Chapter Summaries

For some reason known only to the blogging gods, this post fell out of cyberspace and never appeared on The Writing Life. Thus, it is out of order unless I can figure out how to magically put it where it belongs, which is after the outline and before Chapter 1. If you are confused, I don’t blame you, and I do apologize.

When I teach people how to write a book proposal, I always link the outline to the chapter summaries. I attempt to make it a seamless process, but I realize it requires much thought and wordsmithing to go from bullet points to well-crafted paragraphs. The key is that outlines and chapter summaries are based on intentions—this is how I envision my book and what I intend to write. But a book is fluid and alive and may be quite different at the end than it was in the planning phase. Think of it this way: Your outline is the skeleton of your content, and the summaries are your first pass at putting some meat on the bones.

1. 1968-1972 • You’ve Got Talent

It began innocuously in a night school class taught by a newspaper reporter. I remember only one thing from that class: the teacher took me by the shoulders and said, “I know talent when I see it. You’ve got talent. You’d better keep writing!” I believed her and I struggled to learn to write, get published, and fill one small portfolio. It took me four and a half years.

2. 1972-1973 • Instant Editor

All it took to go from obscurity, writing at a picnic table in my basement, to being a sought-after edit or of a “city magazine” was someone crazy enough to hire me. I was barely a writer, and suddenly I was running a magazine. I knew nothing but was willing to learn from anyone who would teach me. The good news was that I launched a lot of talented writers, artists, and photographers. The bad news was that I never learned to read a profit and loss (P&L) statement. That’s a failing in someone who runs a publication.

3. 1973-1978 • The Making of a Writer

My next job was at St. Louis’s well-established business magazine. My title was a comedown (assistant editor); the salary was a joke; the working conditions were abysmal; my boss was an old-school patriarch; but I did become a “real writer.” I was a one-person writing staff, and in the six years I was there, I built a strong reputation in the community and filled volumes with my articles. However, I was treated like a secretary and didn’t make enough money to go to the gas station and the grocery store in the same week.

4. 1978-1980 • Corporate Culture Shock

I was not born with the corporate gene, and my first job in “big business” was a constant, often painful, reminder. The whole department was comprised of women (a mistake); the general environment was a political nightmare; but the writing and view of the park from the 17^th floor made it bearable. The corporation owned 120 small companies, so the subject matter was all over the place. Eventually, there was a coup in the executive office, and our department was disbanded. We were out by 4:00, just before they locked the file cabinets and wallpapered over the door.

5. 1980 • Fear & Freelancing

I never liked job-hunting, but being a single mom with two daughters made it an urgent matter. While I was circulating my resume and making sure my interview suits were clean, I was landing lucrative freelance projects and making some great contacts in the St. Louis business world. It was a heady experience. I think I knew then that freelancing would be a great life, but I needed a real job with benefits. The prospects were not looking good.

6. 1980-1982 • Disappointed & Dejected

When I was just about losing hope, I had three job offers. I took the one that was the least chaotic and had the best salary. My boss made it seem like I was the best thing that ever happened to him … until the day I started the job. Lesson learned: interview your predecessor and check out your workspace before you accept the offer. Mine office was dismal, but it reflected the general mood of misery that pervaded the department, which was run by a paranoid, petty tyrant (I sure had a way of finding them.) Everything about the job was depressing except for the writing and photography. Once again, I was the whole staff, and I produced so many publications I could barely keep track. I was stressed out. I had to join a gym.

7. 1982-1989 • The Best of Times, the Worst of times

I was hired away by a company that seemed too good to be true, which, of course, it was. I had multiple job titles while I was there—writer, editor, account executive, and marketing manager. The crux of the matter was some doubt on the part of the top man that I could really write, despite having hired me because I was considered to be the best writer in town. So, I spent six-and-a-half years proving I could write, produced the best work of my career, and filled in the remaining gaps in my experience and education. I lost the battle, cleaned out my office, and spent the next few weeks trying to decide what to do. I was getting good at this.

8. 1987 • AMA, The Biggest Break

Hooking up with the American Management Association was the beginning of big things that created the perfect link between a full-time job and full-time freelancing. A colleague recommended me to write three “little books,” and they were little—only 50 pages each. They were like training wheels for being an author, and they led to much bigger books and many cassette-training programs. It was a great gig, while it lasted, but AMA eventually fell upon hard times.

9. 1990 • Going Solo

I had dreamed of being a full-time, independently employed writer since 1980, but it took being “terminated” to make it happen. After 20 years of loving what I did but not necessarily where I was doing it, I hung out my shingle. The freelance life in the ’90s was wonderful. There was plenty of work and plenty of money. Corporate magazines were paying $1.00 a word! I landed steady corporate clients, some of which lasted for years. My motto was, "You need it; I can do it.” And I did. It was an exhilarating time, despite no understanding of how to run a business. I still had no idea what a P&L statement was. That’s also a failing in an entrepreneur.

10. 2001 • The Bottom Drops Out

What goes up must go down, and life as I knew it ceased to be with a loud thud. The economy tanked in 2001; my clients (all very large companies) panicked and fired all their outside consultants; and I found myself with no work. That is not an exaggeration. I was already in shock when September 11^th forever changed the world. The next four years were sort of a blur. I had to start over again, and this time it was going to require ingenuity and imagination. I started writing a training program on how to write a nonfiction book. The training program never materialized, but the material evolved into a workbook I used to teach classes at the community college.

11. 2005 • Reinventing Myself, Again

I was finding work again when life gave me a gentle nudge in a new direction. I was hired to write a book for the CEO of a large hospital system that had won the Malcolm Baldrige Award for Excellence. I knew nothing about the CEO, the hospital system, or the Baldrige; but I took a six-month crash course in all three and wrote the book. Suddenly, I was a ghostwriter, albeit one who didn’t know what she was doing. My little workbook got fatter and fatter; I landed other ghostwriting and editing assignments, and I began to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. The right person came into my life at the right time—a web-marketing guru who taught me the ropes. For the first time, I was truly marketing my business, and clients were finding me on the Web. It was finally coming together.

12. 2008 • Helping Writers Write

Defining one’s mission in a single sentence is not easy. Yet, in a way, I have always known mine. For most of my 40-year career, it was, I want to write. But as I find myself in a new and different place in life, my mission has evolved. Now, in addition to writing, I want to help other writers write. As a teacher, a book coach, and an editor, I have come full circle since my first real job as an editor that allowed me to publish talented writers. My students and clients are publishing their books, and one by one, they are being added to the “friends-of-Bobbi shelf” in my bookcase. I am prouder of those books than of any that bear my own byline.

Chapter 1 • 1968-1972 • You’ve Got Talent

It is time to begin writing this book. I am so ready, I really can't put it off any longer. But first, I want to slip in a reminder and a thank you. The reminder is this: Every writer needs an editor. Every writer. No exceptions. The thank you is to my editor, who continues to remind me by the mistakes she finds and the great suggestions she makes that every writer needs an editor. Thank you, Judy!

Words have power. They can take an ordinary life and make it extraordinary in the time it takes to say them. In my case, words became a compass that pointed me toward my life’s work, though I could not possibly have known that at the time I heard them.

I was a 30-year-old housewife and mother. I wasn’t looking for my destiny; I was just looking for a night school class to take on Monday nights. Any class would do as long as it wasn’t yoga. My friend was taking yoga, and I thought that sounded ghastly. I read the catalog twice and finally signed up for something called “Writing for Fun and Money.” The teacher was a newspaper reporter who fit the stereotypical image of hard-boiled, straight talking, and tough. Writing for fun and money didn’t seem her style.

The first night she asked if anyone had ever made any money from their writing. I raised my hand; no one else did. I was embarrassed to admit it was only $25 for giving a book review to a women’s group. Still, that made me something of a star in our little class.

Looking back, I don’t think I learned anything useful about the subject. In fact, the only advice I remember was from a guest speaker who told us to “Write what you know.” While I was trying to think of something I knew, she described sitting in her children’s playpen and writing funny little pieces for parents’ magazines. I remember wondering where the children were while she was in their playpen. Other than that, I remember nothing … except, of course, the words that changed my life.

On the last night of class, we were all exchanging handshakes and hugs. As I approached the teacher to thank her, she grabbed my shoulders and gave them a good shake. “Listen to me,” she said. “I know talent when I see it, and I see it in you. You’d better keep writing!”

I had no idea what caused her to say that. We hadn’t shown her samples of our work or done any writing in class. But it really didn’t matter. She had said it and I believed her. Her words affected me so profoundly that for 40 years, “You’d better keep writing!” has remained a kind of sustaining mantra.

What comes after such a watershed moment? Well, certainly not instant success. On the other hand, I finally had some sense of direction, however vague. I announced to my husband that I was going to be a writer. He rolled his eyes, but to his credit, he helped me carry the picnic table from our minuscule patio to my new “office” in the basement under the stairs. And he did buy me an electric typewriter, which I used for 20 years until I got my first computer.

Okay, so I should keep writing; but I didn’t know what to write about, how to begin, or where to send what I managed to write. Write about what you know was the conventional wisdom. My life at that time consisted of cleaning, grocery shopping, doing laundry, cooking dinner, and taking care of little kids. This was 1967. Everyone I knew was leading exactly the same life. It didn’t seem worth putting on paper.

How to begin? When in doubt, read a book. Off I went to the library to arm myself with books on writing. The only books I found gave copious instructions on how to write fillers—little stories and clever observations on life—for women’s magazines. So, I bought every woman’s magazine I could find, read all the fillers, and struggled to write something scintillating. Unfortunately, the books didn’t provide much information on the mechanics of submission (paper, format, cover letters, etc.), and those things are not intuitive. I did everything wrong, but I think the biggest faux pas was using flimsy, erasable typewriter paper. Had I read even one article on the mechanics of submitting work to national magazines, I would have known better. Even worse, I made full use of the erasable feature, since I always was (and remain) a lousy typist.

Success eluded me, unless you count the colorful rejection slips that seemed to arrive almost daily. They came in all sizes, shapes, and shades of pastel. (They just don’t make them like that any more.) I considered each one a badge of honor and wallpapered one whole wall of my basement with them. They made a nice collage and at least proved I had been writing, even if my words never saw a printed page.

I didn’t seem to get the hint for quite a while that I was on the wrong track. If I had stayed on it, I probably could have wallpapered my whole house with multi-colored postcards. But at last, quite by accident, I did something right. I wrote a humorous article on what it was like to be handball widow. The title was “H.B.A.A. – Handball Above All.” It was very funny, if you like sports humor, and my husband urged me to send it to the editor of ACE magazine, the handball bible.

Sidebar

“Handball players are like no other sportsmen in the world. They are a breed apart, and they can locate or recognize a fellow fanatic a mile away. Put two handball players together, and they establish instant rapport, even if they have never seen each other before. A party where more than two of the guests are handball devotees is a certain disaster from the point of view of the unsuspecting hostess. They will gravitate together as if they were magnetically attracted. If this is allowed to happen (and just try to stop it), there is little chance of separating them before the evening ends.”

1968 • ACE: The Official Voice of Handball

ACE not only ran it, it did so in the issue that was distributed at the national handball championship matches that were held right here in St. Louis. I was an instant celebrity among the players, but more important, I was published! I immediately bought a portfolio.

That purchase may have been a bit optimistic since it remained empty for quite a while. This was my first foray into freelance writing, and with only one article to my credit, it was difficult to convince editors to take a chance on me. One at a time, however, I carefully scotch taped articles into my book. They were published in newsletters and free newspapers at first, but my first real break came when I was offered a job selling advertising space for a weekly newspaper called The St. Louis Jewish Light. “I really want to write.” I told the general manager, who didn’t need another writer. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “If you learn to sell space, I’ll find some things for you to write.” I took the job.

What he found for me were stories no one else on the editorial staff wanted to cover: meetings, programs at night, book reviews, short personality profiles, and little news items. If the subject was deemed boring or inconvenient, I wrote about it, slowly filling my portfolio with feature articles. Amazingly, ACE kept publishing my stories, first on notable local handball players and then on the emergence of racquetball as a serious sport. I interviewed many sweaty men in what looked like white underwear and became known as the “handball writer” around the courts. It was a heady experience.

I’d love to say that I made all my own breaks, and luck was not a factor; but that’s not true. Sometimes, just being in the right place when the right person shows up is like finding a four-leaf clover. I was still selling space, writing for the Jewish Light, and trying to interest editors of obscure publications to give me assignments or print my articles, when one of those right people came into my life. He was in charge of advertising for a company that owned, among other things, a small sports magazine for country clubbers. He liked my writing and introduced me to the editor, who paid my $50 for my H.B.A.A story. That was big money in 1970; in fact, it was the first money I had earned for anything I wrote. The editor hired an illustrator and published my “humor piece” in Replay. This was my second big break, and it turned out to be bigger than I could have imagined at the time.

Replay had a very short life. It was mailed free to a small, elite readership that had never asked for it to begin with. The publisher had a stroke of genius. He used Replay to give birth to a new city magazine called The St. Louisan. It simply appeared one month as an insert; the next month Replay ceased to be, and The St. Louisan was launched. I was launched right along with it.

Being able to write about subjects that were outside of the Jewish community was liberating. I wrote about a innovative day camp on a farm, a rehabilitation center for trouble teens, a relatively famous restaurateur, and my greatest challenge so far: kidney disease. I truly felt like I had died and gone to heaven, as I met more and more talented people. One of those people was one of the most talented photographers I have ever worked with. Portrait artist turned commercial photographer, Denny had a magic touch with people and pictures. From our first assignment together, we knew we had an unbeatable creative partnership. It was one that continued for a decade.

Sidebar

“Metropolitan St. Louis, with a population of approximately two-and-a-half-million people boasts two medical schools, numerous hospitals, and a reputation for being an outstanding medical center. Yet, only five short years ago, in the midst of all of this bustling medical activity and research, if a person was told he was suffering from kidney disease, he could be relatively certain that he would die. In 1966, there were two research units for kidney disease—one at Washington University and one at St. Louis University. The very small number of patients (two) at these centers was treated for education and research purposes only.”

1970 • The St. Louisan

In the meantime, I was still selling space, juggling a house, a family, and a large dog during the day, and writing almost every night. Ah, the energy of youth! That pace, as well as other circumstances, took their toll. I ticked off all the top items on the list of significant stressors—divorce, a major move, my boss’s untimely death, becoming a single mom, and a new job I was ill prepared to tackle.

Phase one of my writing life was coming to an abrupt end.

A Message to "Anonymous"

I received a comment on my blog post, "Questions Writers Ask,"and feel that it deserves a considered reply. I know I've published this somewhere in the past, but it's worth repeating. Its original title was WRITE!

Everyone is a writer. That includes you, whether you know it or not. If you’ve never pulled out a piece of paper or pulled up a blank screen on your computer and just rambled, you may not know it. If you do write, but your audience is limited to your hard drive or desk drawer, it’s time to reach out and touch a real reader. And, if you know you’re a writer but you feel stuck, this is the time to move to the next level.

W: Wake up! Most of us sleepwalk through life and miss out on what’s happening all around us, on ideas and inspiration, on challenges and opportunities, even on our own experiences. Write! Writers write. If you’re not writing, you’ll never know if you can. You’ll never share your words with others. You’ll never know what you’re capable of achieving.

R: Reach for the next level, whatever it is. If you’ve never tried it, do it now. If you haven’t tested your talent, take your work out of the desk drawer and find an audience. If you’ve never pushed yourself or gone out on a limb, this is the time to take that chance. Risk writing, risk feeling inadequate, risk rejection, risk success.

I: Ignite your passion for something, anything, as long as it moves you. Then involve yourself completely in whatever it is: subject, style, story, or specific area. Identify your niche. Do you want to be a poet, a novelist, a commentator, or a journalist? Are you wild about sports, science, or spirituality? That’s the seed of a career. Plant it, and watch it grow.

T: Try everything — every kind of writing, every possible subject and field,every genre. Take a course, join a writers’ group, go to lectures, read the best writers, keep a journal, enter a contest, write a query letter, submit a short story, a poem, or an article. Test your talent, test your limits, test your courage. Being a writer is all about tests, but then so is being a human being.

E: Explore life, explore your own feelings and thoughts, other people’s feelings and thoughts, things you’ve never done before, things you do without even noticing. Start noticing. Experience life. Get excited. Get involved. Immerse yourself in every activity. Writers feel. Allow yourself to feel; then put your feelings on paper.

Dear Anonymous, Go for it!