#5 Embracing Revision, Turning Up, Trusting the Process, Finding Your Way Home
"Chinese boys learning to write and paint"
All writing is revision.
All writing is revision.
All writing is revision.
I started this introduction with the goal of keeping it short. Good luck with that, Chip.
Revision is a subject I’m passionate about.
Before I knew it I had written more than 1,300 words.
Way too long. So
I decided to revise and break down sum up summarize what I know about efficient and effective revision. when you have a manuscript that could benefit from needs improving improvement. For brevity’s sake, I’ve limited it to three four approaches strategies.
Put it to sleep. When Neil Gaiman finishes a short story, “If I can, I’ll put it away for a week or two. Not look at it. Try to forget about it. Then take it out and read it as if I’ve never seen it before and had nothing to do with its creation. Things that are broken become very obvious suddenly.” I feel better now about the short story manuscript ms. staring at me gathering dust on my bookshelf.
Get physical. Temporal distance is one thing. Hit the print button to achieve the physical distance needed to see your story in a new way afresh. Mark up the pages with arrows, slash marks and commands. to to “Move,” “Check, ” “Ends here.” Speed through the changes. Do it over and over. Rinse and repeat.
Go digital. Most writers I know talk about the excruciating benefits of reading their work or having someone read their draft to them. I rely on Moira. She’s a text-to-speech reader, with the voice of a young Irish woman, who lives in the system preferences of my Macbook Pro. There’s nothing more helpful when I want to find errors or infelicities than hearing her lilting tones read my story to me as I follow it on the screen. Word count tells me if my sentences or paragraphs are too long clogged. Plugging “ly” into the find and replace box goes on a search and destroy machine mission for adverbs that signal that the verb I’ve chosen is weak. “Moira spoke quietly” is transformed into can become becomes “Moira whispered.”
Remember: Accept the flaws of your first draft because they contain the promise of your final story.
And that’s it.
CRAFT LESSON
You show up every day for work. You don't forget to pick up the kids after school. That dentist's appointment? Reluctantly, you're ensconced in that recliner, mouth full of cotton.
So why does a day, or two, or a week, a month go by without writing?
"The muse," legendary filmmaker Billy Wilder said, "has to know where to find you."
I'm not a believer in muses. I trust writing every day and hoping that inspiration will visit. Usually, it seems to, but only if I'm typing.
A writer writes. It's that simple. You leave the judging till later.
You're not lazy, as you might believe. You're afraid, more likely; fearful that you suck, worried that any successes of the past were a fluke. "The Power of Turning Up to Write," this week's Craft Lesson, is designed to propel you into the chair.
It may help to know that successful writers recognize this reality. "I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning"," says Anne Tyler, beloved author of 22 novels. "If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all."
There are ways to find time to write, I found. Inspired by Scott Turow, the crime novelist, I found that I could produce a publishable short story on a morning subway commute, well, several. The key for me — and for you — is simple.
Look for times to write, schedule them. Keep them short, for now. Then, turn up. You — and your readers — demand nothing less.
WRITING TIP OF THE WEEK
You’re surrounded by a mountain of notes, piles of research. It’s time to start writing, but you don’t know where to begin. Why not dive into those piles; there must be something there. Big mistake. “Notes are like Velcro,” Jane Harrigan, a journalism professor at the University of New Hampshire, gave her students the same advice Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer and podcaster Lane DeGregory offers in this week’s writing tip. “Put your notes away! The story’s in your head and heart.” It’s such great counsel that Harrigan used to make her students repeat: “The story’s not in my notes. It’s in my head.” That’s the place to look as your fingers hover over the keyboard.
\
"Young woman climbing stairs to a Shinto Temple"
INTERVIEW
“Trust is a must or your game is a bust.” Roy Peter Clark cites that quote from Billy Welu, a bowler from Texas, to describe the secret behind his own productivity and success.
In this week's “Three Questions with…” interview, Clark says trust in his process is the secret behind his five influential books on the writing craft, with a sixth on the way.
Borrowing methods from the nonfiction narrative master John McPhee, Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, relies on “my raw material, my index cards, my file folders, my bulletin board.”
Writing for Clark, a musician as well as a writer who teaches and a teacher who writes, is like walking on a staircase. “If I try a shortcut, if I lean too heavily on my experience, if I try to dance over a step, I usually crash to the bottom.”
His advice is pragmatic and inspirational: “Use the process. Follow the steps. Trust the process. You have to trust. Even if it’s not going well at this moment, keep at it. Realize that the imperfection you feel right now is necessary.”
Guru is a term bandied about these days, but many, many thousands of writers, editors, teachers and students happily sit at Roy Peter Clark's feet to learn the craft from him.
Roy's belief in process harkens back to the time — holy shit —nearly 40 years ago when we learned about the writing process from our mentor the late Don Murray. Roy's fidelity to that approach and his generous acknowledgment of Don in "Writing Tools" is a testament to his career. and his character. We're all waiting for his new book, "Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser," due out in January. Not soon enough.
Chinese Quotation Marks/LinkedIn Slideshare
WRITERS SPEAK
In Sunday’s Quote, Ralph Keyes provides a comforting observation for those who believe writers are born not made: "One's ability to rewrite is the key to becoming a writer, far more important than native talent or inspired writing sessions."
Bonus quote from children's writer Kelly Barnhill: "That's the magic of revision — every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows."
"Chinese sage reading while riding on a buffalo"
BOOKBAG
Deborah Barfield Berry, who covers Congress for USA Today, adds another story to the growing list of narratives devoted to 1619, the date marking the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of African slaves to America.
While accompanying an African American woman to Africa in search of her roots, a story she wrote about with Kelley Benham French, Berry was also on a meticulously reported odyssey of her own. Her journey took her from archives, graveyards in the U.S., DNA testing, and, finally, to a slave trading museum in Angola where she found brutal echoes of her past. In the process, she learned she's related to Wanda Tucker, the woman she went to Africa with, and, possibly, she could be descended from the first Africans to be brought in shackles to America. Hers is an inspirational, well-told tale of searching for — and discovering truths — about your background that makes you want to discover your own.
I got to interview Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, the only person to win the feature Pulitzer twice, about his phenomenal story, "The Beating Heart," about murder, suicide and a medical miracle, for Nieman Storyboard. It's excerpted from his new book, "One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America."
“I am expected to be, and I am, a storyteller. I tell stories about the future. We human beings simply love stories about the future. That’s part of my job.”
The man who gave that description of himself is not a novelist, a journalist, a writer of narrative nonfiction or a screenwriter. Stefan Ingves is the governor of Sweden’s central bank.
He belongs to a new movement, described by Heather Long, an economics correspondent for The Washington Post, among economists who are turning to narrative to their often arcane work. With English majors down 25% since 2009, economists are also urging science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors to at least add a history or literature class to their course loads. Pushing hard is Nobel laureate Robert Schiller, who says economists need storytelling skills to communicate vital but often murky data. His new book: “Narrative Economics.”
I don't know if it's aging, but lately, my laptop keyboard has been given me the yips. That's why I loved this little piece about Mark Twain's complicated love-hate affair with his typewriter, which he bought in 1871. Believed to have written the first literary work on a typewriter — "Life on the Mississippi" — Twain eventually went back to longhand but not before blasting the manufacturer about its "curiosity-breeding little joker."
Browsing The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection of more than 406,000 high-res digital public domain images, from which this week's illustrations originate, I came across this 1916 quote from poet T.S. Eliot, reflecting on his own machine:
"Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety...."
I'm not sure Robert Caro would agree.
A very cool video homage to the Olivetti portable typewriter featuring ads designed by Ettore Sottsass and Milton Glaser.
CHIP IN YOUR EAR
"Nothing to my name," by Cui Jian/Vice
"Lovely," by Bull Zeichen 88/okmusic.jp
A word of welcome to the many new subscribers, who arrived here in the last week courtesy of Robin Sloan and his exceedingly generous recommendation on his “Year of the Meteor” newsletter.
In a recent one, Robin said, “I think a novel succeeds if it leaves just one durable image imprinted on your brain."
I think the same holds true for people.
As Robin said, we met at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, when Robin was my student in a six-week summer fellowship program for recent college graduates.
A summer day in St. Petersburg is cauldron-hot, the blast of an open oven in your face hot. One day, when Robin was having trouble coming up with a story idea, I suggested he walk the length of Central Avenue, a wide swath at least a mile long.
A student once called our program a journalistic “boot camp” and this is one of the reasons why. We looked for smart young men and women and then worked them as hard as any rookie or accomplished reporter does.
"The Sunshine City," 1920s postcard/ebay
St. Pete is a rich, arty and funkier place now, a far cry from the early 1900s when reporter/humorist/short story writer Ring Lardner called it “the home of the newlywed and nearly dead” and decades later when I gave Robin that assignment.
Back then, Central was a boring, sidewalk-burning-through-the-soles-of-your–shoes walk. It held little but secondhand stores, cafeterias and empty lots — lots of empty lots — to grab your attention. What it didn’t have many of were trees to offer shade from the 90-degree heat and withering humidity.
One of those blistering days, Robin did what I hadn’t expected: he hiked from one end of Central to the other and came back, if memory serves, with a fistful of story ideas.
I didn’t know whether he still wanted to be a journalist, but that feat told me he’d make a great one.
Instead, he became a novelist, a magical one. If journalism had to lose a good one, Robin Sloan is well worth the cost.
Want Chip in Your Inbox? Sign up here.
If you miss a newsletter along the way, never fear. Every week’s edition can be found here.
May the writing go well!