How Not to Write
Publishing is personal.
Just so we’re crystal, understand that writers are my favorite people. Writers are my closest friends. Writers make up most my family. Fact.
So yesterday I pick up the phone in my office just after noon, cutting off the answering machine. A writer with an accent I couldn’t quite peg for a while on the other end. Didn’t catch the name, but that didn’t stop the writer from talking. Once identifying myself, assuring that I’d intercepted the message being left and that I was indeed a real person, the writer continued to talk.
The writer then talked uninterrupted about the writer’s book (manuscript?), periodically asking, “You still there?” for roughly an hour. Throughout, the writer was exuberant, sometimes seeming to get angry, almost pleading to win an argument that I wasn’t even participating in.
Learned many things over the course of that hour. Among them: exceptionally well educated, this writer, retired, and very passionate about a personal crusade to address the emotional and spiritual decay of peoples around the world in effort to provide enlightenment, possibly even solutions to heal; what effusive praise has been garnered from friends who’ve read the roughly “300 pages” of the book the writer has “written.”
Intrigued, the subject matter being in my bailiwick, I listened. Weather was hot yesterday and I needed a break from other work anyway, so I maybe listened too long before having more than enough information to provide wizened, professional advice, if in fact that’s what the writer called for.
Writer said, “Yes, that is why I called you. My book will be published, but I need help.”
Problem is, there’s no book. There is no manuscript. There are no pages. No outline exists of what shape such a book might take. No Chapter One. No nothing but dictated inquiries to ChatGPT that there is an ongoing online record-of-conversation of, which also resides on a smartphone. I think.
Did my best to inform needed steps to take moving forward, how to plausibly use an LLM for guidance, then asked the writer to email me for recommendations for a developmental editor more game than me once ready. When I say “ready,” what I mean is being able to provide something hardcopy. On paper.
The conversation kept me up most of last night. This morning, I needed to write my way through it in effort to understand how better I may have been able to help the writer. Because of the SCWC alone, I have countless conversations with aspiring and emerging writers every year. This one, however, was a first. I didn’t help. It miffs me.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with not knowing what you don’t know. The learning is what defines us individually. But adamantly denying what you don’t know? I don’t know how to fix that and it breaks me.
Don’t be that writer.