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October 09, 2009
Writing, and lawyering, well: Not work-life balance or tech things.
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
--Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864
Writing is not a "get-a-life" thing. Neither is lawyering--especially contentious and advocacy work. You bleed. You give blood. Like writing, it's a privilege and a trust to do it well. In both, you serve. It is not all about you.
Anyone can try to write. And almost anyone--in America, especially (look around you, Jack; we've dumbed lawyering way down)--can and apparently does become a lawyer. Not a big deal anymore.
But great lawyering--like great writing--is difficult. There is too much going on in the work of writers and lawyers to make good work simple to do. If you think that either is easy, you are not doing it right.
Savor the brutality. Revel in the headaches. Stop trying to make great but hard things easy. Stop making tech the main event. Google less. E-mail less. Know that your laptop is not your brain; there are no answers to hard problems there. Talk on the phone. Meet with people. Hear some voices. Fire up ideas. Resist the new mail-it-in culture. Get a standard.
Posted by JD Hull at October 9, 2009 11:59 PM