WE ARE ALL LEADERS -- WHY?

WE ARE ALL LEARDERS – WHY?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 23, 2009

REFERENCE:

I asked an author friend if she got many request to read other people’s manuscripts. This is her reply. She also mentions her nine-year-old grandson who has written two books, both published. The author heads a publishing company. Her grandson dictates his stories to her and she puts them down on the computer. Mozart was writing music with his father taking down the notes when he was that age. Interesting! Leadership has no age restrictions. It is nascent to us all but few make its acquaintance. As Beckett might say, we're "Waiting for Godot."
* * *

A WRITER WRITES:

Jim,

I do receive requests. Of course, they are works of a different nature than your genre.

I even had a friend ask me to write her book for her. I told her I couldn't, as the story was her passion not mine and I must find my own plot and characters. I told her I'd be happy to look at it as she wrote it, which I have done.

She has a thin story and I fattened it immensely. She said recently, "I write it and you make it beautiful." She is elderly and has sent me an outline and asked that if she becomes too ill to write if I will finish it for her. I have agreed but told her she absolutely has to take care of herself and finish this book! I feel it is good for her health to have this project. Other authors and I exchange favors.

If you hear anything from Pat on Ryan's book, please pass it on to me so I can post it. Today was his first day of school and when he got there, his teacher had the recent newspaper article taped to the door.

I will be reading at two upcoming appearances for one of the authors we have published. She was born with Freiderich Ataxia and can no longer hold her head or book still enough to read. It is the wonderfully heartwarming story of her amazing life.

Best,

D

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

D,

You are so diplomatic and enabling. I'm afraid I am not. I say "no" without too much trouble. The lady flatters you but age notwithstanding she needs to do the work.

Writing, as you know, is hard work and most people don't like to commit to hard work especially when the outcome is not certain.

Publishers can be indifferent and critics brutal.

I wrote a book for a consultant nearly 30 years ago. He asked me how much. I said "$10,000." He didn't flinch. He gave me a large box of his scattered notes, ideas, interventions, and I do meant scattered. I whipped the potpourri of material into a manuscript in six weeks, asking for $2,500 when I started, $2,500 when I showed him a chapter and the outline of the book, $2,500 when I gave him the manuscript, and $2,500 when it was published.

With $7,500 in my hands, I waited for the final $2,500. It never came claiming extensive editing and revision (by HIM!) had to be done. I got this notice of his intensions in a letter from his attorney.

When the book came out, it was my book, but hell, I said to myself, it was an easy six weeks of work, and I probably would have done it for nothing (at the time) if I liked the guy, which I didn't. He died never paying me the final $2,500.

It is an old story with me not being one to win friends and influence people. I did a consulting job here in Hillsborough County for a county agency, and they failed to pay me my final $3,750 because I put the blame for the agency's failure clearly on the agency's director. The title of my intervention was, "Why the Agency Can't Get Its Work Done!"

A reporter wanted me to confirm my outrage (at not being paid my final sum) in a derogatory piece he planned to write on the director -- the director had recently been given a $25,000 raise -- but I wouldn't. One of my friends, who still worked for the agency, would have had the toxic waste dumped on him, and so I let it go.

I am not impressed with money. I've always had more than enough to do precisely what I wanted to do yet I am not rich in a monetary sense.

What I'm saying is that the profit motive is not why I write. Nor do I measure my worth in how many books I sell. I do like to get published but I am satisfied if one reader finds my work worthwhile.

One thing is certain. I won't behave. I didn't when I was half the age I am now and I'm not likely to in the evening of my life. I don't see this as immaturity. It is my Joycean cause for integrity in a time when integrity has been reduced to rhetoric.

As I insist we are all leaders or none of us are, I think we are all writers but most of us don't have the patience or inclination to devote the time or energy to perfect the craft. It is a craft like carpentry, taking things apart and putting them together, rearranging and reordering. I have always liked the quote of Goethe, "Architecture is frozen music." Writing is architecture.

Regarding Ryan's book (the nine-year-old author), I did talk to my sister, and she said, "That boy can really write. What an imagination. I think this book was better than his first." I'll copy her on this but she doesn't check her email too frequently.

Keep up the good work and try to keep your sanity in these strange times.

I just read the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s last book -- "Armageddon In Retrospect" (2008) -- and what a painful wit he had.

Vonnegut saw the brutality of life so clearly but with affection for all people. He is another Midwesterner! He came from Indianapolis. He was at Iowa at the time in Iowa’s world famous "Writer's Workshop." when I was there.

I would sneak into some of his seminars watch him smoke, waves his arms and fell the place with scathing wisdom. That was more than fifty years ago. I still remember some of the things he said.

For instance, he told students to go out and interview workers in their jobs and report back their findings.

One student visited the local power plant generating electricity for Iowa City and the University of Iowa. The student said the superintendent of the utility was quiet, composed, lean, trim, reticent to express himself, succinct when he did, with a steadiness that the student found disconcerting and comforting at once.

Vonnegut said something like, "That fits! He had the hum of the turbines and the compact energy of their power with no need to impress." He asked the student, "Did you ask the man how long he was in the job?" He had. It was his only job since college some twenty years before. Vonnegut answered, "That fits, too. He is the job, and the job is him."

By chance, I would one day be a consultant to major utilities across Indiana and Kentucky, and I found these men like this superintendent. Then when I retired the first time, I read Krishnamurti, and realized how esoteric Vonnegut had been.

You're right. My genre is a bit different from yours, but I must tell you that I was always taking electives far removed from chemistry courses such as the American Novel, Understanding Fiction, American Poetry, and Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was a graduate course and I was an undergraduate far out of my depth. Although Shakespeare wrote in the vernacular of his times, I was lost during those initial excursions into his world. Then, one day I found my mind connecting with the rhythm and language of his poetry. Thereafter, it was smooth sailing. I've quoted Shakespeare ever since.

To give you an idea how parochial I was as a new college student, I dropped a required course in Western Civilization because the first lecturer in that initial session damned the Catholic Church.

It wasn't until my senior year that I got this requirement out of the way. During the intervening years, I took other electives in history, including History of the Roman Catholic Church. Teaching the course was a relative, a Father Kelly, who didn't make the connection that I was related to him. It was my first introduction to how human Catholicism is, and again by chance, I would be far more damning in my own writing than that earlier professor some thirty years later.

I am happy for your success as a writer. It must give you much pleasure although, as we both know, it doesn't come easy.

Incidentally, my move from hard science to soft science to the arts has not been as strange a move as it might at first seem. I've been attempting to learn to write since I retired the first time in 1969 writing "Confident Selling" (Prentice-Hall 1970) and then going into social-industrial psychology.

I'm still working on my South Africa novel and don't think I will finish until late next year. The setting of the novel is 1968, a transitional period for me. I can churn out my nonfiction books without much trouble but novels, well, that is another matter.

I admire you for your productivity.

Be always well,

Jim