A writer in the family

I have been father and step­fa­ther to six young peo­ple, all adults now. Their work is far rang­ing. One is a web design­er. Anoth­er a doc­tor. One in  the music busi­ness. A tax con­sul­tant. A marine engi­neer. But now the youngest has decid­ed to be a jour­nal­ist, which is to say … a writer.

When my doc­tor daugh­ter talks about med­i­cine, patients, dis­eases, I under­stand very lit­tle of it, and am aston­ished how much infor­ma­tion she has stored away. And how she cures peo­ple.  When my music busi­ness son and I talk, we like to com­pare some of the quirky sim­i­lar­i­ties between the music and book indus­try. You get the idea.

Hav­ing anoth­er writer in the fam­i­ly is different.

I nev­er knew about his inter­est in writ­ing (because he kept it a secret) until he filled out his col­lege appli­ca­tion forms and wrote down that he want­ed to be a writer. He took pains not to read my books, or if he did, would not talk to me about them, much less tell me had read them. Where­as you might say Charles Dick­ens is my writer idol, his is Hunter Thomp­son, per­haps as far from my per­son­al­i­ty and writ­ing style as he could go. It took a while to grasp his con­scious or uncon­scious moti­va­tion: Yes, he want­ed to be a writer, but want­ed to be so on his own terms, in his own style, in his own niche and way.

Recent­ly he read a new book of mine in manuscript—the first time he was will­ing to do so. “What do you think of it?” I asked. He said, “Feels like you are talk­ing to me.” But then on LinkedIn, he wrote me this sweet rec­om­men­da­tion: “A pro­lif­ic author for young adults with bound­less imag­i­na­tion and creativity.”

Maybe I should ask him to write blurbs for my books.

We have begun to talk about writ­ing. I work hard not to give advice. Besides, what do I know about jour­nal­ism? I am hap­py to talk about my expe­ri­ences, a dif­fer­ent thing. I can assure you how­ev­er, it gives me the most plea­sure to pick up the phone and call him.

“Hey,” I say. “How’s the writ­ing going?”