Quality, balance, and execution

Always go hard, but towards perfection, or volume?

One of the stranger aspects of ghostwriting is that I don’t really have a portfolio. Usually, I love the anonymity. No one knows I was involved in my work except for one or two grateful people, and publishing doesn’t force me to peek behind the psychological curtains at my ego’s deformities. If I could write more without attribution, I would.

The other day I was trying to rustle up a new client, and I needed a sample of my work. I literally don’t even see these articles published until a year or two later when someone has me cite them as sources. My portfolio looks like I copy-pasted some PDFs of other people’s work from the internet and then said “trust me, I did that.”

Now, the smart thing to do would have been to not ask, and just send over the portfolio and get myself a new client. No one would have thought twice. But for the sake of discretion, or thoroughness, I wrote to the old client, asking permission to use the clips I’d written under their name. A normally responsive person didn’t write back. I’m hoping they’re checking up the chain of command out of caution, rather than stressed out, or insulted, or reconsidering my usefulness to the company. My email was too hasty.

The actual question on my mind right now is not how to prove that I can do my own job. I’m lamenting the difficulty, even this late in my career, of finding the balance between the urgent, twig-snapping determination to complete tasks, and the sensitive, paranoid scrutiny required to safely dispatch them. I suppose every profession must navigate a similar tension. When we cut fireline, my last saw partner and I shared an ethic of mild perfectionism—leave no coat-hangers, don’t gouge the bark, cut saplings low and level so they won’t make punjis—but we still had to push ourselves to brush faster each day. Every once in while a veteran sawyer in an overhead position would take the saw and show how insanely fast and efficient it’s possible to cut, leaving a shower of branches that even multiple swampers couldn’t have cleared. Of course, the bosses were sprinting through a tank of gas, returning the saw and guzzling gatorade, when we had all day, week, and summer to pace ourselves.

Time versus quality is simple to balance when cutting fireline. You secure one side of the balance first. You always do the job right. The only variable is how fast. Balance is more elusive with tasks that can absorb infinite amounts of polishing. “A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” and all.

Writing is the least forgiving discipline in that urgent-to-careful tightrope. Both sides are a precarious drop. In a holding pattern, circling my work like a dog adjusting a bed, it is possible accomplish literally nothing. When I lock in and charge, it’s very easy to misword an email and offend someone, or panic them, or simply fail to imply the proper amount of respect. The business email is my least favorite genre to write. When I worked in an office after college, I remember being grateful for Fridays, so that I could close, “Have a great weekend!” As a sign-off it was both sincere and casual. “Best” might sound sarcastic, “Sincerely” insincere. That my emails were sincere mattered to me, probably because honestly conveying the truth as I knew it was my only way of identifying if my writing was complete. Despite my hurry I had to constantly pause, focus on one person, and make it polite.

As a barely non-intern contractor, I didn’t have much leeway to start banging out demands. I remember once communicating with a musical star’s team. I requested facts and figures they weren’t obliged to deliver, and when I didn’t get a response in a few days, I freaked out. Had I offended someone? I wrote a hasty apology letter for taking that tone—remember, at the time I had a to-do-list pouring out my ears, down my calendar, and into the lives of my unborn grandchildren—and tried to forget the stress and move on to the next task. The musicians, it turned out, had just been busy. Tours are busy. I met them backstage a few days later, and it was briefly awkward until I hit it off with the guy I’d been emailing, an excellent musician in his own right. He produced beats for the star, behind the scenes.

If a hurried email wasn’t presumptive, it was over sincere. It’s that old saw: “Excuse the long letter. I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” If I tried to write a sincere compliment, but found myself rewording it ten times over, I might say “fuck it, this isn’t worth it” and hit send. Careless disregard read as fawning flattery.

The danger of ruining relationships, I suspect, is the real reason executives have assistants—someone needs to translate all that high-intensity plate-spinning into polite, respectful communication. Assistants are energy dampeners and schedule-bouncers and blame diffusers. Like a clutch, which transfers power from a spinning gear to a stopped one, they allow someone to perform at full, get-shit-done intensity without offending delegate shit-get-doers.                                     

There’s a chance the tightrope dropped so steeply cause I worked with artists, who are sensitive by profession. I loved calls with Hollywood people, because they were in a hurry too. They talked so fast I had to learn to toughen up and ask them to repeat things. Notes were a pummeling. I scribbled runic scratches and hoped I got the correct email address. One mistake of tone on a letter to an artist could mean they wouldn’t participate in the project. A Hollywood assistant could care less about tone if they could check me off their list.

Editors prefer writers with whom they have a relationship precisely because it saves them the time of crafting a professional pitch. You want someone to whom you can shoot a one line email and know you haven’t offended them for life. (And know that they’ll deliver good work.) At least I think so. Editors don’t email me these days.

I never took enough notes or asked enough questions. Working as a host/busboy while I was an intern had been excellent training for delivering unwelcome news, in a rush, while staying polite. I unlearned it. Sometimes I wish I’d worked in food service longer, although it was pointless—we’d dropped in like Tony Hawk to the great recession, and there was no more Friday rush to pressure me.

Nowadays, like an experienced drunk who feels an urge to text, I still regard Get-to-Business mode with suspicion. I used shelve writing for fresh eyes, but sometimes you don’t have time to relent. Yesterday I spent hours polishing a humor article, absorbed, driven, cleaning every word. When I wrote the cover letter, I splashed through, reckless. Time was short. I needed it sent.