"How Sherwood Saved My Career"

by W. Schuck

“Write an electronic communications vehicle study,” my boss Judy said in our weekly update meeting. “I need it for a meeting one week from tomorrow.”

Having written for the trade press in Cleveland for nine years, much like Sherwood Anderson did in his ad writing days at Chicago’s Taylor-Crutchfield agency, my writing style was standard modern newsroom:  inverted pyramid. Put the important stuff first and the unimportant stuff last. I had also written corporate expenditure policies in my career. This experience stiffened my style, knocking out about all of the creative element that was left. Surely, an “electronic communications vehicle study” would benefit from such a background. Or, so I thought.

Diligently, I scribbled down a list of our company’s electronic communication vehicles:  e-mail, intranet, voicemail, videoconferencing, and the Human Resources Information Database. Next, was to conduct interviews with the “owners” of each vehicle to find out the details:  Who has access?  How is it maintained?  What is its purpose?  Who is the audience?  How does one use it?  And so on.

After four days, I was quite proud of myself. I had interviewed all the electronic communication vehicle owners and documented the information in an organized format. I even photocopied and three-hole-punched the document and put it in a black binder with tab dividers. It looked slick.

I put the report on Judy’s desk a day early while she attended an offsite meeting. I went home on time and bragged to Ellen my wife how well I did the job. I layed on the couch that evening after our son Ernie went to bed and continued reading Kim Townsend’s biography Sherwood Anderson. Life was great.

The next day, as I sat in my ergonomic office chair pursuing completion of the next project on my list, Judy stood in my cubicle opening. Her hands were on her hips. The black binder with the tab dividers was under her arm. She didn’t say a word. Of course, she came to congratulate me.

“This is not what I wanted at all,” she thundered. Fear penetrated me as I turned my head from my computer screen to look up at her. My throat tightened as I stammered to say, “What do you mean?”

“This is not right,” she began in a stern but rolling-thunder tone. No doubt you went to a lot of effort to gather this information. But the way it’s presented just is not right. It’s far too academic or something.”

This was the story of my life. High school English teachers and college professors told me I sounded too much like Hemingway before I ever read Hemingway. High school and college girlfriends left me because I was “too nice.”  Now, my electronic communications vehicle study was “too academic.”  I wasn’t going to guess what Judy meant by the “or something” she tacked on. I was furious, but buried my wrath until she left.

Then, she doused my burning anger with a bit of lighter fluid:  “I want it re-written by tomorrow and I want it to be more user-friendly.” 

“User-friendly!”  I went for a shaky walk around the floor wishing I could make a phone call or tell someone in the office how angry I felt. I ended up going to the men’s room to cool off.

As I sat in a stall, assuming the position of The Thinker, I quietly thought of appropriate forms of revenge like quitting. Realizing I couldn’t do that, I began to think of Sherwood Anderson and of his decision to walk out of his paint company office and follow the railroad tracks eastward toward Cleveland. Here I was in Cleveland, feeling the same pressure to succeed, yet considering a walk home to Lorain County, of which Elyria is the county seat. Suddenly, I had it.

I marched back to my desk, opened a new document and started typing away. This would put her in the corner!  Her meeting was tomorrow and she’d have to use whatever I produced.

I typed into the evening, crumbing up my keyboard by eating lunch and dinner at my desk. The words seemed to come naturally, sounding just like one of Sherwood’s “reason why” advertisements I had read in Townsend’s biography. As Townsend explained the “reason why” style, “it is the word of a writer trying to create a voice that makes you feel he is talking directly to you, in words that you can trust.”  And, as Sherwood himself wrote in one of his ads, “Every word of this book is written under my personal supervision. As you and I may never meet face to face, I give you my word now that what is written in this book is true in spirit and in fact.”

Like Sherwood, I pleaded with the reader (or “user” as Judy liked to say) about the importance of the information in my electronic communications vehicle study. I reasoned with the reader-user that this information would make him the star of his department because now he had the keys to understanding how the company’s electronic communications vehicles work, to whom they are delivered and who is the intended audience of each. I personally guaranteed the compilation’s accuracy by applying dates to each section of information, promising an annual update and putting my name on the report’s outside front cover.

I heard Sherwood’s voice urging me on as I wrote. “Muttered,” one of Sherwood’s favorite words to use, was the only word I refused from him as he took over for me at the keyboard.

When Sherwood finished dictating to me and I stopped typing, I felt relieved like I had come clean about my feelings toward Judy and about writing the study. Writing the study this way was a real gamble and it could mean getting fired but I didn’t care. To me it was just one project in a heap of paper I produced since I began writing for a living nearly 10 years previous.

It was done. All that was left was to print a copy and put it in Judy’s red “urgent” folder that lay in the mail tray outside her office door. Then, I could sleep on the bus ride home.

As I lifted the still-warm 30-some pages from the printer’s output tray and slid them into Judy’s folder, I trotted to the elevator and slipped away.

The next day was like a scene from the film “Groundhog Day.”  I again sat in my ergonomic office chair pursuing completion of the next project on my list. Judy again stood in my cubicle opening. Her hands were on her hips. The black binder with the tab dividers was under her arm. She didn’t say a word. I pretended not to see her, giving her the chance to have the first word. Of course, she came to fire me.

“This is just what I wanted,” she thundered. Fear penetrated me as I turned my head from my computer screen to look up at Judy. My throat tightened as I stammered to say, “What do you mean?”

“This is just perfect,” she began. “No doubt you went to a lot of work to rewrite this. What inspired you?”

I didn’t dare to tell her. I only hoped that this was the beginning of the new story of my life. Career-wise, with Sherwood as my muse, perhaps I’d stop feeling like the stifled George Willard of Winesburg, Ohio. Sherwood had given me a voice and a confidence that would carry me through the next big assignment and, six months later, to a promotion.

“Thanks, Sherwood,” I muttered. “You saved my career.”

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