Who ARE you?

                  My curiosity is more than casual. I need to know. You are reading these words – why? What do you hope from them? How might I bend them in the direction of your interests, season them to your taste?

                  Art is a conversation. Any made thing conjures its recipient like a hologram out of thin air. The best art is one on one – and grows more intimate with time. Everybody has something on their mind. How to export that something into your mind? What’s your wish for our time together? Solace? Assurance? Stimulus? Diversion? If I don’t know your appetite, how can I cook for you? My grandkids favor “chicken nuggets and fries”: if I served them a souffle (if I could make one), it would fall flat.

                  Best I know, this is not taught. I was taught proper English. If I said it right, I’d be writing right, good for me. If my listener dozed or meandered off, that was their problem, not my fault.  One prose fit all.

                  The measure of communications, I used to coach co-workers, is not what was said but what was heard. “But I told you!” is a limp lament. Our transmission tools include much more than lexicon, vocabulary, exactness. A pause, a scowl, a wink, a catch in the throat may convey more effectively.

                  I obsess about this. Writing is about we – you and me. Are we pleasant together? Am I, more than filling your time, fulfilling it? Are my ideas and/or presentation fresh? What (gulp! yikes!) do you think of me!

                  Any confident maker is a boob and a bore. I eye your reaction every instant from behind the curtain. Am I coming across? If not, should I adjust the lights, the script, explode a firecracker? How might I make your day (for making your day makes mine)?

                  Too often, reading, I feel I’ve ripped open somebody else’s mail. I check the envelope – who was this addressed to? If I’m the intended recipient, wow, this author doesn’t know me very well! It’s off-putting to be mistaken. Does this writer think I’m stupid, cruel, deaf, gullible, etc.? To hell with them!

                  Journalists and analysts have useful information to convey. Style hardly matters as long as they’re clear. The less style the better. My job is to beguile. I have no new matter to impart – “There is nothing new under the sun,” sighed Ecclesiastes wearily two millennia ago – so my manner must ingratiate. I’m like a jester that way. If you are not nodding and smiling, I’ve missed my mark.

                  Recently my audience has swollen like a parade balloon. Chances are we’re new to each other. And I can’t see your face! The sole measure of my effect is a statistic labeled “click-through rate.” I watch it like a hawk, though it tells me little. A clunker may not have been a clunker, if an emergency forced attention elsewhere. (Please, Carll, don’t jaw about a poem when the house is burning down!)

                  My method, such as it is, is to make you me. Not me specifically, with my facts and history, but me in general, a person, an American, of a certain hour and age. Am I engaging you – that is, myself? The more you are like me, the more you’ll like me (for we like our likeness). Our identity makes editing easy. Not infrequently I come across (in draft) as a pompous blowhard or swaggering know-it-all. Cut, cut, cut, no matter how clever.

                  Have I mistaken you? No doubt! Who can know themselves, much less another? Are we enough alike to enjoy our time together? That is my prayer.