how to contact people

Mar 13, 2009 2:12 PM
how to contact people
by doctorzamalek

A couple of quick tips on how to contact authors when you are so inclined.

1. Do not send unsolicited long pieces of writing to well-known authors. You’re most likely the 20th person to do it this month, they may have no time to read it, and this may either annoy them or simply make them feel needlessly bad… Successful authors are generally a lot less hierarchical than unsuccessful ones, as I’ve mentioned before, and for this reason they tend to be more supportive of younger authors, feeling charmed rather than threatened by them. They’ll respond to something of reasonable length. Either send them something short, or ask them first if they have the time to read something longer.

The one obvious exception to this rule is if you wrote something specifically about them. Most authors do like to keep track of what is being written about their own work, and no one will ever be annoyed to receive a 70 page manuscript about their own ideas– au contraire.

1a. The fact that well-known authors tend to be unhierarchical does not mean that you get to be a mouthy, preachy prick when writing to them. Normal politeness is still expected, especially when dealing with unusually busy people.

2. Do not tell authors that you “completely disagree with them.” No one cares if you completely disagree with them. Discussion is not possible on the basis of complete disagreement. Focus on one area where you can concede that they are right about something important but wrong about another point that you think is inessential to their argument and would serve them well to modify. Naturally, this assumes that your goal is to strike up a correspondence with the author (which presupposes that you have to make it very clear to them that you find something of value in what they are doing).

Of course, you may have a different goal– the explicit goal of critique and refutation. But in that case you may as well do it in print, not in a private letter. Print (in the broadest sense) is a good honest medium, because it exposes the critic to counter-attack in his/her own name, and that’s how fair play works. The critic can’t just sneer at mistakes by the other author, but must take a stand on some alternate conception of reality. The principle here is that the critic can’t pretend to occupy an intellectual point outside the known space-time continuum. You are as finite and flawed as the person you are critiquing, so to earn the right to critique you’d better stand for something.

3. If you ask an author to do something for you and they say ‘no’, just accept the no and move on. Your paths may cross again, and the answer may be ‘yes’ the next time. Do not respond to their ‘no’ with a three-paragraph response about how their ‘no’ is a hypocritical contradiction of things they have said previously in print, in person, on blogs, or whatever. You may not be in possession of all the facts that motivate their negative response. And even if you’re right, and the person is actually hypocritically contradicting their stated principles– so what? You do the same thing too, from time to time. Let it slide, move on, and wait for the next encounter with the person to yield better results.

I have often had good luck with certain individuals only after 3 or 4 disappointments. Don’t remind them of the disappointments, either. The change is your victory. Only rarely do those who have wronged or ignored you in the past give long orations about how right you were all along and how wrong they were all along. Those can be warm moments, but you may get a handful of those in a lifetime, and you can’t be the one who instigates them– the other person has to choose to be in an apolegetic mood; try to force them into it, and they’ll most likely just spit cobra venom back at you. (ADDENDUM: and the best transformative moment I ever had in any human relationship was with a person who didn’t even remember me from the earlier, negative incidents, which is pretty reassuring in its own right.) The best payment you can hope for, in cases of being wronged, is later receiving something even better than what you were wrongly denied the first time. This is not preaching, but a hard-won lesson. I’m not naturally a stoic, and do generally like to see retribution occur against the unjust. And it does happen, but not always in the way we want it to happen.