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Even literary writers are in the business of customer service. The best ones know that.
You may not think, as a writer, that you’re in the business of customer service. You may say, as I have, “I’m a writer. I don’t shill a product.”
But each story is a product. And each story has to think of how it’s pleasing its customer.
Only the unenlightened, and unsuccessful, think otherwise.
Friend of the pod Ryan Holiday says that whenever he writes one of his best-selling books, he keeps in his head what his editor once told him. “It’s not what your books says. It’s what it does.” Meaning: What in the book moves the reader to re-examine her life and forge a new path? That’s what each of his books does. It compels the reader to act.
Holiday’s books do this because he’s kind of created a new genre: the widely read philosopher who applies the wisdom he’s accrued from, say, ancient Rome to the situations and frustrations of the 21st Century. Each of Holiday’s books is deeply researched, super-smart self-help.
You may be thinking — again, as I have — that it’s easy for someone like Holiday to think about what a story does, to think about “customer service,” because Holiday writes in a genre whose goal is literally to…
