WRITER'S REFLECTIONS ON HIS PERIPATETIC WALK!

Writer’s Reflections on His Peripatetic Walk

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2006

“Someone always seems to come through for you. Serendipity registers; nonetheless the batteries of faith, along with some assembly, are required.”

Ken Shelton, author, publisher
(Responding to one of my rants of exclusion)

Life is a strange accident. I have been tightening up my updated and revised book, CONFIDENT SELLING, published nearly forty years ago to make it more reader-friendly without changing its central thrust.

At the same time, I’ve written a completely complementary tract, CONFIDENT THINKING. This is the other side of the coin of confidence.

As there are two sides to a coin, confidence is the other side of the coin of fear. We know a lot about fear. We know little about confidence other than its charismatic version, which is essentially skin-deep.

We are a skin-deep society and it is one of the reasons we are always so surprised when troubles beneath the surface disturb our tranquility.

Someone has written me that my writing is like my peripatetic walks, spontaneous. I take that as a compliment. If true, it means that I do, indeed, walk in the footsteps of Aristotle without the troubling comparison in profundity. Our connection, alone, is in the spirit of the walk. This is when the mind and the heart and the spirit merge into a common embrace, sometimes coalescing into little dewdrops of insight.

It is kind of amazing how these insights ping your conscious mind out of the blue. You best let them form into collective droplets. Then the mind’s eye, as if it were a microscope, can discern what the visible mind cannot.

In any case, I like these books. I like them a lot. I think they should prove very useful to a person like myself when I was in my early thirties.

I was inordinately successful but yet dismally conflicting. Life made no sense to me because I was reading the script handed to me and not creating my own. I was living a lie, and justifying the lie because for all intent and purposes I was moving with the lie, which was the fabric of my imitative and competitive society and times. I was a hollow man and a Teflon character supported by the lie of success, while being the envy of my peers. I had everything and nothing at all.

It is my testimony to that critical 30-something period that my obsessive-compulsive preoccupation was a measured response to that mood. I will finish these books this week; turn them over to my agent and go on from there. Writing is not a means to an end for me. Writing is very much an end in itself.

How could someone so ordinary be so blessed? It is a good question that I have answered flippantly, “Because I work harder than everyone else.” This is true and it is not true because some work much harder than I did, and do, but not in my zone or not with the attention to the nuances that register with me, alone. I became perspicacious before I knew what the word meant, learning to look for answers in my own experience and not that of others. I found joy in being my own best friend.

SATISFACTION IN BEING GIVEN A “HEADS UP!”

A smile comes to my face when I think of the young book editor of “The Des Moines Register,” Sue Curry. Now, I’m going to contradict myself. I don’t like my writing to be ignored. Contradiction is critical to my character. Ask my wife.

When I was selected as one of the sixty contributors to Senator John Edwards’ book HOME, I sent her tons of information and photographs for a piece on IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, from which my contribution was taken.

She promptly advised me that my mention in her newspaper would be limited. I have no trouble with candor. It is the way to the heart of the matter. Cando epitomizes confidence and competence. She was not afraid to take on the ugly bear, me, who could not understand how an Iowan, me, again, and one of only 30 “common folks” selected from more than 2,000 nominated was not getting more attention.

Ms Curry demonstrated the politeness and temerity to tell me the lay of the land. She is new in her job and should do well because she shows a confidence and honesty that is far removed from the nation of Teflonia to which we are both citizens.

Subsequently, a featured piece was done on this book in the IOWALIFE section of the same newspaper (November 29, 2006) in which a nice quote is taken from my contribution to the book. I would not have known about this were this section not sent to me anonymously.

I suspect it came from Ms Curry. That represents service above and beyond what is expected in a job, something extra that need not be done and has little chance of recognition but which demonstrates both CONFIDENT SELLING and CONFIDENT THINKING.

The way she dealt with me was absolutely “right on.” She told me up front; gave me a “heads up.” I am a person who doesn’t like surprises. Her response couldn’t have been more temperamentally suited for my mindset.

When you have little clout, and an opportunity comes like the Edwards book, you have no idea of how the material will be treated, or if it will be representative of your work. I am a person who also likes control. Such a situation and circumstance increase the level of my anxiety. I must admit that the four-page spread with pictures of my boyhood home and the courthouse were beyond my most exhilarated expectations. Serendipity truly is coin to my fountain.

ABOUT THIS BUSINESS OF WRITING

I am a blue-collar person with a Ph.D. if that makes any sense at all. My da was a brakeman on the railroad. While I’ve departed from that first home economically and intellectually, I’ve never left it psychologically.

You could call it serendipity that I am a writer, but on closer examination, you might see that I am still a blue-collar worker like my da. Writing is a craft not unlike carpentry or plumbing or that of an electrician or an assembly worker, all of which go into the craft of writing if metaphorically.

Writers are readers and reading is a tactile process. Beyond the pleasure of having a book in your hands, reading and writing are physical work like farming in my native state of Iowa, or perhaps gardening, the growing of things from the tiny seed to the fully blooming plant. However, as novelist Truman Capote cautions, writing a novel is like creating a giant redwood and then reducing it to an acorn of a book.

My home is virtually a library with books and bookcases in practically every room, nook and cranny, literally so, to the tune of more than 4,000 books. I am lucky that my wife, Beautiful Betty, is also a reader.

It always amuses me that people say in this electronic age that readers of books are anachronistic, that music and e-stores are the future. Yet, in fact, more than 400,000 new books are printed every year, while giant bookstores are being built every day, and music superstores, only a few years old, are going out-of-business.

That said you don’t become a writer because it is easy. Writing is a struggle every day. I have been engaged in this struggle, hitting that wall, for more than 37 years. If you are a person interested in the word for its own sake, you don’t do it because you have to; you do it because you need to. The satisfaction, the reward, and the blessings are from the writing itself.

Writing is a wonderful connection to make between the floating mind and moving fingers with black symbols on a legal pad or notebook with a pencil or pen, a typewriter, or a computer. Somehow ideas in your mind translate on to paper with some consistency with what you think, feel, believe and value at that moment.

God played one little trick on us as writers. I have to claim indolence in response to this trick. The greatest clarity of my thoughts comes when I am about to go to sleep. I’m at that point when sleep is about to enfold that wonderful ideas visit me in content and context with conceptual clarity. Invariably, I say to myself, because they are so vivid, I shall remember them in the morning, but seldom do.

I believe the most honest profession of all is that of the writer, and the most honest writer of that profession is not the journalist, not the historian, not the philosopher, not the scientist, not the theologian, but the novelist. He writes about the way we really are often getting through his own personal biases and hang ups to tell stories that resonate with our actual experience past, present and future.

The novelist manipulates the symbols, suppresses or exaggerates his biases, transmutes or sublimates his passions to make contact first with himself, and incidentally with the reader. Often, the consequences of a story are so dramatic as to epitomize a condition leading to monumental change.

Such was the case with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. When president Lincoln met her, he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War.”

As with all books, they either come out of one’s own experience, something read in the newspaper as was often the case with Dostoyevsky, or inspired by another book or pamphlet. The latter was the case with Stowe.

Josiah Henson, a slave, born in Maryland in 1789, wrote a widely read autobiography pamphlet. But he was far from an “Uncle Tom.” He actually served as the manager of a plantation before he escaped to Canada and freedom. Once free, he started a profitable sawmill and founded a trade school for blacks, whites and Indians. He also helped more than 100 slaves escaped to Canada. An interesting aside, when he traveled to England, and met the Archbishop of Canterbury, the churchman was so impressed with his speech that he asked him what university he attended. Henson answered, “the University of Adversity.”

Continuing my point that novels have changed society, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was not so much literature as a polemic against slavery. It was a literary attempt to change public opinion rather than to entertain, which it did. Therefore, it was propaganda and not written for pleasure.

Now nothing is ever cut and dried or simply a matter of good intentions, nor was this the case with Stowe. She was haunted by a severe sense of personal loss over the death of her child, which she brilliantly conceived as a byproduct of slavery. Irrational? Yes. But the passion of irrationality often leads to a rational perspective. She built her story on the genuine skeletal structure of Josiah Henson, and the nation was aroused. Meanwhile, buried was a more compelling conflict between the federal government and states’ rights, which to this day has been blurred by this book and Lincoln’s mastery.

I have come to think, and this is the basis of the first and last freedom of CONFIDENT THINKING, to the conclusion that we write most perceptively and most clearly when we write to ourselves. If the reader can make connection, all the better. But to write to an audience is to prostitute a wonderful talent. That is my view, and that is what I am thinking as I walk today.

AN AFTERTHOUGHT ON WRITING

You don’t have to be a published writer to consider yourself a writer. People who have never published a word have shown me their poetry, for example, and I am always astonished by how good most of it is. I’m sure they think I’m putting them on when I tell them it is quite moving. Then the next question is, “Do you think it is publishable?” I smile inwardly but try to hide it not wanting to appear disrespectful. But I am the last person in the world to ask that question. When they think “publishable,” they automatically hear the cascading sound of dollars falling from heaven.

Writers get paid at about the same rate as the laborers they are, near or at the bottom of the food chain. The blue-collar analogy is not poetic license. It is the way it is. Most writers, given the hours they put into their craft, would love to be paid the minimum wage. Ask their mates if you want corroboration.

Writing is my therapy. It is my medicine. It is the cigarette that I have never smoked, the liquor I’ve never consumed, and the drugs I’ve never taken. It is my elixir. It puts me in balance or at least the semblance of balance. Messiness doesn’t suit me at all. Writing works because it restores a sense of order against the frightening disorder and chaos of nature, human and otherwise. I am not interested in being right, which is the gauge of science. I am interested in transcending right, which is the gauge of literature.

So, I write sometimes in anger, sometimes in sarcasm, often with cynical detachment, sometimes with brutal honesty, and sometimes so obtusely that only God and I understand, and I’m not so sure about God.

I’m sharing this with you only to let you know that my satisfaction is not whether or not I have clout, but to possess the freedom beyond it.

That freedom I have purchased by making choices that have given me the socioeconomic wherewithal to write what moves me and not be badgered to write to a prescription, an audience or a prevailing point of view.

I have managed by something approaching serendipity to escape the clutches of those with clout. I have not needed to compromise my authenticity or to dangle obsequiously in compliance beholding to the wishes of those with clout as sycophant.

The only way to explain this is in the words of author Ken Shelton, “Somebody, somewhere always seems to come through for you. Serendipity registers.”

It is what author Shelton leaves out where the message can be found. It is the case in all writing. Meaning is not in the words but between the words.

Left out is the fact that the providers of my serendipity did so in support of their own self-interest and not by any guiding magnanimity. That is why it is good and real. I am not driven by consumer demand or consumer attention, while that may very well be the case of my serendipitous benefactors.

Take Senator John Edwards and his book HOME. I am honored to be serendipitously included, while knowing that he may be fixing to run for the presidency in 2008. Where is one of the first primary caucuses? Iowa, of course. I rest my case, and I hope you will as well.

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