Writing Boots

Thanksgiving Happy Hour Video: "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" wasn't a question

I've seen A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the new Tom Hanks movie about Mister Rogers, as you might do over the Thanksgiving weekend. I like it a great deal.

But the Fred Rogers that Hanks plays almost comes off as a savant of kindness. And while the movie takes pains to say Fred wasn't a saint, it doesn't quite show what a stone cold assassin he was, in defense of what he believed.

I've shown this clip dozens of times around the world, and I still marvel at the iron in Rogers' eyes as he makes the case that his program should be funded in order to compete with commercial children's TV—what he contemptuously calls "animated bombardment."

I still choke up watching it with every new audience of speechwriters, as we all contemplate together what real moral commitment to an idea really looks like. And the power it has. And the rarity with which we see it.

If you can't have the job you want, honey, love the job you have

Did you know that Kurt Vonnegut once worked in PR for G.E.? In a letter to his father, he described it as "this goddamn nightmare job," and he quit it as soon as he got enough money from his short stories. 

But he liked the men he worked with at G.E. enough to keep in touch with some of them for the rest of his life. And he liked the science he learned from G.E. engineers, and based much of his science fiction on it.

And had he not made it as a literary writer, Vonnegut could have stayed in PR his whole life, I think he would have made a meaningful career out of it—just like you. And you and you and you.*

I'm convinced of this after reading "Kurt Vonnegut on Making a Living as a Writer," in The Nation, and weighing its truths against what else I know about Vonnegut (and all the other professional writers I've known for 30 years).

First, Vonnegut was a grinder and an earner first, and a precious artist never. His sister and her husband died in 1958 within two days of each other, and Vonnegut and his wife Jane took in all three of their kids, adding them to their own brood. At one point, he opened a Saab dealership to supplement his income.

Author Suzanne McConnell, a student of Vonnegut's who wrote the Nation piece, says that Vonnegut understood how to cultivate what she calls "obligatory caring," about one's daily occupation. She says he demonstrates the concept in his novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Describing an insurance salesman ...

Poor, lugubrious Fred spent his mornings seeking insurance prospects in the drugstore, which was the coffee house of the rich, and the news store, which was the coffee house of the poor. He was the only man in town who had coffee in both places. . . .

Poor Fred worked like hell for the few dollars he brought home once in a while. He was working now, beaming at the carpenter and the two plumbers in the news store.

Presently, he engages them in conversation about their wives.

“I’ve done what I can for [my wife],” Fred declared. “God knows it isn’t enough. Nothing could be enough.” There was a real lump in his throat. He knew that lump had to be there and it had to be real, or he wouldn’t sell any insurance. “[Insurance is] something, though, something even a poor man can do for his bride.”

McConnell's article contains a great deal of wisdom for people who want to write professionally, and for people who do. (Including some wisdom from speechwriting guru and PSA faculty member Bob Lehrman, another Vonnegut student who's quoted in her piece.)

But nothing here is more important than "obligatory caring."

Real, lump-in-the-throat caring—for your client, for your colleagues, for your organization, for your industry, for your craft or for your cause—if you can't cultivate it in your heart, you simply can't write well over the long haul. 

"I tell you," Vonnegut also said, "we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.” (A sense of humor is just as important.)

* Also, I could be wrong. Vonnegut once went to work for the fledgling Sports Illustrated magazine, and spent exactly one morning there, agonizing over a caption for a picture of a race horse that had shied at the opening gun and escaped the confines of Aqueduct Race track. He left for lunch, never to return. His supervisor found a page in his typewriter with the caption, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence."

The Quotable Murr

Trying to excuse some emotionally eccentric behavior by a friend, I heard myself saying, "It is hard to be a person."

Friday Happy Hour Video: This person is 16 years old today

(Because what do you do for your kid's first-grade Black History Month project? You take her to a cemetery. And then you repair to a South Side soul food restaurant and have a little chat about Hitler.)

Rambling this week and next, not blogging

This week, Madison, Wis., next week Denver, Boulder and Colorado Springs. "Just a wandrin' worker, I go from town to town ..."

Back here November 25.

If it's "broken," rewrite it

Ran across this Writing Boots post from November, 2011, and thought it still held water. —DM

***

When did "broken" become the adjective by which we describe public education, the financial regulatory system, the tax code, The Culture in Washington or American politics in general?

When, and why?

I just read 700 pages of Hunter S. Thompson's letters about how fucked up American politcs were in the late 1960s and 1970s, and not once did I see the system described as "broken."

The trouble with this "broken" term—aside from its overuse by the same sorts of hacks who also write horrible things like, "speaking truth to power"—is that it's purposely simplistic.

What if you went to the doctor and after some tests, he said, "You're broken"? You'd say, "What is broken? A bone? A blood vessel? My heart?" Or if your car mechanic called and said he'd found the trouble: "The car is broken."

Yet we accept it when a columnist describes the free enterprise system—everything happening in an economy of hundreds of millions of people and dozens of nations—as "broken."

It's also a misapplication of a mechanical diagnosis to an organic problem.

And using the word "broken" to describe a social system can have a practical consequence:

The only way to deal with something that is "broken" is to "fix" it. So if you and I think the American government is "broken," the only remedy we'll accept is from someone who promises to "fix" it. Now who are you and I both going to trust to do that? Sure, I might listen to your candidate's bright idea to improve one or another area of the system. But I'm nervous even about my candidate's plan to fixthe whole "broken" thing. Maybe it's just the carburetor and a the piston rings!

Obviously, we need terms to make broad statements about complex social systems.

But "broken" is just about the worst word I can think of.

Then why is it the best word anyone else can think of?

From the General Student Newsletter of Lane Technical High School, Chicago

The Nothing Club

The Nothing Club has grown to a remarkable number of fellow nothing doers. If you'd like to join, just email me at _________ (make sure to tell me what grade level you're in). I'll be accepting people until Friday. In the Nothing Club, we do nothing: no meetings, no events, no commitment. Join to do nothing with us.

Friday Happy Hour Video: Sunday Morning Coming Down, by ... Janis Joplin?

It's terrible; but I want it to be good so badly that it almost is.

(For the uninitiated, this is how it's supposed to be done.)

And here's Janis at her joyful best—in concert in Frankfurt, Germany, 1969. There's a new biography out, and I'm listening to her a lot these days.

A confession

Reproduced with the permission of my friend Suzanne Ecklund, who posted this story on Facebook last Friday night. Suzanne is a chaplain (for godsakes). —DM

***

Have you ever been out walking and discovered a long strip of freshly cemented sidewalk and thought: Here is your moment? And never having etched your name into a sidewalk before thought: This is my chance to leave my mark? And then jammed your finger down into the cement and written your name? And learned that it really hurts to do that so you try little sticks and they all break? And wanting the etching to be deeper but not wanting to linger, you leave? Then realize your keys would work well? Then go back and re-etch your name with your keys? Then head home and feel really good about your very own Hollywood star? And then start wondering why your finger hurts so bad? And decide you will google this when you get home. Then get home and search "cement on skin" and learn about cement burns and amputations? Then cut your fingernail to the nub to get the cement out but it doesn't really work so soak it in soap and dump vinegar all over it like the internet says to do? And then see stories about people getting $12,000 fines for writing on sidewalks? And then replay in your head the car that slowed down when you were writing your name? And imagine that the driver took your picture. And then think: Why did I write my name? Who writes their own name as their crime? And then start thinking about all the houses with security cameras on them? And then think you can't afford $12,000 so put on a disguise with sunglasses and a hooded raincoat and go back to the spot, sneak up to it and scuff your name out with your shoe while nursing your now dead finger? I have.

What verbs do to us

Writers are always telling you about the importance of verbs. They ought to show you, instead.

Reading Last Words, an unpublished novel of my mother Carol Murray, I ran across a passage in which verbs carry the action almost all by themselves.

The novel is about a boy dying of leukemia, and as its title indicates, it doesn't end well. (Which is why it was unpublished; she refused Random House's request that she change the ending.)

Bobby tries everything to get up out of the hole he is in. He spits his way out; he screams his way out; he swears; he washes. He bombs his way out with little balls that leave his rear. He rocks, he sings, he sleeps. He doesn't sleep. He acquiesces; he fights, he punches, he sucks in his breath.

He chatters, he sulks, he hums. He smears, he puffs, he hops, he skips, he jumps, he slides, he fasts, he eats, he tries to vomit his way out.

He teaches himself to read.

(Oh! and are we proud!)

He bribes, he connives, throws, he walks backwards. He plays like a good little boy, claps, prays, wishes, focuses, contracts, touches himself, doesn't touch himself. God love him, he never begs or nags anymore.

He is always working; he never rests.

He shivers, dances, listens, borders on, relinquishes, controls, forfeits, glides, pushes, shoves, jabs, pokes, pastes, taps, pockets, presses, picks, pecks, steals, brandishes, sways, lists, shudders, hides, flops, entertains, faints, recoils, opens, closes, flings, drops, skids; he has neither the strength nor the courage for somersaults or leaps.

Grips, teeters, goosesteps, goosenecks, withdraws, lives, dies.

He is dispirited, annoyed that so much energy could come to nothing.

Still he's in the hole, abyss, swamp, well, hell, box, mire, mud.

He repulses, puts his foot down, puts up a front, contests, wrestles, jousts, parries, pacifies, harmonizes, settles, surrenders, relents, succumbs, cringes, kowtows, humbles, demeans, swallows, hits back, defends, keeps watch, quarrels, tilts.

He sits in the corner of his little room. "I am just a little boy," he says. "There is only so much a little boy can do."

Even though we know it's a heavy-handed literary device, we still feel compelled to take these 100-plus verbs one by each ... conjuring what it must be like for a little boy with leukemia, trying not to die. Empathizing, interrogating, agonizing, philosophizing, rationalizing and stonewalling against the idea that a child with leukemia could ever be our own.

Because that's what verbs do to us.