May 16, 2008
HOW TO SAY IT: BUSINESS WRITING THAT WORKS by Adina Rishe Gewirtz: “I was writing a book, and didn’t know it…”
James Thurber used to tell a great story about himself. He’d be standing at a party, I guess staring off into space, and his wife would say to him, “Damn it, Thurber, stop writing!”
I can relate. For almost two decades, I was writing a book, and didn’t know it.
It started back in Journalism school at the University of Maryland in the late 1980s, where I had the good fortune to study my craft under some fantastic teachers, one of whom was two-time Pulitzer-prizewinner Jon Franklin. He had pioneered an outlining system that transformed standard news pieces into narrative gold – real stories that people wanted to read. In school, he taught that system to his students as the best way to take advantage of how the brain naturally takes in information – in traditional story form.
I drank those lessons up, because until meeting Jon, I’d relied on inspiration and gut to get me through as a writer. Those are two essential ingredients, but they’re not enough. When you’re dealing with complicated ideas, you need some way to get a grip on them, some way to see the story before writing it.
So I learned. And after graduation, I used Jon’s system in my freelance work. It just made sense. I learned to add to it, too, remolding parts so I could use them better. Then one day a friend asked me if I might help her son, a learning-disabled high schooler, with writing. I said sure, and decided to try showing him how I approached my own writing. I worried that the system wouldn’t work for him. I thought maybe it was meant just for professional writers. But he looked at the steps I laid out for him, and I could almost see the light bulb switch on over his head. He loved it!
Not only that, but it worked. It worked better than I could have imagined, and more quickly, too. In no time, he had the sense of it, and his writing improved dramatically. With this early success, I started teaching writing on a more regular basis, first at a community college, then for the accounting giant Arthur Andersen. The system never failed to work. Whether I was teaching senior citizens, high school students or accountants, they all loved it for its sheer logic. Most of all, the system took the fear out of the writing process.
After a while, I began teaching high school students one-on-one, often in the evenings, sometimes at school. And that’s when the gentle pushing began. A learning specialist overheard my lesson one day and asked to see my system, saying she’d never heard a better way to teach writing. Most of all, my husband launched a campaign with the refrain: “You ought to write a book, you know. Nobody teaches writing that way.”
I worried a book about writing would bore people. But that’s where, after all my years working on the nuts and bolts of craft, inspiration kicked back in. One day, I started to hear the book in my head, and I was amazed to find out it was funny! Even more astonishing, it came fairly quickly, because, in fact, I discovered I’d been writing it in my head for more than fifteen years.
So I wrote it, laughing a lot of the time, found an agent who was interested in it, and watched in sheer wonder as she sold it to Prentice Hall, a division of Penguin. They gave me a great editor who appreciated my sense of humor, and in no time, it was in the bookstore. So that’s the story behind How to Say It: Business Writing That Works!
Adina Rishe Gewirtz is the author of HOW TO SAY IT: BUSINESS WRITING THAT WORKS. You can visit her website at www.writersroadmap.com.
• More than 200 women kill their children in the United States each year.
ndparents. Growing up, I was always looking at the pictures of my maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother (pictured here) and wondering about their personalities and what I might have inherited from them. I wondered what were their childhoods were like and in what ways did that shape the way they parented my mother and father, which might have influenced the way they would parent me – and ultimately, how I might parent my own children.
There has to be a better way. That’s what I thought to myself for years when reading all manner of strange and sundry articles about assorted upheavals, unrest and turmoil around the globe. Isn’t there somewhere where people are naturally in harmony with their environment and with the creatures around them? The concepts of naturalness, balance and harmony are all interwoven into the complicated plot threads of fantasy, romance and adventure, so evident in the 600+ pages of The Winds of Asharra. The book is not just a story of an epic adventure or a otherworldly romance. It is a journey of self discovery not only for the characters but for the author as well (and hopefull for the readers). The creation of Asharran culture, so rich and complete including language, rituals and worldview, enabled me to create my place that indeed has “a better way.” This mystical world of the purple sky, under twin suns, is the backdrop for an exploration of what it means to change one’s way of looking at oneself and the universe. I spent many years studying a variety of diverse cultures ,religions and societies. Frequently, I would rejoice over the discovery of some little “nugget” of wisdom or example that people could really be in harmony with their world and be happy. However, the more tidbits I amassed, the more I felt ultimately unsatisfied, since the result was a crazy patchwork that didn’t quite fit together. Asharra changed all that. This strange and sensual alien world, seen through the eyes of two American teenagers suddenly transported there, was my backdrop. The term “Asharra” to the native Asharrans means “the home around us” and applies to their planet and every living thing on it. They believe you don’t even have to be born there to be Asharran, so long as you are natural and “true” (in their terms). Thus, when one native Asharran tells the two main characters (from Earth), “welcome home”, it is because Asharra is simply the home they have never seen yet. Superimposing an entertaining adventure and romance story upon accounts of semi-utopian philosophy and fantasy alien culture was the proverbial icing on the cake for me. The fact that the story contains fanciful elements like telepathic trees, musical dragons and evolved felines made the creation of The Winds of Asharra a pure joy to write. The combination of the ecologically friendly mystical Asharran philosophy and culture, with the unusual characters and setting is a fusion which pleases me greatly. To me, The Winds of Asharra stealthily addresses many present day concerns while managing to tell an unusual and complex story. For each bit of adventure, humor or sex appeal, there is an integrated “nugget” of my own which I unashamedly share. James Hilton told us in the 1930’s that there was a better way, in his classic work, Lost Horizon. It was something I read several decades ago and which subconsciously influenced me when setting out to chronicle the adventures of the strange creatures of Asharra (and their Earth-Asharran immigrants). For me, The Winds of Asharra is not only an exciting fantasy/romance novel. It represents a new possibility for the readers of today, just as the land of Shangri-la, to Hilton’s audience represented that same half remembered vision to his generation. I wrote not only to entertain but also to reassure the reader and inspire him or her to never give up hope for a better tomorrow. I ask each reader to stretch the line between myth and mundane when they read this book and perhaps, echoing the experiences of Victor and Zoe, the two teenagers from Earth, to discover that there is a better way. Things might actually get better if we look at the world differently. As the Asharrans say, the only way to fail is if you give up. By that definition, since I plan on continuing to write other stories about the world of Asharra, I have already succeeded.
The idea for “Checkmate” was spawned by one of those true crime shows on Court TV. Actually I guess it’s called “True TV” now, but it will always be Court TV to me. The report dealt with a man who had tied up his wife and kids, locked them in a windowless pantry, and set the house on fire. They all died. He’s on Death Row. The story stayed with me for days. I was both horrified and fascinated. Then I began to think about what might have happened if the family had lived.
First having been personally regressed so I wanted to create a story connecting past lives. I also have been intrigued with history since my youth. I chose the Alexander the Great period, because Alexander fascinated me with his military and political strategies which were so far ahead of his time. But during my research, I realized that his personality has lightly been dealt with—so I furthered my research of Alexander about his personal life’s events and his own idiosyncrasies. During my research I found him still a teenager emotionally but a prodigy like I said well ahead of his time. So that became the start but only the start. I researched Greece & Crete along with Alexander for about a year before I finally sat down and wrote “The Heretic.” And when I began to write like watching a movie, it was drawn from my images into paper like an artist sketching his rendering on canvas.
Why We Left Islam, a collection of 23 personal testimonies of former Muslims and why they decided to leave Islam behind, was birthed when Susan Crimp and myself decided that these stories simply needed to be shared with the world. People ask if we had an agenda. Absolutely. For those who regularly follow the news, it is apparent that within most Western nations, there is a rapidly increasing occurrence of human rights violations that come as a direct result of the influx of Islam into the West. For those of us in the West who still value human rights and human freedoms, a very important decision is now confronting us all: Which principles takes priority over the others; human rights and freedoms or openness and tolerance. Unfortunately, many today seem to be choosing tolerance over human rights and human freedoms. This book was compiled with the hope that many in the West will begin to wake up and realize that as valuable as the principles of tolerance and openness are, they must be limited. When we as a tolerant and open society begin to tolerate human rights violations and efforts to exalt a regressive culture over our own, then we have not only begun to commit cultural suicide, we have also failed as human beings. The West stands at a crucial juncture in its history. At the beginning of the 21st Century, the decisions that we make in the immediate days to come will determine whether or not we survive on into the next century, of if become history—to be replaced by a globalized Islam.
When my editor suggested writing a book about women supporting each other through the fat wars, little did she know that she was asking me to write about my life. Only a few months before two good friends and I had joined together and formed what we called a diet triage, e-mailing our weekly goals, walking together, yanking firmly when one of us wandered too close to a candy shop. So writing a book about this subject was like writing about myself. Well, to some extent. I’m not worried about my husband cheating. But a lot of the other adventures in my book – sneaking into the cookies, mixing diet pills and diet pop and winding up at the emergency room strapped to a bunch of equipment – those are mine. I think most of us women have, at one time or other, grappled with that four letter word, diet. I also think the best way to overcome bad eating and exercise habits and forge new ones is with the support of friends. In fact, the best way to do anything is with friends.
