Let's (Not) Go Bowling!

The seemingly never-ending Bowl Season has begun. It all started with three bowls on a December Saturday, including Northern Illinois beating Fresno State on the blue artificial turf at Boise State. That was the Humanitarian Bowl.

Really?

I’m a human, but I couldn’t generate any interest in the Huskies against the Raisins or whatever in the Humanitarian Bowl. But then, I’m old enough to remember when bowl games had a certain luster about them, and that was because there were four or five of them. This year there are 35 bowl games. Thirty-five.

Only one bowl game actually counts for something, because its real name is the BCS Championship. That one doesn’t get played until mid-January, and it will pit Auburn and Oregon against each other. Number One against Number Two.

The Bowl Championship Series executives and the fans of this stupid system are breaking their arms patting themselves on the back. They think it’s fantastic that the system has worked--the two teams that “should” be in the title game actually are!

Meanwhile, the Football Championship Series, formerly known as Division 1-AA, has a tournament that will pit two 12-2 teams against each other. Both teams played their way into the title game, the way a championship should work. Nobody in 1-AA is crying for Appalachian State, a traditional power and the top seed, because they were soundly beaten in the quarterfinals of a tournament. In the BCS system, App State would probably be in the championship game because they “should” be.

But Division 1-AA, just like Division II and Division III, has a real tournament. It’s had one for years, and nobody has ever claimed a negative impact on academics or any of the other endless baloney that gets thrown around as reasons for Division 1-A, aka BCS, not having a tournament.

I think that should end. The once-proud bowl lineup has lost all its value. When teams with 6-6 records qualify for bowls, how special are they? Flush the bowls; install a tournament.

Here’s my Christmas gift to the NCAA, a proposal for a Division 1-A Tournament. Start with 16 teams--sure, you’re going to get arguments every year about the teams that don’t get in, but that happens in basketball too. And there are 65 teams in the basketball tournament. So pick the top 16 and be done with it.

A 16-team tournament gives you three playoff rounds and a championship game. That totals 15 games--eight in the first round, four in the quarterfinals, two semifinal games and the title game. The top 15 bowl games, which means the five BCS “series” bowls plus the next tier but not the Humanitarian Bowl, can be the automatic tournament game sites for the first three to five years. After that, cities can bid to be playoff sites just like they do in basketball.

If cities want to keep hosting bowl games that attract 6-6 teams, they can. Nobody will watch, which is how it should be.

Announce this plan at the beginning of the 2012 season, implement it for the 2015 season, and by 2020 you’ve got a football tournament. Presto.

The NCAA can send me a thank-you card any day now. I am not holding my breath.

Surviving, Not Inspiring

A friend from high school made the mistake recently of telling me in an email that I inspired her. Although I tried to be gentle because she couldn’t have known, I replied with firmness that I really don’t like to be called an inspiration.

It was two years ago that I was undergoing chemotherapy for testicular cancer. Most everyone who knows me says that I approached chemo with a great attitude and unbelievable strength.

They were right about my attitude. I was extremely optimistic and upbeat about chemo, and I had good reason. The urologist who diagnosed my cancer, the oncologist who treated me, and an oncological nurse who is also a good friend all confirmed that my particular form of cancer was curable. The chemo protocol that I was facing has a 90 percent success rate. I liked my chances.

I tried to keep a positive attitude during chemo, which was a three-month ordeal. I got infusions of two drugs every day for five days, then two weeks off, then another five-day week of infusions. I was getting a third drug administered every Tuesday for nine weeks.

As I was about to start chemo, some friends told me I should write about the experience as it was happening. Keep a blog, they said. I actually attempted to do just that. I still have the notes from the first couple of days of chemo. Absolutely nothing was happening, and I wondered what the big deal was.

Then the fourth day came along. On that day, two chemo drugs hit me like a runaway train. I was tired; no, I was exhausted. I hit a level of fatigue that I truly didn’t know existed. A day later, I felt worse. On the day after my first five-day infusion week, I hit the jackpot: I was exhausted, weak, nauseated and I had chills. I felt horrible and, with my wife working that day, I got to feel it all by myself.

In addition to those symptoms, which my oncologists and the nursing staff had warned me about, I was extremely emotional. I burst into tears for no reason at all, at the oddest times.

I was sure at that moment that I had made the right decision by not starting a blog. I wouldn’t have been able to accurately describe just how horrible I felt. Two years later, I still haven’t found the words that truly describe the complete absence of strength and vitality that chemo caused.

These days I feel strong and I haven’t shown any signs of tumors for a year and a half. I’m grateful for cancer research and for the dedication of the medical professionals who specialize in oncology. But I don’t feel like an inspiration.

I feel like a survivor. And that’s more than enough for me.

Waging the Annual War

About 20 years ago I worked for a small company in St. Louis that was operated by the two men who had founded the enterprise. They were the original odd couple: One was an Italian Catholic and the other was a Jew.

By apparent coincidence, the staff of just under a hundred people was roughly split evenly between Jews and gentiles.

It was an eye-opener for someone who had never spent a lot of time with Jewish people. I got to ask all sorts of questions about Jewish traditions, beliefs and holidays. In fact, this company was the first place I ever worked where we had an annual Holiday Party to make sure everyone felt included.

We had our party after New Years to make scheduling easier. Look at the calendar sometime and figure out when you can schedule a celebration for a hundred people without bumping into some December religious observance, Christian or Jewish.

What got me thinking about that experience is the fact that, once again, the usual suspects are bleating about the war that the liberals and their misguided ideas about political correctness are waging against Christmas. The outrage of these people has become more predictable than the sunrise, making it pretty easy to ignore.

The usual target is the retailers who have instructed employees to wish customers Happy Holidays instead of a Merry Christmas. Those weak retailers bending to the will of the liberals. Predictable.

So the thing that really captured my attention was hearing people I know, people who don’t have talk shows and ratings to worry about, talking about the war on Christmas. Specifically, they’re railing against those who wish everyone Happy Holidays. So I decided it’s time to sound off.

Look, there’s one thing retailers care about, and it is not political correctness. It’s sales. Retailers like selling things to customers. Several years ago, they caught onto the fact that Jewish people like to buy things toward the end of the year and give them as Hanukkah gifts. With a strong desire to avoid alienating any potential customer, retailers started telling employees to wish customers Happy Holidays. That’s a greeting that covers everybody.

Trust me on this: Liberals have no influence over the retail industry. Unless they can drive down sales. If you think liberals have the power to dampen sales during Christmas and Hanukkah, you just don’t pay attention.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas. Or a happy Hanukkah. And if you don’t like hearing “Happy Holidays” from employees at particular store, shop at another store.

The Cult of Mac

I still remember the very first time I saw a Macintosh computer. It was January 1986 and I had just been hired as a technical writer by McDonnell-Douglas. The man who hired me was building a team of outside-the-box thinkers and wanted us all to be working on an outside-the-box computer.

So I started writing on a Macintosh Plus. To say I was unimpressed is being kind. This was the beige box with a 9-inch diagonal black and white screen. At least it had an external hard drive to actually store some documents. I wanted a real computer--you know, an IBM PC.

Well, I got past that initial reaction and eventually fell in love with the cute little computer. I even bought one. I even found myself completely immersed  in the cult of Macintosh. We cultists tolerated no criticism of our computer; I once even launched an email attack on the Chicago Tribune’s technology columnist because he damned the Mac OS with faint praise. Poor guy’s inbox was overwhelmed.

By 1995 I owned a PowerBook 190 and was attempting to run a freelance writing business using mostly that machine. Problem is, that machine was spending a lot of time in Apple’s Dallas repair facility.

It was in Dallas more than it was in my home. The cult couldn’t help me at that point.

That’s because, at about the same time, I got a project that involved an animated tutorial. The best software I could find to deliver what the client wanted ran only on Windows. And the price for the project was enough to justify buying a shiny new PC.

I discovered that Windows 95, for all the jokes, was pretty sweet. It was usable and I could deliver files to clients who insisted on PC native files. So I broke up with the Mac. I said good-bye to the cult.

Fast forward to today. I was looking for a small, light laptop with long battery life. Netbooks looked promising, but they seemed slow and underpowered for what I wanted a computer to do. You can beef some of them up, but then you’re spending almost as much as you do for a full-blown laptop.

“Get a Mac” is what I kept hearing. Apple’s making quality again, and Macs just work.

So I bit the bullet. In August I bought the 13-inch MacBook Pro. It supposedly had this long battery life, great keyboard and all sorts of other stuff.

Some things have been great. Macs in the past were difficult to network, and that’s putting it mildly. But the MacBook Pro latched onto our wireless network and Internet connection with just a couple of clicks. All I had to do was name this computer and type in the network password.

But at times the pre-installed Safari browser wouldn’t launch. So I got hold of Firefox and use it instead. But the battery life is about hald what was promised. And the DVD/CD drive choked on a DVD. The computer wouldn’t recognize the drive. I had to reset the System Management Controller, and a person on the Mac support forums said that, yeah, that problem sometimes just happens.

I had forgotten what it was like to deal with the cult. Mac believers will tell you that Macs just work, even when they obviously don’t. That problem sometimes just happens. PC owners bitch and moan about every little glitch in the Windows OS, but Mac owners gloss over them. That sometimes just happens.

Something tells me I won’t be renewing my cult membership anytime soon.

The Simplicity of Writing

It was the legendary college basketball coach Bobby Knight who said it as a putdown for a sportswriter he thought was particularly stupid.

"All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things."

Permit me to take offense for just a moment. I've been making my living by writing things for the last 30 years or so, which means I've never gone on to the greater things Knight had in mind. Being a writer, however, has introduced me to some fascinating aspects of the business world.

But once I'm over my pity party, I have to admit that Knight was right, in a way. Writing, at its essence, is a pretty basic endeavor. Most, if not all, of us really master the essential act of writing pretty early in elementary school.

That's where we learn about words. That's where we learn what nouns are, and verbs. That's where we learn the value of adjectives and adverbs. That's where we learn the practicality of prepositions.

If we're really lucky, that's also where we learn that writing really is a simple act. All we're doing is stringing together the best combination of nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives, with maybe some prepositions for spice, in order to communicate an idea to someone else. That simplicity is the beauty of writing. That simplicity is also the difficulty, because the quest for the "best combination" of words can be excruciating.

Nobody can tell us, in any situation, what the "best combination" of words will be. We have to find them on our own. That search is where the work is; for me, that search is where the joy of writing truly lives.

On that rare occasion when I know--I know--that I've found the best combination of words to convey my idea, I can say with conviction that Bobby Knight was flat-out wrong. That's when I know that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, greater than writing something very well.

Get Me Rewrite!

It’s a cliché scene in movies set in the Thirties. A reporter dashes to a phone booth—you can tell he’s a reporter because a card with PRESS printed on it is stuck in his hatband—and calls his newspaper. As soon as he’s connected, he barks, “Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite!”

Rewrite, or the rewrite desk, was essentially a steno pool. The reporter would dictate his story into the phone and the rewrite desk would type it for use in the paper. Then he would close his notebook, hang up the phone, and dash off to the next story or the nearest bar.

Get me rewrite! No matter what I’m writing, at some point or another I hit a spot where I want to grab a phone and get connected to Rewrite. No, I’m not looking to dictate a news story; I’m needing help revising and/or rewriting. Unfortunately, the Rewrite desk is just not there. It’s like the time I mispronounced automatic transmission and it came out as automatic transition, and I realized immediately that having access to automatic transitions would make writing so much easier.

Having a Rewrite desk available by phone would be sweet indeed.

What I know about rewriting I learned the hard way. After a few years on a small weekly newspaper where I rewrote nothing, I got a job in the marketing department of a small company. One of my first assignments was writing something for the CEO; no, I don’t even remember what it was. What I remember is arriving at work the day after I turned it in to find the document on top of my desk.

Scrawled across the top were the words, “I thought we had hired a professional.”

Devastated, I went to my boss for an explanation. After admonishing me for not showing him my work before taking it to the CEO, he began patiently teaching me how to rewrite. He showed me how my document didn’t really say what I thought it said and advised me to concentrate on the message I’m trying to communicate.

He made me rewrite that document. Then he sat with me and marked up that version and made me rewrite it again. He worked with me to polish that document. I wish I could remember what that thing was about. What I do remember was the amount of effort we put into the rewriting. I also remember my boss telling me that I should never show anyone my actual first draft.

That first rewriting lesson was a hard lesson. Rewriting is a skill I’m still struggling to master. If I ever nail it, I’m writing a book on how to do it.

Until then, I’ll keep dreaming of the day I can pick up the phone and bark, “Hello sweetheart, get me rewrite!”

Juan Williams

Everyone in the world seems to be sounding off on National Public Radio's decision to dump news analyst Juan Williams. So I will too.

And I'll admit my bias right up front: I don't like Juan Williams, and I haven't liked him for some time. Unlike most other NPR staffers, his reports have always been slanted. Even his supposedly straight news reports have always been crafted to support and highlight right-wing positions.

For years, Williams has also had a part-time gig sharing his opinion on FoxNews. As I understand NPR policy--and I don't mean to be an expert here--Williams was a rarity. As far as I know, only Williams and Mara Liasson were allowed to appear regularly on any commercial TV show. Both of them were regulars on FoxNews.

So here's the situation: Juan Williams was getting special treatment from his main job and allowed to appear on commercial TV on a regular basis. Even there, his full-time employer asked him to refrain from saying the kinds of things that he would not be allowed to say on his main job.

Williams disregarded what his full-time employer asked, and he lost his job. For everyone who's up in arms about this, I suggest you look into your employer's policies. You might find out that your employer, like mine and Williams' former employer, has a written policy forbidding you from expressing certain opinions in your role as an employee. In other words, you can't go on TV as an Acme employee and state an opinion that Acme doesn't like.

If you did that once, you'd be disciplined. If you kept doing it, you would reach a point where Acme would fire you. You had, after all, violated policy.

That's what Juan Williams did. NPR did not censor him, they have not violated his right to speak his mind. They merely terminated their business relationship with him. Williams still has the right to speak freely; he no longer has the right to speak on NPR and receive a regular paycheck.

Because of all that, I'm just fine with the NPR decision.

Questions for Tea Baggers

For the last several months I've been chuckling at the Tea Party crowd. I can't help it--they're so angry and so sincere but usually so ill-informed that they seem positively silly.

Most of the Tea Baggers are absolutely livid over the national debt, but they were never angry before January 2009. Why did they become so angry then? A lot of them say that FoxNews "opened their eyes." And I believe that, because FoxNews acted like the national debt didn't exist between January 2001 and January 2009.

Along with their alarm over the size of the national debt, Tea Baggers are apoplectic about the rate of spending. Again, spending didn't seem to concern them before the current president was sworn in. So they're very concerned about the spending in "Obamacare," even though they didn't raise a fuss in 2003 when a Republican Congress passed Medicare Part D.

Sigh.

Finally, driven in part by their concern that "Obamacare" flies in the face of the United States Constitution, Tea Baggers want us to return to the "constitutional basics." Got it?

All those concerns have the Tea Bag crowd angry. They're really angry. And they want their country back. Okay, but I have some questions for them. I'd like to know specifically what they plan to do with their country once they get it back. After all, I live here too.

So, for any Tea Baggers who care to answer, what exactly do you mean by returning to the basics of the Constitution? Do you want to go back to the 13 original states? Can you name the 13 original states? Hint: Florida wasn't one of them.

Would you favor the repeal of the 17th amendment to the Constitution? That's the one that gave us direct election of U.S. Senators--before that amendment, state legislators picked the Senate's members.

What about the 19th amendment? That's the one that gave women the right to vote. A return to constitutional basics would mean that white land owners are the only Americans who could vote.

You want to cut back on "runaway spending," so what spending would you cut? Social Security? Medicare? Highway and other transportation spending (including federal subsidies for airports?)? Weapons programs that the Pentagon doesn't want, even if they provide jobs in Republican districts?

Would you get rid of federal departments and agencies in your quest to cut spending? Which ones? The Department of Education is a favorite target--what about the Department of Labor? Agriculture? Energy? How about the Environmental Protection Agency?

I'm asking these questions because the Tea Bagger crowd has gotten a pass from the media on all of them. Nobody has pressed for specifics on what the Tea Baggers would actually do if they got control of government. All we've heard is "anger" and "constitution."

Well, I'm angry. And I demand answers. Anyone care to step up?

Just a Pound Puppy

Rachel Ray once referred to herself as a “pound puppy.”

Sh was describing her lack of a pedigree in the form of culinary school training. The situation that brought it up was chopping onions in front of a live audience. Seems Rachel chops onions the way your mom does, not the way a trained chef does.

The other day I got to thinking of myself as a pound puppy. Not that I lack a pedigree; I have a Master’s degree, after all. No, it’s because of my fondness for all types of writing.

A coworker and I were discussing an assignment I’d just received. It’s a technical writing assignment, and my coworker mentioned his disdain for that sort of work.

“I can do technical writing,” he said “I’ve done it, I’ve studied it, but I really don’t want to do it at this point in my life.”

We both spend most of our time at work writing various marketing materials, from brochures to websites to whatever else is needed. I really enjoy those writing projects. I also enjoy writing a good user manual or a solid proposal in response to an RFP.

I love writing. It continues to knock me out that I make my living by writing stuff.

So I don’t mind that my body of work lacks any sort of pedigree. I suppose that makes me a pound puppy. And that’s okay with me, as long as I get to keep writing.

The Writer's Tools

So many people have told me over the years that life is essentially easy for writers. After all, they’ve said, a writer can work with the simplest of tools: paper and pen.

I’ve always smiled, because I know that they were identifying the wrong objects as the writer’s tools. I also smiled because these people are completely unaware of the true complexity that that can be involved in the choice of those tools.

Just to cite one example, some writers can really obsess over the choice of a pen. I once worked with a woman who had a fondness for a particular pen. This woman was so picky that she was actually having trouble working with the company-issued (in other words, cheap) pens we had in the office where we worked.

Although I don’t remember why, the office manager gave us permission to go pen shopping one day. This was before Staples and Office Max, so we went downtown to the local stationery supply store.

As my co-worker fondled and tried out a variety of pens, I was awestruck by the sheer number of styles and models available. I was always the kind of guy who can pretty much write with any kind of pen. All during my student days, from junior high to graduate school, I used Bic pens because they were cheap. But I could use anything with a point and an ink supply.

I truly don’t remember what kind of pen my buddy bought that day. I only remember that she was happy and able to work. She had the right pen. I still didn’t understand the big deal.

In the years since my discovery of pen options, I have encountered people who have a deep fondness for a specific keyboard. For some, it goes back to the keyboard on which they learned to type; for others, they discovered a particular keyboard by accident and LOVE it and can no longer do without it.

And I don’t understand these people either. I learned to type on Royal manual typewriters--the big cast iron jobs. I also used a Royal manual portable just because it was affordable. But I’ve also used IBM Selectrics and a whole range of computer keyboards.

So I’ve never really been too choosy about my keyboard. Even now that I’ve discovered the wonderful keyboard on the MacBook Pro, I can still easily use other keyboards. The MacBook Pro keyboard has a great touch and just feels right to me as a touch typist.

But I can write even when I’m away from that keyboard. I can still write productively with a cheap ballpoint pen and a pad of paper.

Because those really aren’t the writer’s tools. At least, they’re not the really important tools. The vital tools for the writer are the imagination, the vocabulary, and the need to express thoughts in words. Without those tools, the right pen and the right keyboard are really useless.

9/11

You know what this blog post is about. All any American needs to hear is "9/11" and images of the World Trade Center on fire flashes through the mind. A mix of emotions including anger, frustration, and fear takes over.

It's an iconic date like few in American history. 9/11. It's the day that international terrorism attacked us on our own soil. It's the day that international terrorism violated all of us.

The key is that it was international terrorism. After all, 4/19 doesn't come close to evoking the evoking a sense of violation for most Americans that 9/11 does.

Don't remember 4/19? That's the date that a pair of clean-cut white American males parked a van loaded with fertilizer and fuel oil in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and then detonated it. The resulting explosion killed nearly 650 people, including children who were in the building's daycare center.

I've never completely understood why so many people have apparently forgotten 4/19/95. The idea that American citizens were so angry at the government that they planned and executed such an attack absolutely chills me to my core. Ever since that day, I've wondered how many more clean cut Americans are out there thinking about striking a blow against the government by blowing something up.

Many words will be written and spoken today about 9/11 and the necessity that we never forget that day. I certainly won't. But one of the disturbing lessons that some people have apparently learned is that Muslims are evil--after all, it was a bunch of Muslims who struck us on 9/11. None of those people think Catholics are evil, in spite of the fact that one of the 4/19 bombers was Catholic. Both of those attackers were Army veterans, and nobody thinks veterans are evil.

I sincerely hope that Americans who work to never forget 9/11 also remember that it was members of al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11. That's the group that means to harm the United States; al Qaeda, not Muslims.

What the ?

Okay, so that was a bit of an unintended, unscheduled break.

It was a long hot summer in central Illinois and too many things happened that gave me a general feeling of ennui (for those who just love them foreign languages). Plus, after that last post, I would read the headline and fail to come up with an answer.

Time to get moving--and writing--again.

Why Blog?

So Jen Singer has this post on her blog exploring all the reasons--including unimaginable fame and untold fortune--that might possibly be the motivation for some people to blog. The whole time I was reading the post, I thought about this blog.

I also thought about the question Jen asks. Why, after all, do I blog?

It's not because I'm expecting some book publisher or movie producer to discover my incredible untapped talent and offer me an eight-figure contract. It's not because I'm expecting some CEO to be cruising the net and stumble upon my blog, realize the potential I have for saving his company through stupendously effective corporate communications, and offer me an eight-figure contract. I'm pretty certain neither fantasy will come true. I figure my odds of winning the lottery are better.

So why do I do it? The reason is simple: I love to write.

Writing is both my vocation--that is, my job--and my avocation, my hobby. I enjoy writing. Okay, I love writing. It's really the only thing I've wanted to do as a profession. I don't tingle with excitement when I sit down at my desk these days, but I still get a kick out of knowing that I make my living by writing.

So if I make my living by writing, why blog?

Blogging, at least the way I blog, is just like keeping a journal. As thousands of teachers have attempted to explain to students in hundreds of writing classes, a journal is not a diary. While a diary is an often emotional recording of the daily events of a life, a journal is a daily exercise in writing. Some journal entries might be essays while others might be character sketches or bits of dialog or descriptions of a place. Most journal entries are exercise.

Exercise is good. As any honest writer in the corporate world will tell you, we don't necessarily write every day. There are days that you spend in meetings, or on phone calls, or doing everything imaginable except writing.
It's like my post "Beating the Blank Page," in which I recount the story of John Steinbeck warming up before writing. Steinbeck probably understood the need to exercise his writing on a daily basis, just to keep that muscle in shape. That's what I'm doing here. I'm just doing it in a way that allows anyone to read the result.

Like publishers, producers, and CEOs with eight-figure contracts.

The Perfect Opening Line

Legendary guitarist Keith Richards has told the story of how he came up with the famous guitar riff that opens the classic Rolling Stones song "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction."

Richard claims the opening--those five notes--came to him in his sleep. He woke up, grabbed his guitar, hit the record button on a tape recorder, and played the notes. Then he went right back to sleep. The next morning he rewound the tape to hear that riff followed by a full tape of Keith Richards snoring.

Sometimes that happens for a writer, too. Not the snoring; sometimes the perfect opening line for a short story, a novel, or even an internal memo comes to you as if in a dream. You just think of what you need (or want) to write, and the opening sentence is right there for you.

But for now, let's talk about reality.

In the real world, most of us struggle with the opening sentence. In fact, a lot of people I've known get so frustrated with trying to come up with a perfect opening line that they're too paralyzed to write whatever it is that they need to write. The blank page is sitting there mocking them because they refuse to soil it with just any opening sentence. They just know they have to right the perfect opening.

Well, that's a load of crap. You should never let the quest for the perfect opening prevent you from writing anything at all.

If you find yourself falling into that trap, if you feel that you can't put any words down at all because they're not going to be perfect, try this: Start with the middle. Just start with the absolute center of the document and write whatever needs to be described in that part of the document. If you get on a roll, write all the way to the end.

Then go back to the beginning. Then think about what you've written and put down some words that prepare the reader. And tell yourself that it doesn't have to be perfect. Take some satisfaction from an opening line that simply invites the reader into your document effectively.

And just be ready for the day that the perfect opening line comes to you in a dream.

It's the Audience, Stupid

The most important thing to think about when you're writing is the audience.

Whether you're writing a corporate announcement, a marketing brochure, an email, a tweet, or a user manual, your audience is everything. And it's the only thing.

If you don't know who you're writing to, you can't write. At the very least, you can't write effectively. You have to know who the audience is to know what works with them.

I've driven quite a few managers up various walls by insisting on identifying the audience before we ever began talking about the message we needed to communicate. I know why they were blowing a fuse, too; it's because they hadn't stopped to think who the audience would be. They only thought about sending out a message.

In any kind of business writing, the audience is the absolute key. Is the audience made up of line employees ("worker bees" as we've called them at too many places where I've worked)? Is the audience made up of mid-level managers? Is your audience executive row? You really need to know which group you're writing for, because each group has its own hot buttons and its own sore spots. Hit the wrong one and your message misses by a mile. But when you hit the right buttons, your message nails a bulls-eye.

You say your message is going outside the company? Okay, who is the audience? Is it the customer base? Is it a group of prospects? Is it your suppliers? Each of those audiences has different relationships with you and expects different kinds of information. In addition, each audience has different motivations. You really need to keep all of that in your head when you're crafting your message.

You're a journalist or a fiction writer? You need to keep the audience in mind, too. But I'll have more on that in a future post.

A Love of Writing

I truly love writing. I love wrangling with the English language in my attempts to convey a message with creativity or mere cleverness. I love it when it's going well and when it's going badly.

I even love it when I realize someone else has captured my attitude toward the craft more eloquently than I could. Check out this blog post, which my friend Jeff Kraft identified for me.

Enjoy the post. I hope to have something of my own very soon.

Joy of a Morning Run

There really is nothing comparable to the joy I feel during a run in the early morning.

At an early hour, there is very little traffic on the streets of my village, so I don't have to be so concerned about safety. At an early hour, I can run for miles outside and still enjoy the solitude of exercising my body by myself. In the quiet of the early morning I can listen to the sound of my shoes on the pavement, the sound of my breathing, and sometimes even the beat of my heart.

During the winter months an early morning run means I run in darkness. Although it seems like a contradiction, the darkness heightens my awareness of everything around me. Sounds are sharper, the air is crisper, and the pavement somehow seems more unforgiving than usual. I feel full of energy and I'm ready for anything to happen--and it sometimes feels as though something will happen.

But these days the sun breaks the horizon well before 6 am, and I am often watching it rise as I run. The combination of the sun's first light and the energy that comes from running fills me with exhilaration. It's incredibly uplifting, and I'm grateful for the experience.

There is joy to be felt during an early morning run. One of these days I'm going to describe it well.

40 Years After Kent State

Tuesday, May 4, is the 40th anniversary of the Kent State massacre. On that day the Ohio Army National Guard opened fire on Kent State University students protesting the war in Vietnam. When the shooting stopped, four students were dead and nine wounded.

College students had been protesting the war on campuses for years, but Kent State stopped all that. On that day the message was clear: Protest, no matter how well-behaved the protesters might be, would no longer be tolerated.

I think about Kent State as I see media reports of today's protesters. Many of them gripe and moan that their rights and liberties are being infringed. I wonder what they would think if National Guard troops showed up and opened fire. I wonder if they even know what happened just 40 years ago in Kent, Ohio. 

Beating the Blank Page

An old Tom Petty song claims that the waiting is the hardest part. Anyone who has to write anything knows the starting is truly the hardest part.

For whatever reason, facing a blank sheet of paper or the white on-screen expanse that represents a new document, which Microsoft Word cheerily calls “Document1,” is very similar to facing the north face of Everest. It’s that level of challenge for most people.

Over the years I’ve read all sorts of tips and exercises that are supposed to help the writer who’s stuck, but there’s really only one way to achieve any level of mastery over the blank page: Practice.

I teach a business writing course in which I tell my students that writing is not a spectator sport. It’s a participant sport. That line always gets me some very blank looks. But the truth is there. The only way you can do well at writing is to practice, is to actually write.

How do you practice? Simply by writing something every day. Whether you write a letter, a description of your office, a description of your commute to work, a funny anecdote you thought about in the shower, a funny accident you had in the shower, the key is to write something every day. Once you’ve written it, you can choose to keep it or throw it away.

I know you’re going to feel self-conscious about writing these little things, especially if you’re only going to throw them away, but here’s a little secret: Professional writers throw away more stuff in an average year than you may write in your lifetime. A colleague of mine often observed that the real difference between the professional and the amateur is the size of the wastebasket.

Part of the reason we throw so much away is that many of us write multiple drafts before we produce the version that’s acceptable to us. I once knew a writer who actually had a T-shirt imprinted with her personal motto: Nobody Sees My First Drafts. Part of the reason is that we understand the value of writing just to write, simply to keep in practice.

Karl Malden, the late actor who worked in film and television for decades, once told a story about working on a project with John Steinbeck, author of such books as Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden. They were assigned to a small office and, Malden recalled, Steinbeck would breeze into the office every morning and write little stories, small essays, wonderful little pieces that had nothing to do with the project they had been assigned.

Finally, one day Malden’s frustration got the best of him, and he asked Steinbeck why he was spending his time on the little pieces he was writing. “Karl, I’ve got to warm up,” was steinbeck’s reply.

I’ve always loved that line, “I’ve got to warm up,” because it crystallizes the reality of the writing process. You simply can’t produce anything when you’re cold, so you have to warm up. Yesterday’s work as nothing to do with the quality of what you produce today if you don’t warm up. Whether you do it like Steinbeck did, by writing small pieces with no relevance at all, or you do it by writing an extra draft or two of your project, the warm up—and the daily practice—is essential.

That Stupid Slide

I think I'm a fairly intelligent individual, but there are many things in the world that I simply don't understand.

Nuclear fusion is one example. I don't understand why, 65 years after we got a firm handle on nuclear fission, fusion technology is still so far out of our grasp.

On a slightly different level, I don't understand why major league baseball players slide into first base. Every week or so throughout the season, I'll a replay of some guy charging down the first-base line and then launching himself headfirst toward the bag. It never works, but they do it. It's really stupid, but they do it.

I don't understand why they do it. Don't they know that the rules allow them to run past first base? If they're not tagged and the throw doesn't beat them, they can step on first base and keep running past the base. Once you're safe at first, nobody can run you down with the ball and tag you out.

But here's the real point: Don't they know that they slow down when they slide? They do. Anybody does. When a human is running 90 feet, that human continues to accelerate while on foot.

If you don't believe me, watch a track meet some time (as I write this, the Penn Relays are coming up). Pay attention to the sprints, especially the 100 meters. What you will never see is a sprinter sliding headfirst across the finish line. Why? Because they know that they're going faster while they're running than they would go if they were sliding. And if sliding was faster, there would be sliding pits at the finish line of every track in the world.

That part is much easier to understand than, say, nuclear fusion technology. Somebody has got to have a handle on that one.

Welcome

Welcome to House Calls, my new blog.

This is my venue for writing about my firmly held beliefs on the topic of good writing. I've been writing professionally--that is, getting paid for the things I write--for nearly 30 years. I've picked up some thoughts along the way on how writing should be done, if the goal is to do it well.

But this is also my venue for writing about politics, sports, food, and anything else I care about. I'm a husband, father, cancer survivor, pet owner, and lover of modern communications. So you just don't know what you'll find here.

Thanks for reading, and please come back.