The grill and the girl

My home for my last year in college was a garage apartment behind a small brick house that had been carved up into three tiny apartments. A friend of mine lived in one of them. One summer afternoon, while taking the shortcut through the alley, he found a discarded grill, which he helped himself to.

He hadn't had a date all summer, and he saw this grill as the break he'd been looking for. If he only had some charcoal, and something to put it in, he could set them under the grill. And if he had two steaks, he might be able to entice a girl to eat one of them. Which turned out to be true; a girl did agree to come for Sunday dinner.

My friend scraped up enough money to purchase a bag of charcoal and two steaks. He took another trip down the alley and borrowed a garbage can lid. He walked half a block to the Texaco station, which was closed on Sundays in those days, lowered the hose of the first pump, and drained a few drops of gasoline into a Mason jar. Doing the same with the other pumps, he filled the jar about one-third full.

What happened next, I was privileged to watch from my second-story porch. At first, everything seemed routine. My friend washed the garbage can lid, filled it with a thin layer of charcoal and balanced the grill on top. Then he picked up the Mason jar and poured the gasoline over the charcoal. I knew enough about gasoline to suspect that it wasn't soaking gently into the briquettes, but was probably pooling at the lowest part of the garbage can lid. So alarms went off in my head when my friend took out his cigarette lighter and leaned into the garbage can lid as if intending to blow on a glowing ember in hopes of coaxing a flame. I think I may have leaned back from the rail of my porch in the spirit of self preservation.

Two things happened. My friend's head disappeared in a huge ball of fire, and his hand threw the cigarette lighter straight up. The picture that is seared into my brain is of a body on all-fours, with fire where the head should be, and a Bic lighter flipping end over end about even with me on the second-story porch.

He survived. He cooked his steaks. His date showed up for dinner as promised. She ate quickly and then left, probably thinking she was pretty sure that my friend had eyebrows when she accepted his invitation.

It's amazing that he wasn't seriously injured. Not his time, I guess. That would come the following summer, when, crossing a parking lot on his way home, he walked into a bullet meant for someone else.

***

The point of all this goes back to the theme of being a master story-teller: you have to be ruthless about what you leave out. I really wanted to tell you why I was sitting on the porch in the first place, why I didn't shout a warning to my friend, where he was going the night he got shot, who shot him, and why there were other bullets waiting for him if that one hadn't found him. And maybe you're curious about that now. But at the time, we were trying to draw a straight line from the finding of a grill to a date with a girl, with a twist at the end. Anything that didn't help us get from Point A to Point B was left out. Mastery demanded it.

Metaphoria

In today's Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan says the current health care bill "will now get lost in the mists and disappear. It is a collapsed souffle in an unused kitchen in the back of an empty house."

And over at The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse is asking "where will the court's raging judicial hormones lead it next, now that it has experienced the joy of overturning?"

Ah, metaphor.

I once recommended to the president of a broadcasting company that he sell his 27 barely break-even radio stations and focus on his seven TV stations that were making hundreds of millions of dollars. But to give it a little extra kick, what I wrote was "Let's take all these radio stations, put them in a paper bag, drop it on someone's front porch, set fire to it, ring the doorbell, and run." He stared at me for a long time, and then he put me on retainer.

Elizabeth Warren tells a story about data

I pre-ordered Garr Reynolds's second book, Presentation Zen Design, because he makes me better at what I do. It's been on my desk for a few weeks, and I pick it up from time to time and think about his "ways to think like a designer." One of those ways is "Become a master storyteller." Okay, that's on everyone's list these days. I read what Garr says, and I don't feel like it's made me any better as a storyteller. I've been wondering how I would deal with that topic.

And then, last night, I was thinking about Elizabeth Warren, and how every introduction of her starts off by saying, essentially, that she was born and raised in Oklahoma and now here she is, incredibly, against all odds, a professor at Harvard. I happen to know there are lots of ways to grow up in Oklahoma, and at bedtime on a school night I suddenly had to find out exactly what part of Oklahoma Professor Warren grew up in, and what was it like. I never even found out what town in Oklahoma, but I did end up watching a lecture she gave at Berkeley. She came with a bunch of statistics comparing family budgets as they looked in 1970 and in 2006. All on PowerPoint graphs. But here's how she talked about them:

You may be surprised to know that there's a place in the federal government where they've kept track of everything a family spends, going back over a hundred years. When I found out about that, it was like I had died and gone to heaven. So I called them up and actually talked to a real person. I asked him if we could slice and dice those figures and he asked me to tell him exactly what I wanted. So I said, give me a mom, a dad and two kids, and tell me what they spent on clothing in 1970 and in 2006. Because, you know, we have these $200 Nikes now and all these special stores in the malls. And he came back and said the difference was 30 percent. I was sure he meant 30 percent more in 2003, but he meant 30 percent less. And the next eight times I talked to him, it was with the firm belief that he was reading the numbers wrong. But no, so I said let's look at appliances, because you know we didn't have to have microwaves or cappuccino makers in 1970. Only to find out that we spent less on appliances in 2006. And so we looked at food, and not just at the grocery store, but fast food restaurants. And the numbers showed that we were spending less in 2006...

Now, those may not be her exact words. I didn't go back and look at the video this morning. I'm going on memory. And I'm also telling the story the way I would retell it at lunch today. Check it out for yourselves -- I think you will find that my version is accurate, if a little compressed. And I could tell you the rest of what she said, but that's not the point. The point is this: If her slides were in Garr Reynolds's book, or Nancy Duarte's, they would be the "before" example, not the "after." And I'm all for making them better. But despite that handicap, she kept me up last night long past my bedtime. It wasn't the slides. And it wasn't what I could learn from the slides. It was because she took me on the same journey she had been on. Oh my goodness, the government has these numbers? There's a real person I can talk to? They will slice them any way I want? The results came back and everything I thought I knew was wrong?

That's how you become a master storyteller. By telling the stories only you could tell.

Five sentences

Some recent sentences I'm happy to have written:

"It was the kind of crazy idea that Alberto Colzi would never have approved in the old mindset." It's a sentence on which a story pivots. There was an old mindset, and now there is a new one. There's an idea on the table, and it's crazy. One man gets to decide. Things are not usually so portentous in corporate writing.

"Complexity never sleeps." Admittedly, I'm a sucker for assigning human characteristics to abstract nouns. I also carry around with me a few Neil Young influences.

"The Gooley Club, on Third Lake in the Essex Chain, is six miles from the nearest road." It's about the specificity: Gooley Club. Third Lake. Essex Chain. Six miles. We're painting a picture of a real outpost in the middle of a managed forest that provides pulp for a paper mill. The club is run by and for conservationists. They serve as "extra eyes and ears" to monitor the well-being of the forest. You should feel good about buying your paper from this mill.

"We have this orphan drug for this orphan disease." Words matter. When you're given a word like "orphan," run with it. It is actually a technical term in the pharmaceutical industry, dating back to and before The Orphan Drug Act of 1983. Nevertheless, a word like "orphan" goes straight to a place we all want to reach as writers.

"To have adjusted so quickly and effectively in mid-course is an indication, in my judgment, of the outstanding financial discipline, operational agility and managerial commitment we have in our company." You don't see the beauty in that? It's in the stability of "financial discipline," "operational agility" and "managerial commitment." You're looking at word pairs of 19 characters, 18 characters and 20 characters. Substitute a shorter word anywhere in the triad, or insert an extra word, and the beauty is gone.

Shopping for punctuation marks

If I were going out to restock punctuation marks, I would buy a pound of periods and the same of commas. More endashes and colons than are probably good for me. A small bag of ellipses if I'm writing a speech, but not if I'm writing for print. Wouldn't take an exclamation mark even as a free sample. The economy pack of quotation marks, apostrophes and hyphens. Ambivalent about semicolons. And then we come to the little pairs of parentheses. Never buy them, as a rule. Got little to no use for them. I figure, if you can't say something right out in the open, then why mention it at all? But then, in this morning's New York Times, there was this:

Since its release in December, James Cameron's science-fiction epic has broken box office records and grabbed two Golden Globe awards for best director and best dramatic motion picture. But it has also found itself under fire from a growing list of interest groups, schools of thought and entire nations that have protested its message (as they see it), its morals (as they interpret them) and its philosophy (assuming it has one).

That's mighty fine use of the parenthesis, right there. A body probably ought to have a few around, just in case an opportunity like this comes along. Okay, I'd take three pair. Probably a total waste.

The art of the input session

I'm sitting at a table of about 15 people, all of them talking about what their organization stands for. They're collectively working very hard to help me "understand." I'm saying as little as possible, trying to be a bottomless receptacle. I don't want to take them in any one direction. I want to see where they will go on their own. Mostly, I listen and nod.

They talk and they talk and they talk. We're not capturing anything; no easels, no white boards. (But I am unobtrusively running my digital recorder.)

About an hour into this group effort, someone at the end of the table says something that rings true and pure to my ears. I don't remember the exact words, but it was in three parts, like "We are people who believe A, B and C. Very different from those who go in the direction of X, Y and Z. And therefore, what we do is 1, 2 and 3."

Instantly I know I've got what I came for. As soon as this person finishes talking, someone decides to call me out. He says, "So are you getting any of this?" To which I respond:

"I think our message is that we are people who believe A, B and C. Very different from those who go in the direction of X, Y and Z. And therefore, what we do is 1, 2 and 3."

I was very careful to repeat, exactly, the sentences I had just heard. I thought it would be funny. I thought we would all have a great laugh. But no one even smiled. They just stared at me. And I realized they hadn't heard what I had heard. They were taking this as my distillation of everything that had been said. Then, as one, they exhaled. They took their elbows off the table and leaned back in their chairs. They smiled, not in a ha-ha way, but more like "whew..." And one of them said, "You see! THAT is why we brought a writer to this meeting."