Every so often I write about Walt.
How he got it in his head that sub-arctic temperatures sounded like a nice week away, and I went along with it, and came home short a few toenails. How I hand him the rental car counter, because I know he’s going to chew those people to bits if they keep him waiting, and I know I’ll be out on the patio pretending I’ve never met the man. How he tells me, again, to quit being such a people pleaser, because it does nobody any good, least of all me.
Then I turn the whole thing into a lesson about your book, and we all go about our hyper-productive day.
Today I’m going to deviate from that plan. Just to keep things interesting.
You know Walt as a character in my stories, but you may not know what he does for a living. That’s not your fault. I sort of wrote him that way.
Let me tell you about that rental car counter for a hot minute, because there’s another way to tell that story.
I’ve been telling it like it’s about a man with a temper. It isn’t. Watch what he actually does.
Years back, Walt booked us a car in Mallorca with an outfit that turned out to be a forty-minute shuttle ride into the countryside, where some ninety of us stood around a parking lot in the sun, waiting our turn like we were queuing for Beyoncé tickets.
He’s holding a deli ticket that says 62. The board says 54. He’s been standing there an hour and forty-eight minutes against a posted estimate of twenty-eight. And when the good people of OK Cars finally call his number and start in with the full tank of gas, and the incidental charges, and the nine hundred euro hold on the credit card, he does the same thing three times in a row.
He pulls out his phone. He opens the contract. He zooms in until the sentence is in 64-point font. And he says no like the word has three syllables.
He isn’t louder than they are. He isn’t meaner, though he gives it a run for the money. He simply knows exactly what his position is, he can point to it, and he will not be moved off it. No matter how hard the opposition chooses to push.
That’s what a career as a criminal defense attorney does to a person. (I’m wondering if I should go to law school.)
Out in that parking lot afterward, we ran into an American woman close to tears. She’d just handed over four hundred dollars for coverage she’d already paid for, and she couldn’t tell you how it happened. She said she just couldn’t argue anymore.
She had the same contract Walt had. She was right about the terms and she paid anyway — because being right isn’t what saves you. Being able to say it out loud, plainly, to somebody who’s counting on you not to. That’s the part that saves you.
I think about that woman a lot more than I expected to.
Because I watch a version of her every week, and she’s usually about three chapters into a book.
I’ll switch person here because this — OK, I could be guessing — is really about you.
You sit down to write the part where you explain how you’re different from the other eleventy people in your field, and you discover you don’t know. You’ve been running on referrals and being in the room and people liking you, which works beautifully right up until the moment you have to type it.
You sit down to name the outcome — the specific, desirable thing a person walks away with after working with you — and you produce four sentences that all mean it depends.
You sit down to say what you are, in one term a stranger could repeat to somebody else at a party, and out comes a job title that’s never been used in the history of language. Think: “I am an intuitive dog trainer who aligns behavior with the stars.”
And then it goes properly existential, because now you’re staring at a manuscript that’s supposed to be about what you know, and you’re no longer sure you know it.
That’s not writer’s block, honey. That’s a business problem that’s been sitting politely in a drawer for years, and the writing just dragged it, kicking and screaming, out into the light.
Which is one of the reasons, if you’re looking for credibility and authority in the marketplace, I recommend you write the damn thing. It’s the cheapest diagnostic you’ll ever run on yourself. (Unfortunately, you can’t fix reality until you face it. Ask me how I know.)
Now. Walt is head of book marketing and promotion at Summit Press Publishers. Which means most of my authors don’t meet him until the publishing stage, once the manuscript is finished.
Sometimes, however, when I need to bring in the big guns, I break my own process and put a client on a call with him in the middle of the book. One hour. He gets to the heart of it faster than anyone I’ve ever watched work.
They come out knowing who they are in the market. Knowing where the book can actually take a reader — not the vague promise, the actual destination. Knowing what their business model is, because the writing kept exposing the holes in it. And knowing what they want the book to do for them, not just for the reader, which is a question almost nobody thinks to ask, other than me, and which changes everything about what gets written.
His tool is one sentence. I help X do Y so they can Z.
That’s the whole thing. Same move as the rental counter. Find the sentence, blow it up to 64-point font, refuse to be moved off it.
I watched it end a year of paralysis in about forty minutes. Woman with a personal brand, a company, a product line, and a book on the way — four real things, all of them working — and she could not, for love nor money, tell you how they connected or what to call herself. One call.
Here’s the part that costs me something to write. Because Walt and I can be quite competitive. I so hate to admit he’s better at something than I am.
A few weeks ago, I was on a call with a man I’ve been working with for months. Sharp. Runs a firm. Writing a book that genuinely matters. His business is actively evolving right now, which affects the content of his book, not to mention every other related asset, so I suggested he get on a call with Walt so he could get clear enough to move forward without the non-stop second-guessing.
Not long after that conversation, he mentioned — casually, not unkindly — that he’d assumed Walt was simply my husband, and that “helping out when things got busy” was his top job. He’d appreciated the favor. (Sweet, when you think about it in those terms.)
Thing is, months before any of this, when he needed a website, and a LinkedIn presence, and someone to make his book and his speaking and his firm all point in the same direction, he went and hired strangers. Three months in now. He hates every piece of it. He’s got nothing to show anybody. He checked out the moment they asked him what color palette responds to him. (Yah, I don’t get that either.)
He wanted exactly what was standing in front of him in the form of Walt (and Summit Press Publishers). He went and bought a worse version of it somewhere else.
I can’t pin that on him. Nobody told him.
And I know exactly why nobody told him.
I write the copy around here.
Fifteen years of it. And every single time I’ve sat down to describe what the two of us actually are together, I’ve done the precise thing I just spent four paragraphs warning you about. Softened it. Made it smaller. Turned Walt into the guy who folds the laundry — he does, and, again, this grates on me, better than I do — instead of the guy who can take a thirty-year career and hand it back to you in one line.
Maybe because saying it plainly would require saying that we’re formidable. And I don’t do that.
I fold my hands in my lap and look docile. It’s a trick I picked up early and it has never once served me.
Walt’s been telling me to quit being a people pleaser for years now. I nod. Then I go back to my desk and write us small.
So people guess. And people guess low. Every single time.
That’s not on them. Nobody is under any obligation to figure you or me out.
So what’s the sentence?
Not the paragraph. Not the credentials. Not the thing with all the semicolons in it.
The sentence.
I owe Walt one. I’m working on it.
