the other day when reading an interview in the latest Worthwhile magazine with Garrison Keillor. (Interview not yet online.) Though he's talking about people in pulpits on Sunday mornings, I think what he says applies to all of us:

I think that people who speak in public make a terrible mistake in putting paper in front of themselves. So many good people stand in a pulpit on Sunday morning and they pull out this little sheet of paper and they read from it. What they wrote down was just a start and if they were to trust themselves a little more they could have done so much better.

Amen.

Cross-stitch coincidence?

The April masthead at Dooce.com is a cross-stitched "Go Dooce Yourself." Dooce has also pointed at a website for subversive cross-stitching. Also noticed in this past Sunday's NYTimes magazine that the title to William Safire's column was War Names and those two words were presented in cross-stitch. Mere coincidence?

Unfortunately when you view the article online, the cross stitched "War Names" is now just normal text, no cross-stitching available.

Seatbelts save lives (the rider does not stop)

Okay, once more back to the four-day drive from Austin to Boston with my dad. While I was scouring the owner's manual to find out how many gallons the gas tank held, I came across these visuals depicting how seat belts work. What got me, though, are the images themselves. They're not photos. They're drawn, but not even drawn as good comics. I can't quite get why they look like they do. They look like a 5th grader drew them is what they look like. And the look of the images (oddly comical) is at odds with the message: if you don't wear your seat belt, you continue moving when the car stops.

Comical, yes, but it doesn't mean to be. And not only that, but there aren't any other images in this whole owner's manual that look anything like these images. I'm wondering if the people who put this booklet together stole these images from somewhere else.

No, you go first

Had a pleasant experience while driving today. On a busy street I let a car come in from a sidestreet. Just being a good boy scout. Then I turned into a gas station to fill up. As I'm standing there holding the handle on the gas pump, a guy walked by and said, "Thanks for letting me in." I stared at him blankly, having already forgotten about letting the guy in to traffic. It turns out we both turned into the same gas station and he remembered my car. Now that's something that doesn't happen often, getting thanked by someone you've let cut in front of you on the road. Sometimes you get the wave in the rearview mirror from the other driver, but that doesn't even happen very much. I usually say "you're welcome very much" in a sarcastic tone to the person who doesn't acknowledge that I've done them a kindness. On the other hand, you shouldn't expect a thank you for a kindness, I suppose. But of course we do want to be thanked. Just human nature.

Then I said, "Well, I don't understand why that doesn't happen more often. Are people in such a rush that they can't spare five seconds to let someone else in?"

"Yes, it's a strange thing."

But then I thought to myself: what if I had been in more of a rush, what if I had had an argument with someone before getting in the car, what if some other driver had just pissed me off? It would have all been different. I might not have let this guy in. And then I wouldn't have gotten the "thank you" from him. That piece of positive reinforcement. Now, I generally try to let cars in when I can, but you can bet I'm going to try harder now that I've actually been thanked by someone for doing it.

Just pick up the phone, will ya?

Reading a book on Asset-based thinking and there's an exercise where you're supposed to communicate with someone you admire and respect and let them know why you admire and respect him/her. With this qualifier: "(Communicate through voicemail, telephone, or in person—not by email! It lacks emotional intelligence." Hadn't thought about this but was wondering why I get so frustrated by these email 'conversations' that go back and forth and back and forth, particularly when you're trying to set up an appointment. If we just got on the phone we could iron this out in a couple of minutes. And tell a joke or two. Without having to endure an onslaught of smiley faces. I always include my phone number in my emails. Some things just need to be sorted out with a phone call. Though I feel as if people want to do everything over email. Because it's cheaper? I don't know, phone calls hardly cost anything anymore.

But of course you have to learn to talk on the phone as well. When I first met the woman who would become my wife, we lived in different cities. So we talked on the phone a lot. Early on she said to me, "You know, Erik, you give bad phone." That comment was a wake up call. So I worked on giving good phone.

Would you say to someone, "You give bad email?" Or is it that the email is so lacking in personality/intelligence that it's a lost cause?