Has your writing ever been so powerful a head of state has ordered your execution?
Yeah, me neither. But a kid can dream, can’t he?
I just read a fascinating New Yorker account of life as Salman Rushdie after Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa – a death sentence – to kill Rushdie following the release of his novel, The Satanic Verses. The article’s a first-person account written in third person – a very compelling choice.
So, how do you build a narrative so rich, so compelling, so dangerous, people want you dead?
Here’s Rushdie:
[Rushdie] was supervised by Arthur Hibbert, a medievalist, a genius, who, according to college legend, had answered the questions he knew least about in his own history finals so that he could complete the answers in the time allotted.
At the beginning of their work together, Hibbert gave [Rushdie] a piece of advice he never forgot.“You must never write history,” [Hibbert] said, “until you can hear the people speak.”He thought about that for years, and it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t—you shouldn’t—tell their story.The way people spoke, in short, clipped phrases or long, flowing rambles, revealed so much about them: their place of origin, their social class, their temperament, whether calm or angry, warmhearted or cold-blooded, foulmouthed or polite; and, beneath their temperament, their true nature, intellectual or earthy, plainspoken or devious, and, yes, good or bad.If that had been all he learned at Arthur’s feet, it would have been enough. But he learned much more than that. He learned a world. And in that world one of the world’s great religions was being born.
It’s very hard to write powerfully for a business until you know them and their customers as people.
Some ad writers write without ever visiting the town or even meeting the business owner! How is that possible?
Wait – let me rephrase … how is that possible to do well?
You must go and curl your toes in the proverbial carpet of the town, city, state, or province.
In other words, as another famous, often reviled author likes to say:
“How well do you know your ad writer? How well does your ad writer know you?” – Roy H. Williams
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