Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll
Six months ago, a friend from my motorcycle club sent me a copy of a book being written by his daughter. This was the story of a forty-seven-year-old woman who had been a serious drug addict in her youth, had kicked the habit in her twenties and went on to build a complex of drug rehabilitation centers and sober-living houses to help other recovering addicts. She had written her life story and her father was asking me for some help with advice about the book. It seems that she had hired a professional writer to help her with the book, but she was less than happy with the product as it was coming out. I have seen this movie once before. Another friend from my same motorcycle group had done the same thing three years ago in sending me fifty pages of a manuscript and asked me for my opinion. I seem to have an inability to say no to friends when it comes to writing.
In both instances I took on an initial challenge to give my opinion of what had been written and show them how much better I thought it could be with some tweaking. In both instances, the authors were much happier with my rewrites than they were with the work being done by their paid ghost writers. And in both instances I agreed to take on the task of writing or rewriting the books. The last time I spent four months writing a 400-page book, having fed the author one chapter at a time for approval. It met with his approval all the way through. There were the normal issues of the conflicts between the author and the writer, but we got through them. Then an outside critic was hired who put a list of twenty-three problems with the book that I had produced. I think it is safe to say that this critic didn’t think much of my work. I didn’t take the criticism particularly well, but I sucked it up and rewrote the entire book being sure to address each of the twenty-three specific criticisms. Now my friend had two versions of his story, both over 400 pages long. That project went into the ozone three years ago and I have no clue what has happened to it since, so there is a bit of a sense of frustration with the project.
This new project is now 80% finished. I have been somewhat more casual about the work since this is a clear rewrite versus an original work. The other project was about a life that it was easy for me to relate to. We had both been businessmen who had a passion for motorcycling. This project is about a life I can only imagine. I have never given into the drug culture and what I know of it I know from movies. I have less in common with the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll that dominate this story than with almost anything I could imagine.
I have found the story of this woman’s life more interesting than I expected. It originates and ends in Atlantic City with stints in between in Southern California and the Rocky Mountains in ski country. I had worked a summer in Atlantic City, I had vacationed in ski country (not Colorado, but Utah), and now here I am living in Southern California. But I had never taken drugs and I had never been to a Grateful Dead concert. I found the first four chapters of the depths of despair as this young woman takes every type of drug known to man and sinks to the point of walking the streets of Philadelphia to support her habit, to be quite shocking since this was the daughter of friends. The next four chapters are what I would call the struggle. This is where the woman gets clean of drugs, but cannot shake the drug culture as she tries to move on with her life. There is a strange commercial angle to the story in that the woman is actually quite an accomplished businessperson when it comes to selling drugs and manages to convert that tendency into the family real estate business.
But there is building purpose to her life and that is to use all she has learned of the drug world and process of rehabilitation combined with her growing knowledge of the real estate business, to build an array of sober-living houses to help addicts with the crucial step of converting their clean post-rehab status to a successful reintegration into economic life. This all happens as her family business is looking for a transitional strategy since the story of Atlantic City as a gambling Mecca had more or less run its course and other business initiatives like private golf clubs had also run their demographic course.
I am actually very happy with this project. I’m doing it for all the right reasons, which is to say it is not an economic endeavor. It is an act of friendship for people who I see a few times a year at best (I have never even met the author and have only talked to her twice by phone at this point). My knowledge of her is a function of her writing and a few emails. But I feel like I have found the thread in her story and I am building a narrative arc to the story.
I have a few more chapters to refashion, but I now know exactly what I want to do with them, so my experience is that I can write very quickly when I have found the thread. I am told she has a publisher, but I do not really care. I have no skin in the game. On the other project I had a 30% interest after costs. On this project I have no such arrangement…by choice. If something comes of this project I will have been of service to a friend and I will have the pleasure of knowing that my capabilities brought a story to life and made it compelling. That is what I like to do with my writing. To me, writing is better than sex, drugs and rock n’ roll.