All Student Success Letters
Douglas Davis
Dear Gotham,
Just to be clear, I’m not a writer (but I am opinionated). And that is why the fact that I’m writing this in the first place is remarkable. On June 14th, 2016 my first book, Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, will be on shelves in Barnes & Noble. If it weren’t for Gotham, I know that I wouldn’t have been able to tell the story of the professor who had no intention of going to college (at least that’s my opinion).
I’m a designer and strategist fortunate enough to also have an outlet in academia (this mix of outlets has been priceless). My time in the industry gave me the confidence to pitch and land a book contract. The problem is that in an applied industry like mine, a resource is only relevant in the classroom if it is relevant in the boardroom.
Therefore I arrived in Ryan Britt’s Essay & Opinion class with a contract in hand and no idea what a nut graph or lede was. That class with those characters was worth double what I paid because I developed the confidence to apply what I learned (please don’t double your prices).
As awesome as Essay & Opinion was, I realized that I needed more help (introduction down, fifteen more chapters to go). I then signed up for the One-day workshop The Editor’s Eye taught by Francis Flaherty. I reasoned that I’d be a better wordsmith if I could think like an editor. My most valuable takeaways were the lessons on word choice and charging the writing with emotion, though my editor’s eye wasn’t yet 20/20 in only seven hours.
So I called Dana Miller, Dean of Students, and. after listening to my topic, she found an exact fit for One-on-One Mentoring with Clifford Thompson. I can’t tell you how helpful working with Clifford was in shaping the manuscript before I submitted it to my publisher (but I will say each chapter would have sucked without him).
Thank you Gotham Writers Workshop for helping me to gain confidence, understand the editor’s POV, and write a book that doesn’t suck.
Douglas Davis
