Finding your voice - What’s your story?

Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019

Finding your voice
What’s your story?

You don’t have to be famous or powerful to offer something useful to the public conversation. We can all, with some work, find stories to tell. Well-known people have a better chance of being published—but only if they can figure out what their story is and how to tell it.

A few years into my new job as Op-Ed editor, I got an email from one of our columnists, Nick Kristof, informing me that the daughter of his friend Mia Farrow wanted to write a piece about the molestation she said she had suffered at the hands of her father, Woody Allen. Although Nick writes powerfully about suffering in the world and visits the poorest, most remote places, he also has some famous friends. I said I would take a look.

Most of Dylan Farrow’s allegations were not new, but her piece was wrenching. It was her story, powerfully told. Still, I doubted I could run her article because by definition, an op-ed does not give the other party a chance to comment. It seemed unfair to run an article alleging a crime without getting reaction from Allen. I emailed my boss about it, saying my impulse was to pass. Because no investigators or court had brought a case against Allen, I thought we’d be in legal jeopardy. Andy agreed.

So I told Nick that we would have to reject it, and he informed the family. Shortly after, he asked whether he could run her story in his column. That seemed fine to me. It didn’t have the same legal ramifications, because in his column, Nick could ask Allen for comment.

As soon as Nick’s column ran, along with an expanded version of Farrow’s story on his blog, I heard from Woody Allen’s publicist. Her client, she said, wanted to write a piece for the upcoming Sunday section.

Polite discussions over timing, space, fact-checking, and the like ensued. Allen said he had much to say that had never been said. He would send the piece to me only if he could be guaranteed the same amount of space that Dylan Farrow’s story had been given in Nick’s column. I said fine, if the piece was worth the space. There was a pause in our email exchange after that; it made me wonder whether Allen had decided to go elsewhere. Was his publicist working with a publication that had offered her a better deal, with no qualifier that the amount of space devoted would depend on how interesting the article was?

So I wrote back, again: “Are you interested in sending something from Mr. Allen? Obviously we’re very interested in seeing what he has to say.”

While I worried that the publicist had ditched us, it was just the normal busyness of work and life; she was surely getting hundreds of calls on Farrow’s piece. She promised to submit by the next morning. When the piece arrived, I read it instantly. Allen said that with this article, he was done, and would never again comment on the matter. It was powerfully written, in great detail. I said I had to run it by our lawyer, and then it would have to be fact-checked.

It was weird to be in the middle of a family conflict, although if you become an editor you will find it happens surprisingly often. We would run an essay by a son who talked about his falling out with his mother and then she would call, outraged, with a very different version of reality. One editor I know, when he was just starting out, had to sit through an endless lunch with one of his literary heroes while the man consumed nine scotches and revealed the details of his unsatisfying marriage and his impotence.

Was Allen innocent? Guilty? I could not tell. I was still a newsroom person at heart, without a lot of opinions. I just knew that he had never been charged, and I thought he deserved to tell his side because of the space we had given his accuser. Still, I knew that many readers would be furious. Was I going to let someone that many people considered a child abuser have space in Op-Ed?

Allen knew what story he had to tell, which is the first and most important step in figuring out what to write. He didn’t offer a treatise on bitter divorces, or family feuds, and he didn’t refer to the movies that have made him so well known. He was just writing about the particular experiences that his daughter had brought up, giving his point of view.

There will always be something you know or feel or observe that others do not. We are all individuals with a singular experience and sensibility. Your writing has to reflect that, whether you are eighteen or eighty, known or unknown. Plenty of famous people have tried and failed to write publishable articles because they haven’t understood what story they have to tell.

I teach occasionally, and once worked with two dozen high school students in a course on opinion writing. They wanted to discuss the issues that were important to them—feminism, gay identity, Israel. I encouraged them to think about their personal, singular experiences in the context of those issues. No one cares what a high school student thinks about the path to peace in the Middle East. On the other hand, if that student spent part of the summer at a camp with both Palestinian and Jewish teenagers, her recollections might lead to a publishable, persuasive essay. That teenager would be telling her story, and her experience would make her an authority.

You must always have a clear reason to be telling the story you are telling, along with some expertise in that matter. Whether you feel confident or not, write with authority. Lay out your credentials. People are attracted to those who demonstrate knowledge on a topic. You don’t need to have a doctorate. Just make it clear that you have the experience or the history to write about your subject, whether you are a struggling landlord in Cleveland or a young woman who decides to take off her hijab for a day.

Use your individual experiences to make points of universal interest. When you write the way you talk rather than the way you think people should write, you are being authentic. If you just give lists of facts or write the way “experts” write, you will not sound real. Adding emotion and concrete details—as the landlord did, pointing out that he bought eviction notices by the carton—amplifies your power. Sounding like a technocrat diminishes it. It’s tedious to read words that sound like they could have been spit out by a robot. It is critical to write in your own voice. I know; that advice is tough to follow. It’s like saying, “Relax!” It’s about as useful as the advice my older brother gave me when I was thirteen or so and wanted to get the attention of boys. “Be yourself,” he said. But it’s true.

You need to strip out the external voices and allow your true voice to come out. There are a few tricks to that. Sometimes, when I can’t get started, I write with my eyes closed, to block out reality. Other times I talk into my phone, and the voice memos help me get going on something that has been troublesome. No matter how you get there, you have to write from your deep self. If you stay at the level of your office brain or your academic self and use the jargon of your profession, you will kill your work. You might not even know what story you want to tell until you think about what you, and only you, can offer.

In one prescient piece I edited that preceded Donald Trump’s presidency, a rich man in New York called on his fellow rich people to do something about inequality before the ever-growing income gap spawned a revolution or a popular uprising. In an op-ed titled “Capitalists Arise,” which he later turned into a book, Peter Georgescu told the story that he knew and could tell: that his rich friends were scared. His first version didn’t start out like that. It was more abstract. He wrote in generalities, about the big issues of the day. As we got to know each other through phone calls and email, I asked him to tell what he knew and tell it as directly as he could.

The result was an appeal to the nation’s privileged from one of their own. It’s possible that Peter understood how rapidly and devastatingly change could come because he had been born in Bucharest, Romania, and fled Communist rule. Although there’s no way to know if he changed any minds with his article, as a refugee and the emeritus head of one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, he had the authority to suggest that people ought to view their wealth as not simply an unalloyed good. If that piece had been written by someone with a middle-class income, I wouldn’t have wanted to publish it. He was the right person to make a plea for higher salaries for the working class. When presented by one of the 1 percent’s own, the argument becomes powerful.

Here is an unedited piece followed by the version edited by EvidenceNetwork.ca, which helps academics in Canada make their work more accessible to the public. The first has no voice and feels robot-like; the second has voice and feels human.

Before

Canada Post Corporation (CPC) is looking for a new President and Chief Executive Officer. Deepak Chopra, the former head of the Crown, stepped down in January.

The opportunity to run one of the largest and most significant federal Crowns is a daunting one. The new leader will have to manage a host of operational and structural challenges facing this firm and will have to do so in a deeply politicized environment. The Liberal government has, and looks to continue, to interfere in CPC’s operations to meet partisan aims. He or she will need sharp political, business and diplomatic skills in order to steer CPC towards a sustainable future.

I offer the following observations: CPC’s core purpose is to provide mail and package delivery services to rural areas and small towns—places where private sector logistics firms offer limited service. CPC is granted (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) with a national monopoly on mail service, but this does not cover the costs to provide remote services. CPC is obligated to serve all Canadian addresses, and this “Universal Service Obligation” must be met regardless of the cost.

After

Looking for a new job? Canada Post is looking for a President and Chief Executive Officer. But it’s not a position anyone should consider lightly.

The new CEO will face daunting challenges managing Canada Post’s operational, financial and governance deficiencies in this digital age, and will have to do so under close public scrutiny and in a deeply politicalized context.

However mundane it might appear, mail delivery is politically significant to the federal government. Mail and parcel service is one of the few tangible things the federal government does which affects the daily lives of the general population. Any problem with mail delivery makes its way swiftly to our elected MPs. Instances of poor customer service or corporate mistakes generate newspaper headlines.

This was the piece Peter Georgescu originally submitted:

I have been on an important journey. It all started a couple of years ago. I became worried, worse, obsessed having realized that America is facing a challenge, an existential threat to our current way of life. It wasn’t Al Qaeda, or the vicious ISIL or whatever evolving radical group from the Middle East, Africa or Asia. Oh, they could indeed do damage to us, like 9/11 did or worse, but we would cope. We would bounce back. That’s part of our character and the strength of our nation. My fear centered about an internal threat from within our homeland. America’s number one challenge keeps rising like a monstrous Phoenix. Its most visible manifestation lies in the much talked about inequality of income.

This is the version that better reflected what he knew, published August 7, 2015, in the New York Times, as “Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal With Income Inequality”:

I’m scared. The billionaire hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones is scared. My friend Ken Langone, a founder of the Home Depot, is scared. So are many other chief executives. Not of Al Qaeda, or the vicious Islamic State or some other evolving radical group from the Middle East, Africa or Asia. We are afraid where income inequality will lead.

But don’t think that because you grew up in a suburb and have led a seemingly uneventful life that you have nothing to say. Oppression and pain and isolation are not necessary components of successful stories. Your real story is what is needed. Look at the novels of Elizabeth Strout, a bestselling novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner. She delves into the lives of people who seem ordinary. The wisdom and insight come when she gets below that surface. In your life and in your writing, you have to be receptive to what’s in front of you.

Woody Allen had a story to tell that no one else could tell, because no one else knew what was in his mind. I published it with great nervousness that some detail might turn out to be factually wrong. Even if it was perfect, I knew the reaction would be one of fury. And it was. Some of that fury came from members of my staff. They couldn’t believe I had given space to someone they believed was a child abuser. Only a few people knew what I was working on. I didn’t want news of the story to leak. I knew a few younger staffers were irate. But besides being a fan of the concept of innocent until proven guilty, I thought I had a moral obligation to run his article because our publication had given his accuser space to tell her story. In college, at work, in your office, you will probably encounter decisions and opinions you dislike, and you just have to deal with them. I knew what some of the editors were thinking: What about Hitler? Stalin? Mao? Would you have given them space to tell their stories? And you know what? I might have. The Times didn’t have an Op-Ed page until 1970, so we don’t know what the editors of that time would have done if that outlet had existed. But I am convinced that understanding evil is just as important as understanding goodness.