Brian Hodge

Now you just stand there and think about what you’ve done. (Photo by Richo.Fan http://www.flickr.com/photos/richo-fan/ / CC BY 2.0)

An open letter to Anonymous:

I don’t know your name. I didn’t ask, and our mutual acquaintance was tactful enough not to volunteer it. So it’s not impossible you and I have crossed paths, but since I just don’t know, I can at least assure you:

This is nothing personal.

You and I were among five authors that a fledgling writer contacted, looking for advice concerning her first novel. She knew us only by our work, our reputations, and held them in high enough regard to believe we might have some worthwhile counsel.

Three of us she never heard back from at all, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes it takes me a long time to answer e-mail too. Good intentions alone don’t click the reply button.

You, though. What were you thinking?

Now, if you couldn’t be bothered, that’s one thing.

“I’m sorry, I wish I could help, but at the moment I’ve got so much on my plate I just can’t see past what’s right in front of me. Best of luck, though.”

That’s all you had to say. Cordial, honest, and while it may have come as a disappointment, no one would have thought any less of you. Would’ve taken you 30 seconds, tops.

Instead, I’ll bet you spent quite a bit more than half a minute on the way you handled it. Meaning time wasn’t the underlying issue at all, was it?

So I wonder: When you unloaded on her, did you think you were teaching her a lesson for having the gall to bother you? Did it give you some sort of petty satisfaction? Did you stew over it for a while, or did you let her have it with the first things that came to mind?

There are quite a few words that could apply to you, but let’s focus on just one:

Myopic.

Your reaction was myopic. Your sight fell short both ahead of you and behind.

First the forward myopia.

Did you pause to consider that you were losing a reader? Forever, probably? Do you think she’ll ever again see a work of yours and not remember your treatment of her, and pass it by?

I know for certain she’s bought books since then. Guess what. They weren’t yours.

And it may not be just her. There’s a marketing statistic I recall reading, that a person who has a negative experience with a company is seven times more likely to share it with other people than a positive experience.

So did you never consider that she might convey this experience with you to someone else? She may not have told me your name, but I’d be surprised if she hasn’t disclosed it to people she’s closer to. Members of a writers group, maybe, or others with whom she’s spent months or years honing her craft, who understand and empathize.

How eager do you think they’ll be now to contribute to your bottom line? Even friends of theirs, maybe. True, the damage may not extend out for too many degrees of separation. But neither will any good word of mouth. Odds are, you’ve lopped that branch off for good.

And now the backward myopia. Because you give the appearance of having forgotten a few things.

You seem to have forgotten how much courage it can take to reach out to a stranger, and how fragile confidence can be.

You seem to have forgotten that you were once unpublished. That you needed help, advice, wisdom, counsel. That you needed occasional pointers and course correction.

I wonder: Did you abide by your current creed then? Did you refrain from asking anyone for help? If you did, well, points for consistency to you, but still, such a solitary path seems pointless and self-limiting, because help was out there to be had.

And you seem, finally, to have forgotten the value of a few kind words. They cost nothing to give, yet to the recipient their worth can be inestimable.

Along the way I’ve been the beneficiary of many kindnesses, and can’t help but think of their sources with appreciation, warmth, and respect.

I don’t know if he’s still as accessible as he used to be, but there was a time you couldn’t find anyone, no matter how slim their resume, who had anything other than a good thing to say about how well they’d been treated by one particular resident of the top of the bestseller lists. I used to wonder how he had the time to respond to all the inquiries that no doubt came his way.

His name: Dean Koontz.

A few simple lines of encouragement he gave still live inside me long after, I’m sure, he’s forgotten giving them at all.

Others come to mind as well, none of whom behaved as though they were the guardians to some citadel of expertise. None of them seemed to believe they were members of a frat house entitled to haze pledges. None of them acted like they might enjoy clubbing baby seals.

Rather, they understood principles that escape some writers: Publishing is not a zero sum game. Your success doesn’t depend on anyone else’s failure. Part of success lies in how many others you can help climb higher.

These were writers who defined success to me, in more ways than one, and I can think of them as reflecting well in the light of a line I recently encountered:

“Money doesn’t change you. It just reveals who you are when you don’t have to be nice.”

As a beneficiary of each writer’s generosity of time and spirit, I imagine we both knew there was never anything I could do to offer payback in kind. Just this: remain a fan, read their work, and encourage others to do the same.

And try, however much I might fall short sometimes, to not lose sight of their example.

Either you too benefitted from such an example along the way, or you didn’t. It’s one or the other. But whichever it is, right now I kind of feel sorry for someone. Because either you, or they, probably deserved better.

So will the next writer who seeks your advice. And there will be a next time. I hope you come through. Really. I know you can, because you’ve overcome far greater obstacles.

They’re just panties, after all. So unwad them and do what we all have to do from time to time:

Back up and rewrite the scene for the better.

*****You are invited to segue over to my just-launched blog, Warrior Poet, which explores writing and storytelling through the lens of the ancient-yet-timeless warrior poet ethos. It’s still taking shape visually, but since when did custom headers matter more than words?

As 2009 was skidding into history’s ditch, it was a stellar way to wrap up a year, with all the makings of a buddy movie. Two friends — adoptive brothers, really — trekking hundreds of winter-lashed miles to attend the wedding of a third.

Both the bride and groom live in Los Angeles, as does a sizeable contingent of the guests. The happy couple, however, instead swapped vows in the deep-freeze flatlands of central Illinois, a location mutually inconvenient for just about everybody … except, of course, the bride’s family.

Thus, after my flying into Omaha and linking up with crime writer Sean Doolittle, the road trip leg of the journey cut through a monochrome wasteland of asphalt ripped up by the Midwest’s icy Yuletide blizzard, and littered with dozens of spun-out, flipped-over, half-buried vehicles still awaiting salvage.

This is not traditional wedding weather. This is weather that compels you to drag the brass monkeys in off the porch, cluster together, eat and drink a lot, make new friends, talk yourself hoarse, and laugh yourself delirious.

In all this, something unexpected and kind of reassuring emerged.

There were a lot of creative, accomplished people assembled for these nuptials. The bride is one of the head writers on the SyFy Channel’s series Eureka, with several TV movies also to her credit. The groom, our non-biological brother, is currently in the Warner Bros. TV Writers Workshop — one of 10 or so selected out of over 1500 hopefuls — that will almost certainly lead to a series gig upon completion.

Among the guests: A visual effects specialist who most recently worked on Avatar. His wife, an effects producer. A writer on Battlestar Galactica and its successor, Caprica. Another is a working musician. And so on. Wonderful people, all. I was fairly gobsmacked at the level and diversity of talent that had gathered for a couple days of celebration. I knew their work, in some cases, and liked it, respected it, even loved it.

Here’s the unexpected and kind of reassuring part: No few of them were gobsmacked right back.

It happened often enough that it seemed to Sean and me to be an identifiable trend. It wasn’t, in most instances, that they were familiar with our work. Novels tend to have a lower profile overall than films and TV. No, it was the fact that we engaged in it at all.

They couldn’t believe we wrote books. Entire books. They couldn’t imagine wrangling that … whatever it takes to crawl inside a blank Word document and come out six months or a year or longer later with a finished novel.

Why this reaction? I don’t know for sure, didn’t press, but maybe it’s this: that what film folk work on are parts of a whole. Even the writers of scripts, as important as they are, and as brilliant as they may be, still provide a skeleton of narrative. It’s the actors who jolt the characters to life, the lighting director who brings them in and out of shadow, the effects people who conjure the magic, the makeup artists who accentuate the positive and conceal the negative, and the director who rules over everyone.

But as writers of novels, even short stories, we do it all. While a film or a TV show is a team effort, the combined work of a small army, we prose folk are an army of one.

More than once on this trip I had occasion to recall and recount a parallel encounter from several years before, one that I’ll cherish until the day I die.

His name was Chris Whitley, and he was the kind of singer/songwriter/guitarist who seemed engineered down to the last chromosome to do what he did.

I’m one of those writers hugely influenced by music. When I wrote a novel called Wild Horses, there was no greater sonic influence on it than Chris Whitley’s debut album, Living With The Law. The entire CD felt like a soundtrack to the novel. During the writing, I compiled a more varied soundtrack that helped me remain deep inside the world of the novel; a couple of songs from Living With The Law went on it, including the title track, whose earthy yet epic sweep made a letter-perfect opening theme for the movie I saw in my mind.

Flash forward to an early April afternoon, another day of heavy, constant snow, one month after Wild Horses sold at auction for a very nice sum that pretty much saved my life at the time. Chris Whitley was booked to play at a theater across town. Doli and I already had tickets, but then I learned that a few hours before the concert, he was also going to play a few songs in a basement record store across the street.

Just Chris and his National steel guitar and his voice — that’s all he ever needed, really, to bring the magic. Like most creatively restless people, he ventured in several directions, but for me he was never better than when things were stripped down to these essentials, or when he was otherwise mining the sweaty, passionate roots of American folk-blues traditions, and managing to put his unique stamp upon them.

After he finished this mini-set, I handed him my copy of Living With The Law to have it signed. It’s rare that we get so timely a chance to tell someone how much their work has meant to us, done for us, and why.

It’s risky, too, meeting someone whose work you’ve long admired, although in Chris Whitley I encountered someone who had zero trace of ego, attitude, or affectation, but who was instead endearingly, maybe even painfully, shy.

Doli told me later that it was a fascinating exchange to watch, each of us in awe of the other’s abilities. Her phrasing, not mine. I’ll accept it. She’s the intuitive one, the emotionally eagle-eyed one. Me, I’m a moron that way, reluctant in that type of situation to attribute to someone much more than polite tolerance.

I enjoy dabbling in music, a fact that I spared Chris, but can’t conceive of writing songs like his. The melodies, the feeling, the precision of their lyrical imagery. He told me he couldn’t begin to imagine writing a novel. The size, the scope, the complexity.

That was okay. He helped a novel emerge anyway.

*

I originally conceived this piece with only one takeaway in mind, but now it feels more like two. Both seem like good thoughts for anytime, but especially for January, things worth taking into the new year, one to act upon and the other to remember whenever you need it.

First the latecomer: Take advantage of an opportunity, or create it yourself, to let someone know it if their work has really meant something to you. That it has added value to your life. Guaranteed: It’ll make the day better for both of you.

I was online, a few years ago, when I discovered that Chris Whitley had just died of lung cancer. I sat in front of the computer and cried like I never had before, or have since, over someone I’d met exactly once. But I’d never been more glad I’d been able to tell him about his music’s place in my life.

Now the other bit, the thing to remind yourself of as needed:

No matter what you do that you wish you did better, no matter how much you feel still lies ahead to be done, no matter how much room for improvement you perceive in yourself…

And no matter how accomplished someone else may appear to you, or how low you may regard your own efforts in comparison…

Someone still admires you for them. Right here, right now. This day. Maybe even the object of your esteem. From near or far, someone marvels at you. You do something he or she can’t imagine doing. In their eyes, you work wonders and magic.

So remember that this year.

Remember it … and keep doing your very best to deserve it.