Ask the Author: Jay Heinrichs
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Jay Heinrichs
I'm probably not the only writer with a cabin. Even Thoreau wasn't the first. As for intelligent design, I suppose your interpretation of that belief depends on what intelligence you're talking about. A specific god? Many gods? I've yet to see someone excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church for understanding the theory (explanation) of evolution. Spiritual explanations for phenomena not yet known to science--along with spiritual explanations for all of reality--are rarely monolithic. That's why we have rhetoric in the first place. We're free to argue about all that stuff.
Jay Heinrichs
The same as every other writer: Write. Keep a diary. I try to write 1,500 words a day. It's like playing a musical instrument: when I slack off, my writing gets clumsier and the words come more slowly. I started keeping a diary when I was in third grade. A teacher told me that writers kept journals, so I asked my mother to buy me a notebook. My teacher said to write about myself and my life. When I sat down to write for the first time, I discovered that there was nothing interesting about a third grade boy living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Figuring I had to write something, and working off the principle that you are what you eat, I wrote what I had eaten for lunch. I called my diary Lunch. Half a century later, I still keep a diary called Lunch.
Jay Heinrichs
I get paid for thinking. Chances are, I'd be doing some thinking anyway. Maybe it's terrible thinking. Which means I'm overpaid. A wonderful thing.
Jay Heinrichs
Deadlines. Over the years you get used to meeting them. I use Omnifocus to keep track of all my clients, writing projects, and deadlines. And I go over my day's tasks the evening before. Also, I check what's coming ahead so that ideas can percolate in my head in advance. Not that writing is ever easy. But deadlines take away the choice of not writing.
Jay Heinrichs
Yes! The third edition comes out patriotically on July 4. It will contain some rhetoric from the 2016 election, including an ancient breathing trick that Trump uses. The new edition also includes a new chapter on tropes and other goodies.
Jay Heinrichs
I'm finishing up a beginner's guide to rhetoric, "How to Argue with a Cat." My collaborator is the brilliant London illustrator Natalie Palmer-Sutton. It'll be published next year in the UK.
Jay Heinrichs
Years ago, I was wandering through Dartmouth College’s library for no particular reason, flipping through books at random, and in a dim corner of the stacks I found a large section on rhetoric, the art of persuasion. A dusty, maroon-red volume attributed to Adams sat at eye level. I flipped it open and felt like an indoor Coronado. Here lay treasure.
The volume contained a set of rhetorical lectures that Adams taught to undergraduates at Harvard College from 1805 to 1809, when he was a United States senator commuting between Massachusetts and Washington. In his first class, the paunchy, balding thirty-eight-year-old urged his goggling adolescents to “catch from the relics of ancient oratory those unresisted powers, which mould the mind of man to the will of the speaker, and yield the guidance of the nation to the dominion of the voice.” To me that sounded more like hypnosis than politics, which was sort of cool in a Manchurian Candidate way.
In the years since, while reading all I could of rhetoric, I came to realize something: Adams’s language sounded antique, but the powers he described are real. Rhetoric means more than grand oratory, more than “using words … to influence or persuade,” as Webster’s defines it. It teaches us to argue without anger. And it offers a chance to tap into a source of social power I never knew existed.
You could say that rhetoric talked me into itself.
The volume contained a set of rhetorical lectures that Adams taught to undergraduates at Harvard College from 1805 to 1809, when he was a United States senator commuting between Massachusetts and Washington. In his first class, the paunchy, balding thirty-eight-year-old urged his goggling adolescents to “catch from the relics of ancient oratory those unresisted powers, which mould the mind of man to the will of the speaker, and yield the guidance of the nation to the dominion of the voice.” To me that sounded more like hypnosis than politics, which was sort of cool in a Manchurian Candidate way.
In the years since, while reading all I could of rhetoric, I came to realize something: Adams’s language sounded antique, but the powers he described are real. Rhetoric means more than grand oratory, more than “using words … to influence or persuade,” as Webster’s defines it. It teaches us to argue without anger. And it offers a chance to tap into a source of social power I never knew existed.
You could say that rhetoric talked me into itself.
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