Chip’s Writing Lessons #33
Writers Speak – Joe Fassler on the Acceptance of Short-term Floundering
Interview – The Stone Wall Builder: Four Questions with Anne Fadiman
Craft Lesson – Uncle Oren’s Toolbox and the Value of Over-reporting
Tip of the Week – Resist the Impulse to be Perfect
Podcast to Savor – 25 Two-Minute Writing Lessons
WRITERS SPEAK
“Literary art is produced through the acceptance of short-term floundering. It’s the resolve to continue laboring in the service of a task with no clear beginning, no clear end.”
— Joe Fassler
INTERVIEW | The Stone Wall Builder: Four Questions with Anne Fadiman
Anne Fadiman/Photo by Gabriel Amadeus Cooney
Anne Fadiman’s most recent book, “The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir,” was an NPR and Library Journal Best Book of the Year, won the Readable Feast Award for Memoir & Food Writing, and was chosen as one of The Guardian’s Top 10 Culinary Memoirs of all time. The former editor of The American Scholar, Fadiman is also the author of “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Nonfiction, and two essay collections, “Ex Libris” and “At Large and At Small.” She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
My friend the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, who died in January, visited my writing class almost every year since I started teaching it in 2005. In her own writing, she always embraced whatever subject lay at the center of her life, however difficult or unpleasant—mental illness, addiction, breast cancer, the discovery in her forties that her father wasn’t the man she’d been told was her father. And she always wrote in a voice that sounded exactly like her: funny, bitchy, contrarian, grumpy, warm, brazen.
She told my students to be themselves, too.
One year, when the students around our seminar table introduced themselves to Elizabeth, one of them said he came from “a suburb of Chicago.”
“What’s the name of it?” asked Elizabeth.
“Flossmoor.”
“You don’t come from a suburb of Chicago! You come from Flossmoor! Always say you come from Flossmoor! Be proud of it!”
As we become better writers, we may become deeper, more skilled, or better versions of ourselves on the page. But we should never try to become different selves. The moment we stop sounding like ourselves, we should remind ourselves that we come from Flossmoor, and we’re proud of it.
What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
That anyone would want to read about me.
I spent nearly twenty years as a reporter before I started writing personal essays. I’d always assumed that my own life—both exterior and interior—was too small to be of interest to anyone but myself, so I figured I’d gain some height by standing on the shoulders of people more interesting than I was. Hence, reporting. Then, at age 40, I was stuck in bed for eight months during a problem pregnancy. I started writing personal essays only because I could do them horizontally.
The essays were enormous fun, and some people actually wanted to read them. The baby turned out fine and is now a writer.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe you as a writer, what would it be?
A stone wall builder.
I tried writing fiction in college, but I was terrible. I’m a nonfiction writer through and through. I’m decent at recognizing which stones are beautiful, and how to fit them together, and in what sequence I should lay them in order to build something that won’t fall down. Those suckers are heavy! I’m willing to grunt and sweat as I pick them up. But if I tried for a million years, I could never make the stones themselves.
What’s the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
My husband, George Howe Colt, who is also a writer, once said, “The difference between a good piece of writing and one that’s absolutely as good as you can make it is all the difference in the world.”
CRAFT LESSON | Uncle Oren’s Toolbox and the Value of Over-reporting
One summer when Stephen King was a young boy, he helped his Uncle Oren, a carpenter, repair a screen door on the side of his house.
“I remember following him with the replacement screen balanced on my head, like a native bearer in a Tarzan movie,” King recalled. Oren meanwhile lugged his toolbox, bulging with tools and weighing in at nearly 100 pounds, “horsing it along at thigh level.”
“There was a hammer, a saw, the pliers, a couple of sized wrenches and an adjustable; there was a level with that mystic yellow window in the middle, a drill (the various bits were neatly drawered farther down in the depths), and two screwdrivers. Uncle Oren asked me for a screwdriver.”
Wielding the simple tool, Oren speedily removed the eight screws that secured the broken screen and attached the new one. But King was puzzled. He asked his uncle why he’d lugged the toolbox all the way around the house “if all he needed was the screwdriver. He could have carried a screwdriver in the back pocket of his khakis.”
“Yeah, but Stevie,” he said, bending to grasp the handles, “I didn’t know what else I might find to do once I got out here, did I? It’s best to have your tools with you. If you don’t, you’re apt to find something you didn’t expect and get discouraged.”
I thought of this story, which can be found in King’s magisterial memoir “On Writing” today after a conversation with my friend Stephen Buckley. Stephen has had a distinguished career as a journalist; Washington Post foreign correspondent with postings in East Africa and Brazil, national correspondent and managing editor for the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times), dean of The Poynter Institute before returning to Kenya to run the Professional Development Program at the Aga Khan Graduate School of Media and Communications, in Nairobi. He is now a media consultant.
When Stephen comes back on his occasional visits to the U.S., we always try to have breakfast at Trip’s, a local diner. It’s a highlight of my year, not just because he’s a wonderful companion, but a reflective practitioner of the craft of writing.
“I always worry that I don’t have enough material for a story, so I over-report,” he said on his last visit. “Of course, then I have so much to wade through.”
I stopped him mid-bite. “You can’t ever overdo it,” I said. “You can’t over-report or research too much. But you can under-think. You can under-plan. You can under-revise.”
Writers, my mentor Don Murray taught me, “write best from an overabundance of material.”
When Murray was a prolific magazine writer, he filled a trash can with the reporting materials he used, and if the can was full, he—and his editors—were satisfied he had a solid, fully reported story. But when he needed something else—a quote, a fact, a statistic—and had to scour the bottom of the near-empty bucket, he knew he was screwed. He’d under-reported.
Over-reporting played an important role in the first draft of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “The 1619 Project,” a New York Times Magazine essay about the bitter legacy of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves to America. Her first draft “was more than twice as long as what ran. There were a lot of examples that did not make it in the final draft. This is part of what makes long-form, deep research really hard. You just have so much information and it’s hard, when you’re so immersed in it, to figure out the most important examples and storytelling points.” The abundance of material, winnowed during revisions, gave the story the authority it needed to make her case. It won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
What Stephen Buckley thought of as overreporting was the crucial accretion of facts, details, scenes, dialogue that made his own stories so memorable. Yes, it’s a hassle, whether you’re researching a book or magazine piece, a feature story or even a deadline news account, to confront a pile of notebooks, or screenfulls of interview transcripts, audio recordings and the other research materials that go into effective writing. It can be agony to realize you can only use a fraction of what you collected.
As Bloomberg Business Magazine writer Bryan Gruley said in a recent interview, when he’s pursuing a feature story, doing the work means “looking at every page of notes, documents, and other materials I’ve gathered in my weeks of research, even though only about 1 percent of what’s there is likely to make it into my story.”
But that’s where the power of a story comes from. It’s the price writers pay for writing stories that have the heft of Uncle Oren’s toolbag. It’s what goes into stories that have no holes, that are written with the strength that can come only from over-reporting.
TIP OF THE WEEK | Resist the impulse to be perfect
Writers want to produce the perfect story, hoping it will bring them acceptance and, at best, acclaim. “To begin at the perfect point in the story, in the perfect way, using the perfect voice to present exactly the desired scene,” Stephen Koch says in “Writers Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction.”
"Unfortunately,” Koch says, “you have no choice but to be wholly clueless about all of this: the rightness of things is generally revealed in retrospect, and you’re unlikely to know in advance what is right and wrong in the story that has not yet been written. So instead of writing until everything is perfect, begin anyhow, anywhere, and anyway. The result probably will not be exactly right, it may not even be close. So what? Persist until you get it right.”
How many hours and even days and weeks have I, and many other writers, wasted trying to make something perfect when all we can do is do the finest work we can and hope for the best. Often, it is only in retrospect that we can see the flaws and gold in our writing. As George Howe Colt says earlier in this issue, “The difference between a good piece of writing and one that’s absolutely as good as you can make it is all the difference in the world.” Perfect, it’s said, is the enemy of good. Be suspicious of perfectionism because it keeps you from creating something good.
PODCAST TO SAVOR
With his Yale University writing students stuck in Covid-19 quarantine, Mark Oppenhemer came up with an ideal way to inspire and instruct via a podcast. “25 Lectures in Under an Hour” is just a single episode, but it’s a rich compilation of two-minute mini-lessons of advice from great writers about journalism, personal essays and fiction. They’re just the prescriptions when you need a jolt to get writing or want to make your work better. Like those individual squares of Ghirardelli chocolate, each one is a treat.
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Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
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