Chip's Writing Lessons #30
In this issue:
Writers Speak: Katherine Anne Porter
Interview: A Choice, Not a Gift: Four Questions with John Woodrow Cox
Craft Lesson: Rituals to Write By
Writing to Savor: Lauren Smiley on Riding out a Typhoon
Tip of the Week: Read to Write
WRITERS SPEAK
“If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I’m going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God’s grace.”
— Katherine Anne Porter
INTERVIEW: A Choice, Not A Gift: Four Questions with John Woodrow Cox
John Woodrow Cox is an enterprise reporter at the Washington Post, currently working on “Children Under Fire,” a book being published by Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint. It will expand on his Post series about kids and gun violence, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.
He has won numerous awards, most notably the Scripps Howard’s Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Storytelling, the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, the Meyer “Mike” Berger Award for Human-interest Reporting and the National Association of Black Journalists’ Feature: Single Story Award. He was a finalist for the Michael Kelly Award and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. John previously worked at the Tampa Bay Times and at the Valley News in New Hampshire. He attended the University of Florida, earning a bachelor of science in journalism and a master of science in management.
What’s been the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
So much about the way I approach stories has changed since the start of my career, but one lesson I learned early on has remained constant: Nothing matters more than the reporting. The most meaningful words in any story are the ones journalists earn before they ever sit down at a keyboard. I sometimes wish that wasn’t true, because capturing a revelatory detail or scene never gets easier. In a way, though, I also find comfort in that reality. I’m not the most naturally gifted writer I know, but the best reporting days are, more than anything, a product of hard work, and working hard is a choice, not a gift.
What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
My obsession with structure. It’s inconceivable to me today, but there was once a time when I didn’t outline anything before I wrote it, and I’m sure readers could tell. Now, I start thinking about a story’s potential architecture well before I’m done reporting it.
I just finished the draft of my first book, and it felt like I spent as many weeks working on structure as I did on writing. A blueprint of openings and endings — for the whole book, the chapters within it, the sections within them — migrated from dozens of notecards, spread out across the floor, to two massive sheets of paper taped to the wall in my home office. The journalist I was in college could never have imagined that scene.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?
I don’t use many metaphors in my writing and am reluctant to apply one to myself now, but I guess I could go with woodworker. A good woodworker, from what I gather, invests in his raw material. He fixates on small details and cares about precision. He plans before he builds. And, in my case, he works for a wise forewoman who knows just what to do when he saws the leg off of a chair.
What’s the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
Get out of the way. In other words: don’t overwrite; let your reporting do the work; cut the superfluous, whether that’s the unnecessary turn of phrase or the repetitive detail. I don’t know who first gave me that advice — or, rather, order — but I’ve heard some version of it from many great editors through the years. It’s always true.
CRAFT LESSON: RITUALS TO WRITE BY
Photo courtesy of Unsplash
I’d heard the story many times before, but I still couldn’t believe it.
Let’s face it, it sounded a little strange.
Gay Talese, the acclaimed narrative writer, a pioneer of New Journalism, pinned his manuscript pages to the wall of his office.
He then walked across the room to his desk. On it rested a pair of binoculars.
He picked them up and trained them on his pages to study them word by word.
Or so the story went.
Bizarre. Perhaps. But it seems to have worked.
Talese is the author of books and magazine articles that set the standard for narrative nonfiction. One of them, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” famously demonstrated how you could write a profile without actually interviewing the subject.
Talese wouldn’t be the first writer to turn to a ritualistic, quasi-religious behavior.
Rita Dove, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, wrote by hand, standing up at a lectern with a candlestick on it. She wrote at the end of the day. She lit the candle and as the burning tallow began to flicker on the page, she began to compose.
When John Steinbeck was writing his classic novel “East of Eden,” he started each day by writing a letter to his editor, Pascal “Pat” Covici. By his side sat 12 round pencils sent spinning twice a day through an electric sharpener, each sharpened tip enough to last a page.
Gail Godwin, the novelist (“A Mother and Two Daughters,” “Grief Cottage”) and essayist, lights two different kinds of incense. Godwin relies on other totems: crisp new legal pads and new No. 2 pencils, with erasers that don’t leave red smears.
Rituals, as these acclaimed writers demonstrate, matter to writers. They are part of their process, almost religious-like gestures designed, it seems, to summon the Muse.
Allure of rituals
The rituals of successful writers hold a special allure for those trying to emulate their success.
In her slim but rich and meticulously researched book “Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty: the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors,” Celia Blue Johnson does a remarkably thorough job documenting the rituals, working habits and environments of nearly 200 writers, from Diane Ackerman to W.B. Yeats.
James Joyce wrote in bed wearing a long white coat and used crayons to mark up his notebooks (in the picture below, he chose red and green ) for "Ulysses."
Truman Capote, author of the legendary "In Cold Blood," insisted on leaving three—only three — cigarette butts in his ashtray. Honoré de Balzac, the 19th-century novelist, gulped dozens of cups of strong coffee every day—the exact amount is in question—to keep him going. The French writer Colette couldn’t pick up her pen before picking the fleas off her cat. Whatever works, I guess.
Some, like poet Robert Frost, could only write by night, Johnson recounts. As an aspiring fiction writer, teenaged J.D. Salinger huddled under his bedsheets at night, and “with the aid of a flashlight he began writing stories, his editor William Maxwell recalled. William Faulkner wrote “As I Lay Dying” in just six weeks, churning out his novel during the night shift at the power plant where he worked.
Others, like Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf trekked for miles in the countryside finding energy and inspiration along the way. In the modern age, the airplane became the favorite place of composition for “The Handmaid’s Tale” Margaret Atwood.
Environment matters to many writers. Marcel Proust famously lined the bedroom where he wrote with corkboard to keep out the noise and heavy curtains to blank light that might distract him from composing the classic “Remembrance of Things Past.”
The Covid-19 Pandemic has altered the usual working spots for many writers, as author and teacher Matt Tullis found in this fascinating piece for Nieman Storyboard.
If you’d like to learn the rituals of some of your favorite writers, I recommend Johnson’s book, (I got a used copy off Amazon for under nine dollars. If you’d like to save some money, Maria Popova over at the inestimable Brain Pickings blog has already done a great service summarizing Johnson’s findings beyond the ones I’ve listed here.)
How writing rituals help
Tools matter. Prolific French writer Alexandre Dumas could only write poetry on yellow paper, pink for articles, blue for novels. Eudora Welty revised with scissors and pins—“straight pins, hat pins, corsage pins and needles”—rather than paste. Langston Hughes wrote his letters in bright-green ink, Rudyard Kipling jet black.
To non-writers, these behaviors must smack of obsessive-compulsive disorder. To those of us struggling every day to create something worthwhile, they can make the difference between a productive day or one that ends in despair. Writers are fascinated by rituals, I believe, because they think if they mimic the routines of successful predecessors they might be able to achieve the same.
What may seem like ridiculous behavior to the non-writer I recognize as actions with rational goals. They:
Help writers get in the frame to write.
Alleviate anxiety that prompts writer’s block—starting writing—or procrastination—the inability to get in the chair in the first place.
Focus on the mundane as a way to set aside intrusions.
Provide a routine to keep a writer on track.
Of course, not everyone believes in rituals. Isaac Asimov, with over 500 published books to his name, dismissed the idea as “ridiculous.”
“My only ritual is to sit close enough to the typewriters so that the fingers touch the keys,” he said.
Gay Talese by David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons
I own a treasured paperback copy of Gay Talese’s first book, the 1961 collection “Fame and Obscurity: A Book about New York, a Bridge and Celebrities on the Edge.” To call it dog-eared is a vast understatement; the cover hangs by a few threads. I carried it with me to a writing conference years ago where I knew my idol was speaking. During a break, I managed to get not only Talese’s autograph but to confirm, from his own mouth, that he had indeed reviewed his manuscript pages with binoculars.
I was so awestruck that I neglected to ask an obvious question: Why?
But if I had to guess, I think he would have answered, “Because it worked.”
WRITING TO SAVOR
"Arma had spent more than 25 years at sea. Just five months earlier, in these same waters, he had faced his most arduous trial yet, white-knuckling the Diamond’s helm against Typhoon Faxai. He had held the bow straight into 100-mph winds, lest they catch the cruise liner’s massive flank and fling it around like a toy boat in a Jacuzzi. He accepted the sea’s hierarchy—“You can’t beat Mother Nature, but you can come to a compromise”—so all night he negotiated, gunning the engines and thrusters to keep the 115,875-ton behemoth in place, the nautical version of running on a treadmill. You didn’t hear about a Princess cruise ship slamming into a cargo vessel or capsizing last September, because he succeeded."
“27 Days on Tokyo Bay: What Happened on the Diamond Princess” by Lauren Smiley in WIRED
Favorite bits:
“white-knuckling the Diamond’s helm against Typhoon Faxai.”
“lest they catch the cruise liner’s massive flank and fling it around like a toy boat in a Jacuzzi.”
He accepted the sea’s hierarchy—“You can’t beat Mother Nature, but you can come to a compromise”
“all night he negotiated, gunning the engines and thrusters to keep the 115,875-ton behemoth in place, the nautical version of running on a treadmill”
Notice the use of vivid, action verbs: “filing,” “gunning,” and nautical terminology—“thrusters”—and specific details—115,875-ton— that give the story authority and credibility.
The writer uses a simile—“like a toy boat in a Jacuzzi”—and analogy—“the nautical version of running on a treadmill.” These are rhetorical devices that make the unfamiliar familiar to the reader.
One paragraph, five sentences. 123 words.
Longest sentence: 43 words
Shortest sentence: 9 words
The right-branching sentences are longer, mimicking the nail-biting nightlong struggle to keep the massive liner afloat.
TIP OF THE WEEK
Find inspiration in reading.
Writing teacher Donald M. Murray liked to say that when he read something that inspired him, “my hand itches for a pen.” “Writers,” he once wrote, “read to be inspired, to see the possibilities of language. They learn most about writing by writing, but they learn a great deal by reading.” If you’re having trouble finding inspiration or are stuck in place, choose a “sacred text.” It could be anything from Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets or the King James Bible to a novel or short story collection by one of your favorite authors. Read for pleasure. When something strikes you as wonderful, copy it out. See if you can apply its lessons to your own work. As I mentioned in the last issue, I’ve steeped myself in the “Collected Stories of John Cheever.” His diction has inspired me to work harder on my own word choices. His carefully woven sentences prod me to write with greater complexity. Reading writers whose work I admire helps me see what works in my own writing and what needs work. It can do the same for you.
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Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line