The Write Stuff

The Write Stuff

I’m at the National Speakers Convention in The Big Apple, which is unusually good this year. Marshall Goldsmith and Steve Forbes were two of the keynoters, and they were superb. This morning, Bill Strickland told his story of transforming the lives in inner city youth through art and education, and it’s absolutely life-affirming stuff, pathos short of bathos. You just feel humbled by this guy.

So there’s the good news, and kudos to the convention organizers and staff for high-value learning. I was proud to be a member.

Lest I began to feel the world was becoming too perfect, however, I was moved to attend a concurrent session on how to get a book published. I’ve been published 27 times, with five more coming, so I have some experience in the realm. But I thought I’d pick up some ideas that I hadn’t thought of to help those I coach and mentor in this pursuit. I find it’s easiest to learn something when you’re already pretty good at it.

About 70 of us turned out, a panel of six or seven authorities were crowded together on the stage, and the moderator opened things up. That’s when it took a turn for the worse.

He began by pointing out that he had just come from Venice, having left his family, in order to be with us to moderate this panel. He then milked the applause he had pandered. Now, it seems to me, on the life balance scale of things, that anyone could have moderated that panel, including any of the six guys on his left, but not everyone could have enjoyed some more time in Venice with his own family. So, right away, I’m wondering about his choices. It wasn’t like he was a keynote speaker, or even urgently needed for this gig. And, in any case, why was it important that we know that?

However, the coup de grâce was yet to come. He then told us that he was, and I quote, “a crappy writer, maybe the crappiest writer in the world.” Yet he had published ten books which had sold hundreds of thousands of copies. So if he could do it, guess what, so could we (and presumably, so could my Beagle, who has many virtues but could also be considered a pretty crappy writer.)

I don’t know what his segue was, because I left, having at least had the veteran knowledge and behavioral predispositions which had led me to sit near the exit.

My friends, I believe in the written word and I think Guttenberg was a hero. There are typos in my work at times, an occasional factual error, and opinions, I hope often, which provoke and infuriate people. But my books, columns, articles, and newsletters are written as well as I can manage, and on the verbal calibration scale, that’s not bad. I’ve never been a crappy writer trying to simply create and move a product to make money.

Anyone who writes should be seeking to convey value and to constantly improve his or her craft, which is, at the very least, an ethical obligation. One should not claim to be Shakespeare or Dickens, but neither claim that the words and intent don’t matter and aren’t of matter to the writer and the reader.

And one should never deign to speak publicly with no respect for one’s craft or the audience.

© Alan Weiss 2008. All rights reserved.