Say What You Mean
A Working Writer's Guide to Clear, Publishable Prose
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Glenda Hatchett's approach focuses on the editing process itself. Her chapter details the three main passes through a manuscript: content, structure, and style. The guide explains how to work with editors and what to expect during the publishing process. It includes sample query letters and advice about traditional versus self-publishing routes.
Nonviolent Communication teaches writers to express ideas clearly without blame or anger. This chapter covers how to make your writing accessible to readers who may disagree with your position. It explains how to avoid passive-aggressive language and create prose that works for everyone. Writers who want to communicate effectively will find this guide practical and useful.
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Overview
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist, a key figure in the Beat Generation and a postmodern author known for experimental work with unreliable narrators. He drew heavily from his own life, especially his struggles with drug addiction and his time living in various places, including New York City, where he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Together, they helped define the Beat movement that influenced 1960s counterculture. Burroughs published his first novel, Junkie, under the pen name William Lee in 1953. His third novel, Naked Lunch, sparked a major obscenity trial in 1959 after Grove Press published it. He collaborated with Brion Gysin on the cut-up technique and wrote The Nova Trilogy using this method. Later, he created Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands. Burroughs was honored by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 and received France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1984. Jack Kerouac called him "the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift."
Early life and education
William S. Burroughs was born in 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri, to Mortimer Perry Burroughs and Laura Hammon Lee. His family had prominent English roots, and his grandfather had founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company. His mother's brother, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer who worked for the Rockefellers. Burroughs's father ran an antiques shop called Cobblestone Gardens in St. Louis and later in Palm Beach, Florida. Growing up, Burroughs described a family where affection was considered embarrassing. As a child, he developed an interest in magic and the occult, recalling visions of a green reindeer and ghostly gray figures. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis, where his first published essay, "Personal Magnetism," appeared in the John Burroughs Review in 1929. Later, he went to the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, a boarding school for wealthy boys. There, he kept journals about an erotic attachment to another boy, which he destroyed later, ashamed. According to his account, he left the school voluntarily during Easter vacation of his second year rather than being expelled.
Harvard University
William S. Burroughs attended Harvard University, living in Adams House, where he spent summers working as a young journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering police reports. He found the work distasteful and refused to cover certain stories, including the death of a drowned child. That summer, he lost his virginity in a brothel in East St. Louis, with a woman he regularly visited. During his time at Harvard, he also traveled to New York City with a friend from Kansas City named Richard Stern, exploring gay venues in Harlem and Greenwich Village. At one point, Stern frightened him so badly that Burroughs asked to be taken out of the car. He graduated from Harvard in 1936, and his parents gave him a monthly allowance of $200, which sustained him for the next twenty-five years. Before the 1929 stock market crash, they had sold their shares in the Burroughs Corporation for $200,000—a significant sum by today's standards.
Europe and first marriage
After graduating from Harvard, William S. Burroughs stopped formal schooling, though he briefly studied anthropology at Columbia and medicine in Vienna. He traveled to Europe, where he immersed himself in gay culture among exiles and runaways, picking up young men in steam baths. There he met Ilse Klapper, a German Jewish woman fleeing Nazi Germany. They never dated, but Burroughs married her in Croatia against his parents’ wishes so she could get a U.S. visa. She later moved to New York, divorced him, and they stayed friends. Back in the U.S., he held unremarkable jobs. In 1939, his mental health worried his parents after he cut off the last joint of his left little finger at the knuckle to impress someone. That act appeared in his fiction as The Finger.
Beginning of the Beats
William S. Burroughs joined the U.S. Army in 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor. He was classified as a 1-A infantryman, which made him feel defeated. His mother helped him get a civilian disability discharge, saying he shouldn’t have been allowed to enlist due to mental instability. A family friend who was also a neurologist at a psychiatric center evaluated him. Burroughs waited five months at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis before being released. While there, he met a Chicago soldier also waiting for discharge. Once free, Burroughs moved to Chicago and worked as an exterminator. Two friends from St. Louis—Lucien Carr and David Kammerer—left for New York City, so Burroughs followed them.
Addiction and Joan Vollmer
In 1945, William S. Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams, who was married to a G.I. and had a young daughter, Julie Adams. They shared an apartment with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on a novel titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which wasn't published until 2008. During this time, Burroughs became addicted to morphine and later sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. Vollmer struggled with an addiction to Benzedrine, an amphetamine available over the counter. After her husband returned from the war, he divorced her. With encouragement from Allen Ginsberg and possibly Kerouac, Burroughs became emotionally linked with Vollmer, moving in with her and her daughter by summer 1945. In spring 1946, Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics prescription. Vollmer asked her psychiatrist, Lewis Wolberg, to sign a surety bond for his release. As part of his release, he returned to St. Louis under his parents' care before leaving for Mexico to get a divorce from Ilse Klapper. Vollmer's addiction led to a temporary psychosis and hospitalization at Bellevue, which threatened custody of her child. Upon hearing this, Burroughs immediately returned to New York City to gain her release, asking her to marry him. Their marriage was never formalized, but she lived as his common-law wife. In 1949, he secretly married a Mexican woman named María Lucrecia Barquera for immigration purposes. They returned to St. Louis to visit Burroughs's parents and then moved with Vollmer's daughter to Texas. Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs's child, and their son, William S. Burroughs Jr., was born in 1947. The family briefly moved to New Orleans in 1948.
Mexico and South America (1950–1952)
In New Orleans, police stopped Burroughs’s car and found an unregistered handgun as well as a letter from Ginsberg that mentioned selling marijuana. They searched his home and discovered drugs and half a dozen firearms. Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible imprisonment at Angola State Prison. Vollmer and their children followed him there. He intended to remain in Mexico for the full length of the statute of limitations on his charge, which was at least five years. In 1950, he also attended classes at Mexico City College, studying Spanish, Mesoamerican manuscripts, and the Mayan language with R. H. Barlow.
Killing of Vollmer
William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer's Mexico time was unhappy, especially for Burroughs, who lacked heroin and abused Benzedrine. As his libido returned, he pursued other men while Vollmer drank heavily and mocked him. At a gathering above the Bounty Bar in Mexico City, a drunk Burroughs allegedly pulled out his gun and said, "It's time for our William Tell act." Vollmer allegedly agreed by placing a highball glass on her head. Burroughs shot her in the head, killing her instantly. He claimed the gun fired accidentally when he dropped it, but he was arrested and spent 13 days in jail. His brother paid off Mexican officials to secure his release on bail while awaiting trial, which was ruled culpable homicide. Vollmer's daughter went to live with her grandmother, and Burroughs Jr. went to St. Louis. Two witnesses said the gun had fired accidentally when Burroughs checked if it was loaded, and ballistics experts were bribed to support that story. The trial kept being delayed, so Burroughs began writing what became the novel Queer. When his lawyer fled Mexico due to legal issues, Burroughs decided to "skip" back to the U.S. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and given a two-year suspended sentence. Vollmer's death deeply affected Burroughs and shaped his work for the rest of his life. Allen Ginsberg wrote about her in Dream Record: June 8, 1955, and in Burroughs: The Movie, he suggested she may have seemed suicidal before her death, possibly influencing her willingness to take part in the stunt.
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Overview
Glenda A. Hatchett, who goes by the professional name Judge Hatchett, is a lawyer and television personality born on May 31, 1951. She’s best known for hosting the court show Judge Hatchett, which aired in the past, and currently stars in The Verdict with Judge Hatchett. In addition to her work on TV, she’s also a founding partner at a law firm called The Hatchett Firm, which operates nationally.
Early life and education
Glenda Hatchett was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and went on to study political science at Mount Holyoke College, where she earned her B.A. in 1973. The college honored her later, naming her a distinguished alumna and giving her an honorary degree in 2000. After that, she attended Emory University School of Law and graduated with her juris doctorate in 1977.
Career
After law school, Glenda Hatchett served a federal clerkship in Georgia before joining Delta Air Lines, where she became the company's highest-ranking woman of color, working in both legal and public relations roles. In 1990, she left Delta to become Chief Presiding Judge of the Fulton County Juvenile Court in Georgia, making history as the first African-American woman to hold that position in the state. She later hosted the nationally syndicated television show Judge Hatchett, which ran from 2000 to 2008. That same year, she published her first book, Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say, followed by Dare to Take Charge in 2010. Hatchett has served on several corporate boards and continues to speak widely, including at events where Hillary Clinton was a keynote speaker. In 2015, she returned to Atlanta to launch The Hatchett Firm, PC, focusing on personal injury and malpractice cases. She also appeared regularly on CNN and other networks as a legal commentator. In 2016, her firm took on the civil case of Philando Castile's family.
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Overview
Nonviolent Communication, or NVC, is a method developed by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg in the 1960s and 1970s, rooted in nonviolence and humanistic psychology. It helps people understand each other better and reduce conflict through four steps: observing without judging, naming feelings, identifying underlying needs, and making clear requests. Rosenberg taught NVC through workshops and video lectures, with one San Francisco recording becoming especially well known. His book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life and companion workbook are widely used. The approach applies in therapy, education, workplaces, and communities, showing benefits for empathy and relationships in small trials, though researchers say more rigorous studies are needed. The United Nations Academic Impact sees NVC as supporting peace and Sustainable Development Goals by building emotional intelligence. It's part of the Inner Development Goals Toolkit, encouraging personal growth to meet global challenges. Public figures like Anthony Robbins, John Gray, and Deepak Chopra have endorsed it. Workshops and training materials are widely available online, including on Spotify and YouTube.
Origins
Marshall Rosenberg began developing what became known as Nonviolent Communication after experiencing deep personal conflict during the Detroit race riot of 1943 and later facing antisemitism in his youth. By the late 1960s, while working on racial integration in schools and organizations across the Southern United States, he started forming the foundation of his model. In 1972, Rosenberg compiled an early version of this approach into a training manual. That original framework included four key components: observations, feelings, needs, and action-oriented wants.
Influences
The development of Nonviolent Communication was shaped by Carl Rogers’ person-centered therapy, especially his emphasis on congruence, empathic listening, and authenticity. Rogers valued experiential learning, emotional honesty, and the deep satisfaction of being truly heard. He believed in the importance of aligning one’s inner experience with communication and in the power of unconditional love and appreciation. Later, Marshall Rosenberg drew influence from Erich Fromm, George Albee, and George Miller, who pushed him toward a community-based approach. Fromm argued that individual mental health depends on social structure, Albee said therapists can't meet community needs alone, and Miller believed psychology should be shared freely to better understand human behavior.
Early work with children: Giraffe and Jackal
Rosenberg began his work with children who had learning disabilities, showing his focus on how language shapes thought and connection. His approach restructured the traditional pupil-teacher relationship so students took more ownership of their learning. Over time, this model expanded to address power dynamics in many areas of life—like police-citizen or boss-employee interactions—and even personal relationships such as man-woman or parent-child. He used symbols to help people understand different communication styles: the carnivorous Jackal for violent communication, and the herbivorous Giraffe for Nonviolent Communication. The Giraffe represented awareness and compassion, with its long neck symbolizing clear-sightedness and its large heart showing empathy.
Evolution of NVC model
By 1992, the Nonviolent Communication model had taken its current shape, built around four parts: observations, feelings, needs, and requests. Since the late 2000s, a growing focus has been placed on self-empathy as a key to how effectively the model works. Another change since 2000 has been calling the approach a process rather than a set of steps. This shift highlights not just what someone says, but why they say it—whether the goal is to get others to do what they want or to build deeper relationships and shared satisfaction. It also changes how people listen, asking whether the intent is to prepare a response or to truly hear another person with respect and care.
Overview
Nonviolent Communication is a framework that explains how most conflicts between people or groups start not from outright hostility, but from confusion—misunderstanding what each side really needs. It points out that when we use language meant to control or manipulate—like making others feel guilty or afraid—we push the conversation away from understanding one another. That kind of communication keeps people focused on blame instead of on their actual needs, feelings, perceptions, and requests. And because that happens, the conflict just continues.
Alternative names
In a recorded lecture, Marshall Rosenberg explains how the name “Nonviolent Communication” came about, linking his work to the peace movement’s use of “nonviolence” and its goal of global peace. Still, Rosenberg didn’t fully embrace that label because it focused on what NVC wasn’t, rather than what it was. That conflicts with a key idea in NVC's fourth component—requests. In an NVC request, one should ask for what they do want, not what they don’t want. Because of this, people have started calling it by other names, like “giraffe language,” “compassionate communication,” or “collaborative communication.”
Research
Since the 1990s, research on Nonviolent Communication has grown across many fields including healthcare, education, and peace efforts. Studies have shown positive results, but reviewers have noted that it's hard to fully prove how effective NVC is. Many of the studies are limited by small sample sizes and lack long-term, controlled trials across multiple locations.
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