Writing Boots

Friday Happy Hour Video: Sanders for lyrics, Trump for rhythm

Thirty-two years ago, Bernie Sanders made a folk album.

President Trump is a very competitive fellow.

Drawing the line on trickery for baseball players is like drawing the line on trickery for magicians

I don't write much about sports here, because it's not called "Sporting Boots."

But my speechwriter/humorist friend Eric Schnure was pretty balled up on the phone the other day about the current scandal involving the Houston Astros and possibly the Boston Red Sox using video cameras to steal signs from catchers, to alert batters as to which pitch was coming next.

I hadn't been following the story too closely, so I let Eric brief me on how these teams conspired in a fraud that he said could be compared to the Chicago Black Sox throwing the World Series in 1919. I thought that was a little overboard. The Black Sox scandal involved gamblers paying players to throw games—a true invasion of the game by gangsters, rather than just the usual low-grade criminality normally known as "baseball strategy."

Whereas, this latest thing was just a more sophisticated version of sign-stealing, which has been going on since the first time a pitcher tried to bamboozle a batter.

Baseball is trickery and treachery. That's why we need signs in the first place; because pitchers refuse to tell batters how hard they're going to throw it, or where, exactly. (Sometimes they throw the ball such that it curves! What kind of dirty trick is that?)

If a guy bats right-handed, you bring in a right-handed pitcher to zing the ball away from him. How shabby. If you think a guy might get a big hit, you walk him intentionally. How cowardly. Occasionally, a guy will throw the ball 100 miles an hour at another guy's head. Attempted murder.

Stealing is literally part of the game—and players only resort to that if they can't hit the ball over everyone's heads, out of the ballpark so no one can play with it! Real mature.

There's the "hidden ball trick." The "rundown." The "pickoff play." Baseball players will do pretty much anything, just to keep a fellow human being from getting home.

And now we're shocked and dismayed because ballplayers and managers are adding to the sandpaper, thumbtacks, rosin, pine tar, vaseline steroids, cork and spit they've always used to get ahead, video cameras?

Fonzie jumped the shark in 1977. Here’s a picture of Ty Cobb doing it in 1909. By now, we should be getting used to it.

Anyway, that's what I told Eric. I think he thought I was being obtuse.

But I'm pretty sure he told me the whole thing in the first place, just so he could introduce his new names for the Astros and the Red Sox—the Houston Asterisks, and the Boston Red Pox.

Happy now, Eric?

"I Don't Take a Piss Without Getting Paid for It": Don't you, either

As it says on my bio, I have been published in The New York Times, the Atlantic, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine and many other publications; and I've had my work rejected by other periodicals, ranging from The New Yorker to Modern Drunkard magazine.

Now comes Cannabis Magazine, whose director of marketing is trawling on LinkedIn, "Searching for content contributors! This is not a paid position but an opportunity to showcase your writing talent and industry knowledge on one of the top Cannabis related websites."

Because what writer doesn't want to be associated with "one of the top" dope websites? It's a gateway byline!

In a rare example of people daring to say a discouraging word on LinkedIn, a number of writers pointed out that bullshit doesn't make for a well-rounded diet, even for writers. "I’m especially impressed," cracked one commenter, "with the requirement to apply for the unpaid privilege. That takes cojones."

Of course there is only one response to this sort of nonsense, and it was delivered many years ago by the late writer Harlan Ellison, to a higher class of hucksters than Cannabis Fucking Magazine.

Look, I've written without getting paid. In fact, I'm doing so right now. And I wrote a ton of stuff on Huffington Post when the economy tanked, and all freelance journalism dried up dozen years ago. That makes me feel like a bit of a scab; at the time, it made me feel I was staying relevant, and finding new readers. But if you're writing for free—or speaking for free—you should be able to say in a sentence or two, what you're getting out of it, or why you've decided to give your talent as a gift. (And in those sentences, "showcase" should not be the verb.)

But writing for a weed website as a feather in our cap: What kind of dopes do they take us for?

Speechwriter! Neither a professional whore nor a pipsqueak moralist be.

A phone call last week with a speechwriter who's looking for her next job.

She said she's only written speeches for Republicans in her career, but she's a registered independent and in any case, she's professionally agnostic about politics. "If you want me to write an argument for the casino, yeah, I'll do that. If you want me to write against the casino—sure, that's fine!" She has a news broadcasting background, she added—so she's used to covering both sides anyway.

It had been awhile since I talked to any speechwriter like that—probably since the early 1990s, when I was a very young cub reporter working on a little brown-paper weekly called Speechwriter's Newsletter. A freshly minted English major, I was always asking speechwriters how they could words they didn't believe in. ("Kid would prefer a moral issue to a real one," as my old boss Larry used to chuckle.)

Back then, lots of speechwriters copped to being points-of-view for hire—even boasted about it. Claiming with pride that they had "no pride of authorship," lots of scribes back then saw themselves the way lawyers do, and saw their clients as deserving of rhetorical representation, right or wrong.

Everybody had lines that couldn't be crossed: Many speechwriters said they would never work for tobacco companies, I remember. Similarly, the woman I spoke with last week said that of course there were people and views "on either extreme" that she couldn't work for. But mainly? She was up for anything—including a job for either party, in D.C. She just loves writing speeches, and she's written for leaders she has admired, whether or not she agreed personally with every syllable she helped them utter.

I told her not to tell anybody in D.C. that. I was remembering back to 2006, when I wrote a letter to Robert Gibbs, communication director for the junior senator from Illinois, asking him to add my letter "to what must be a teetering stack of letters from people hoping to contribute their talent and experience to the cause of Obama for President."

For people like me—liberals and conservatives not content in our hatred of the other side—Senator Obama has offered a pinhole of hope for a basic American reconciliation around common values we all know we share. For us, so long despairing in a political context designed to make us see our fellow Americans as either godless monsters or superstitious idiots, a pinhole is plenty.

After offering my services and listing my qualifications, I explained why I wanted so badly to help: "I have a three-year-old daughter. I’d like to be able to tell her, as I was told as a child, that she lives in a great and wise country. President Obama would be my best hope."

Before I sent the letter to Gibbs, I ran it past a Washington speechwriting veteran for a critique. He pointed out that nowhere in my letter did I tell Gibbs which political side I'm on. If I didn't, nobody would trust me.

I remember feeling let down by that, wishing naively that politics hadn't become so tribal. And I bet that's what the woman I spoke with last week felt when I told her not to go into D.C. bragging that she'll write for anybody reasonable on either side.

Between that call and this post, PR legend Harold Burson died, at 98.

“We are advocates,” Burson said about public relations people. "We are being paid to tell our clients’ side of the story. We are in the business of changing and molding attitudes, and we aren’t successful unless we move the needle, get people to do something. But we are also a client’s conscience, and we have to do what is in the public interest."

Obviously, we can't serve as a consistent conscience for our clients if we don't have a strong conscience of our own. But neither are you and I authorities on what is in the public interest on every issue, even if we're pretty sure what we think of casinos.

Speechwriting: It's complicated, and it should be.

Two texters passing (a doobie) in the night

Got a text last week from a number I didn't recognize. It was a link to a Colbert piece about legal marijuana in Illinois.

Never wanting to write, "Who is this?"—but terrible about putting people's contacts into my phone—I tried to draw the person out by responding provocatively:

Me: Why couldn't [legalization] have happened before or after I was trying to set a good example for my kid?

Other Person: Well, now you wouldn't be breaking the law.

Me: What about giggling uncontrollably with mustard all down my front? Oh, I guess that's my m.o. anyway, LOL.

Other Person: Exactly.

Me: I'm glad we had this little talk. Off to get a sack of Amnesia Haze.

Other Person: Fond of Chronic Aphasia myself.

Me: Who is this, by the way?

Other Person: I was going to ask the same thing.

Friday Happy Hour Photo

I'm trying not to be such a jerk on Facebook anymore, because I don't think people need more truculence in their lives. But sometimes it's fun to poke numb-nuts companies like Kohler, which owns a golf resort with great toilets.

A Letter From Mister Boring (the first in an increasingly frequent series)

Dear CNN Talking Heads,

I realize your job is to stall for eternity.

But:

When Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Rosanne Barr or Gwyneth Paltrow don't take back a thing they have said—or "walk it back," as you would say it, because that chews up a little more time—that doesn't mean they're "doubling down" on their argument.

In blackjack, "doubling down" means actually doubling your bet in the middle of a hand. So doubling down on an argument, to the extent that it's a relevant rhetorical metaphor at all, would be like Joe Namath guaranteeing that the New York Jets would win Super Bowl III against the heavily favored Baltimore Colts—and then guaranteeing that they would win Super Bowl IV as well!

But if Broadway Joe just repeats his original prediction in stronger terms, he's not doubling down. He's just sticking to his guns.

No big deal, and not breaking news.

Sorry,

Mister Boring

"Writer's block" isn't real. Neither is "rewriting."

I told an accountant friend before the holiday break that I was looking forward to a rare period of uninterrupted writing. He said that sounded to him like unmitigated hell.

Why do most people hate writing so much? For two reasons, I think: First, what goes down on the page is inferior to what's in their head. And second, they know goddamn well that if they're going to produce anything decent, they'll have to face the tiresome, wearisome, worrisome process of "rewriting." 

I think they're thinking about the process wrong, literally from beginning to end.

The Professional Speechwriters Association's resident writing coach Mike Long—who is leading his back-by-insatiable-demand workshop Strategic Speechwriting: The Method and the Art in D.C. March 19-20 and you should totally go—has a theory about "writer's block."

That theory is that writer's block doesn't exist.

Is he serious?

What do you think?

If I may presume to paraphrase a man as articulate as Mike, "writer's block" is merely what happens when the writer shies away from the inevitable disappointment of translating the immaculate idea she's concocted in her head into real, homely words on a page.

The immaculate idea and the words on the page are always and inevitably going to be different and the more you write, the more routine that disappointment becomes—and the more you become used to watching your synapses morph into syllables.

(This is happening to me right now, regarding this post that was much shorter and more elegant when I thought of it 15 minutes ago. I'm dealing with it.)

I agree with Mike on this, and after years of reflection, I think his theory on writer's block has led to my theory on James Michener's old saw, "I'm not a good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter." 

I think what we call "rewriting" is largely an attempt to make the imperfect thing we have written—the thing that took off on us because words are different than thoughts and fingers think differently than brains—more like the original thing we had in our head.

Which we shouldn't see as a separate process, but rather a fourth step in my seven-step process for writing short pieces.

1. Have an idea. (This relates to the first rule of baking a pie—get a stove.)
2. Write it down the best you can, as completely as you can, in one sitting if you can. (This doesn't mean writing a bunch of "crap" as a first draft, as some hacks advise; if it all seems like "crap," it was probably a crap idea in the first place and you should abandon it altogether.)
3. Have a short nap.
4. Go back and try to make what you wrote as much like the original idea as you can. Painfully, this step might involve "killing your babies," which were either precious baubles that your brain prefabricated prematurely, or fun phrases that your feckless fingers came up with.
5. Write an email to a bill collector droll enough to appear one day in your Collected Letters.
6. Polish your piece—adding an inspired flourish here, subtracting two extraneous lines here.
7. Build yourself a nice big drink. You've earned it. Even though it's only lunch time.

Now, look at old Mike! (And sign up for his seminar; I'll be there too, with a bunch of other writers, and we'll all talk about this kind of stuff for two days straight.)

The Golden Globe Awards: Calm down, folks, it's just a movie

"Speak it, Ricky," spake a professional communicator friend on Facebook. 

She was praising Golden Globes Awards' hired badboy emcee Ricky Gervais for having directed honorees, "If you win, come up, accept your little award tonight, thank your agent and your God, and fuck off. No one cares about your views on politics or culture."

Questioning actors' intellects is an old sport. "Of all actors, the most offensive to the higher cerebral centers is the one who pretends to intellectuality," wrote H.L. Mencken about a hundred years ago. "No man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor." I read that when I was young, and ever since, I've been looking for exceptions. Over a quarter century, I've identified Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Lily Tomlin and Bryan Cranston. Take that, Mencken!

But you know whose intellects I have an even lower estimate of than actors'? People who watch Hollywood awards shows for any reason other than an ironic laugh, aided by a giggly strain of sativa. To anyone who takes the Golden Globes the least bit seriously as an Important Cultural Event—well, the actors's speeches might actually bring them news that the continent of Australia is on fire or that there's a political movement to severely limit abortion laws in America.

So good for Dicky Ricky for publicly afflicting the smug. And good for the actors for "defying" him with all the pathos they've got. And best of all for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, for manufacturing the whole melodrama.

It's all part of the show.

How many times are you going to fall for it?

A gingerbread house in heaven

My pastor pal Suzanne is one of my favorite Facebookers, partly because she runs activities at a nursing home and finds poetry and comedy in patients with varying degrees of dementia. Before Christmas, she posted this:

Trivia today:
Me: Name a candy you might use to decorate a gingerbread house.
Resident: Nicorette.
Me: