#23 The West Wing and the power of digressive narratives, In praise of slacking, Weeding out passive verbs, 19th century trading cards
If you're reading this for the first time and enjoy it, you can get the newsletter free every Friday by subscribing at chipswritinglessons.com/newsletter. Thank you.
R.D. Sears, Champion American Lawn Tennis Player, 1888
WRITERS SPEAK
"I do not sit down at my desk to put into in verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind I would have no incentive or need to write about it. I am an explorer...We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand."
CRAFT LESSON: The West Wing and the Power of Digressive Narratives
I’m bleary-eyed as I write this. Late last night, I finished several weeks of binge-watching “The West Wing,” all 156 episodes of the nostalgic political series. It ran on television for seven seasons between 1999 and 2006, dramatizing the Democratic presidency of liberal Joshua “Jed” Bartlett and his young, idealistic staff.
The show has become a kind of televised comfort food (New York Times subscription may be req'd) for many Americans as the country is swamped by partisan bickering. The plots are captivating, the dialogue, like its characters, is whip-smart. But while I watched the show for enjoyment, I also viewed it through the useful prism of a writer interested in story structure. What I found especially fascinating was a particular approach to storytelling that I think can be useful to writers of fiction and nonfiction: digressive narrative.
This is a stylistic device that writers employ to provide background information, describe the motivations of its characters and heighten suspense. They’re quick detours from the story at hand.
Writer/creator Aaron Sorkin uses the tool throughout the series, but its power is especially evident and instructive in the first two episodes of the second season.
“In the Shadow of Two Gunmen” is a two-parter about an assassination attempt on President Bartlett and its aftermath. Using quick cuts, Sorkin toggles between the shooting by white supremacists that wounds the President and Josh Lyman, his deputy chief of staff, and a separate storyline: the creation of the upstart campaign staff that launched an obscure New England governor into the highest office in the land. (You can watch parts one and two on You Tube; Sorkin’s scripts for parts one and two are also available.)
Novelists and nonfiction narrative writers also use digressions.
J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher In the Rye,” is replete with these departures from the main plot, mirroring the manic personality of its rebellious teen hero, Holden Caulfield.
Digressions seem to stray from the main topic, but their purpose is to heighten the reader’s understanding. A famous one is Holden’s fixation with a pair of nuns he meets at a restaurant. He helps them with their suitcases, feels badly that they are eating just toast and coffee, and gives them a ten dollar donation.
“That’s what I liked about those nuns,” he reflects. “You could tell, for one thing, that they never went anywhere swanky for lunch. It makes me so damn sad when I thought about it, their never going anywhere swanky for lunch or anything. I knew it wasn’t too important, but it made me sad anyway.”
The nuns reappear in his consciousness as he worries about their poverty. At the novel’s end, he looks for the nuns, wondering if he might run into them collecting donations. Like many digressions, Salinger’s focus is on minor characters. In this case, their only purpose is to tell the reader more about Holden and his concern with morality that is a major theme.
Nonfiction writers also turn to digressions. In “The John McPhee Reader,” editor William Howarth describes how the narrative nonfiction master's "diving into the loops and stalls of digression, circling the main subject for a while" that "works his characters into a suspenseful plot.”
Many writers, like Sorkin, use digression as flashbacks. Others like McPhee take literary off ramps from their main story for informative digressions on everything from geology to roadkill. But sudden interruptions have other uses as well.
"The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America," is Erik Larson's nonfiction book about two warring enterprises—building and murder—during the construction of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
To tell the twin stories, Larson relies on repeated digressions, alternating the story of how the Exposition came to be with a more chilling tale of H.H. Holmes, a serial killer at loose in the city. Each story is powerful in its own right, but switching between them makes for a relentless read. It’s hard to lose interest when you have two suspenseful narratives that you can braid into a single story, which is why digressions can be such a useful narrative strategy.
I didn’t know the term at the time, but as a reporter for the Providence Journal Bulletin in 1981, I employed a digressive narrative to heighten suspense and give background information.
“In Sorrow Thou Shalt Bring Forth Children” opens on Jackie Rushton, a young woman about to give birth in a local hospital. An encounter with a nurse convinces her that the birth has gone terribly wrong. “I’ve lost the baby,” she tells herself. “The baby is gone.” The story then switches to the past as I use a digression to take Jackie and her husband Rob through courtship, marriage and parenthood and a new pregnancy. The section ends at a baby shower when Jackie’s water breaks. After the digression dispenses with the requisite back story, the main narrative picks up from the opening scene and without interruption follows Jackie and Rob through a perilous night when they don’t know if their baby will live or not.
Not everyone is a fan of the device. “It’s really hard to jump back and forth in time without giving the reader whiplash,” says New Yorker contributor Jennifer Kahn. I think you can overdose on them, but used judiciously and with skill digressions, can engage readers who may welcome these temporary departures from the main plot. They’re certainly worth studying. You can start with The West Wing’s “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen” or “The Catcher in the Rye” and then experiment with your own stories. Have fun!
Jack McGee World Champion Pugilist, 1888
BOOKBAG: In Praise of Slacking
For decades, economists, labor activists and researchers have lobbied for the four-day workweek. Companies are now beginning to listen.
How about a four-hour workday?
For years, I've been reading interviews with authors, full-time authors chiefly -- who have described that or thereabouts as their limit.
That's why I so much enjoyed "Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too, a fascinating article in "The Nautilus" which dissects the work habits of successful scientists, musicians, and authors.
While their workdays were short, writer Alex Soojung-Kim Pang found, their achievements were huge.
"Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus."
Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they spent only a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work.
The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking.
Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements resulted from modest “working” hours."
Pang clocked their workdays:
Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who wrote more than 30 novels: 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., put in after his day job as a civil servant. He took Fridays off.
Stephen King, more than forty novels, most best-sellers: two thousand words a day, in the morning. More than that is a "strenuous day."
Some writers stretched their workday, but not by much. Ernest Hemingway put in six hours as did Gabriel García Márquez. But among these literary luminaries, the eight-hour day was absent; three to four hours seemed to be the average.
These writers weren't lazy. They understood their limits, either instinctively or through experience, and knew that by working longer days they risked burnout, a creativity killer.
Clearly, this approach isn't going to work in many fields. Can you imagine a newspaper reporter telling his editor, "Boss, I'm only going work five hours a day from now on?" Or telling your department chair you're going to do the same? You'll probably be shown the door. Consider showing them this article. which is adapted from Pang's book, "REST: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less." The piece shows that brief daily sessions, focused with deliberate attention, will improve your chances of success.
Let's face it. We waste a lot of time during the day: chatting (gossiping) with colleagues, procrastination. Subtract all that and the workday sounds like those of successful writers and musicians.
Pang gets support from Robert Boice, a psychologist, who prescribed "brief daily sessions," writing 10-60 minutes at a time, no more than 3-4 hours a day, followed by "comfort periods," such as rest or other activities. This is the case even when writing is your "full-time" job.
The objective: to establish "regular work related to writing," he wrote in the pricey cult classic "How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: a Psychological Adventure," which chronicles his work with blocked academics. "Be quick, but don't hurry," Boice said. "That is the secret to good writing." His research found that binge writers produced far fewer pages than writers who followed his method.
Two factors determined the success of successful "slackers" profiled by Pang. They recognized the importance of rest to recharge their creative batteries and they were masters of time management. When it came time to work, they gave it their full attention. (Of course, as several commenters noted, they also had wives who took care of family and home responsibilities, freeing them to write and take long walks.)
Writing, like the mastery of a musical instrument, demands "deliberate practice," Pang writes, "engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improve one’s performance.”
This is possible even if you have a full-time job and can devote only part of your day or week pursuing your writing dreams.
It may take longer to finish your projects this way, but if you burn yourself out with long work sessions, chances are strong you'll quit anyway.
How well do you manage your time? Do you work with relentless focus or fritter the time away, stopping to surf the Web, or heading to the break room to learn the latest office gossip when you're stumped?
Or when you've put in a productive stretch of work, do you decide to keep working or do you hit save, take a walk with the family, or read a good novel or essay just for the enjoyment of it?
Go ahead. You deserve it.
TIP OF THE WEEK
Replace all forms of passive verb constructions—”is planning,” “are hoping”—with active verbs—”plan,” “hope.”
Vigorous sentences follow subject-verb-object format. “Passive voice twists sentences out of their normal shape,” says Jack Hart, author of "A Writer's Coach: The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work."
The result is a style that is flabby, dull and plodding. Thus, as Hart argues, the lead "The West Hills home of a prominent business executive was destroyed in a fire Monday morning" is stronger and actually more precise when written as "A Monday morning fire destroyed a prominent business executive’s West Hills home. The fire is the subject, the actor, whereas the house is the object, which receives the action.
Ralph Temple, World Champion Cyclist, Trick Rider
CHIP IN YOUR EAR
"Bicycle Song"/Red Hot Chili Peppers
Amazon.com
MISCELLANY: This week's art. In the late 1880s, tobacco company Allen & Ginter began including illustrated cards in their packs. This week features "World Champion" athletes from the era of bare-knuckled fighting and "penny farthings;" with its tall front wheel and tiny rear one, it was the machine to be called a bicycle. The name comes from the size of a British penny of the time compared to a smaller farthing. Lawn tennis, which originated in England, is still with us, though it's hard to imagine Roger Federer suiting up for Wimbledon like R.D. Sears.
Sign up for Chip in Your Inbox.
Question? Comment? Email me at chipscan@gmail.com or send a reply to this newsletter.
May the writing go well.
Chip in Your Inbox participates in the Amazon Affiliate links program, which enables sites to earn commissions from the sales of books listed here. Many of the books are also available in public libraries.