Dear Cary,
I’m writing a book based on my day job where I have access to all kinds of sensitive information.
It is about the parallels between criminals and business people and I’ve named it, “Everything I Know About Entrepreneurs I Learned from Drug Dealers.” I’ve been privy to a lot of behind-the-scenes situations including going on ride-alongs with various federal, state, and local field officers who arrest drug traffickers on our country’s highways.
Plus, I’ve sat in on phone calls where they compare notes about the types of cases they’re seeing, drug trends, etc. I’ve filmed in places where drug traffickers have taken over land in our forests and national parks and polluted rivers by siphoning off the water for their illegal and toxic marijuana grows.
It is not a tell-all or anything like that, but it gives an insider’s view of a world that most people don’t know anything about.
I have confided in my boss, who is also a friend. He says to turn it into fiction, but that’s not the book I want to write.
I don’t plan to retire before five years or so and I feel like this book could be damaging to my career. However, I am obsessed with writing it. Do you have any suggestions as to the path forward?
Dealing
Dear Dealing,
First of all, before anything else: Write it.
Write it as if it will never be read by anyone.
Write it for yourself.
Write it for a caring and omniscient god who will protect you from all consequences.
Write it for those who know you best, all the people you’ve ever loved, all the ones you’ve ever lost, all the kings and queens of your magnificent dreams.
How?
Ask yourself what enrages you, what makes you laugh, what haunts you at night.
Use these things as prompts:
What haunts me at night?
What makes me laugh?
What makes me afraid?
What do I love about my co-workers?
What do I hate about my co-workers?
What do I fear about my job?
What do I see in my job that makes me sad?
What do I see in my job that makes me angry?
Then: Write it one little piece by one little piece piece. Write it five minutes at a time. Write it on your way to work. Write it while you are eating lunch. Write it in your car, using Voice Memos. Write it anywhere.
Now: As you write, label each piece, however small. Make a menagerie of them, like little gems of your soul.
Give each piece a name, like you have a hundred kids, each one with the same hair but different freckles.
Make it personal. Yes, make it personal. How have you yourself been affected by this longtime experience? Did you enter the field with high ideals and have seen them betrayed? Or did you just sort of stumble into the job, and then, over the years, find yourself increasingly caught up in it and changed by it? See if you can find moments, incidents, that crystallize your ambivalence or growing disenchantment, or whatever it is that drives your passion to write this book?
Most of all: Just keep writing it.
Then: When what you are writing becomes a nightmare, something you no longer recognize, like a person who has turned on you or a family member who has gone mad, you must analyze it like a patient in a laboratory. You must interrogate it: What are you really trying to become? Why are you here? What form must you take?
Actually, your title might solve the whole problem of structure: OK, Hotshot: Give me twenty things you learned: Twenty succinct lessons that a drug dealer can teach you that entrepreneurs could use. Make those the chapters. Done.
Hey, that’s a winner!
It will help that you are not an outsider. You are “one of the family.” Still, such a project is bound to arouse intense emotion among your co-workers. If potential sources sense that you are driven by a sincere moral and social purpose, and that you scrupulous and discreet, they are more likely to cooperate. A persuasive argument for why you are writing this can win their trust. So make it personal and have a thesis.
As you write, the story may change. That is normal. It may begin with the clever premise in your title but end up expressing some other truth. That is why you have to write it first.
Now. No point writing in a vacuum. We write to be heard. One must adjust sensitive stories so that no individuals are needlessly harmed, including yourself. Once you write it, you will see the trouble spots. (You cannot know until you write the story.) To get perspective, read books by other whistleblowers. Contact their authors. Learn about publishers, agents and lawyers who have handled whistleblower book cases by reading the publishing world press. As many recent books from inside the White House have shown, if you have a good enough story, who cares about the fallout?
But don’t be cavalier. Take a careful look at your terms of employment. What kinds of confidentiality agreements have you signed? Ask how a firing would affect your pension. Would you be able to find a new job in the private sector if you lost this one? But don’t let that stop you from writing. Keep writing without fear. You can always decide not to publish it.
OK, that’s enough from me.
As I say, I’m intrigued, as I always am, by the tricky questions that arise in the writing of a nonfiction book, and I hope you go through with it!
Let me know how it’s going!
Best regards,
Cary T.
