Just a spoonful of sugar...or maybe a pound

I've spent a lot of time this summer thinking about the art of diplomacy.

In my current work-in-progress, one of my secondary characters is a diplomat. So far, he hasn't said a word.

And in a way that illustrates how art mirrors life, in all my job interviews this summer, I've been asked what former employers would consider my strengths and weaknesses (or "challenges" if the interviewer has a public relations background).

Now after a few years in the professional world, anyone with an ounce of self-awareness knows what she does well and not so well. So it's a fairly easy question to answer.

I am not a natural-born diplomat.

OK that's an understatement. I can be rather blunt, more than a bit cynical and entirely too likely to say what everyone else is only thinking. I've been told not to admit this to prospective employers, but I figure it's better to give them a heads up. No sense in having them think they've hired Shirley Temple only to find themselves across the conference table from a less-witty (but more sober) Dorothy Parker.

What's interesting is each time I give this answer, the interviewer has smiled and said, "sounds like me. I'm always saying things I shouldn't."

I laugh, but also wonder if he is merely being diplomatic or if diplomacy is truly a rarified skill that we all wish we had, but few actually do. Who among us hasn't said something he shouldn't? How many times have you blurted when you should have been reticent?

After a lot of thought, I've decided that diplomacy isn't the ability to tell someone to go to hell and make him want to go (that's charisma) but the genius to tell hard truths yet still make peace. Mary Poppins reminds us that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, but finding the correct truth to sugar ratio is a skill worthy of a medieval alchemist.

This insight should help my diplomat character in his struggles to find the words that will prevent war (we'll know for certain after I write that chapter). And hopefully it will remind me to walk a little more carefully through the forest that is human interaction.

After all, writing requires we type what others only think, but reading it and hearing it are two very different things.