BOOKISH: The Writer’s Audience

I haven’t always been a writer. I was once a businessperson. Of course, when I was a businessperson I would have said I haven’t always been a businessperson. I was once a writer.

This isn’t that unusual. You come out of college with a full head of steam, sporting a degree in English, or Psychology, or Art History. All that specialized knowledge is going to be put to work. Then real life hits, and there you are, sitting in a cubicle, thrown in with everyone else.

Ya gotta make money. So you become both artist and worker. An “amphibious” creature, as Defoe called it, that wag.

As this amphibious creature, I struggled to connect with clients. My explanations were lectures. My lectures were filled with fine points, careful reasoning, and splendid language. I believed in my product, my company. I believed or I wouldn’t have worked there, and I wanted clients to believe, too. I wanted them to be as smart as I was.

Big mistake.

A coworker spotted this. He wandered over one day and watched me. When I put down the phone he said, “Not going so well, is it.”

No it was not. “No one’s listening to me.”

“Who’s fault is that?” he asked.

Theirs, of course. I was a writer. If there’s one thing a writer knows, it’s how to communicate. Maybe if my clients had studied Shakespeare, or at least read Jane Austen, or Tolstoy, they’d understand. Wisely, I kept this to myself. Instead I told him, “People don’t want to make good decisions.”

“I don’t know. I think they probably do, or they’d lose their jobs. But I know one thing people do want, without a doubt. They want to have fun.”

I was thunderstruck. I was insulted. Here we were, tasked with expanding a product line, watching management develop ulcers as they scrambled for more and better loans, running from bank to bank and trying to keep the whole works from imploding, and everyone just wanted to go to Disney World? What sense did that make? (Sidebar: I learned something pretty quickly in business. No one has any money. They borrow from others, who in turn have no money, so they borrow from others, who in turn have no money, and so on. All the way up to the Federal Reserve which, you guessed it, has no money, and operates on an IOU basis.)

My pal left, but returned with a trade magazine, Architectural Metal Today. Hot stuff. He opened to an ad. There stood a fat man in a smock, holding a length of channel aluminum, a grin as wide as Mickey Mouse. “This is who you’re talking to.”

“That dope?”

“Exactly. He’s the installer. Or the site manager. Or architect, or human resource manager. Life isn’t bad, or shouldn’t be, and these people want to have fun.” He ripped the picture from the magazine, and tacked in to the padded grey fabric of my cubicle. Right above the phone. “Stop talking over their heads. Have fun. One more thing.”

“What?”

“Get stupid.”

He was right. When I got off my pedestal and quit lecturing people, my life in business became infinitely easier. And more enjoyable. It even influenced my writing. I stopped producing elaborate, technically sound but boring stories. Instead I had fun. Shakespeare had fun, I realized, with his endless wordplay, preposterous scenes, and blown-up characters with their wide-eyed, doltish, misplayed lives. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

It was something never taught in college. Even Shakespeare got stupid.