#7 Why We Read, Why We Write, Storytelling As Sculpture,The Glazed Donut of Thinking, A Blues Playlist
“Early Sunday Morning” / Edward Hopper
Wikimedia Commons
Do you remember the book that made you a writer or a lifelong reader?
I don’t recall being read to as a child, but I must have been. In third grade, I was reading at a sixth-grade level. Then when I was about 12, “Youngblood Hawke” entered — and changed — my life.
It’s a massive book, a 783 page-long novel, a hefty two-and-a-half pounds. I’ve weighed it.
“Youngblood Hawke” by Herman Wouk, who died last May at 103 (he was working on a new novel), is the story about the life and death of a doomed Southern writer. That’s a spoiler, I’m afraid, but as with much good storytelling, it’s more about the how and why than it is about the what.
Published in 1962, it’s a romantic tale about a man so in love with words and the trappings of fame and fortune that it drives him to an early death, just as he is to marry the love of his life. But the scenes that captivated me the most showed him scribbling furiously with a fountain pen at a desk scarred by cigarette burns, composing his best-selling novels deep into the night.
Reading it taught me, as I wrote elsewhere, the power of story, suspense, description, characterization and dialogue, the importance of theme and structure. It’s not Wouk’s greatest book, no “The Caine Mutiny,” his gripping, Pulitzer Prize-winning war novel. Still, it was powerful enough to keep a boy up late for several days, tearing through its pages, sometimes by a flashlight under my covers so my mother didn’t catch me awake past curfew.
When I finished it, I wanted to be able to do with words what Herman Wouk had done to me, and I wanted to be like Youngblood Hawke. Except for the dying part.
Just as important, it made me a lifelong reader for whom reading became, as my friend Scott Mackay puts it, “like blood.“
You can’t write if you don’t read.
That’s why the news this week about children’s reading scores in the U.S. was so dispiriting. According to The New York Times, “the average eighth-grade reading score on a nationally representative test declined among public school students in more than half the states.”
That tells me we will have fewer writers in the future.
“I like to write,” says Gerald Carbone, a prize-winning journalist turned historian, “because I like to read.” He recalls lying in bed with his mother, quietly reading their own books and sharing a bag of pretzels as he made his way through “Lord of the Flies,” “Wuthering Heights,” “The Return of the Native,” “Animal Farm” and “Brave New World,” staples of summer reading lists.
For Jessica Blais, an Air Force brat growing up in Germany without TV, “Nancy Drew” “saved me.”
“During every dark period in my life,” says Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Johnson, “There was always a book that got me through it. One time it was ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.’ Another time, ‘All the Pretty Horses.’ Another time, ‘The Shipping News.’ Makes me sad to think how many kids grow up to feel that reading is a burden.”
It’s a burden because so many of them struggle with it. Terry Schwadron, my friend and former editor at The Providence Journal-Bulletin, spends part of his retirement as a “ reading partner” with a second-grader in New York City.
“At age seven he cannot read three-letter words fluently,” Terry told me. “We will get there. The real point is that there are lots of kids out there who lag far behind and we should be giving an hour or two a week to help them.”
He’s right, of course.
I have the immense joy of reading with my grandson Theodore, who turns four this month. His parents read to him, and his older brother, Henry, as well.
With me, Theodore’s current favorite is “Sir Pete the Brave” of the “Pete the Cat” picture book series. He likes to read it over and over. I marvel at his growing comprehension and fluency. I doubt he will remember these times, but if they spark joy in reading, that will be a wonderful thing.
If he becomes a writer, all the better.
CRAFT LESSON
The other day, things weren’t going well. The short story I’d been working on for months was still without an ending and I was convinced the middle was a mess. I wanted to give up. Throw in the towel.
It got me thinking about why I write and brought to mind the Greek myth of Sisyphus. He was a cruel and crafty king, and for his crime, the gods gave him a brutal sentence. For eternity, he was obliged to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to see gravity prevail, forcing him to start over, again and again.
The myth has come to suggest actions that are laborious and futile.
And that’s how I felt. I wondered: Why bother when the writing is arduous and rejections can make it seem futile?
Have you ever felt that way? If you’re a writer, I imagine practicing the craft can feel like rolling that boulder up, only to see it crashing down. Over and over and over again.
Why do we write? For fame? Fortune? Adulation? After all, who wouldn’t want publishers and Hollywood agents banging on your door, offering these riches? The reality, of course, is that we have no control once a piece is finished over how our story will be received.
So what’s that left us with?
Writing is a hard, lonely endeavor. Whether you’re a full-timer or pursue it on the side, family and fun often take a back seat. And, as with Sisyphus, it can be a hard daily slog to make characters come to life, create plots that hold together and render scenes that serve as their glue. It can give you the blues, like the kind of woeful songs featured in this week’s Chip in Your Ear playlist, suggested by Violet Baron, a journalism student at Indiana University.
Then I realized there was a plausible reason to stick with it. What it all comes down to for so many of us. I love trying to make meaning with words.
In the end, I realized that I didn’t want to quit. Trying to make meaning, as I’m doing now, gives my life meaning. Because, as the writer-activist Gloria Steinem put it, “Writing is the only thing that, when I’m doing it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”
That’s why, if I can be presumptuous, you should write, too. If you need more support for your decision, consider what other writers have to say on the subject.
“I write,” says the essayist and novelist Joan Didion, “entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
Or perhaps you write because you’re like George Orwell, and there’s some lie you want to expose, some wrongdoing to which you want attention drawn.
Or in an age with so much suffering around the world, you are motivated by the impulse that drives the Indian author Nitya Prakash: “I write for those that have no voice, for the silent ones who’ve been damaged beyond. I write for the broken child within me.”
Inspired by these writers, I decided to make a list of the reasons I write. The entire list can be found in this week’s Craft Lesson: “Why I Write, and Why You Should, Too.” It’s a long one, so I recommend you follow the link if you’d like to see what I came up with. Perhaps you’ll find ones that resonate with you. Here are the most important entries:
1. It makes me feel whole.
2. It exercises my brain.
3. It feeds my soul.
4. It might help others.
5. It lets me write the stories only I can do.
If you’re feeling blue about writing, as I was, I suggest you make your own list. It worked for me. I’ve shaken off those blues and am ready to take up that boulder again and keep pushing.
“Gas“ / Edward Hopper
Wikimedia Commons
INTERVIEW
Matt Tullis spends his days immersed in the writing life. The author of “Running with Ghosts,” a meticulous and moving rendering of his experience surviving leukemia as a child, he writes narrative nonfiction, teaches journalism at Fairfield University and hosts the influential “Gangrey: The Podcast.” Little wonder that “Revision as Sculpture,” my three-question interview with him, is so studded with insight, guidance and information.
“I tell my students in my Literary Journalism class that we’re going to be sculptors, and their first draft is just going to be the raw stone,” he told me. “They need to get it all out there, and then we’ll start chipping away at it until it becomes a wonderful piece of journalism in story form.”
What a comforting metaphor to keep in mind when that first draft feels inert.
Among his many projects, Tullis is planning a book on reporting and writing narrative, drawn from his Gangrey interviews. I, for one, can’t wait.
WRITERS SPEAK
My Sisyphean infatuation found comfort in sportswriter Sally Jenkins’ trenchant view of the writing process.
“I’m continuously, constantly, everlastingly, refreshingly surprised by how hard writing is,” she says. “It’s like a case of amnesia — between stories I forget how awful it was. But I remember again as soon as I sit down in front of the computer.“
What also surprises Jenkins “is how much writers fumble around in the dark, just hoping for a blast of fortunate inspiration. And I’m surprised by what a minor factor inspiration is in the overall process. It helps. But frankly,” — and I love this analogy — “it’s the glazed donut of thinking. Writing is breaking rocks with a shovel. It takes a certain kind of strength.”
If you have any doubt about the strength it takes to write, check out classical images of Sisyphus on the web. The guy is ripped.
TIP OF THE WEEK
“Remember the upstream theory of problem-solving. If your 17th graph isn’t working, the problem is probably in the 12 graph. If your writing isn’t working, the issue is probably the reporting. If the reporting isn’t working, the issue is probably the story idea.”
Lex Alexander’s writing tip brought to mind an experience I had writing narratives at The Providence Evening Bulletin. I was struggling with the end of a story when my editor, Joel Rawson, said, “ The problem is it ends two paragraphs sooner than you finished the story.” We cut them and the piece finally worked. I realize now that Joel was following the upstream theory of problem-solving.
Problem with a story? Look back.
“Hotel Lobby“/Edward Hopper
Wikimedia Commons
BOOKBAG
Here’s a tad more on reading, specifically, debunking speed reading, making a case for the slow kind — backed up by neuroscience.
Nieman Storyboard documents the transformation at Reuters, the financial news engine, into a new home for narrative nonfiction, and the role of the editor who’s helping with the change, with links to several jaw-dropping stories.
This past winter, Andrew Ferguson did something “reactionary and backward-looking”: he subscribed to delivery of the print edition of a newspaper. In an experiment, he put aside his laptop and phone and began the day with news the analog way. He loved it: “I unfold the paper, and the world opens up to me as a parting cloud. But it is a special world,” he says in this Atlantic piece. “My news on paper isn’t subject to updating until tomorrow morning.” Read his delightful story to see the other charms of print, and learn if, for Ferguson, it became a permanent habit.
FEEDBACK
M. Charles Bakst, who for decades was the “dean of political journalists” in Rhode Island, made an interesting and important counterpoint to my introduction to last week’s newsletter, when I made the argument that students need not fear approaching strangers because people love to talk about themselves. “Endlessly.”
“While most interviewees like to talk, some people, notably politicians who lack candor or honesty, don’t,” Bakst wrote. “ And it can be intimidating to press them.”
Bakst, who made a reputation for staring down and getting pols to chatter, had this piece of advice for students and working journalists who inevitably will encounter the political class.
“I would often try to take myself, personally, out of the equation. For example, interviewing a president or presidential candidate, instead of asking them an accusatory question from my own mouth, so to speak, I might quote from a Wall Street Journal accusing them of something and I would ask, “What is your response to that?“
His approach also wisely used an open-ended question, which requires an expansive answer. These begin with “What,” “How” and “Why.”
VISITORS
New international visitors to “Chip on Your Shoulder:” Romania, Russia, Ukraine, Taiwan, Pakistan, the Philippines and American Samoa. Welcome, and thanks for stopping by.
CHIP IN YOUR EAR
“Rolled and Tumbled“/Rosalie Hill
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“Trouble So Hard“/Vera Ward Hall
youtube.com/wikipedia.org
“See My Jumper Hanging on the Line“/R. L. Burnside
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May the writing go well.
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