Should prizes be handed out for the most inexpert and unprofessional approach to writing a book, I would surely be in the running. For better or for worse, I have an untidy mind so structure and I are uncomfortable bedfellows. I struggle, for example, with the notion that it is advantageous to read one book at a time. What kind of crazy thinking is that?! How can I ignore the innumerable distractions on the shelves, on the floor, by my side, in my head, wherever? That requires a cast iron discipline I just don’t possess.
Many of these elements combined to birth “Leave Your Phone At The Door” which at its core is a celebration of the much underrated virtues of randomness and serendipity. The book is loosely based upon the OFFLINE concept that I devised over fifteen years ago. Its simple premise was to invite, typically, 30-35 disparate individuals for dinner at my club, all ages, all backgrounds, boys and girls. There was no semblance of any plan apart from sharing a bunch of stories over the evening that touched upon the OFFLINE ethos in various guises. And it was these stories that formed the basis of the book.
Yet the very writing of the book presented me with a particular challenge. Although I had previously contributed articles to different publications, I had never done so in any coherent fashion. They covered a plethora of themes from art to football to travel, some in longhand, others lurking in some distant computer file. The technology was more of an irritation than a useful tool to me so I never bothered to organise any articles. When I started the process in earnest, I haphazardly plucked content from multiple sources and that included ransacking my own memory.
There are excerpts in the book which had never before spilled out onto screen or paper. These stories were composed entirely in my head so transliterating them for the page meant I needed to think carefully about the way the message would now be conveyed. Whenever I spoke at the OFFLINE dinner or elsewhere, my audience was sitting directly in front of me. My tone of voice or body language, my ability to pause or read the room, my very physicality, were not available to me now so it encouraged me to improvise and take a chance or three. I tried to visualise readers flicking through the book. What might catch their eye? How did it flow? Did the structure really matter?
The delivery of the spoken word inhabits a parallel universe to the written one. Words may suddenly assume fresh meaning, emphasis or nuance on the page. While reading you can linger or retrace your steps in a manner quite impossible listening to a story en passant. There was no rewind button at an OFFLINE dinner. It was loosely curated, warm and intimate, conversational in style and mood and with an added twist of the unexpected to keep everyone on their toes! How to replicate that in the book?
Setting my initial thoughts down was easy. Ideas and inspiration flowed in multiple directions, albeit I did not much worry about the order of play nor the minutiae and I certainly did not follow any prescribed schedule. Some writers are very disciplined and may be up at the crack of dawn to spend a couple of hours on their opus while others go to a retreat to truly dedicate themselves to their craft. I wrote whenever, wherever, however, but it was consistent with my belief that unpredictability and a hint of devilry offer significant value when applied in the right way. It may be no surprise to learn that one of the chapters in my book was entitled “The Charms of Imperfection”!
OFFLINE was as much an invitation to wander off the beaten track, take a chance on people and life and remind ourselves what it means to be human. And there were two very graphic examples in the production of “Leave Your Phone At The Door”. A friend recommended Publishizer, a quasi online literary agency, which acts as an entrepôt to bring authors and publishers together globally. So during 2019, I cobbled together a synopsis of my book, which luckily attracted attention from publishers, and I presold a few hundred copies through the Publishizer platform. Then coronavirus arrived out of the blue, the dinners came to a juddering halt and the rest of my life was turned upside down due to a combination of factors. The book was one casualty and by the time it was released so were some of the early buyers. A few had tragically died over the intervening five years, mainly due to coronavirus, a vivid example of the fragility of life.
The best advice I can share with aspiring or existing writers is to ensure your voice is authentic and does not get lost in publishing pedantry. Some pushback from editors is inevitable, one of whom told me to be prepared to kill my babies. He meant that there may be stories or scenarios, which are perhaps deeply precious and meaningful to you, that may need to be sacrificed to make the book more appealing. But it pays to listen and not argue every point as a matter of principle. You need to manage this relationship over a period of time.
My editorial director at Radius, which is located in New York City, paid me a very kind compliment at the outset by stating that with first time authors and overseas authors – and bear in mind I fell into both categories – they liked to apply a few guard rails on the manuscript but in my case they decided not to bother! My narrative voice was largely untouched as a consequence so I was mindful to reciprocate their foresight wherever possible, despite the creeping Americanisation of the English language.
In fact, the only contretemps came late in the day when we were in prepublication mode. The copy editing and proofing was a laborious back and forth and I became acutely aware of a proliferation of hyphens littering the text, the majority of which were superfluous and unnecessary. The editorial director told me that they were placed there for the benefit of the reader to which I replied I did not understand unless he believed the average American had a reading age of nine. They would work it out themselves!
But I discovered that publishers there are slavishly obsessed with conforming to an industry bible, the Chicago Manual of Style, which determined the application of asterisks or semi colons, the width of the margin or display of footnotes. I viewed much of this as pure academic flatulence. Obviously, there should be boundaries for the explanation and clarity of technical subjects or scholarly articles, where scrupulous care and consistency is expected, but not for a book which represented the very antithesis of structure and order. I merely took a deep breath and upheld the OFFLINE mantra of displaying an open mind and a generosity of spirit.
By Howard Lewis
