Tom Sawyering a book
The joy of collaboration, plus my weekly shareables: How you think, how doggy your name is, and RIP to old friends
The other day a few of us gathered at my dear friend Joe Posnanski’s house to help him finish a construction project. The project was his latest book, WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL, which comes out in September. If you also love baseball, if you don’t love baseball but might be persuaded, or if you’ve ever seen a baseball, you should buy it. I think that covers everybody.
Joe had promised to get a completed draft of the book to the publisher by Monday, and like most writers, he was racing to meet deadline. So he asked a few of us to read sections of the book and check for typos, stray words, misplaced punctuation—basically anything that looked out of place.
So we hung out and ate homemade pretzels and half-watched the Bengals-Bills game and gave the book a quick touch-up. We were all aware of the Tom Sawyer nature of the thing—Joe had talked us into whitewashing his fence. But in some ways that’s the best thing about a book. Nobody does it alone.
Joe was one of several friends who read my book THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM when it was still in its early stages and gave me great feedback. You have to choose carefully when you ask someone else to read your work. You don’t want somebody who tells you every sentence is gold. That’s not helpful. But you don’t want somebody to rip your world apart, either. What you’re looking for is someone who’s rooting for you and wants your work to be the best it can be.
That feedback comes in many forms. My friend Rosita Boland, a brilliant Irish writer, went through THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM with a pen. Every so often she’d circle a word or a sentence and write “Beautiful!” Every so often she’d cross out an entire paragraph and write “Rubbish!” But the book was so much better when she was done.
There’s a reason books have a section for acknowledgements. Beyond the people who are paid to work on a book—editors, artists, publicists and such—there’s a larger group of people who played some role in making it happen. That covers everyone from people the author interviewed, to friends who made suggestions, to spouses who took on an extra load at home so the writer could get the book done. (My wife, Alix Felsing, is doing this for me right now as I finish this dog book. Let this serve as a reminder that I owe her one. OK, many more than one.)
When I write a story or put out a podcast or whatever, I always feel a little guilty about seeing my name out front. There are always a lot of other hands that formed the work. That’s especially true with something as big as a book. It also, I think, applies to any big project you might be working on. There’s a certain fulfillment, I guess, in completing something big by yourself. But it sounds awfully lonely. And writing a book, at least, is lonely enough as it is.
It’s easier and more fun to build a tribe of friends and colleagues—people who will happily paint your fence, because they know that when it comes time to paint theirs, you’ll show up with a brush and a bucket.
10 things I wanted to share this week:
My weekly for WFAE was about the art in artificial intelligence—and why humans don’t have to worry just yet.
I contributed a few lines to Jeff Pearlman’s important discussion of how much writers should trust memory—even our own.
Are you a word thinker, a visual thinker, or somewhere in between?
Vivian Howard, the famed North Carolina restaurant owner and TV host, has a thoughtful piece in the New York Times on the struggle to keep ambitious restaurants open.
DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: A fun data search for how doggy your name is, or how human your dog’s name is. I scored a 34 on the dog scale and a 50 on the people scale.
Finished reading THE BEAUTY OF DUSK by Frank Bruni, a moving story about how a stroke threatened his eyesight—but also got him to see the world in a different way.
RIP Gwen Knapp, who was with me in the original crew of the startup Sports On Earth. I’ll miss her kindness, her toughness and her great phone calls.
RIP Todd McBride, who I met at a high-school summer program back in 1981. Even back then he reminded me of Tom Petty. He nearly made it to the bigtime with his band Dashboard Saviors.
(A side note: It had been a while since I talked to either Gwen or Todd. Don’t wait to track down your old friends.)
And RIP a guy I only met once, but who was a legend in Athens, GA for decades: William Orten Carlton, or as everybody called him, Ort.
YouTube music find of the week: Jennifer Hudson and Tom Jones trading licks on the UK version of THE VOICE. It should be noted that Tom Jones is 82 years old.
See y’all next week, everybody.
Tom Jones at 82! Just Wow on that number.
Gwen introduced me to your writing and told me how much she thought of both you and your work. I had planned to fly to NYC yesterday to see her at MSK, but she nixed that plan by dying too quickly. Her sisters held the phone up to her just after she passed so I could say good bye and tell her how much I loved her. Fifty years of friendship doesn't end with lymphoma. One of my last gifts to her was a packet of phone charging cords so she could keep calling me. I'll wait for the phone to ring forever.