Tag Archives: Speech

I Is A Teacher Now

Books, teaching, Writing, , , ,

I started teaching at Lee College in Baytown, Texas (close to Houston). It’s been an interesting, yet very positive, ride so far. I like the students, and now if I can just get past the health part of the process, I should be fine.

This semester I am teaching five sections of public speaking, one section of interpersonal communication and one section of business and professional communication. Most of those are great, although the business and professional communication is a night class, starting at 6:00 pm and ending at 7:15 pm. It’s a bit of a struggle, but as I kept saying all last year, I want to teach, not sit in a lab and just help other instructors teach better.

The one (or two) drawback(s) is that it doesn’t give me a lot of time for writing, filming videos, or (okay, three drawbacks) playing games. The one game I’m currently involved in is Guild Wars 2, which is one of those games that occupies any gaming time you have so that you rarely play any other games. It’s a fun game, and they keep churning out new add ons, constantly keeping you occupied. The only problem I’ve had with the add ons is that they make them awfully difficult if you’re not already an expert in the game. I’m pretty good, but definitely not an expert. I remember playing one of the add ons, and I couldn’t get beyond the opening of it because the bosses send me into a corner in a fetal position because they make those add ons way to freaking hard. I play this game to have fun, not to be stomp;ed by boss guys that seem to laugh at me, stomp me into the ground and then steal my lunch money, demanding I bring more to them next time he arrives to stomp me into the ground again.

Well, that’s all for right now. I’m still in dire need of a new kidney, which I’m starting to suspect I will never get. So, read my books, and read them soon because soon that’s all that’s going to be around to communicate on my behalf.

“Your Story Made Me Cry”: The Impact of Fiction on Readers

Business, Writing, , , , ,

Some years ago, I used to do performance literature, which is where you take a piece of your writing and you perform (interpret) it. One piece I was performing was a story of a doctor who had to pull the breathing tube on a newborn in an operating room during triage. While a lot of stories of this type of narrative focus on the emotions of the doctor, or something equally tragic, this story focused on the fact that the baby, who was too small to survive, was going to die, but no matter what else was going on in the chaos of that operating room, the baby wouldn’t die. So everyone in the operating room had to keep working through their other dramas as this infant was fighting its last moments of life. The linking line from each scene was “and the baby was still breathing….” I interwove this narrative with a story I had written about a man who shows up for work one day in a job where everyone lives a mundane life where nothing changes, and on this one day, a co-worker goes nuts, killing everyone all because he was that one guy in the office that no one ever took seriously. To describe the experience of those two stories linked together, it was like riding a rollercoaster, going from humor to tragedy to horror to shock and back to humor again. All linked with “and the baby was still breathing….”

Anyway, it was one of those pieces that received a lot of positive praise at the time, but years later, I completely forgot about it. I was serving as an assistant debate coach a decade later and at a speech tournament when this person I didn’t recognize walked up to me and said: “Holy crap! It’s you! You made me cry one day!” I looked at this guy, who was rather large and intimidating, and to be honest, I couldn’t imagine ever being able to make this guy cry, unless I had hit him with a crowbar, right before running the other direction because it would not have done any damage. But then he started describing the story I described earlier and said that he remembered walking out of that room and crying for a long time because of the impact of that story. He said he’s never forgotten it.

And I believed him because it had been over ten years, and there was no way anyone could have remembered a simple story for ten years and then remember who told it to him unless it made some sort of an impact.

And that’s when I realized the true impact of being a writer. Over the years, I’ve written a lot of stories, some funny, some tragic and some heart-breaking. Each story has been a struggle in taking a journey that I’ve never taken before, and while I’ve always believed that I’m seeking out some way of moving myself through a narrative, the simple point is that we really want to touch other people, to remind people of why they’re living in the first place, and provide either some meaning, or something further to think about. I think this is what has bothered me so much about a lot of the fiction I come across; it’s almost like the only reason it exists is because someone just felt the need to fill up space on a blank piece of paper.

Writers have the ability to influence people, but even more important, at least to me, is that they have the ability to make people stop and think. And sometimes, that requires the writer to put himself/herself outside of a personal comfort zone. One of my strongest narratives in my writing career is probably one of the few pieces that received the most attention, having won a number of national awards. It has actually been performed a few times by people from different sections of the country, who each seem to find a new way of interpreting something that was written with multiple layers of perspective. When I wrote it, I had this idea to tackle the problems of gay bashing in this country. Having come across a lot of attempts of this type of story, I used to criticize the fact that either someone was too linked to the subject matter (experienced it before) to distance oneself well enough, or someone had no connection to the gay lifestyle, so it ended up being one of those stories where someone was trying to make an impact by touching a controversial subject only because it was controversial (but really had no nuance to breathe any life into the narrative). I was afraid I was going to suffer from the latter problem because honestly I’ve never been involved in a gay bashing before (never having bashed someone, nor was I gay or someone who was a victim of such an incident). When I started this project, I was convinced I was tackling a subject that wasn’t mine to do so, and it would be recognized instantly once it was completed.

So what I did was try to analyze a gay bashing from every perspective of the incident itself. I went into the mind of the victim, the basher, an innocent bystander who witnessed the event but did nothing, and the lover of the victim itself. What I did was write the story from the perspective of a survivor who has lost his memory of the event and is in the hospital recovering, remembering the incident from each perspective before finally realizing he was the lover of the victim, and as a result, the final victim as well. For me, the story was extremely hard to write because I had to explore the story from a perspective that was completely uncomfortable for me, but I had to do it sincerely and not try to fill the details with cliches or common expectations. The final crescendo between the main character and the basher, and the realization that anger and hate were the only two things separating them (where he loses his battle with anger and is left with “hate” as the last step towards becoming everything he feared the most) was the critical scene in the whole story and it was probably rewritten twenty times before I got it right.

I received a lot of letters from people about that particular story, from practically every walk of life and particular backgrounds that I had never expected. I even received comments from people who were big Elvis fans (the linking tie between all of the narratives was an old Elvis song that had been playing on the jukebox where the bashing took place), and felt that the song would never sound the same to them again after having experienced the story.

Unfortunatey, not all of our stories can achieve this level of narrative, but when they do, that’s when we’re reminded of why a lot of us became writers in the first place. And it wasn’t just be called a writer or to put words on paper, but to move the audience to think and experience something they hadn’t expected to feel before beginning the journey.

Vilifying Debate

Politics, , ,

I was taking a required “Crucial Confrontations” course today at work. I find these exercises really funny because they’re designed to “help” you deal with confrontations at work but automatically make an erroneous supposition that everyone who has a job also has negative confrontations at work. Then it gets worse because they assume that you’re constantly at odds with people and that you’re obvious lacking in abilities to handle yourself in these horrible circumstances. I’m going to let you all in on a little secret: I get along smashingly with the people I work with, and a course on “Crucial Confrontations” needs a crucial confrontation with its suppositions because not always do we have problems with the people with whom we work. It’s actually pretty funny to listen to a group of people who actually get along with each other trying to find some reason to complain before giving up and deciding that they’d rather just eat more of the free bagels and laugh with each other over how ridiculous life can be sometimes.

But one thing that was included in the conversation that kept bugging me was the fact that the authors of these series of books and corporate programs (Grenny Patterson and Switzler McMillan…really, are these really their names?) seem to have a HUGE complex with the process of debate because every time they mention it, they use such statements as “avoid letting someone use debate tactics in conversation”. In other words, they don’t see debate as what it is, but as they seem to perceive debate might be.

And this is what I want to talk about because I’ve seen this mistake a lot, and my supposition is that this is a mistake often made by people who never did debate, or might have done it but never did it very well so that they have been scarred by the premise of debate forever. To them, debate is this evil thing that people do in order to hurt other people. When they talk about “debate tactics” they’re not talking about using advanced persuasive skills to convince another person of the merits of your side’s arguments, but think of it as insults, biting commentary and probably snide attempts to dominate a conversation unjustly.

I see it used in the media a lot, mainly because the majority of people do not have a history of positive debate. Instead, their closest brush with debate has been a political campaign where one individual used some parlour trick to disgrace his or her opponent during a quick exchange that was handled on national television where people get sound byte moments of time to win or lose a campaign. Or they think of the few “debates” they’ve seen between two talking heads on some violent political show where people screamed each other down until one person managed to survive long enough to get his or her point across in some zero sum diatribe that never consisted of a moment of actual conversation.

People have forgotten that the founding fathers dreamed of a future of cool and deliberate conversations between people to decide what might be the best course of action for any number of different circumstances. Debate in this country was supposed to be the kind of conversation you find between common men who would argue points of view like was supposed to be done in a court of law before lawyers became the main attraction. People were supposed to be able to hold public conversations so that the best possible views could be heard, and then people could make enlightened decisions based on having heard all of the good information provided for them.

Instead, we base our decisions on sound bytes and screaming matches. Or even worse, we listen to only those voices we already agree with, so we don’t even allow ourselves to be exposed to voices that might differ from the ones we already hear on a constant basis. This means that new ideas are ignored and avoided while we keep hearing the same bad ideas over and over again, because that’s all we’re ever capable of hearing.

Debate in this country is seriously lacking, and part of the problem is the derision we cast towards the very nature of debate itself. Having a conversation with someone you disagree with used to be a wonderful thing until people stopped communicating and just went to “win” arguments with people they disagree with. When that happens, we stop listening to what other people have to say and hope to keep talking long enough to exhaust the other guy so that we’re all that other people hear.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to hear a debate between a very good collegiate team from Ireland against one of our top teams in the United States, and what was so interesting about the debate was that the issue was about immigration, and in the beginning, it appeared the Irish team was at a disadvantage because the conversation was one that was dominating the US market. But what happened was that the Irish team brought up arguments and evidence that people in the United States rarely, if ever, get to hear, and it was as if we were hearing about immigration for the very first time, even though we hear it practically every time there is an election in the United States. During this one hour or so debate, it was unique, different and overwhelming.

Unfortunately, we don’t partake in such exchanges like that very often. Instead, we remain with tunnel vision and pretend we know all of the facts because we’ve been convincing ourselves that we’ve heard it all before and compartmentalize any opposition before we actually even hear the first opposing word.

There’s not enough debate in this country as it is, and the very little there is remains locked up in despair because people have already decided what is and is not “debate”. So, like the whole Crucial Conversations joke of an educational module, we are doomed to treat debate as opposition to good conversation, leaving us in a state of rarely ever learning anything new. And that is truly sad.