Diane and David at 65 mph

Driving on I55 north toward Chicago on the day after Thanksgiving, I found a public radio station where Diane Rehm was interviewing David Wroblewski about his first novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. He quickly said three things that made me smile.

First was the way he honored his story, which was apparent in this remark: 

I had the one advantage that unpublished writers have, which is, I had time. I promised myself that I would take as long as it needed.

That led Diane to ask him how he supported himself for the 10 years it took to get the book written. He said he had "a 30-year career in making software." And then, before we could leap to the standard story-line of dumping-the-dreary-day-job, he set us straight:

I was pulling a paycheck doing that. But I really don't think of it as pulling a paycheck, because I love the work and I expect I'll be making software my whole life. 

I think that took Diane out of her game plan for the interview too, because she asked a question that, if you read between the lines, came across as "well, at least maybe you could work at home and slip in a little work on the novel while you were getting paid to make software." To which David replied:

I did work from home a couple of days every week. But I was really working from home on the software. And usually it was evenings and weekends when I was working on the book. I wanted to be at home because I wanted to be with my dog. That was my real motivation for working from home. 

I bought his book -- because here's a guy who's willing to take ten years to tell a story if that's what the story requires, who writes not as an escape from something but as another way to be happy, and who has found a way to work from home not because the office is such a bad place -- but because home is where his dog is.    

Grammar and lexicon

Yesterday I talked about the work we're doing with the upcoming projects -- as good an excuse as any to quote Annie Dillard again, this time from Total Eclipse:

The mind -- the culture -- has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. 

The race is on

Thanksgiving is over. Now we start the Iditarod of corporate communication; it's mush you huskies, from now until about mid-February, and I'm one of the huskies. I was curious how the load would compare this year and what the market mix would be. And here's the news as of today: 

The load is a 9 on a scale of 1-to-10, with 10 being the highest. The mix includes the usual suspects (annual reports, kickoff meetings) with a new influx of web work and podcasts. 

For projects already on the books for the next two months:

• There are five clients (two pharmaceutical, two professional services, one energy and communications infrastructure; three are global, one is international, and one is the North American subsidiary of a global enterprise). 

• With multiple projects for some clients, six assignments are leadership-oriented, seven are marketing-related and one is investor-based. Slicing them along media lines, three are face-to-face (meetings or conferences), six are print, four are web and one is a podcast. 

What actual work are we doing with these projects? We're repositioning a multi-billion-dollar business, assimilating an acquisition, launching a new product, aligning a leadership team and reporting to shareholders on what is shaping up as a year of record sales and profits and about an 80 percent decline from a 52-week high in the price of a share of common stock.  

One sentence

I wrote this sentence as part of a rebranding of a product line:

Imagine starting from scratch, getting everyone involved, trying every combination of softwoods, hardwoods and post-consumer fiber and you don't stop until you can go to the customer and say, here's a beautifully formed paper that invites you to hold it a little closer, a little longer, and with a little extra fondness.

Structurally, there's a lot going on here. You start by advising unknown numbers of readers-in-waiting to dust off their shriveled imaginations, and then you swerve dangerously and possibly illegally out of the imperative sentence you started and into the declarative clause that begins with "and you don't stop until you can go to the customer," only to brake hard and skid sideways across the lawns of beauty and intimacy before coming to rest with a heave and a sigh in front of a word that you have never in all these years invited to the corporate dance: fondness. It's a sentence I like to revisit from time to time.

I know what you're thinking...

How can we go on about "sentences" like this without invoking Hemingway in A Moveable Feast? Where he said, "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." And as long as we're in A Moveable Feast, we really must go another hundred pages or so and get, "Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do."  

Some sentences I'm happy to have written

Not going global...

You can find bigger paper companies. You can work with people who are less available, less flexible, and less committed to your needs and timelines. Or you can work with Finch, here at our Hudson River Valley home, where we're not trying to go global or become part of someone else's worldwide empire. 

Gone global...

We have an organizational model designed for action across essential markets throughout the world. We have action-oriented leaders in key operational positions. We have assets deployed behind actionable opportunities wherever we find them. We have investment capital primed to turn big actions into bigger ones. We demand action. We support action. We reward action. And action rewards us.

And global-schmobal, it's all about digital ...

But in a Web 2.0 world, commerce is also what happens on the way to somewhere else. It's the in-game offer, the ad on the IM client, the personalized recommendation on the My Yahoo! home page. For every intentional visit to a digital commerce storefront, there are multiple impromptu touch points in the general flow of life. So look for an architecture that allows you to hook up to your web storefront, to your mobile storefront, to your IPTV storefront, to your in-game storefront, to some small portal box on a home page, to a two-line ad on an IM client, to a physical kiosk in a shopping mall, to anywhere people are buying things on their way to somewhere else. 

Do you like sentences?

Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life:

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?"

"Well," the writer said, "I don't know ... do you like sentences?"

Like them? I love them.  One really good sentence a week is enough to keep me sitting through the conference calls. Here's Don DeLillo:  

But the basic work is built around the sentence. This is what I mean when I call myself a writer. There's a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look.... I'm completely willing to let language press meaning upon me. Watching the way in which words match up, keeping the balance in a sentence -- these are sensuous pleasures. 

The sentences I wrote last week were load-bearing. They got the job done. Which is fine; it's what the world needs right now. 

One sentence

I wrote this sentence as part of a positioning statement in a total rebranding of a firm:

Our clients come to us for the passion of the first time, the savvy of the umpteenth time, the boldness of the right time, the originality of the only time, the anticipation of the next time ... and the enjoyment of a great time.

Through a lengthy review process, one word was changed. Yeah, umpteenth. Changed to hundredth. The sentence was plucked from the positioning statement and used in the flash announcement of the brand relaunch. It makes me happy to have written this.