A path lit by words


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An “American” twist on “Show, don’t tell”

Every writer has heard the advice, “Show, don’t tell.” It usually means conveying a feature of your character or setting by “evocative description” rather than “simple exposition.” Science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer uses these terms in an old but still relevant article, and offers several good examples. I thought I got it—until I watched an episode of The Americans last week.

If you don’t follow the show, the central characters are a pair of married KBG spies—Phillip and Elizabeth—living in a Washington, D.C suburb during the Cold War. They routinely commit acts of treachery and violence that I’ve considered gratuitous, designed to keep the show moving and to ensure that viewers don’t forget that these sympathetic characters are, after all, enemy agents. It’s a lot like Tony Soprano, whose entourage—kids in trouble, a mother with Alzheimer’s and terminal bitterness, a long-suffering wife, and a psychiatrist to help him cope with his anxiety—almost make us forget he’s a mob boss until one of his crew of psychopathic intimidators and assassins blows a man’s brains out or crushes a defiant shop owner against his car.

Last week’s episode of The Americans, called “Baggage,” included a scene that grabbed me by the throat and showed me how much may be lurking behind violence. An American diplomat’s wife, recruited by Phillip, is strangled while seducing a Pakistani intelligence agent. Phillip hears it all from the hotel room next door and rushes in to do damage control. The naked dead woman is laid out on the floor when Elizabeth rolls an enormous suitcase into the room. You’ve seen it before, you think. The scene will end there, because you know what’s coming. Body. Suitcase. The suggestion is enough.

But it isn’t—not for this show. While the horror-struck killer looks on, Phillip and Elizabeth force the woman’s body into the suitcase. They don’t pretend she is made of rubber; while we watch—and listen—they systematically break her arms and legs at every joint, accompanied by crunching and popping sounds. The characters do not speak; they grunt, wince, and grimace with the effort. They are grim, but not squeamish, as thorough and efficient as if they are packing a moving box with kitchen items or fitting the family luggage in an overfull car trunk. At one point, Elizabeth yields her place to the killer—and snaps a photo of him with the dead woman’s leg in both hands. The look on her face is chilling. It says, better than words, “What? I’m just doing my job.”

The sequence was both unbearable and riveting. I tried to look away, but I kept looking back because there was so much to see. Characters were developing right before my eyes, transforming in ways I couldn’t have imagined. The glances exchanged by Phillip and Elizabeth made it clear they would never again think of themselves—or each other—in the same way. The writing was brilliant and ruthless, a stunning example of “show, don’t tell.” Yes, it was TV, which by definition, shows, but there is much to be learned from it, even though we put words on the page, not images on screen.

The first thing I plan to do is watch that episode again, as many times as necessary to understand every nuance, so I can write it as if it was happening in a story or a book. And then I will scour my novel to discover where I’ve disadvantaged my characters and my story by masking a change—by being coy or squeamish, showing too little rather than too much.


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When human bias creeps in…

surveytableRecently I worked on a change readiness survey for a large employer replacing their payroll and human resource systems. Among the interesting results, one area caught my attention: Employees’ perceptions of their own, their departments’, and their organization’s adaptability to change. The table shows what they said.

It made me wonder: If so many employees consider themselves adaptable to change, how is it possible that their departments and the organization as a whole lag so far behind?

I’ve had some experience with cognitive biases, errors in thinking that influence how we make decisions. A long list of biases includes “illusory superiority,” often referred to as the “above-average effect,” “superiority bias,” and my favorite, the “Lake Wobegon effect,” named after Garrison Keillor’s fictional town “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”

Many studies document the human tendency to rate ourselves higher than others in academic, work, and social settings, on intelligence, job performance, and positive personal characteristics. However, most research lacks an objective standard to determine if, in fact, respondents are rating themselves accurately—that is, if they really are above average. To address that gap, one study used a population considered irrefutably negative:  prisoners convicted of robbery or violent crimes.

Researchers asked the prisoners to assess themselves against the average fellow inmate and the average free man on nine positive traits. The result: The prisoners rated themselves above average on eight of the nine traits—moral, trustworthy, honest, dependable, generous, compassionate, self-controlled, and kind—against both standards. On the ninth trait—law-abiding—they considered themselves only average.

Not surprisingly, the researchers declared these results conclusive evidence that the above-average effect is caused not by rational judgments but by people’s self-enhancement needs. Other studies have shown that the tendency to evaluate oneself more positively than other people is more apparent for important traits than for unimportant ones. So, consider my client, in the throes of major change. What trait could be more important to its employees than individual adaptability?

I can’t prove it, but I’m willing to bet that the above-average effect is at work in the results shown above, and in many surveys that ask employees to report on themselves and their abilities. In the case of a change initiative, taking employee responses at face value could be a huge mistake. It might cause leadership to become complacent; or the change team to back off project communication; or employees who overrate themselves to take training efforts less seriously than they should. It might cause the change effort to fail.

In short, organizations should err on the side of caution, knowing bias creeps in. To do anything else would be to succumb to another type of bias—the tendency to believe what you want to be true.

 


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Let the agent find you!

As 2015 begins, I’ve been musing about the business of writing, especially the tedious and inefficient process called “getting published.” In the past, I’ve compared finding an agent to searching for a job or a spouse, but if I learned one thing in 2014, it’s that authors face a far greater challenge. While job seekers and singles can take comfort in the knowledge that two interested parties are trying to find each other, the burden of securing an agent falls almost entirely on the author.

So why isn’t there a matching service that helps agents and authors find each other? On dating sites, members describe themselves and who they are seeking—aware that others are seeking them, too. Job boards allow candidates to “Find a job” and employers to “Find talent.” Even better, the latest job search apps (see New Year, New Job) target passive candidates with a tag line, “let the job find you.”

If only it worked that way with agents, but “Find an agent” websites don’t even have a dual path. It is up to the author to search agent information—which, too often, is broad, limited, and, I suspect, outdated almost as soon as it is posted. Because agents change agencies, preferred genres, and “dream books” according to market trends, authors often feel like we’re throwing darts and hoping one hits. It doesn’t help that every rejection letter reminds us, “This business is subjective. What doesn’t ring true with one agent may click with another, so keep trying.”

There is a better option: Make the process two-way by creating a clearinghouse for authors to submit a bio, query letter, synopsis, and sample pages in standard formats to a searchable database. Imagine how much more efficient that would be for all concerned. Authors would prepare one set of materials instead of tailoring them to each agency’s requirements. Agents could read what they want to. Query letter only? No problem. If they hate it, they can stop reading. If they like what they see, they can move on immediately to read sample pages or a synopsis, even the whole manuscript if they so choose. An approach like this might even encourage a dialogue between authors and interested agents!

How hard could it be to build a database, establish search parameters, and write a few algorithms to spit out potential matches between agents and authors? Monster, LinkedIn, and others have done it with resumes and work history. Match.com and eHarmony have done it with personal profiles and dating preferences. There might be a few kinks to work out–privacy, for one–but I think most authors would jump at the chance. Whoever out there wants to take this on, I’ve written an irresistible tag line for your marketing efforts: “Let the agent find you!”


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A lesson in gratitude

I didn’t set out to blog about Thanksgiving. In fact, I swore I wouldn’t. I’m a guest this year, so I’m not brining a turkey in a forty-gallon washtub or surfing the Internet for gluten-free stuffing and sugar-free pie. And the world has enough of the “what I’m thankful for” posts that crop up each year like stalks of ornamental corn. My position on gratitude is that it should be a daily practice, carried out in private. Count your blessings and thank who you wish. Just leave it at that.

Nevertheless, it is true that being grateful can become rushed and rote, like the “God bless Mommy and Daddy” prayers of my childhood. I repeated them each night, my eyelids heavy, not fully aware of what I was saying or why. Gratitude can be like that. Even in the face of poverty, illness, and suffering, it is easy to take our blessings for granted, but the source—whatever you call Him/Her/It— finds unexpected ways to make its presence known.

Mid-afternoon one day last week, I was browsing dinner recipes when I found a hearty soup that called for leeks. I headed for Publix and pulled into the lot—slowly, as I’ve seen too many parking lot fender benders not to be cautious. Usually, I leave the close spaces for the retirees who share this Hilton Head community, but that day I felt a little creaky from a new exercise class. I bypassed a few spaces and eased into one not far from the store’s entrance.

Eased is the critical word here. The landscaped islands that divide the lot into rows have low curbing that scrapes the underside of my front bumper if I’m not careful, so my foot was on the brake. I had nearly stopped when the car roared like a Ninja and leapt the curb. Suddenly airborne across a five-foot island, I saw myself crashing through parked cars and mowing down innocent shoppers. Scant seconds later, the car came to rest—gently—in the vacant handicapped space on the other side of the barrier, as if the car had overruled my choice of parking space and taken an unconventional route to get there.

I don’t know what caused my car to take off like a rocket; it may have been unintended acceleration, a mechanical defect that has caused terrible tragedies. Nor do I know what stopped my flight. What I do know is that, in a busy parking lot, I selected one of the few spaces with no vehicle parked opposite, navigated between a metal signpost and an ornamental tree, and struck nothing but a shopping cart. I am profoundly grateful that what might have been a horrible tragedy was no more than an embarrassing incident that means the next time I shop at Publix, I’ll wear Groucho glasses and a mustache.

Joking aside, I can’t stop wondering why it happened, and maybe that’s why it did. This year, I have a new definition of “what I’m thankful for” that transcends the things we ask for and do—or do not—get.  That’s why I’m sharing a special kind of gratitude: for the blessings I receive that I don’t know I need.


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Creative disruption

Last week I blogged for Steelbridge Solutions, a consulting firm that works in Human Resources technology, helping companies replace legacy systems with Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS solutions are sworn to improve efficiency and functionality at a lower operating cost, in part, by reducing the number of employees required to manage them. All good, right? Maybe, maybe not— because providers leave the bad news out of their sales pitch: new technology disrupts an organization.

For my purposes here, the causes of disruption aren’t important. The point is that, usually, disruption is thought of as negative. Consider its definitions: to break apart or rupture; to throw into disorder; to interrupt an event, activity, or process; to destroy, usually temporarily, the normal continuance or unity of a process or thing. No wonder most human beings hate disruption. It’s difficult and painful. It takes us out of our comfort zone. We resist, making it harder on ourselves, and even as we adjust, we mourn the old order, convinced that the new solution will never really work.

But Professor Clayton M. Christensen of the Harvard Business School has developed  a concept called disruptive innovation that has a positive spin. When applied to technology, it means “any technology that displaces an established technology and shakes up the industry, or a ground-breaking product that creates a completely new industry.” Think email and “snail” mail, PCs and typewriters, or, more recently, the new Apple Watch and traditional luxury timepieces. In fact, Apple’s design head, Sir Jonathan Ive, has claimed that the iWatch will “disrupt the Swiss watch industry.”

All of this made me wonder about applying disruption to writing, and then, what to call it. When I typed creative disruption into my search engine,  I found it already in use, all over the Web, by business, government, and social organizations. In every case, it means seeking disruption because it forces individuals and companies to adapt, learn, and improve.

We authors can be protective. Certain parts of our stories and novels fall just short (and sometimes not so short) of sacred. It could be a character we adore, a scene that sings, the paragraph that has opened all seventeen drafts of a manuscript, or the themes we can’t let go of, even when our books have taken a different direction than we expected.

Especially if a manuscript has languished in Query Land, it’s time to seek disruption. Blow your baby up, break it apart, and put it back together in a brand new way. At different times, I have nuked my first chapter, wiped out favorite scenes, and killed off my hero’s love interest. Once, I transgendered my hero because an agent said that to appeal to women, my book had to have a heroine. (I’m pleased to report that the surgery was reversible.)

Making changes like these is hard, and it hurts, like a bizarre form of grief with no truly dead bodies, but one day you’ll discover the startling truth: your hero’s kid brother was a pain in the neck, that clever subplot was a risky distraction, and your opening pages, once thick with back-story, are so crisp and compelling that agents can’t resist asking for a full.

Seek disruption. Start small if you have to, but challenge yourself to take manageable risks. Future readers will thank you for it.


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Leaders: On telling your story

once upon a time

When Blessing-White‘s recent article, The Importance of Narrative, arrived in my inbox, I clicked on it right away. Writers are keenly aware that the business world has a love-hate relationship with people like us—we are welcome in good times, but too often expendable, a luxury some companies choose not to afford. So I was curious to see what a business consultancy had to say about narrative.

The Blessing-White article endorses our central belief in the power of story. It encourages business leaders to share their personal stories with employees “to show who they are in a way that builds trust and expands their credibility, while allowing their direct reports to be inspired and engaged by them.”

Hmm, said my inner cynic. I’ve heard those words before. I’ve lived in a business world filled with stories: Those aimed at the external audience (developed by Marketing, in order to sell) and those meant for a company’s internal audience (Employee Communications, designed to guide and/or change behavior). In that world, stories can be deceitful and manipulative. They aren’t always true.

Then there are leadership stories created by the media. They give us legendary CEOs like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jack Welch, and notorious CEOs like Bernie Ebbers, “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, and Ken Lay. Some CEOs fall in between—think Ted Turner and Larry Ellison. Their stories are colorful, frequently inspiring, and too often cautionary.

Blessing-White’s article is refreshing because of its emphasis on truth and its apparent focus on the unsung, not-famous senior leaders who step up every day to empower, engage, and inspire—in short, to lead. It espouses honesty and openness, the willingness to be vulnerable, and a commitment to show respect for one’s audience. And wonder of wonders, it quotes Joseph Campbell, best known for The Power of Myth, who defined the purpose of myths as “a way to make sense of life in the world and establish a shared set of rights and wrongs.” That is a noble challenge for leaders—not just of our corporations, but of our government and organizations of every kind.

Even better, stories can create a vibrant and compelling vision for the future. To quote Blessing-White, “Stories explore the possibility of where we can take ourselves and our organizations with a little imagination and a significant effort. Your way of editing the story of your business and its goals for the future makes you the editor, author and storyteller all at once.”

Kudos to global consultancy Blessing-White. The world will be a better place when more leaders lead by your model.


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What’s in a word?

brand

What’s in a word?

A lot, especially if it’s jargon.

Reading an article from Fast Company called “5 Secrets to Better Employee Engagement,” I got distracted by the author’s use of the word “brand.” The article itself was great, dead on in most ways in terms of actions and approaches that increase engagement. My comment to the author was:

“Please, whatever you do, don’t call it an employment brand in public, to your employees. The word is too buzzy, it sounds phony or pretentious, and it makes a lot of employees suspicious about your motives.”

As a communicator, I’ve been there, done that. I spent 25 years in Human Resources, land of buzzwords, acronyms, and jargon, beginning with what we called ourselves. Just this morning I googled “names for Human Resources” and dropped into discussions that were remarkable in their earnestness: Groups of people debated the pros and cons of Human Capital Management, People and Culture, People Relations Management, Talent Management, and the Center for Organization Effectiveness, to name a few. Google calls its HR function People Operations, a name I like because it’s simple. It makes it clear that people are there to work. It doesn’t get snarled up in the emotional argument that the word “resources” depersonalizes human beings.

Here’s the point: Whatever you call it, the intention is what counts, and after that, the behavior. How does the company treat its employees, associates, assets, resources, talent—whatever it calls the people who do the work? And that’s where things so often fall apart.

The article about employment branding to increase engagement set me off because it reminded me of an “initiative” I worked on. The consultants arrived with glossy presentations filled with jargon and catchy phrases that were quickly picked up by the project team, a group of people engaged in a risky endeavor—risky because their employer was notorious for being alternately oblivious to and demeaning of its staff. The project team felt threatened because their coworkers already were suspicious and tense. The consultant’s elite lexicon, with its pillars and proof points, purchase drivers and messaging matrices, made the project team feel special. It made them feel safe. Unfortunately, it made the rest of the workforce angry, bordering on hostile, first, because it excluded them and second, because it seemed to be missing the point.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for employment branding because it takes a thoughtful and deliberate approach to people, in the context of business strategy and culture. I love acronyms for their cleverness and jargon for its precision. But linguistic devices need to stay behind closed doors, restricted to those who already speak the language.

The best communication happens when you forget about yourself, your insecurities, and your needs, and speak to your audience in terms that are clear, candid, and meaningful to them. Paired with consistent, follow-up actions, there is no better way to build a dedicated workforce that returns your sincerity and respect.


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The devil is in the details

fishing boat at sunset

You’d think a guy like Robert Redford—actor, director, founder of the Sundance Film Festival, a guy who gave us Butch Cassidy, The Way We Were, and The Sting, not to mention Ordinary People—would know how to make a great movie. It turns out he made a rookie mistake in his last film, All Is Lost. The sailors who read Soundings magazine got all riled up, and one wrote an article titled, All That’s Wrong with All Is Lost.

It seems that Redford neglected to hire a technical consultant who could have educated him about bilge pumps, EPIRBs, and oh, yeah—the proper use of a life jacket. Let’s say the result was not something you’d display on your book jacket or movie review:

I spent the entire movie picking apart the implausible details, and I’m sure I missed many. “All is Lost” will have one positive value: It will provide endless fodder for discussion and laughter at dockside bars.

Ouch. But I married a sailor, and I know that community. They are fanatical about chart plotters, life rafts, gel coat, bottom paint, davits, and even electric heads (aka toilets). They attend boat shows in Miami and Annapolis, subscribe to Passage Maker and Sail, and debate—online or over a beer in the flybridge—life and death decisions like diesel versus gasoline, Cetol or varnish on their teak, and which brand of polish is best for their hulls. They care about all things boating, especially safety, and Redford and company insulted them: They failed to do their research.

That is sad, and so unnecessary. There really is no excuse—except laziness, arrogance, or cluelessness—for writers not to learn everything they can about the details that matter to their audience. These days, in particular, you can become an armchair expert by trolling the Internet. Even better, you can find  a real expert. They’re everywhere, and they’re surprisingly generous with their time and knowledge.

Here’s an example: When I was writing a mystery set on the South Carolina coast, the inciting incident was a murder. A hospital CFO went fishing to unwind after a disastrous public meeting. My villain was waiting to kill him and dispose of the body. Clueless how to write that scene, I reached out to a fishing guide service in Georgetown, South Carolina—Delta Guide Service, Gene Dickson, if memory serves—and asked for help.

Thanks to Gene, my CFO was fly-fishing on a creek, for speckled trout (it was June), in a seventeen-foot Boston Whaler, at dusk, when my villain, a diver, sneaked up on him. He hovered under the Whaler’s overhang (one finger in the bow eye), and yanked his victim overboard when he reached down to net his catch. The killer drowned him by holding him upside down in shallow water and drove his boat to a marker buoy. He sank the body with his weight belt and an anchor and followed it down to the bottom, stabbing it multiple times to release the gases that would have made it float. He tied the body to the buoy, where the “crabs and other creatures that lived in the weeds and debris that clung to the anchor and chain would make a fast meal of the corpse.”

Neat, eh? Plenty of details for a 1,600 word prologue.

Never forget, the devil is in the details. It makes sense to take time to learn them.


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To blog is human

blogging

I’ve been writing a novel for a while now, which means that people keep asking, “Got that book published yet?” As if it’s easy. As if I could be published if I wasn’t so lazy, dumb, and distracted. With that kind of pressure, it’s hard to think about anything but what you can do to make your book better. To draw the attention of an agent. To get a contract and be published.

A few months ago, after a request for a full manuscript ended in disappointment, I put my book aside. I didn’t write anything, and with time on my hands, I started reading about the business of writing. Want to get published? You need a website, a Facebook presence, and a blog. Writers really need to blog.

Oh, man. Really? Bloggers are narcissists. They are relentless self-promoters. The world already has too many bloggers. And so on.

I’ll spare you the details of my conversion journey, but I rolled up my sleeves and built a website on WordPress. I’ve been blogging since November 2013 and I highly recommend it. Here’s why:

  • A blog demands a commitment. Unlike the essays, short stories, and books that languish in forgotten Word files, “in progress” doesn’t work for blog posts. They must be completed and posted, on a schedule—once a week, or ten days, or two weeks. Finishing a piece of writing feels good.  I’ve written on deadline—usually someone else’s—so setting my own deadlines and sticking to them was a discipline I needed to learn.
  • A blog teaches you to be concise. Like any writing, a blog is a story—in 500 words or less. Beginning, middle, end. Tell the story. Notice what you had to cut to reach the right length, and apply the same principles to your other writing. Try it on short-short stories.
  • A blog gives you objective feedback. When you’re writing a book, your only readers are people you know, people you ask—too often,  because they’re friendly and safe. With a blog, your fans (and your critics) self-select. They tell you what they think. Whether you like it or not.
  • A  blog makes you human. It shows who you are as a person. Imagine an agent reading your dozen or so posts and saying, “Hmm. How interesting. I’d like to get to know her.” The same is true for any business person. Blogging puts you out there and makes you approachable.
  • A blog connects you. Writing is lonely, even if you love it. Writers need isolation, but we also need companionship to feed our minds and our hearts. Following others’ blogs helps you make a different sort of friend, one who shares your interests—and often your concerns.

Blogging will make you a better writer. It will expand your confidence, and if you let it, your self-knowledge. Sometimes what you learn will make you cringe; other times it will make you smile. All of it will help you move through life—as a writer and as a person.

So yes, I admit it: I love blogging.

But I still hate Twitter!


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Waiting for tulips

Tulips-1

I grew up in Pennsylvania, where spring bulbs not only thrive, but multiply, exploding each spring in waves of brilliant color. For twenty years, I’ve lived in the South, where daffodils and tulips have to be coaxed into half-hearted bloom and even then, they’re only good for one season. Despite mixed results, I keep planting them, but not without an argument. I stand over the bed, a spade in my hand, while a little voice whispers, “Remember Atlanta? You’re wasting your time.” Then a louder voice argues, “Give them a chance. Maybe they’ll grow.”

That voice is my mother. When I was a child, her kitchen garden spanned half an acre, with six-by-eight plots for my sister and me. Mom grew root crops and beans, lettuce and tomatoes, sweet corn and English peas. Her seasonal border charmed passing motorists, beginning with daffodils, tulips, and iris, and giving way, through the summer, to daylilies, gladiolus, and dahlias.

Her gardening impulse spilled over to the weird and wonderful hybrids advertised in the Sunday supplements and the back of Woman’s Day. Every few weeks, the mailman would beep and Mom would hurry outside, returning with a ventilated cardboard box from Gurney Brothers or Burpee. Inside would be a tomato plant that promised a three-bushel yield, a vine guaranteed to cover a twenty-foot fence in a single season, or a shrub that dared to flower half-pink and half-blue. Each one arrived as a humble three-inch stem with two leaves, its immature roots enclosed in a plastic bag of potting mix and straw. Mom nurtured them all, rejoicing when they thrived and shrugging—unconvincingly—when they didn’t. She played the game with vigor and she won more often than she lost.

One October, after a long time away, I went home for a visit. The first thing I  noticed was the dooryard garden, weed-choked and dry. There were no fading marigolds, no pungent chrysanthemums filling in until snow. My indefatigable mom, who  hand-mowed a half acre into her sixties, was slowing down. Our relationship had had its bumps, but gardening always brought us together, so I changed into jeans, armed myself with Mom’s shovel, and prepared to attack the neglected bed.

Mom stood by, wringing her hands. “Be careful,” she said. “There might be some bulbs.”

Might be some bulbs? Each thrust of the shovel brought out a clump of five, or ten, or even twenty. There were hundreds of bulbs. There were more bulbs than soil, and pretty soon we were giggling. While I dug out the weeds and amended the soil with compost and bone meal, Mom separated the daffodils from the tulips and the crocus from the grape hyacinths. Many were shriveled; others were beginning to rot. I would have thrown them out and started over, but that wasn’t Mom’s way. We planted every one, the last of them by the light from the porch.

That winter was hard and by January, Mom had grown weary of the cold. “Spring’s coming,” I’d say, and she’d answer, “I know, and I’m waiting for tulips.” I had my doubts that those bulbs would bloom, but I didn’t let on, and it’s a good thing: Those old bulbs put on a show that truly amazed me. Mom was ecstatic and I learned my lesson.

Now when the dreary months get me down, I remind myself spring’s coming. And thanks to my mom, I’m waiting for tulips.