Chip's Writing Lessons #35
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Chris Jones on Engineering Stories
Interview | “Riding a Ferris Wheel”: Four Questions with Tommy Tomlinson
Craft Lesson | The 10% Solution
Writing to Savor | “I Don’t Know What Antonio Brown Did, but He’s Already Damned by Misogynist Language,” by Sally Jenkins, The Washington Post
Tip of the Week | Be As Creative Managing Your Time As You Are Creating Stories
WRITERS SPEAK | Chris Jones on the Importance of Structure
“The older I get, the more I write, the more I realize: It’s all about structure. Every story is a piece of engineering that either stands or collapses because of how it’s made.”
— Chris Jones
INTERVIEW | “Riding a Ferris Wheel”: Four Questions with Tommy Tomlinson
Tommy Tomlinson / Photo by Jeff Cravotta
Tommy Tomlinson is the author of the memoir “The Elephant In the Room” about life as an overweight man in a growing America. He is also the host of the podcast “SouthBound” in partnership with WFAE, Charlotte’s NPR station. He has written for publications including Esquire, ESPN the Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, Garden & Gun, and many others. He spent 23 years as a reporter and local columnist for the Charlotte Observer, where he was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in commentary. His stories have been chosen twice for the “Best American Sports Writing” series (2012 and 2015), and he also appears in the anthology “America’s Best Newspaper Writing.” He has taught at Wake Forest University as well as at other colleges, workshops and conferences across the country. He’s a graduate of the University of Georgia and was a 2008–09 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
It’s all about the reporting. We don’t write with words—we write with information. Every time I get stuck in writing a story, it’s because I don’t have the information I need and I’m trying to write around it. But fancy writing won’t patch the potholes. Make the extra call. Read the extra clip. When you’ve got the goods, the writing will be a whole lot easier.
What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
How much people don’t stop and think about their own lives. I’ve written a bunch of stories where the subjects told me later that they learned things about themselves. What I’ve learned from that is that most of us spend most of our energy just getting through the day, and don’t step back to dwell on where we’re headed and why. I’ve realized that I’m not good at this, either.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?
I think of the job sometimes as riding a Ferris wheel. You’re in this constant loop of diving down low to the ground, then rising up to look from a higher vantage point. It’s the text and subtext—what’s happening in the story and What It All Means. I spend a lot of my time circling up and down, from text to subtext, trying to make sure the reader stays along for the ride.
What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
I don’t remember who gave me this advice—I suspect I learned it by osmosis from watching some very good reporters. But here’s the advice: If you hang around people long enough, eventually they become themselves.
At first, everybody a reporter talks to is likely to put up a front—some people suck up, others are mean and try to run you off, still others are fearful about the whole process. It’s hard for your first interactions to be authentic. But not many people can put up a front forever. If you stick around long enough, you’ll see the real person.
CRAFT LESSON | The 10% Solution
In “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,” Stephen King describes a rejection slip he received in 1966 when he was still in high school.
“Not bad but puffy,” the editor wrote. “You need to revise for length.”
The editor provided this formula:
“2nd Draft = 1st draft – 10%”
It may sound mechanical, but it’s a useful way to trim the fat off your story.
“I wish I could remember who wrote that note…” King writes. “Whoever it was did me a hell of a favor. I copied the formula out on a piece of shirt-cardboard and taped it to the wall beside my typewriter. Good things started to happen for me shortly after. There was no sudden golden flood of magazine sales, but the number of personal notes on the rejection slips went up fast. What the Formula taught me is that every story and novel is collapsible to some degree. If you can’t get out ten per cent of it while retaining the basic story and flavor, you’re not trying very hard. The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing.”
The Oregonian’s multi-award-winning narrative writer Tom Hallman is a charter member of what I think of as the 10% Solution Society.
“I really believe in being spare,” Hallman says.
“On every story I’ve ever done, I’ve hard-edited and cut no less than 10 or 15 percent of the story,” he says. “So if it’s a 100-inch story, I always cut out 10 or 15 inches. And that’s before I give it to the editor.”
As Stephen Koch advises in “The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction,” “If your story is 10 pages long, make it nine pages long. 20 Pages? Make it 18. If your draft is 300 pages long, knock it down to 270. Do you have a bunch of pages—any bunch of pages—that needs work? They have not been worked on until they have been washed and pre-shrunk in the 10-Percent Solution.”
Likely candidates:
Passive verb constructions. “The mayor is planning” becomes “The mayor plans,” adding energy, saving a word.
Modifiers. Search for “ly” to identify weak adverbs. Replace them with verbs that communicate with power and economy. “She knocked lightly” becomes “She tapped.”
Quotes. Most speech is bloated. Trim the fat, leaving the verbatim message, or paraphrase. You’re the writer: Unless your sources can say it better than you, silence them and put it in your own carefully crafted words.
Boredom. Heed Elmore Leonard’s dictum: Cut out the boring parts. Replace bloated description with dialogue. Do you really need that long anecdotal lead, or would the nut graf that follows do the job just as well? If your eyes glaze over as you read your draft, be ruthless. Slice and dice.
Showing Off. “Cut phoniness,” Koch says. “There are going to be certain passages that you put in simply in the hope of impressing people…We all have our way of showing off, and they rarely serve us well. When you have identified your own grandiosity, do not be kind.” Georges Simenon, the prolific French mystery writer, made it his mission to cut away “his efforts to impress.” His main job when he rewrote was to cut “every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence…cut it.”
Follow Stephen King’s lead and join the 10% Solution Society by keeping the formula close at hand as you revise.
Lose a few words, but gain many more readers.
Or better yet. Whittle away as close as you can to the formula, or beyond, for maximum impact.
Lose words.
Gain readers.
WRITING TO SAVOR
“I don’t know what Antonio Brown did, but he’s already damned by misogynist language,” by Sally Jenkins, The Washington Post
“Skank whore here, checking in. Dumb ass bitch, reporting for work. After climbing through the thicket of social media insults that regularly starts the day of a woman in a sportsman’s business, I sat down to read Antonio Brown’s alleged text messages to a young woman who is accusing him of rape. It’s of course impossible to tell from the lawsuit, filed the day after he signed with the New England Patriots, whether he’s guilty of that crime. But if those texts are his, he most assuredly is guilty of using language that countenances it, and now he’s in the position of trying to explain that it was just words.
You want to be thought of as a good man falsely accused? Then don’t talk like a crude, rapacious brute. Find a different expression. Search out an articulacy, something other than the tongue-tied dead-end vulgar cough that is the word “bitch.” She’s a “lien bitch thought it was easy to get a come up.” She’s a “weak bitch” and a “fake hoe.” She and her mother, too, are “dum ass hoes.” This isn’t innocent language. To employ the phrase of Toni Morrison, it’s “mutant language designed to throttle women.”
…
For decades now I’ve written about pro athletes with an interest and respect that borders on reverence, and always wanted to err sympathetically on their side—for their ability to turn themselves over so completely to a craft, and yet their susceptibility to being used. For their exquisite physical precision and ephemeral beauty, and yet their propensity to get burned up by others. But I’ve never reconciled myself to the clumsy, casual “all my bitches” way so many of them talk, and the implacable coldness of their refusal to acknowledge the pervasive, contagious damage they do with it.
Language is a projection of personal quality. The language of “bitches” and “hoes” that so many great athletes use is exactly what it appears to be—a menacing unfeelingness, a limitedness of expression that bespeaks something insensate, a hardheartedness and determination to subjugate. …”
Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post is one of the pre-eminent sportswriters of our time. This year she was a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize “for columns that marshal a broad knowledge of history and culture to remind the sports world of this responsibility to uphold basic values of equity, fairness and tolerance.” Jenkins does so here by first startling the reader with opening sentences normally unfit for family consumption. But there’s a reason behind the profanities: They mirror texts by Antonio Brown contained in a lawsuit filed on behalf of a former college classmate who accused him of rape.
Putting aside its veracity, Jenkins instead focuses on Brown’s damning misogynistic texts. She wisely draws on the eloquent wisdom of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison to dismiss the notion that they are examples of locker room banter. Jenkins makes clear she has always admired athletes and their devotion “to a craft,” one of the reasons that her criticism is so credible. So when she steps back from Brown’s case to laments her inability to reconcile their talents with their brutal language aimed at women, she makes an unassailable case for her critique of a culture that demeans women. It’s a brutal, angry read, one perfectly in keeping with the brutality of the subject.
Favorite bits:
“You want to be thought of as a good man falsely accused? Then don’t talk like a crude, rapacious brute.”
“tongue-tied dead-end vulgar cough that is the word ‘bitch.’”
“To employ the phrase of Toni Morrison, it’s ‘mutant language designed to throttle women.’”
“The language of ‘bitches’ and ‘hoes’ that so many great athletes use is exactly what it appears to be—a menacing unfeelingness, a limitedness of expression that bespeaks something insensate, a hardheartedness and determination to subjugate.”
TIP OF THE WEEK
Be as creative managing your time as you are creating stories.
Finding time to write may be one of the greatest challenges for most writers who don’t have the opportunity to pursue their craft full-time. Whether it’s a day (or night) job or caring for a family, most writers have to be creative about time management. Among the options: get up an hour early or if you’re a night owl, stave off bedtime for an hour. In the quiet of dawn or late night, you have the freedom to pursue your dreams. But it’s also possible to produce copy in 15-minute bursts of freeewriting or editing. I’m a big fan of time management guru David Allen’s “2-minute rule”: If you can do something in two minutes, do it! It may be just the time you need to jot down that line of dialogue or description before it vanishes. Review your schedule for a week and look for windows of opportunity. Make appointments to fill them and be sure to keep them. Bring a printout of your story to work and revise over lunch at your desk. Yes, there are inviolate claims on your time, but every writer can find minutes or hours when they can work. Take control of your time instead of letting it control you and you’ll be a more productive writer.
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