The audacity and hope of Barak Obama, the writer

• Barak Obama wrote his own book -- no ghostwriters or co-authors. He did the literary heavy-lifting himself.

It was with plenty of audacity and no small amount of hope that Barak Obama sat down in the early 1990s to write his life story.

He had just turned 30 in 1991 and could reasonably assume that much was ahead of him -- an assumption that would be true, of course -- but he also knew that his life to that point had been like no one else's whom he knew:

• The son of a white mother from Kansas and an African father from Kenya;
  
  
• Raised in Indonesia, Africa and Hawaii;
  
  
• Intellectually brilliant, confirmed by the fact that he was editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama's defining experience to that point had been his relationship with his father, with him he had lost touch early in life and then re-established contact. Shortly after that, however, his father died, and Obama traveled to Kenya to find out more about the man. There, many of the images he had of his father are shattered. He finds that his father had slid from being a brilliant and respected academic to a drunk and an object of pity.

The small amount of fame that Obama achieved as being the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review netted him a call from a literary agent, a book proposal and a publisher. His first idea was to write about race relations, but that didn't suit him and where he was, according to an article about the book by Janny Scott published this week by the New York Times.

That journey of discovery through the images he had of his father is what he decided he had to tackle. What he produced was Dreams From My Father (Amazon).

He did so with confidence and flair -- even audacity -- using composite characters, invented dialogue, out-of-sequence events and a variety of literary techniques. He has since come under some criticism for his account. Inquiring journalists and political opposition researchers say things didn't happen the way he said they happened.

But there is one fact that no one disputes. Obama wrote his own book.

He struggled with sentences, phrasing and structure. He edited, rewrote and rethought.

The words are his and his alone. He didn't pay a ghostwriter or take on some partner to do the literary heavy-lifting. The writing is his creation. In this age of spin and carefully calibrated public pronouncements, getting an unobstructed look into the mind of a prominent political figure does not happen very often.

Obama wrote his own story. In my book, that counts for a lot.

Links:

• Janny Scott, The Story of Obama, Written by Obama, The New York Times, May 18, 2008
  
  
• Paul Watkins, A Promise of Redemption, New York Times, August 6, 1995 -- a review of Dreams From My Father

A seventh edition

• A textbook that goes into multiple editions can be like a child who grows up but doesn't leave home.

Textbooks can be funny things. If you write a textbook, you want it to be widely adopted so that about four years later the publisher will ask for a second edition (because, while your royalties don't amount to much at that point, the publisher is making a ton of money).

Only a few textbooks, maybe 15 percent, make it into a second edition. (I don't have a reference or stats to back that figure up.)

But then, the text may begin to gather new adopters and hang onto a few of the original ones. If that happens, about four years later, the publisher will ask for a third edition. And so it goes.

Sometimes a textbook can be like a child who grows into adulthood but never leaves home.

Those are a few of the thoughts I'm having this morning (May 20) as I am procrastinating doing work on the seventh edition of Writing for the Mass Media. The publisher is Allyn and Bacon, and the good folks there want the revised edition from me by June 1. That's why the posts on this blog and others I maintain have been a little thin in the last few days.

During its quarter century of existence, Writing for the Mass Media has been adopted as a textbook at nearly 500 colleges and universities (mostly in America but also in places across the globe). The sixth edition was used at 240 different schools, and many of those places are multi-year adopters.

So, this job is well woth doing (and has even become financially justifiable). But it's hard -- and a little boring and tedious. Fortunately, it's almost done.

And to make sure it's done, by June 1, I had better get back to it.

You can find out more about Writing for the Mass Media at these spots:

• Description on JPROF.
• The book's web site at Allyn and Bacon
• Amazon page.

The fiction writer's bookshelf

If you are interested in writing fiction, here are two of the best books you can have:

Christopher Vogler
The Writer's Journey

Renni Brown and David King
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers

(These are the Amazon links.)

No one explains "story" better than Vogler.

I'm going to post these to a couple of lists to which I subscribe and see if any of those folks have suggestions. If they allow it, I'll post them here.

Review: The Last Casualty

• An Episcopal priest hears the confessions of a dying man. Get ready for a ride.

THE LAST CASUALTY, (Amazon) the latest thriller by Cyn Mobley, is like an Indiana Jones movie, a wild ride that never lets you catch your breath. David Dalt is a U.S. Navy Episcopal priest and an ex-SEAL -- except that apparently there are no ex-SEALs. (Just as Marines will tell you there are no ex-Marines.) Dalt is drawn back into the life when he hears the confession of a dying man. The man is a spy who has betrayed Dalt's old unit. Dalt's vows won't allow him to violate the confessional, but they can't stop him from trying to save his comrades.

It's a complex tale that moves at the pace of a speeding train.

Recommended.

(Disclosure, BSP: Cyn Mobley is a good friend. Her publishing company, Greyhoundbooks, will unleash my debut novel, Kill the Quarterback, sometime later this year.)