EVERYONE'S AN AUTHOR -- PART TWO

 EVERYONE’S AN AUTHOR

(PART TWO of edited transcript of Temple Terrace Public Library talk by Dr. Fisher)

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 20, 2014

PART TWO

Phase One

Despite the fact that we are all talkers, that we all have stories to tell, despite the delight we derive in sharing these stories, we still construct barriers that block us from ever starting.

But there is no barrier greater than “I can’t do it.  I can’t write.  I’m not smart enough to write.”  These barriers are clinchers.  They stop us dead in the water.

I’ve never been the smartest kid on the block, but that has never been a barrier to me.  I've never stopped to say, “I’m not qualified to write.”  It never occurred to me to be relevant.

One person who has known me all my life said, “I never thought you'd turn out this way.”  

"How's that, Gussie?"

"You know, as a writer, that kind of deep stuff."

What he didn’t say but implied was, “Where'd you get the arrogance, Fisher, to think you could 

write?”

It wasn't arrogance.  It was need, a need to express myself in words, symbols, language to make connection with my thoughts and feelings, beliefs and biases, loves and hates, dreams and fantasies, to make peace with my demons and dreads.  Writing gave me a modicum of control.

The other thing is it made me feel comfortable in my own skin, comfortable with what I am and am not, can and can’t do, where I need help (weakness) and what I do well (strength).  Writing introduced me to myself.  I’ve never let others define me.

Moreover, I’ve always been attracted to people smarter than I am, people from whom I could learn. This has included dead authors. My granddaughter, Rachel, is like her grandfather in that sense, and she is an outstanding student.  I've been an outstanding student at every level of my education, receiving my share of academic honors despite an occasional misstep.  I'm not saying you have to be a good student to be a writer.  F. Scott Fitzgerald was a terrible student but a great writer, so was William Faulkner, and he won the Nobel Prize.  With my insecurity, I needed the affirmation of academia.   

I went from a Catholic grammar school to a public high school, and although an “A” student in the Catholic school, I was put in classes where the “C” student was the norm.  I suppose – in this Protestant community – a Catholic “A” was the equivalent of a Protestant “C.” 

Language was important in the Catholic school, especially grammar.  My teacher in my freshman year of high school was struggling in diagramming a complex sentence before the class and got lost in the process.  I went to the board, erased her work, and diagrammed the sentence properly, returned to my desk with a smile, and was promptly sent to the principal’s office with a pink slip. It kept me out of National Honor Society, although I graduated in the top 10 percent of my class, as I did at the University of Iowa, and in graduate school.  I have received every academic honor offered at every grade level throughout my academic career because I paid attention albeit with periodic aberrant behavior that put my status in some jeopardy. 

This is told to readers as I come from the lowest end of the food chain, and have known from the get go that to climb up the ladder there would be no help, no safety net, no golden parachute, no off ramps to cool my jets, no one or nothing to break my fall.  I was on my own nickel, and I was going to do it my way or it was for sure the highway.

   

To put it another way, if I can write books, anyone can write books.  The only real qualification to write is to demonstrate the courage to start.  You can't worry about what others' think or whether you're qualified or not.  No one owns that crystal ball.

Five things have worked for me as a writer: (1) I am not afraid not to be smart; (2) I'm not worried about letting the group down; (3) I'm not afraid of failure; (4) I accept the pain and the risk to coming up empty, which I often have; (5) when I succeed, and I have on occasion, I have no delusions of being other than the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad. 

Readers of my books -- several people tonight have noted how wide and diverse my career -- try to define me, thinking I am an extrovert.  I am an introvert.  People are my laboratory, and all my works emanate from that laboratory.  I prefer only the company of my wife, Betty, and my books.

People wear me out.  This (tonight) wears me out because I leave my energy behind when I leave.

Writing to me is serious business.  It requires thinking, and thinking is like meditation, not something you do with others.  We are a society enamored of “group think,” which I appall.

The satisfaction from writing comes in the doing not in the concluding.  We make too much of the product, not enough of the process.  Stephen King has all the money he will ever need, but he is a compulsive writer, and admits it, once comparing it to trying to give up cigarettes.

So many books are written today because authors sense a connection with Aristotle’s “rational man” in this most irrational of times.  It has been my experience if you read for pleasure you will write for pleasure, too.

Phase Two

The newspaper lady in the back who is writing a book about the role God has played in her life can appreciate what my mentor told me about my audience, which is top management and professionals:

One is “More is less."

Two is “You know that it (your audience) knows, and you know that it knows that you know, and you know that it knows that you know that it knows that you know.”

So, this limits gamesmanship.  Neither the writer nor the reader can play dumb.  This cuts to the quick.  My mentor is wise and knows that I will struggle with this until it is my own.

Phase Three

Everyone has a story crying within to be told, and I suspect, that is the reason you are here.

How do you get started?  How do you put yourself in the mood to begin? 

Abraham Lincoln wrote and rewrote his “Gettysburg Address” while traveling to that destination, feeling he had failed, as he was not an orator.  He spoke for a few minutes, while celebrated orator Edward Everett spoke for two hours.  

Lincoln understood my mentor's admonition subconsciously if not consciously.  Less proved more and Lincoln made connection; Everett did not.  Lincoln had a wheezing voice in his massive body, while Everett had a booming voice in his stout diminutive one.  

Everett was a performer; Lincoln was a communicator.  Lincoln was meditative, Everett was charismatic.  Lincoln was an introvert; Everett an extrovert.  Lincoln was writing to himself; Everett was speaking to an audience.  Lincoln made spiritual connection with himself and hit his target; Everett was a mechanic and spoke over the head of his audience.  The present time more resembles Everett's mindset than Lincoln's.  That should give us pause. 

Someone asked: “How do you get your thoughts and the way you speak to translate to make sense on the page?”

Lincoln, who was essentially self-educated, an autodidact, read a lot, and loved the music of language, and came to master its rhythm and make it his own.  For the rest of us, we have to simply practice, practice, practice.  Even then, it is difficult to match precisely what we think with what appears on the page.

My wife Betty chimed in, “Jim talks to himself.  He talks out loud as he thinks about what he is about to write.”  

Yes, that is true.  I must hear how it sounds “out loud” before I commit it to the screen.  That said I write and rewrite and rewrite some more, as it takes several attempts before it makes sense to me, and resembles what I am thinking. 

When I was back home doing research for my book on my youth (IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE), I would walk through the streets of this small town, tape recorder in hand, talking as I walked.  Three African American boys stopped and stared at me.

One boy said, “Look at that man?”

The second boy said, “What?”

The third boy said, “Can’t you see?  He’s talking to himself.”  He rolled his finger in a circle by his ear, "Crazy man!"

“I’m talking into my recorder,” I said.  “I’m writing a book.”

“Oh, yeah," they giggled in unison, "He's writing a book!"

Talking to myself is my way.  It is not the only way, but it seems to help me match my thoughts with what eventually gets written.  Now, it is hard to find cassettes for my micro recorder.

    

Phase Four

Genius is not rare, but pervasive.  We often look for it in all the wrong places.  That is also true in the case of writing.

A few years ago, the Temple Terrace Public Library had a writing contest for young people nine to twelve to write what the library meant to them.  Some forty young people participated.  I had the privilege of being one of the reviewers.

Some of these essays were so pristine they looked as if they came out of a published book; some had vocabulary that indicated more than a little help from a parent.  Then there was one handwritten essay that stood above all the others.

It was captivating from the first sentence.  For this writer, the library was a dream fulfilled.  He said when I walk into the library -- and I’m paraphrasing now -- it opens up to me as if it belongs to me, and it directs me to where I want to go.  I pick up a book, and my whole world changes.

I wrote in my evaluation that this essayist should one day be a writer.  I wasn’t there when they gave out the prize.  Nor did I know that this writer had won.  I understand that a little African American boy in the back of the room, rushed up to accept his prize grinning from ear-to-ear, saying to no one in particular, “Can you believe this!” 

Phase Five

My daughter, Laurie, is a professional model.  We share one common thread of professionalism, rejection!  We are familiar with being rejected.

I came back from South Africa in 1969 something of a broken man after experiencing that assignment (see A Green Island in a Black Sea – A Novel of South Africa during Apartheid – on Kindle), having retired only in my thirties, writing to the William Morris Agency in New York City asking it to represent me as a writer.  I had no idea how absurd that request was.  

I told the agency that I "had retired" from my high paying executive position to write books.

The William Morris Agency wrote me a blistering letter in reply, stating it thought it had heard everything, but that I took the cake, nothing was more maddening then what I had done, or proposed to do.  I still have the letter.  It goes without saying I never heard from the agency again.

Hemingway advised a would-be-author to write about what he knew.  I had written “Sales Training & Technical Development” in South Africa for the new company.  So, I wrote a book on selling, which I completed in six weeks, then sent it off to Prentice-Hall, calling it “Let’s Take the Worry Out of Selling."  Two weeks later it was accepted.  

It was published with the title, “Confident Selling," with a 1971 copyright.  The book sold 25,000 copies in the first two months, and was in print for 20 years, only with Prentice-Hall’s copyright, not mine.  Caution: don’t give up your copyright if you can help it. 

That was so easy that I sent other manuscripts off to a bevy of publishers receiving form rejection letters, enough to paper a room.  

Discouraged, I turned to reading, going back to school to get my Ph.D., not publishing again until WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1991).

  

At the same time, I launched a website with a blog, finding an open market for my essays in trade journals, newspapers and periodicals.  None of them paid me a sue.  Only The Reader’s Digest did when I sent them "Twenty Points of Light."  It was accepted in January 1993 with a check being received two weeks later for $2,000, saying the piece would be published June 3, 1993.  You have to sell a lot of books to make $2,000 in royalties.

That following July, I got a letter from Reader's Digest that requests for reprints had past 30,000.  The first line of my article was, “To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself.”  This led to the writing of "The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend" (1996). 

Phase Six

If you think publishing a book is like winning the lottery, think again.  If you want to be famous, want to be a celebrity, make a lot of money, read the blistering letter I received from the William Morris Agency.

There are hundreds of thousands of books published every year, especially in this era of print-on-demand books and e-books in which the authors don’t make expenses.  I’m one of such authors.  I lost a bundle early in my writing career thinking everyone would want to read my works.  Not true. 

On the other hand, if you have the confidence, and a passion to write, if only your family reads your work, this could make it worthwhile.  Remember, publishing is a business, and publishers have to find a lot of willing gamblers for them to afford giving large advances to celebrities whose book sales seldom match their advances.

A friend of mine is writing her family history.  She is as genuine as they get.  She was as a young girl, and now a grandmother with the same vigor and élan that she had as a youngster.  She is writing her story, which should be appealing because she has lived a wonderful life.

My favorite cousin, Robert, who died a few years ago, wrote a book for his family titled “An Insignificant Life.”  I’ve never been able to read it because I become too choked up after the first few pages.

Robert earned a BSEE, went into the US Navy and became an officer in Naval Intelligence, and found himself in the Arctic at an outpost monitoring the Soviet Union’s nuclear program.  He was at his post in 1952 when Russia detonated its first hydrogen bomb, years ahead of what the CIA and NSA expected.  

He alerted his commanding officer, who told him to call the White House, which he did with trepidation.  Later, he went back to school and took a Ph.D. in economics and became an economist for the State of Colorado.  Insignificant my foot!  But modesty was natural to him from his Norwegian side of the family.

Phase Seven

We desire to be authors because we want to make connections, to get outside ourselves to connect with ourselves in another way.  That is the basis of the appeal of the social network.  How many here are on Facebook – most everyone.  Do you feel connected?  Of course you do.  We seek the approval of other so that we may in turn approve of ourselves.  

It is too funny.  We are not a reading public.  Less than 10 percent of Americans are regular purchases of books, yet nearly everyone tweets, which requires reading.  Put all the tweets together after a day, and it would likely make a fairly good sized book.  But it is not considered reading, certainly not book reading, so it is absolved of that connection.  Who knows, maybe book reading one day will reach 11 percent of the public, but probably mainly on some electronic device.

The Information Age has made everyone readers despite themselves.  I’m a fairly good typist. Now I learn that typing is passé; that all you need now are your two thumbs.  Can you imagine that?

Phase Eight

I would encourage you to have a conversation with yourself, keep a diary, scribble notes, write poetry, or fragments of a philosophy, as I did in the early 1970s.  One day I picked up one of my manuscripts, and said, “Wow!”  

What I had written some thirty years ago seemed as relevant as if it had just been written.  “Time Out for Sanity! Blueprint for an Anxious Age” was the title, which TATE Publishing will release later this year.

It occurred to me that my books are chapters of the same story: why do we remain stuck, why do we treat ourselves so poorly, why do we keep running from ourselves?  In the 1970s, the narcotic of escape was psychedelic drugs, now it is the societal approved ubiquitous mobile.  

My books have no answers but attempt to ask the right questions.

Twenty four years ago WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS was thought to be angry, if not crazy, yet in 2014, it is clear we don’t need managers.  We don't need them at all, yet we still have them, and chances are 24 years hence we'll still have them.  See why I think we are stuck?  Our lies and deceits become our Tar Baby, and we get stuck on that barrier, ignoring the problems we face solving the ones we can, but don't necessarily face.    

Writing such books, it is no surprise I'm not a household name.  That said I'm encouraged hearing from people like Eric, Klaus and Ted who are in the audience.  They stimulate my mind when they write, as they cut through the folderol and penetrate the nonsense with their strong views.  

Some of you may have your own strong views but are afraid to share them.  You shouldn't.  We are all trying to get inside the limits of language to the ideas buried inside.

My writing is meant to help people do that, to inspire them to have more confidence in themselves by taking charge and control of their lives, as tenuous as that possibility may be.  

Our culture isn’t serving us very well, yet it refuses to change.  It is hard to get a sense of ourselves in a time of pervasive sameness.  The lady writing about God in her life says she isn't religious but spiritual.  Did we ever imagine a dichotomy between the two?  It is hard to be spiritual in a secular world, but equally hard to be religious.   That doesn’t mean we have to abandon the spiritual or religious, but it does mean we cannot count on others to carry our burden, not politicians, pundits, priests or prognosticators.  That is impossible.  That is the reason I write.