There is one. Wait, two. No, three. Ok, four humans who directly inspired my writing. (Ok, five.)
The list is not in order of importance, but by time:
Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (Fall 1988)
Think what a better world it would be if we all—the whole world—had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess. And it is still true, no matter how old you are—when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
Fulghum wrote a whole series of front-porch wisdom books, but the one that most people know is All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, published in 1988. I was working at Waldenbooks in the Vallco Mall, and this book literally flew off the shelves. Fulghum was a Unitarian minister, and he wrote “Kindergarten” for his church bulletin. The essay was passed around (pre-Internet) and eventually landed with a literary agent.
The essays were brief, dense, and heartfelt. He effortlessly gives names to all parts of the human condition… ideas and feelings you have all the time, but have not named.
Fulghum is hopeful.
Robert B. Parker, Looking for Rachel Wallace (Fall 1991)
I waited. I knew he was trying to size me up. That was okay, I was used to that. People didn’t know anything about hiring someone like me, and they almost always vamped around for a bit.
Looking for Rachel Wallace was published in 1980. Fall 1991, unlike other entries on this list, is when I read the book as part of a UCSC class called “The American Detective.” It’s how you know a new author or book is novel — you start reading, hours pass, you are hungry and have a headache, but you read the whole god damned book.
Parker comes from the Dashiell Hammett School of detectives. Spenser, the detective who never has a first name, is an ex-boxer from Boston, but geography is not important to these books. It’s dialogue. 80% of Parker books are gritty, intelligent dialogue. His characters are talking all the time, and it’s delicious. They are clever, funny, moral, and respectful. You sniff out the villains because they can’t keep up the banter with Parker’s main recurring characters.
Parker was conversational.
Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires (February 1992)
Here’s the important part: they are our nerds. And having, by their conspicuous success, helped create this mess we’re in, they had better have a lot to teach us about how to recreate the business spirit we seem to have lost.
I first discovered Cringely as he wrote a gossip column for InfoWorld. This was on the last page of the magazine and, again pre-Internet, was full of the latest gossip and news about the relatively nascent technology landscape. Accidental Empires read like a historical record of the early days of tech companies like Microsoft, but it later became clear that many of the more entertaining stories were unsubstantiated. Cringely explained this by claiming he was not a historian, but an explainer.
Like PC Week’s Spencer F. Katt, Cringely’s column was the first thing I flipped to when InfoWorld showed up. Sure, it was gossip and mostly not true, but…
Cringely was entertaining.
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (June 1995)
Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system — and he just whaled on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using the Bloom County-cartoons-taped-on-the-door index, Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven — not the type to take criticism easily. Exactly why Bill would choose Michael of all people to whale on is confusing.
We figured it must have been a random quality check to keep the troops in line. Bill’s so smart.
Accidental Empires was still echoing through Silicon Valley when Coupland’s article that became Microserfs was published in the then-fledgling print magazine Wired. Like Rachel Wallace, I vividly remember starting the piece, realizing I was reading something revolutionary, and finishing it.
And reading it again.
While clearly fiction, the book read like nonfiction to me because it so clearly reflected my life working in technology in the early 90s. This was pre-Big Bang Theory, where we nerds were not remotely mainstream. Seeing my work and personal life so clearly reflected hilariously in writing made me feel like less of an outsider.
Coupland is hilarious.
Michael Sippey, Stating the Obvious (August 1995)
Basically, what it comes down to is that there is no place in the Pointcast world for anything resembling a point of view. And that is what you should be surfing for. Now that you can have all the pre-digested information you can handle spewed to you in real time — in a nice, animated screensaver, nonetheless — you should spend your time surfing for someone that actually has something to say.
Finally. Michael Sippey started the blog Stating the Obvious in August of 1995. You know the feeling. You know you can write, but you haven’t really gotten around to that first piece, and then you read something so good, so relevant, and so important that you realize… yeah, I would never be able to write like that.
Fortunately for me, I ignored that instinct and, like everyone else in the mid-to-late 90s, I started a blog before we called it a blog in 1996 called The Bitsifter Digest. Like my early journals, I can’t read any of those early writings without nauseating disgust. Horrible, horrible writing. I stopped in 1999 probably because I knew the writing was… bad.
Sippey did not. Some version of Stating the Obvious has been published every year since 1995 and, thankfully, quite a bit more starting in October of 2003. If you’ve ever read one of my pieces and thought, “Duh, that’s obvious,” my first question is, “It is. Are you already following that advice?” Probably not.
Sippey states the obvious.
Rands, Rands in Repose (April 2002)
With the Bitsifter Digest purged from the system, I started this place on a whim when someone irrelevant said, “You should blog.” So I did.
The conversational tone and snark come from Parker. Fulghum reminded me to stay hopeful. Coupland showed me how stories can entertain. Sippey allowed me to state the obvious, which sounds easy, but requires discipline. And, finally, Cringely — who sadly allegedly passed away recently — showed me how stories (real or not) can both educate and become legend.
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