#15 A Page a Day, The Iceberg Theory of Writing, John Branch on Believing In What You Write, The Loneliness of Writing
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"Queer Fish"/Mabel Dwight
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The dawn of a new year is typically the time to make resolutions, set goals, make promises. Start exercising. Cut down on sugar. Limit binge-watching and read more. Lately, I've been following a dictum I first heard from writing coach Donald M. Murray. "A page a day," he said, "is a book a year."
As the author of more than a dozen books, Murray knew what he was talking about. A double-spaced page of prose is 250 words. Multiply that by 365 days and you could produce 91,250 words in 2020. Give yourself vacation time and days off and you can still generate enough copy for the writing project you've been putting off, a body of work that you can revise. A page a day is doable as I've learned over the past month, and it's not uncommon to double that. My resolution is to keep it up. Perhaps it will work for you.
Happy New Year.
CRAFT LESSON: The iceberg theory of writing
On the surface, Ernest Hemingway’s iconic 1927 story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” is about a man and a woman having a conversation and drinking together while waiting for a train.
Lurking beneath the surface, however, is the question between the two over whether the woman will have an abortion. But the words “pregnant” and “abortion” are missing.
The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.
"The beer's nice and cool," the man said.
"It's lovely," the girl said.
"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said. "It's not really an operation at all."
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in."
The girl did not say anything.
"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural."
Then what will we do afterward?"
"We'll be fine afterward. Just like we were before."
At work here is his theory of omission, or more colloquially, “the iceberg theory of writing,” as described in this week's Craft Lesson.
It’s found in Hemingway’s nonfiction book about bullfighting, “Death in the Afternoon,” when he segues into reflections about the writing process.
“A good writer should know as near everything as possible,” Hemingway said. That knowledge, he qualifies, should not necessarily show up in the story, however.
"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”
When the lookouts were on the Titanic on April 14, 1912, what they feared was not the jagged tops of ice that broke the surface of the North Atlantic but the mountain beneath.
The same principle holds in writing. What makes a story powerful is all the work — the process approach to writing — that lies beneath. It isn't wasted effort, as many of us fear, but instead constitutes the essential ingredient that gives writing its greatest strengths. We write most effectively from an overabundance of material much of which won't appear in the story, but whose absence makes it stronger.
The power of a story comes from what's not in it.
It's a paradox, one of many contradictions that lie in the writer's path.
But we ignore it at our peril.
"Monkey House"/Mabel Dwight
Wikimedia Commons
INTERVIEW: Three Questions with John Branch
In 2012, John Branch, a sports writer for The New York Times, wrote "Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek," a brilliant narrative that broke more than one record. At 17,000 words, it was one of the longest single pieces in the paper's history. Heralded as one of the most innovative narratives in recent times, it won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing while its multimedia presentation earned it the Peabody award for digital storytelling.
For all his success and enormous talent, Branch remains a humble reporter who still can't believe he has a writing life at all, as he told me in his "Three Questions with John Branch" interview.
"I never imagined it. I was a manager at Costco until I was 29. When I went back to school to get a journalism degree, I truly didn't believe if I would be any good at writing."
But Branch had read enough newspaper stories in his life that he knew good ones from bad ones. He recalls his first published story about a baseball game written as a stringer for the Denver Post.
"The editor on duty seemed pleasantly surprised at how quickly I did it and how clean the copy was. People have been giving me opportunities ever since."
Like many success stories, Branch suffers from imposter syndrome. "Believe me, I sometimes don't think I do this very well," he told me. "I'm always about one painful graf or story away from thinking I'm a fraud about to be exposed."
His work belies that doubt. It's been featured six times in "Best American Sports Writing." His series, "Punched Out," about the National Hockey League enforcer Derek Boogaard was a Pulitzer finalist in 2012, a Dart award winner for trauma coverage and the subject of his book, "Boy on Ice,' which won the PEN/ESPN Prize for Literary Sports Writing. His latest book, about a championship rodeo family in Utah, is called "The Last Cowboys."
Branch offers sound advice for any writer who seeks to excel.
"Believe 100 percent in what you write," he said. "I know people who have angles or hot takes that they don't believe but know it will get attention. I know people who write in ways (everything from angle to style to the words chosen) to please others, like editors or sources and readers. Be you; Your name is at the top. If you don't believe in every word below it, why should anyone else."
Asked if there was a metaphor that would describe himself as a writer, Branch demurred.
"I'm devoted to nonfiction, so I'm a bigger fan of similes. They feel more honest. As a writer, I'm like a winding trail in the woods. You might not always see where you're going, but I think you'll appreciate where you're going."
WRITERS SPEAK
"Here is the fundamental reality about the writing business. It's lonely. You spend all your time writing and then wondering whether what you wrote is any good."
- Lee Child
It's ironic that Child, creator of the phenomenally successful "Jack Reacher" series of crime thrillers, would still be plagued by self-doubt, but comforting as well. If he can worry whether what he's done is any good, it makes me feel better about the misgivings I have about my own writing. It tells me that we must push past that doubt, finish what we write and send it out to let others decide.
As for the loneliness, it's a reality every writer and those around them must face. Tethering oneself to a desk, apart from others for hours at a time, is the only way to get anything written. It helps to have supportive friends and family who understand this and are willing to make sacrifices so that happens. It's up to the writer to engage with them once the work is over for the day. Otherwise, the loneliness will be all-encompassing and destructive. Do your best to avoid that fate.
A contrarian view: I find that I am never less lonely than when I am writing. The challenge of making meaning with words, the excitement of creating characters who speak and talk to and past each other is all-absorbing. It makes me feel very lucky.
TIP OF THE WEEK
Avoid sucking black holes of negativity in your newsroom and your writing life. They will bring you down with them.
That advice came from the late Christine Martin, who was one of the finest journalism teachers I ever knew. For nearly a decade, Chris and I ran a summer fellowship program for recent college graduates at The Poynter Institute. She taught them and me many lessons, but I think this may be the most important one.
"There will be some people in every newsroom who create a whirling vortex of negativity," she told her students.
"They spend their time and energy (and yours) complaining, criticizing, blaming and spitting bile. Avoid them at all costs. Their cynical aura may at first seem seductive. But don’t be fooled. They will suck the life and energy out of you—like vampires. Stand back. Be warned. Run for your life. They are vampires. And once they suck you into their dark world, you become one, too. Twenty years from now, you’ll still be sitting in the corner of the same newsroom, spitting bile and looking for your own new recruits."
"Cafe, Boulevard des Italiens"/Mabel Dwight
Wikimedia Commons
BOOKBAG
"He's a Liar, a Con Man, and a Snitch. His Testimony Could Soon Send a Man to His Death," by Pamela Coloff, is a story that is as disturbing as its title suggests. Paul Skalnik has left behind a string of bamboozled women and a history of helping prosecutors put men behind bars, with dubious testimony that inmates had confessed to him.
"Buried deep in thousands of pages of court records spread across two states lies evidence to suggest that Skalnik was one of the most prolific, and most effective, jailhouse informants in American history," Coloff writes. But prosecutors and the criminal justice system are also indicted in her story, co-produced by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. A Florida death row inmate faces death, a sentence sealed by Skalnik's testimony, even though the facts of his innocence and Skalnik's perfidy are overwhelming.
CHIP IN YOUR EAR
"New Year's Resolution"/Otis Redding and Carla Thomas
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