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The Spin Doctor

The Spin Doctor is another name I could have given to my book, The Language Professor, given the ease and effrontery with which its central character deliberately misrepresents his doings.

Here are some examples from the book:

When confronted with extensive written evidence that he has illegally and unjustly removed a stellar employee from her job, he changes registers effortlessly. But no one gave you any verbal assurances that you would get your job back when you returned from you leave, he says,  because if they had, I would have felt bound to honour such a commitment.

In that same conversation, he advises the employee to accept a compromise, The college thinks highly of you, he says, and wants the happiness of its employees.

And he describes the union rules that protect the employee as petty technicalities.

Of course, months later, when his job is on the line, a most unusual, esoteric rule becomes a right.

And, again, in reply to the question why there had not been any strikes at the college, he answers that budget restrictions were being managed by attrition as opposed to layoffs because staff morale was of the utmost importance to him.

Finally, in response to repeated criticism of his secretive and despotic ways, he feigns shock and ignorance. Why didn’t people come to him, his door was always open, he didn’t understand it, why people didn’t come to him.

Spin, spin, spin. Say what you need to say when it suits the moment, the veracity of what you say is of no importance.

So why The Language Professor? Because there are many spin doctors out there, but the story told in The Language Professor is about the effect this kind of spinning has on a morally upright individual to whom words have always had meaning and whose world is turned upside down when she learns otherwise.

Debora Resnick

author of

The Language Professor

Eloquent Books

Strategic Book Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-60911-868-6

http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheLanguageProfessor.html

Start In the Middle of the Action

Start in the middle of the action – that is my mantra.

It is the rule I have applied to all my writing since I discovered it.

It’s not really as original as all that, though. Mysteries and thrillers start in the middle of the action when the crime is committed or the body found. After that comes the search for and the discovery of who did it and why it was done.

But what exactly does it mean, start in the middle of the action? For not all novels are action novels, what then?

Modify the word ‘action’ with the word ‘emotional’ and you have the formula – start in the middle of the emotional action.

Here is an example.

An earlier version of my book, The Language Professor, began like this:

The phone call came at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, nine days before Naomi was scheduled to go back to work…

“I’ve been instructed to tell you that when you come back to work, you will not be coming back to your position as Director of Admissions…”

“This must be some kind of joke, Reuben…”

There was no rejoinder.

“I don’t believe this…”

The emotion Naomi is experiencing is implied. The action is taking place in front of the reader but it remains static, as if it were taking place on a canvas. The reader remains outside.

The present version starts like this:

The bastard, the fucking bastard, Naomi swore…

Here the emotion is proclaimed vehemently. The reader cannot remain outside but is pulled in and deposited squarely in the middle of the emotional action.

This rule can be applied not just to the beginning of a novel, but to every chapter and key scene in a novel as well.

A practice followed in The Language Professor.

Debora Resnick

author of

The Language Professor

Eloquent Books

Strategic Book Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-60911-868-6  http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheLanguageProfessor.html

“You told, you did not show,” my friend, Harriet, said when she gave me feedback on the first version of what was to become The Language Professor. Three other friends had given me mitigated feedback, but their reticence had not registered with me. When Harriet said what she said, however, a feeling of certainty took hold of me and did not let go. She was right, I thought, I had to rewrite this story.

I left The Phone Call – that was the story’s first title – worked on something else and came back to it a few years later. This time I would show, I would not tell.

This time I did show, but poorly. I told the story in dialogue form, a form I had used in another book I had written. No sooner did I finish this second version, which now bore the title, The Language Lesson, and give it to a friend for feedback than I knew, before being told, that I had still not succeeded in showing how it felt to be thrown out of your job with the flick of a finger.

And then I remembered something else I had learned about writing through the years, start in the middle of the action. The final version of The Language Professor was born.

Here are the three different opening sentences: the first, from The Phone Call, which tells; the second, from The Language Lesson, which tries to show but does not succeed; the third, from The Language Professor, which shows in no uncertain terms:

• The phone call came at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, nine days before Naomi was scheduled to go back to work…

• “I don’t believe it, “Naomi said.

“I’m sorry,” Reuben said, “those were my instructions.”

• The bastard, the fucking bastard, Naomi swore as she searched frantically for the memo

granting her  a one year leave of absence.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Debora Resnick

author of

The Language Professor

Eloquent Books

Strategic Book Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-60911-868-6

http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheLanguageProfessor.html

A frequently mistaken belief about boards of directors is that they are more than the sum of the human beings who sit on them, that somehow their members are magically transformed into a unified, supra-human whole the moment they take their seats.

This was Naomi Singer’s hope when she was summarily removed from her job by the vengeful president of her college. She was about to turn to the board for recourse when her situation was rectified. But once on the board – she had been elected as a representative of her employee group – it takes a single sitting for her to realize that there is no such thing as the ideal she had imagined. The board she has just joined does not have a collective persona that transcends the different personae of its members but is composed of twenty individuals, all of whom have come there with distinctive ideological bents that make of some fervent supporters of the powers that be, of others open-minded individuals willing to judge by the evidence, and of others, like her, thanks to their intimate knowledge of the president’s ego-tripping, his irreconcilable opponents.

As just as was her cause, Naomi realizesthat she might not even have been given a hearing by the board, let alone a fair hearing.

Boards, like chains, are only as good as all the links of which they are composed. One weak link and the whole thing can fall apart, as it does in The Language Professor, the story, among other things, of Naomi Singer’s eye-opening encounter with micro-politics in a post-secondary educational institution.

Debora Resnick

author of

The Language Professor

Eloquent Books

Strategic Book Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-60911-868-6

http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheLanguageProfessor.html

Loss of Innocence

“…and the eyes of the two of them were opened.”

Habitually, the loss of innocence is associated with the loss of sexual innocence.

But there is another kind of innocence, the moral kind, one that good people, unless they live on a desert island, inevitably lose at some point in their lives.

One of the spheres in which one can lose one’s moral innocence is the workplace.

The Language Professor is the story of just such a loss.

The lead character in the book, Naomi Singer, does not think in biblical terms, but what happens to her does, indeed, open her eyes. She learns that words do not mean what the dictionary says they mean or what she has habitually believed them to mean, that their meaning and value are not fixed.

After losing her moral innocence, Naomi’s character does not change, nor does she change the way she uses words, but she learns not to expect other people to use them the way she does. From trusting others until proven otherwise, she learns not to trust others until proven otherwise. From believing the words people utter, she learns to wait upon their actions before judging them.

Several years after the events in The Language Professor take place, the new president of Naomi’s college utters many reassuring and inspiring words at his first college-wide meeting . Naomi listens but waits. Let’s see whether he will carry through on all his promises, she thinks, on the team-building and the renewal of purpose.

Naomi waits, the new president does not carry through, and she is not disappointed.

That’s what the loss of innocence does, it robs you of expectations, but it spares you the disappointment.

Debora Resnick

author of

The Language Professor

Eloquent Books

Strategic Book Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-60911-868-6

http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheLanguageProfessor.html