A Question – Believe It or Not – That Haunted Me for Years! 

Years ago, when I was actively writing short stories, I sent a dozen of them to the brother of a friend for a critique. He (the brother) was an award-winning Canadian author of novels and short stories.

Since a few of my earlier stories had received positive comments from published fiction writers who were kind enough to review them at writing conferences, I was hoping for positive feedback, since the ones I sent him (the brother) were more mature. And he was positive about some of them. But he criticized others as “anecdotes” rather than “stories.” I should have asked him what he meant by that. Instead, I spent years trying to figure it out on my own.

All those with literary ambitions believe they have at least one novel inside them waiting to be put into print and stun the world. The great majority of such people never write their stories. And of those that do, I’d wager that 90 percent of them are written as anecdotes.

What’s the difference between a “genuine” work of fiction and an anecdote?

I figured it out, finally, just recently by reading a “story” sent to me by a family member. It was a first-person account of interesting aspects of his life, strung together in a sophisticated way with a strong sense of style and abundant literary diction. It was the sort of thing you would expect to read in The New Yorker.

But I could see that it was an anecdote. It was an anecdote because it was written the way anecdotes are told – about an incident in the person’s life that he/she found relevant and memorable.

Let me try to rephrase that as a formal definition: Anecdotes are first-person, autobiographical accounts formulated and recited to document some significant-to-that person incident or incidents in his/her life. However well-written and however literary the style, the distinguishing feature of anecdotes is that they are essentially memories, embellished by pride and shame and the desire to document and validate the teller’s existence.

I published my “stories” that were the closest to actual stories in my book Dreaming of Tigers. I saved the anecdotes – dozens of them – to be reworked when I figured out how to do it. So now, I’m going to go revisit the best of them.

My initial strategy will be to revise them from the first to the third person. I’m hoping that will force me to rethink the characters and the plot from the reader’s point of view. Then I’ll read them again with these questions in mind:

* This may be interesting to me. But will it be interesting to the reader?

* This is meaningful to me. But how can I make it meaningful to the reader?

Connecting the Dots:

Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately 

Why Fixing Matches Is Good for Boxing: Years ago, a friend of mine who was a boxing promoter explained to me why boxing has a history of fixed fights. “When you have a good-looking, charismatic fighter that’s won three or four fights in a row, the fans get interested,” he said. “If he keeps winning, the gate gets big. And fast. It can go from $10,000 to $100,000 to $1 million to $10 million to $100 million. When that happens, everybody wins. The promoter, the venue operator, the boxer, the trainer, the manager – even the kids selling popcorn and hotdogs. And the fighter who takes a dive? He gets paid, too. And if the fight is good, there’s a chance for a rematch. So, you don’t need a big conspiracy to make boxing work that way. Everyone does what’s best for himself.”

How Big Fixes Work in Business: That was an eye-opener for me. I realized that the same phenomenon could occur in business. When, in any industry, the financial incentives are positive from the top to the bottom, you don’t need a big conspiracy to make a big fix happen. Big Pharma is a perfect example. There are dozens of medications and procedures recommended routinely by not just doctors but medical associations that have zero proof that they work. In fact, there are many that have been proven to be useless. So why are they still on the market? Moreover, why are they still being recommended? The answer is that whenever you have a medication or procedure that doesn’t actually kill patients, everyone up and down the chain makes money – from the companies that make the pharmaceuticals, to the associations that are supported by the drug companies, to the lobbyists that promote Big Pharma, to the legal and accounting firms that represent these questionable drugs and procedures, to the hospitals that employ the procedures, to the universities and institutions that do the studies, to the salespeople that persuade the doctors to recommend them, to the drugstores that sell them. The only people that don’t usually make money, oddly, are the doctors that prescribe them. They prescribe them because, most of the time, they believe they actually work, especially when they are recommended by such trustworthy organizations as the American Heart Association. The thinking, up and down the line, seems to be: “So long as it isn’t killing anybody, what’s the harm?” I’ve got much more on this. But I submit the thesis to you for your review.

The Difference Between Waging a War and a Family Feud: As I have said, and as the leaders of Hamas understood when they invaded Israel, the pressure for Israel to pause the war and return to negotiations for a “two-party solution” has mounted as the Palestinian body count grew. The greater the disparity between dead Palestinians and dead Jews, the stronger and larger will be the condemnation of Israel. This idea of “parity” is emotionally comprehensible, but intellectually specious. Parity makes sense and eventually works in a family feud. But it is not – and never has been – a metric for “regulating” war. War is terrible because its purpose is – and must be – defeating the enemy. And however history views it, war is justified – and always has been justified – by the claimed virtue of its cause. The US didn’t justify its role in WWI and WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the war against Iraq by how “proportionate” the body count was. (In WWII, for example, about half a million Americans were killed compared to about eight million Germans. And of those eight million, a quarter to a third of them were civilians.) I’m not defending the killing of thousands of Palestinians by Israeli bombing. I’m pointing out that the argument about proportionality makes sense only if you see this as something other than a war. We have to ask ourselves: Is it a war? And if it isn’t, what is it? An ancient family feud? An urban, police action? What do you think?

The Mentor Question: I’m having a discussion with an old friend, spurred by the piece I wrote Nov. 4 about people in my life that had a positive impact on my career. He pointed out that half the people on my list acted as mentors to me. He said that of the many people influenced him, none were mentors. He, like me, had a successful business career. But he managed to have it without the help of a mentor. Why? Was it because of the different industries we were in? Do some industries, such as writing and publishing, benefit more than others from mentor-mentee relationships? Or were our differing paths due to our individual personalities? We are both hyper-resistant to being told what to do. Nor do we like answering questions. I have a few inchoate ideas I’m tossing around. What do you think? Have mentors played a helpful role in your career?