Let Ryan Reynolds & Blake Lively Inspire You...

...to do your job and allow other people to do theirs.

Me on a red carpet in the early 2000s, possibly after being verbally abused by an unbalanced celebrity

In 2018, I’m going to guess that some former English teacher in Canada rolled her eyes. Because that’s the year Canada’s own Ryan Reynolds became a “screenwriter,” receiving his first writing credit on Deadpool 2.

I’d never given Reynolds much thought until the It Ends With Us clusterf*ck¹. I’d never thought about his wife either, save for those moments she was pictured with my personal (and the world’s) patron saint Taylor Swift. I had never seen any Reynolds or Lively movies or TV shows² and the only time I really thought about them was when listening to “Betty,” a song in which Swift managed to work their (then) three children’s names. (Mostly I thought about how jealous I was of those children.)

When the hoopla came out about Blake Lively accusing Justin Baldoni of harrassment, I’d never heard of him either but the moment I saw the interview Lively did with the Norweigen journalist that went viral, I was Team Baldoni all the way.

ICYMI, Blake was blatantly cruel to a reporter for no other discernable reason than that she could be. Having been the recipient of that in my former former life as a celebrity reporter, I can attest to how horrible it is. When Juliette Binoche made me sob at the Oscars after snapping at me that I was an idiot, Lisa Loeb treated me like I was literal trash and Julia Roberts gave me the most passive aggressive non-response ever to a question on the red carpet for her movie America’s Sweethearts, I felt a level of humiliation I hadn’t experienced before or since.

The fact is, there’s an insurmountable division of power between a celebrity and a non celebrity. In the case of the celebrity inteview, one person is being paid in the millions for their time while the other is being paid in the hundreds, one is so indistinguishable they could be replaced by any other human who could do the same job while one is recognized everywhere they go, one is the reason the entire experience is happening, one is irrelevant…I could go on. The point is that the imbalance is so ridiculous that it could cause an unbalanced person to do whatever they pleased with impunity³. While the power difference between Lively and Baldoni isn’t as stark, there definitely is an imbalance.

I’m not saying that sexual harrassment, if that’s what Lively experienced from Baldoni, is okay; I’ve experienced enough of it to know how not okay it is. But its horror is less about the sexual aspect and more about the power imbalance. Sexual harrassment can literally not happen if the victim and abuser have the same amount of power.

So while Baldoni may, by virtue of being male, have greater physical power, Blake Lively—because of her association with her “writer” husband Reynolds—has power Baldoni can only dream of. Obviously I wasn’t in the room and blah blah blah but based on the texts Baldoni released of his communication with Lively, she actually looks like the abuser—someone who created a casual, anything goes dynamic and then suddenly decided he’d stepped over the line. And she did it because enough people have indulged her in her basest desires for so long that she actually believes she is right.

So why does this get me so riled up?

Well, as I said, Reynolds has been calling himself a writer since 2018 and Lively proudly explained that her husband “helped” her by reworking a scene in It Ends With Us. Many have claimed that all the Lively-Baldoni issues came down to creative control. And that means that the succession of lawsuits would not have happened had people not convinced Ryan Reynolds that he was a writer.

As someone who dealt with celebrities and their sycophants for many years, I can promise you that Reynolds has been led to believe he’s a writer not because of his writing talent but because of his power. Don’t believe me? Allow me to show you, if you haven’t yet seen it, the statement that Lively and Reynolds released to “apologize” for causing all the bad PR the film received.

Now, the statement was allegedly dismissed by Baldoni and WME as “fail[ing] to address the issues at hand.” But what Baldoni and WME didn’t say is that this statement appears to be written by either A) AI, B) Someone for whom English is not a first language or C) Someone (or two people) who are bordering on illiteracy. “Caused upset to”? Weird unrelated half sentences separated by a sad comma? “Welcome arms that it’s received”? Literally every sentence of this bizarre statement that says absolutely nothing is riddled with the sort of mistakes a second-grader should have been able to correct. It’s actually insulting to ChatGPT to accuse it of having been involved. And this wasn’t some off-the-cuff note the Lively-Reynolds family co-wrote. This was a statement. This was their best effort.

Now I realize I’m being an absolute snob. But I’ve loved words since the moment I could say them (and potentially before). To me, writing is the greatest art form that exists. And so I am violently offended when people who can’t write call themselves writers. No one goes storming into a hospital, picks up a scalpel and begins operating because they have decided they are a talented surgeon. Writing is a skill that requires years if not decades of practice to excel at. Forget Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. It requires a lifetime and even at the end of your life, you’re probably still trying to get better. I’m also offended on behalf of the swarms of incredibly talented writers I know who are never paid. Why should someone bordering on illiteracy be able to live out their dream? (I know that writing a statement and writing a script are different but at the same time, writing is writing.)

But let me wrestle myself off this high horse and explain what this has to do with you.

Here it is: if you’re writing a book, no matter who you are and what experience you have, I beg you to get help from experts. Then, once you start working with those experts, allow yourself to benefit from their expertise.

I say this as someone who has run a writing and publishing company for roughly eight years. In that time, my team has ghost written books for some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. We’ve also published books that brilliant entrepreneurs have written themselves. But even if we’re “just” editing and publishing a book for someone, there are about 4,000 tiny creative decisions that need to be made during the course of the project. And while almost all of our clients are geniuses, their genius never lies in book publishing. It’s why they pay us a lot of money: because it’s where our genius lies.

And yet some of these geniuses fight us every step of the way. They fight us on the manuscript; sometimes they give the pages we’ve painstakingly written to friends (who are also not professional writers) and those friends find their inner writer and start re-working our gorgeous pages to Lively-Reynolds-level illiteracy. We’ve had clients who have fought with us on the wording of their bios and book descriptions and press releases and covers that we’ve obsessed over so lovingly. Their fear, combined with their belief that they know more than us because they’ve been very successful in another field, makes them forget that book publishing professionals know a lot more than they do when it comes to book publishing.

Not all of our clients do this; not even most of our clients. But the ones who do…oh, do they make our lives tough. We fight to save them from themselves. And still they don’t listen. And because they’re our clients—because they’ve paid us and we want them to be happy—they have power.

Of course, none of them are abusive (well, one was and we fired her) and all of them are roughly a billion times smarter than Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds seem to be.

Still, if you’re publishing a book, whether you’ve written it yourself or not, it’s probably scary and that fear may be coming out sideways. It may come out as a desire to take back the reins. But I promise you that trying to wrestle back control because you’re convinced you know better is shooting yourself in the proverbial foot. Yes, it’s your book and your story. But it’s your body that gets sugery and you don’t instruct the doctor, pre- or post-surgery, on how to operate.

You’ve hired professionals. So let them do their job. Reynolds and Lively didn’t and look where it got them.

LINKS FOR THE WEEK:

Look out, Kanye’s now a book publisher

Asking someone for a blurb is no small thing; just ask this author who’s decided “no more”

A lot of authors say they’ll donate their book proceeds to a charity but usually their proceeds aren’t enough to be more than a rounding error. That’s not the case with Barbara Kingsolver, who is maybe the kindest woman ever (btw I have an AMAZING Barbara Kingsolver story…if you want to hear it, tell me in the comments!)

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1. If you’re like “WTF is she talking about,” first let me congrtaulate you on having a life and then encourage you to Google.

2. According to this podcast, I haven’t missed anything.

3. In my admittedly anecdotal experience, there are far more absolutely lovely celebrities than horrible ones. Lisa Loeb, Juliette Binoche and Julia Roberts were more than drowned out by my experiences with people like Jessica Alba, Lena Dunham and Naomi Watts. In my experience, fame, like money or alcoholism, just makes you more of who you are,