Goin’ places that I’ve never been, seein’ things I may never see again

 I heard a philosophy professor on the radio, Agnes Callard, who famously wrote a piece for The New Yorker called “Against Travel”.  Her basic premise is that the actual, long-lasting benefits of travel are delusional.  All you’re doing is disturbing the lives of people who speak another language, spoiling the very places you profess to admire, while retaining nothing of any enduring value.  That discussing your travels is a type of virtue-signaling that pleases your ego and bores your listeners

Rarely have I disagreed with a person more than Professor Callard.   She has the right to her

opinion, and her feelings, which are hers and fairly held.  One of my best friends hates traveling.  He’s a brilliant, erudite, accomplished man.  We just don’t share the same convictions on this matter, just as I hated the original “Top Gun”, which he loved, and he heaps scorn on my cherished “Independence Day”. 

Callard maintains that “tourist” is a term you use to describe other people with suitcases who go running around the world, but not yourself.  Fair enough, since tourist is clearly a pejorative, often for good reason.  The assumption is these are people who travel badly: dress like slobs, hog scenic overlooks, yell at shopkeepers as if volume will overcome a language gap, gorge on unhealthy snacks and cheap tchotchkes, and fall off cliffs trying to take shareable selfies.  They clump together in their tour group, rarely mingle with the natives, pine for hometown meals and remain blissfully unaffected by the foreign country’s physical and cultural charms.  They’re dumb jerks over there, which means they’re likely dumb jerks over here, too. 

Asked if she’d give a pass to creative people, such as Gauguin in Tahiti, or Picasso in Paris, Professor Callard grudgingly gave an inch.  The thing is, the question itself is fraught with a certain elitist presumption.   A professional accountant, not encouraged to be overly creative, can be utterly entranced and enriched by visiting a new place.  I know this because my brother-in-law was a partner at Deloitte and Touche and was positively glowing after returning the other day from a cruise around Scandinavia.  He doesn’t have to be transformed into a different person, nor would he expect to be, but he now has a mind that’s fuller and more aware than before he hopped on that boat.

My wife spent a few weeks in Africa on safari in four different countries.  She thinks about it every day, and is always moved by the recollections.  Is she a different person?  Not exactly, but she would say she is more of a person, an expanded version.

Entranced, expanded and intellectually refreshed is how I’ve felt after visiting strange new lands.  Notably Japan, Australia, Alaska and Budapest.  You can only really grasp these places, however superficially, by going there.  Driving around the Australian state  of Victoria, I felt like I’d been dropped onto a different planet.  Vast grasslands punctuated by gigantic Eucalyptus, waves of Kangaroo streaming through the grass at startling speeds, a mountainous rainforest where you half expected a Tyrannosaurus to burst out of the tangled tree limbs and vines. 

You might not care to know that on one side of the River Danube is the city of Buda, and on the other side Pest.  By I do.

My wife and I always make a point of talking to people wherever we go, which mostly means conversations with bartenders, waiters and waitresses, cab drivers, bell hops and store clerks.  But these are people who live in their places, and they have a lot to tell you if you ask.  You don’t have to move in with a family to get the basic lay of the land.  People love talking about their lives and their homes.  You just have to engage. 

For creative people, the benefits of travel are self-evident.  James Joyce moved to Paris (along with Picasso, Dali, Hemingway, Stein, Pound, etc., etc.).  Orwell, John Singer Sargent, Joyce Cary, D.H. Lawrence and artists you’ve never heard of journeyed and lived all over the place.  Critics agree that their art was hugely influenced by the changes in venue.

Brain science can explain some of this.  When you’re in familiar surroundings, your mind can sort of relax and shove many basic mental functions down and away from the most cognitive, and energy consuming, portions of the brain, like the pre-frontal cortex.  When you’re in an entirely new environment, your survival instincts kick in, and you become hypervigilant.  Your brain literally gets extra busy.  You also instinctively compare your immediate experience with the well-known, which has the effect of bringing perspective to your life back home.  This is why James Joyce sat in a room in Paris and wrote about Dublin, why Lawrence wrote about English people in Italian villages and an adobe hut in Mexico. 

I love writing in places where I don’t speak much of the language. I’m in the midst of people having a pleasant time with no danger of being distracted by neighboring conversations.  All I have to say is café Americano et croque monsieur, or cervesa y patatas bravas, and I’m good to go.  I once wrote half a book over less than a week in joints hanging off the cliffsides of Positano.  It just gushed right out of me. 

Faulkner muddled through rarely leaving Oxford, Mississippi, my favorite philosopher Immanuel Kant barely budged from Königsberg, and Emily Dickinson basically never left her room, and they all did fine, though I still think those smart folks should have travelled more.  Dickinson’s poetry might have taken a different trajectory had she consumed a Philly cheese steak or punted on the Cam.  Kant’s belief in the tenuousness of objective reality might have been bolstered by meeting a platypus. 

As with all literary pursuits, there are prosaic travel writers who can recommend great hotels and ticketing hacks, and geniuses who happen to like a good amble.  For that, you can’t do better than Bill Bryson.  Or Paul Theroux, who I think went everywhere on the planet without ever relaxing his keen eye or joie de vivre.  Even Mark Twain, the Innocent Abroad who was anything but. 

Sorry, Professor Callard.  I’m sure you have other fine qualities, but on this issue you’re just dead wrong. 

Every story paints a picture, don’t it

Mary and I went to this year’s Bouchercon in Nashville.  Aside from the venue, which was undoubtedly the weirdest place I’ve ever been (Harlan Coben said it felt like being trapped in the world’s biggest terrarium), it was a pretty good program.  A writer friend asked me what I took away from the experience, so when thinking about it, in that moment, I realized it was all about the story.

There’s so much advice, good and bad, so much bullshit and blather about writing mysteries, that one tends to forget the core mission:  To tell a good story. 

I grew up walking our big collie at night with my older brother.  He kept it interesting by

telling stories, novel-length narratives he conjured in real time and strung together like a radio series.   During the day, he fed me books, mostly from the stacks collected by our father and grandfather, early 20^th century adventure books and tales of Victorian derring-do.  Most of my family were also big readers, and story tellers, even fabulists, often concocting imaginary tales rendered as indisputable fact.  So I was awash in a storytelling environment.

This is the point of the whole enterprise. 

The plot is naturally at the center of this, though plot is nothing without believable characters, voice, setting, brisk dialogue, etc., all the scaffolding that holds the thing together.  The vegetables in the beef stew.  Pick your metaphor.  It’s not one thing, it’s everything.  

One thing you don’t need is a Ph.D. in English literature, though Robert B. Parker had one.  As does David Morrell, who gave us Rambo.  Though Mick Herron, who invented Slow Horses, told us at Bouchercon that he knew exactly nothing about the British Secret Service, which he feels served him well.  All he had to do was tell a good story. 

To wit:  Right after graduating from college, a friend and I thought it would be an excellent idea to drive from Pennsylvania to the West Coast in my ’65 MGB.  We travelled light, with only the essentials:  two sleeping bags, a guitar, beer cooler and about $80 in hard cash.  Somewhere in Arizona we were driving through 100 degree air down RT. 66 at about eighty miles an hour, since any slower would reduce airflow to the MG’s engine, causing it to overheat.  We kept seeing signs for “Arroyo Ahead.”  I figured that meant a taco stand, or Native American trading post, so pressed on at the same velocity. 

Arroyo actually means a big ditch in the middle of the road to allow for very occasional flash floods to pass through unabated.  So when we got there, the MG basically became airborne, hit the bottom of the ditch, then shot up in the air on the other side.  My friend, asleep at the time, spent most of the zero-gravity pinned under the top of the car, when he wasn’t bouncing off the seat.  The entire exhaust system, never more than a few inches above the road, was scraped clean and scattered into the desert. 

Civilization was only about a hundred miles in either direction, but down the road we could see a maintenance crew at work on the white-hot pavement. 

So after piling up all the exhaust components we could find, we hiked down there, hoping they had some thoughts on next steps.  Though before we got there, I found a spool of mechanic’s wire lying off to the side of the road.  Exactly what we needed.  So using the aluminum beer cans and C-clamps I always kept on hand (if you’ve ever owned an MG, you know why), and the mechanic’s wire to suspend the whole jerry-rigged apparatus under the car, I had a serviceable exhaust system.  Actually sounded pretty cool, since the resonator and several feet of tailpipe were lost to the scheme, resulting in a pleasing, guttural purr. 

We made it to the Pacific Ocean, up to Oregon, across the big sky states, then down to New Orleans by way of North Dakota, then back up to home.  About another 10,000 miles. The exhaust worked fine.   

And that’s the story. 

 

 

Say what?

            

            Much of writing you have to make up.  

            This is hard work, taxing for the mind and body, which has to input the effort on a keyboard.  But I find dialogue much easier, since it usually just comes to you over the airwaves – on the sidewalk, at the cash register, in friendly conversations with close friends and strangers. 

            I live in both Connecticut and New York, so there are regional nuances, but all fertile territory. 

            One day I was walking my dog past an outdoor restaurant and there was a clutch of late middle-aged New Yorkers more or less in the way.  As my dog and I negotiated the tight space, one of them said, “Cute dog.”

            I thanked her. 

            “How much?” asked one of the guys.  “For the dog.”

            “I don’t know,” I said. “Make me an offer.”

            “How old is he?” the woman asked.

            “About ten.”

            “Oh,” said another guy, “So we get depreciation.”

            Several years ago, a local paper in Connecticut had an article on my novel writing.  It included a photo.  I went into the hardware store I’d been frequenting for about twenty years, staffed by dour Yankees who only knew how to say, “It’s over there,” and “Thank you,” when you bought something.  That day, the granite-faced clerk looked at me and said, “You’re Knopf.”

            I admitted I was.

            “I knew it.”

            Just recently I picked up an O ring I’d special ordered from a tool repair shop in New York.  The tab was about $1.75.  When the woman behind the counter rang me up, I said, “Big sale for you folks.”

            “Yeah, I’m locking up and we’re heading out to the bar.”

            I was at Walmart buying a pile of stuffed animals for a Christmas toy drive.  One of the toys was a little dog in a seated position.  When I put it on the conveyor, I said, “Sit.  Stay.” The cashier looked over and said, “Now there’s good boy.”

            I was having some hardwood milled at a lumber yard.  I was standing there with a friend while the old, bearded mill worker in a flannel shirt with gnarly hands was feeding the material through various machines.  For this one piece, I asked the guy to rip it. 

            My friend said, “Rip it good.”

            Without looking up, the guy responded, “Into shape.  Shape it up. Get straight.  Go forward.  Move ahead.  You gotta rip it.  Rip it good.”

           I was listening on the radio to a couple of scientists talk about the difficulty of designing a Mars rover given the extreme conditions on the planet.  One of them said, “It can get up to well over two hundred degrees during the day.”

The other guy said, ”But it’s a dry heat.”

I was late for a meeting in New York, held up by a huge traffic jam only a few blocks away from the meeting place, a midtown hotel.  When I got there, literally hot and bothered, the guy at the front desk, a native African of some sort, lamented that the cause of the problem was a state visit by an African dignitary who decided to spend the afternoon visiting the department stores along Fifth Avenue.  He apologized on behalf of the hotel and the entire African continent.  At that moment, the doorman, a burly white guy clearly from Brooklyn, dressed in his John Sousa uniform, volunteered, “I think it’s the king of fuckin’ Somalia.”

The desk manager nodded at that, and said, “Can’t feed his own people and what is he doing?  Shopping at Bergdorf’s.”

The two of them smiled at each other in solidarity.

It’s too much to say that I live for these moments, but obviously they’re unforgettable.  It’s not just the humor, but the timing of the delivery, the spontaneity of the response.  It’s a type of improvisational music.  A volley and serve poetry.  And it’s an elevated example of how people naturally speak.  All you have to do is remember the rhythm to fit the content to your story.

It’s the soundtrack of our lives if you take the trouble to listen. 

Who knows?

            All sorts of interesting philosophical constructs have emerged from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, one of the pillars of Quantum Mechanics.  It mandates that an observer can never simultaneously know the exact velocity and position of a subatomic particle, that is, how fast it’s going and where it’s at, both at the same time.  You have to choose.  One or the other.  This is probably the most famous scientific axiom to delineate what we can never know, undermining our abiding belief in science, which is that we can know everything if we just stick to the problem and develop better instruments of measure.

            Einstein worked for decades to prove Heisenberg wrong.  He never did.  After that, physicists stopped trying.  Instead, they built not-knowing into their calculations, yielding formulas that have given us digital computers, smartphones, lasers, electron microscopes, LEDs, MRIs, etc.   

            So not-knowing can yield all sorts of benefits. 

I suffer from a condition I’ve self-diagnosed as infomania.  I’m eager to learn things, so I read obsessively about nearly everything I can get my hands on.  I’ve absorbed a lot of information, but I’m mostly struck by how much I don’t know, and never will.  I’m at peace with this, because there are actually a lot of things I don’t want to know, like the date of my demise, the potential carcinogens in my quarter pounder with cheese, or the political rivalries consuming my local planning and zoning committees. 

            Artists and musicians are well aware of the value of empty spaces between brush strokes and notes.  As are fine writers.  Which gets me to my point.  I think one of the highest forms of literary craft is the unreliable narrator.  A protagonist who is either ignorant of the events surrounding them, or has willfully decided not to be aware, or is simply lying to you, the reader.  This last version takes exquisite management of the narrative to give room for both the chronicler rendering the story and evidence that there’s something fishy in the telling. 

            The art of the unreliable narrator relies on us not really knowing what the hell is going on. 

            Given the difficulty of the effort, there aren’t a lot of good examples, though Humbert Humbert in Lolita comes to mind.  He’s not exactly lying to the reader, though he wants us to accept, even endorse, his elaborate philosophical, intellectual and aesthetic rationalizations for what is ultimately an ugly act of pedophilia.  As his obsession becomes more obvious, we start doubting more and more of his account, so while the story holds its logic, the actual description of events becomes, well, unreliable.

            In the world of mysteries and thrillers, I’d argue one can never rely on anything expressed by Patricia Highsmith’s protagonists.  Humbert-style rationalizations are at the center of every story, though often overwhelmed by outright deceit and sociopathology.  Ripley only wants a world that is the way he wants it to be.  Getting at the empirical truth is the farthest notion from his mind.  And with all the ambiguities and possible interpretations swirling around, the reader will never really know what is true and what isn’t. 

            Another triumph for Werner Heisenberg. 

            I can’t remotely claim to have made a comprehensive study of unreliable narrators (I willfully choose not to know everything about the subject), but for my money, nothing comes close to Gone Girl.  It’s a tour de force.  I feel this way partly because I was completely snowed by each of the book’s unreliable narrators, their stories told so convincingly, with lavish detail and nuance, lies and misdirections at industrial scale. 

            What makes the novel more than a clever hall of mirrors are the characters – their full realization, like Highsmith’s, people you might know, or have the misfortune to encounter in your regular lives.  In this way the crime novel leaks into the horror genre, the kind of horror you could actually experience, with no need for monsters or creatures from the beyond.  Because we recognize that the human mind is capable of almost anything.  Deceiving itself, deceiving others, weaving its own truths, denying, justifying, rationalizing its way into the unspeakable.  

            And unknowable. 

Ode to the blank page.

           It doesn’t frighten me.  I like looking at it.  All naked, pure and brimming with possibility.  A flat field covered in snow, untrammeled.  A white void, unlike the black version whose magic is threatening and malevolent.  You’re invited to disfigure the nothingness with words, which in the age of electronic pages, you can easily wipe clean again.  You can have a conversation, first with yourself, then with a possible reader, if the words start sounding like something you’d want to share. 

There is nothing about a blank page you need to dread.  It will accept anything you wish to contribute.  There are an infinite number of blank pages waiting for you to trundle across, clumsily or with easy grace.  They don’t care.  Like your devoted Labrador, a blank page will forgive your every transgression and never love you the less. 

Nothing feels more perfect than the communion between two beings.  You and the blank page are one-on-one, a fundamental relationship that produces a third thing, nourishing the world.  And like all successful unions, the more you put into it, the better it gets.  The richness is limitless, the possibilities beyond counting. 

The blank page is the ultimate renewable resource.  Consume all you wish.  There will always be another blank page, and another after that. 

Assuming the continuation of the species, the product is eternal.  It will outlive you and other material things.  It will be reborn with every new edition, or preserved as an artifact for future observers to unearth. 

            All it asks of you is to join in the process, to convert its blankness into something real.  To shape the whiteness into a new form, unique unto itself, that allows the void to exist as a tangible thing and not just a potential. 

           When the blank page is no longer blank, it becomes something else.  Its purity has been compromised, never to be perfect again.  It can never be perfect because no two readers will ever agree on what is written there.  Including the writer, who likely has the least ability to judge the result.  Even a sonnet that wins the Pulitzer Prize will whisper possible revisions, hint at blemishes, betray compromises.  Though what should be celebrated is the almost-perfect.  Or perfect in its own way.  Perfect for me, if not for thee. 

The more the fleshed-out pages, the greater the possibility for imperfection.  Irritating for the writer, though often endearing to the reader, who may savor the nicks, scuffs and scars as evidence of the work’s unique allure, its true claim to originality.  As with any object prone to the capriciousness of time, the planned purpose, that first proof of brilliance, may dim, while the less intended, the rough shavings that litter the words, sentences and paragraphs, begin to glow. 

You don’t know, the writer, the maker of footprints across the drifts of snow.  You probably never will.  But this is no reason not to make the attempt, over and over again, as long as the hands, or voice, or blinking eyes have the ability to convey.  It’s why the act of writing is always justified, the blank page an everlasting invitation.

 What’s not to love?

No obits necessary for the life of the mind.

These are times when optimism is about as easy to sustain as the suspension of disbelief during a superhero movie.  Especially in the face of all the media fury, of which I consume way too much.  So I won’t add to it here.  Rather, I’d like to address one small slice of the public debate, at least among those who are literate enough to ask:  Are we moving into a post-literate society?

Maybe, though it might depend on how you define literate. 

Just as there’s a natural distribution of bad hairdos, nice teeth and athletic grace across the population, there’s a percentage of people who like to read, absorb information and artistic expression, and formulate their own opinions from the swelter of competing views.  Let’s assume that the qualities described above are encouraged, for some, by achieving at least some education.  This means the percentage of the thoughtful and inquisitive is larger than ever:  In 1940, only about five percent of the country had graduated from college.  Now it’s over a third.

  You’ll hear it said, “People don’t read anymore.”  That’s not exactly true.  While overall book sales and reported reading habits have slid a bit, they’re certainly not gone.  After a long bloodletting of independent bookstores, their numbers have actually increased, if you discount some fatalities of the pandemic.  Barnes & Noble is still in operation, and doing pretty well, even if their big box competitors have mostly disappeared. 

          Social media and other forms of media engagement have eroded book reading, for sure, especially among the young.  But that’s an understandable outgrowth of the surging digital environment.  But as with all fresh trends, this too will stabilize and a new balance of wider choice will emerge.

Movies didn’t kill books.  Television didn’t kill movies (even streaming).  CDs didn’t kill records.  For that matter, the novel didn’t kill poetry, jazz has survived rock ‘n’ roll, synthesizers didn’t wipe out drums and guitars and song writers are still writing beautiful melodies and captivating lyrics.

There are temporary swells of artistic fashion, but the end result is additive, not wholesale extinction.   

Journalism is another institution that is supposedly dying on the vine, and print media is particularly under huge duress.  Though for every daily newspaper that goes under there are hundreds, if not thousands, of fresh news outlets appearing online.  You may rightly assert that many, or most, are poorly managed and edited, and filled with uncurated dreck.  That still leaves so much worthy and enriching information, and commentary, that you’ll never be able to absorb it all.

You can make a case that the once and possibly future cretin in the White House has caused an upsurge in media consumption, however polarized individual outlets have become.  Trust in the media favored by Democrats has actually improved in recent times.  I submit this is because people are paying more attention, that they’re reading more. I also believe that responsible journalism, in an era of propaganda and phony news, is trying harder to keep their facts straight and their commentary thoughtfully nuanced. 

A good friend of mine has a theory of the human mind:  “People have a tendency to extrapolate current circumstances indefinitely into the future.”  Even the scantest understanding of the past ought to unburden you of this fallacy.  We are, no doubt, going through some monumental changes, occurring at an unprecedented pace.  This is much of the problem, since rapid change makes it feel like everything is going to hell in a hand basket.  The originators of Chaos Theory, a scientific paradigm that explains the behavior of complex systems, say that nature moves from order to disorder, and back again, in irregular, but relentless, cycles.  They call the state between these cycles “phase transition”, when things become the most chaotic. 

            This is where we’re living today.  It’s not a post-literate society, it’s a society making a painful adjustment to the Information Age, finding its way through the torrent of books, articles and essays, along with posts, podcasts, online rants and blogs, just like this.

If you believe civilization is worth preserving, you have to believe that wisdom and critical thinking are essential ingredients in that preservation.  Thought in isolation from information is valuable, but closed-ended.  You can only go so far on your own.  I maintain that the richest source of revelation and enrichment are books.  Whatever form they take, physical or electronic, books will save us from annihilation, from the foolishness – economic, military, environmental, cultural – that is also an irredeemable aspect of the human experience. 

Don’t despair.  Publishers are publishing, readers are reading. Thus, thinkers keep thinking. 

 

To thine own self, get some perspective.

I think the most difficult thing about being a writer, or any other type of creative person, is the work itself.  Everything else pales in comparison.  The second most difficult is knowing if what you are creating is any good.  This is an affliction that has ruined more creative careers than any other.  It is the plague felt most broadly by the young, or the novice at any age, though it can cripple the experienced, accomplished artist as well. 

I’m not exactly addressing self-confidence, though there’s an element of that.  It’s more a problem of perspective.  It’s impossible to know yourself the way others see you.  Remember the shock of hearing your recorded voice for the first time?  Seeing yourself in a video?  These experiences for most are appalling, not only if you see or hear something much less appealing than you imagined, it’s just the utterly other-worldly sensation of observing yourself.

I imagine film actors get over this, though more than one has reported never watching their own movies and TV shows.  They all probably have different reasons, though to me it boils down to the jarring cognitive dissonance of witnessing a self presented to the world that you don’t exactly recognize. 

This is a big reason we have editors.  Nobody needs a lousy one, yet a good one is priceless.  Unfortunately, the spread between a good editor and a crummy editor is very wide.  And they can make or break your life’s work, not to instill any more dread than you already feel trying to be successful at the trade. 

Even good editors can be wrong, and poor editors can have good ideas.  So you have to learn how to be a capable arbiter of your own work.  There’s no getting around that.  In the creative world, you often hear the words, “It’s all subjective.”  Well, that’s true, sort of.  But we have recorded evidence of Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet and Bo Derek as Tarzan’s girlfriend, Jane Porter, and no one would dispute which performance was the better effort.  All of us are muddling around in between these extremes, and hoping to settle toward the Olivier end of the spectrum.  You can maybe do that all on your own, but usually it takes a little help.

I learned one important lesson from my years in advertising, much of which was consumed by qualitative market research.  This is the branch of study where you go deep into questioning a small sample of respondents.  Exemplars include focus groups and one-on-one interviews.  An important factor was whether the respondents were aided or unaided.  Unaided means they were told nothing about the product or service except the most essential.  Say you were hired by Subaru to learn more about their Outback model.  It would start like this:  “Do you drive a car?”  “Yes, I do.”  “So, let me ask you a few questions about cars.”

If you have a manuscript you want to learn more about, I think it’s best to find someone who doesn’t know you, and make it a completely blind study.  Meaning, they don’t know whether you’re a man, woman or giraffe.  They don’t know your publishing history, or anything else.  Nothing, nada, zip.  The only thing they have to consider is the work on the page.  These people aren’t that easy to find, but usually writers know other writers or literary types who would know someone whose opinion they would trust.  It’s not perfect, but I think the best approach.

You’ll hear these helpful people called beta readers.  My beta readers, with any luck, are residents of far planets. 

I’ve learned there’s no one worse for this task than friends or family.  They’ll either be too gentle or too harsh.  Because they know you, they will screen everything they read through that familiarity.  Doesn’t work.  I do have a very small number of people who read and offer ideas about my stuff who know me well.  But I trust them to be honest, and I like their advice.  But this is only after many years of give and take.

I’m not entirely sure that professional editors are all that good at being beta readers.  They come with a lot of experience, which usually carries some accretion of bias and preference that can get in the way.  I’ve had some wonderful professional advice, though also some that could have been damaging had I not had the wherewithal to stand athwart those judgements and say, nah. 

Even as it’s impossible to truly know thyself, it’s not that much easier to judge the quality of the advice you’re getting, but that’s the deal.  It will always be your ship to captain, and you alone will determine whether or not you make it to port. 

 

Amadeus

Some of the best writers I know have never published a word, nor have they tried. They don’t think of themselves as writers, and I only know of their brilliance because they write me letters (these days emails).

Concordantly, there are many professed and professional writers I’m aware of who are, to put it charitably, not very good.

I think this random sorting of talent is true with any of the arts. I like to refer to the guy who’s never joined a band sitting on his bed ripping off guitar solos like Eddie Van Halen. And clunky wanna-bees who keep starting bands and disappointing people like me when they attempt a lead. We all know both these types.

One theory for why my talented correspondents are so good is they feel no pressure. They’re just writing to a friend, and having fun with it.

They’re under no deadline (journalist, novelist, copywriter, attorney, academic) so the stakes are zero. They also have an audience of one, or just a few, and aside from the pleasure of entertaining each other, no other purpose.

I worked with a guy, a Brit, whose charm was apparent and irresistible. Occasionally dazzling. But put a camera in front of him, and he’d suddenly turn to stone.

The words wouldn’t come, and the lively grace demonstrated in casual conversation would dissolve away. I guess this is called performance anxiety. The same malady often affects talented musicians, actors, circus acts, and writers.

I can understand this when the artistic expression needs to happen in front of a live audience. If your show goes off the rails, you know it immediately, even if the people out there don’t start throwing tomatoes, storm out, or just sit in stony silence with confused looks on their faces.

With writing, chances are good the critical reader is in another room, long after you’ve written the piece, and far, far away.

There’s another more important distinction. While no one is expected to sing on key, everyone is presumed able to write at least a little, and virtually everyone does so at one time or another, even if it’s a note to the postman to stop sticking your neighbor’s catalogs in your mailbox.

So we all get a lot of latitude. The difficulty comes when you decide that you want to write well, and tell people of that intent.

Then the fear of rejection begins to creep into your heart. And by extension, once you’ve declared yourself, you assume tolerance for your failings will turn into ruthless judgment. So now you feel compelled to demonstrate your facility at every opportunity, or that’ll be the end of such foolish ambitions.

For most writers, this feeling never goes away. I remember how long it took to get the boss’s birthday card out of the copy department.

You can imagine the paranoia, the competitiveness, the relentless revisions, the magic marker-sized well wishes, the collapse of self-esteem when one of us would really hit one over the fence.

Back to my clever, officially non-writer correspondents, they are very, very good. And it is such a delight to read their work. Aside from their misspent school years (one never made it to college, though his father was a certified genius, which counts for something), no one told them how to do this.

It just happened through some natural bent toward eloquence and wit. I know these people about as well as you can know anyone, and none of them ever aspired to write professionally, because they simply didn’t want to. They had other fish to fry. I’m sure they’d sell their God-given talent to the highest bidder if such a market was available.

I once chatted with one of my father's close colleagues. They were executives in a huge, international corporation involved in engineering and technology. I knew my father was a consummate gearhead, but this guy told me, with a hint of reverence, something no one ever said to me, before or since.

“Your dad was the the best writer in the company.

His memos were legendary. They would piss off a lot of people, but only because there was no getting around how well he made the case.”

I never knew. He was long gone by then.

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Dear Friend:

            I know you haven’t heard from me for a while.  I’ve been busy, what with geo-political upheavals and the local zoning board hearings, the copy editor’s final notes on the review copy of my book, to say nothing of feeding the needy cats and attending my cousin’s son’s bar mitzvah (I was there for the bris, not actually there, but in spirit) taking so much of my time, I can hardly drag myself into the email ecosphere. 

I do have a topic in mind, and that’s the importance of maintaining a regular correspondence, even though you’re so much better at this than me.  I have two points:  1.  Connections established and preserved over time through the written word are precious and indispensable.  2.  Writing letters is the best practice any writer can ever have.  By that I mean any person who writes for a living/wants to write for a living/loves writing/is occasionally stalled in a big writing project and needs to limber up before going back at it again.  For writers, writing letters is like training for the New York Marathon.  Without the dehydration and sprained ankles. 

You might not believe this, but I’m always very excited to see your emails pop up in my gmail account.   You could tell me anything you want, and I’d be enthralled, because I can hear your voice in your words, see your face, and imagine your life going through various triumphs and travails.  I find myself really wanting to know all about Spotty’s gastrointestinal difficulties, the struggle to pay all those vet bills, your benighted spouse denting the new Subaru, little Evelyn’s soccer goal, and the short-listing for the National Book Award. 

My life is so much less interesting than yours, since most of it is consumed by hours at this keyboard in a tiny apartment on the Upper West Side with two cats and a neighbor whose snoring is loud enough to be entered in the Guinness Book of World Records.  Though by now, it’s become sort of soothing.  I might miss it when I start my book tour, sending me to places where the walls are thicker and the loudest noises are the Harleys fleeing from law enforcement. 

You might realize that we’ve been writing to each other for about thirty years, ever since we started passing notes in Mrs. Braverman’s social studies class, including that one Mrs. Braverman intercepted where I noted she had a little piece of tissue stuck to her chin and nobody had the courage to tell her.   She got very red, but did thank me, sotto voce, after class, to her credit.  Since then, all this back and forth with you has never stopped, even when you were in Beirut and I had that little time away in rehab. 

The thing about letter writing is it’s very different from face-to-face conversation, or talking on the phone, which has it’s own peculiar qualities, positive and negative.  There’s something honest and pure about a letter.  Maybe because it isn’t a two-way communication until you hear back from your correspondent.  You’re writing it all alone in the quiet, dispensing a monologue that you control without interruption, unless a cat decides to jump on the keyboard.  Yet the whole time I’m writing to you, I’m thinking of you.  You’re there in my heart and in my mind.  I know who I’m addressing, and what you might want to hear about.  What amuses you, what stirs you to fire off a rejoinder.  It’s tailored exactly to your sensibilities and the tempo of our relationship.  And thus maybe the most personal of all types of communication. 

I’m sure you’ll answer this with a very funny satire on writers entering the formative stages of sentimental middle age, but I know you know what I mean.  I know because you’ve always sent me two letters, or emails, to every one I write back to you, so I know you understand why this is important.  And so much fun. 

Just because it isn’t a love letter, doesn’t mean you can’t send a letter to someone you love. 

Sincerely,

Your Friend