Chip's Writing Lessons #36
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Marilynne Robinson on the Importance of a Complex Character
Interview | A Benevolent Machete: 4 Questions with Maria Carrillo
Craft Lesson | 8 Steps to Successful Revision
Tip of the Week | Stand on the Shoulders of Giants
WRITERS SPEAK | MARILYNNE ROBINSON ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A COMPLEX CHARACTER
“I feel strongly that action is generated out of character. And I don’t give anything a higher priority than character. The one consistent thing among my novels is that there’s a character who stays in my mind. It’s a character with complexity that I want to know better.”
— Marilynne Robinson
INTERVIEW | A BENEVOLENT MACHETE: 4 QUESTIONS WITH MARIA CARRILLO
Maria Carrillo
Maria Carrillo is deputy editor/enterprise at the Tampa Bay Times, where she oversees a team of reporters and works with journalists across the newsroom on ambitious stories. She was previously enterprise editor at the Houston Chronicle and, before that, managing editor at the Virginian-Pilot. She has edited dozens of award-winning projects, frequently lectures on narrative journalism, co-hosts a weekly podcast (WriteLane) about storytelling and has been a Pulitzer Prize juror four times. She was born in Washington, D.C., two years after her parents left Cuba in exile. She now lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, with her husband, and they have two grown children.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as an editor?
Listen much more than you talk.
What’s been the biggest surprise of your editing life?
How many jobs are actually rolled into this one: teacher, coach, counselor, therapist.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as an editor, what would it be?
I really struggled with this, so I asked my three reporters.
Here’s what I got back.
One said: “How ‘bout a benevolent machete, cutting away the stuff we don’t know we don’t need. And at least part therapist.”
Another: Mary Poppins: Fun, firm, kind, punctual, polite, collaborative, innovative…able to wrangle naughty children (and their parents) and make them want to please you…administering spoons full of sugar with each bitter dose of medicine…with all kinds of tricks in your bag.
The third: My brain headed to plants for some reason. I feel like you nourish us to grow, making the conditions best so the most beautiful plants can flourish. You trim us exactly how we need it and give us darkness or sunlight depending on how we are doing. You fertilize us with a great writing road map, clearing away the overgrowth so we can stand straight up. Reporters can grow awful healthy under those conditions.
What’s the single best piece of editing advice anyone ever gave you?
A lot of things raced through my head thinking about this question, but I think the advice that has stayed with me the most wasn’t specifically about editing—in terms of handling copy—but about managing people and it came from Maya Angelou:
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
CRAFT LESSON | 8 STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL REVISION
When I hear the word “revision,” I think:
I failed. I should have gotten it right the first time.
I have no clue how to revise my story.
I don’t have time to revise.
Yippee! I’ve got another chance to make my story shine.
Too many writers would pick 1, 2 or 3 from that list. Many writers equate revision with failure. “If I were more talented,” they think, “I wouldn’t need to revise.”
“My editor’s a sadistic hack,” they complain when a story has been sent back for revising. “He wouldn’t know a good story if it hit him in the face.”
Revision has negative connotations because many writers don’t know how to tackle that part of the writing process. It’s a shame because revision is the most important step. All writing is, or should be, revision. “It is at the center of the artist’s life,” Donald M. Murray writes in “The Craft of Revision,” “because through revising we learn what we know, what we know that we didn’t know we knew, what we didn’t know.” When it comes to writing success, it’s the winning choice. Successful writers recognize that revision is not failure, but another attempt to make their story better.
“What makes me happy is rewriting,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman. “It’s like cleaning house, getting rid of all the junk, getting things in the right order, tigthening things up. I like the process of making things neat.”
For many writers, the problem is No. 2 on the list. They don’t know how to revise. They know their story isn’t working, but don’t see a way out.
I know. I’ve been there, and so have many of the writers I’ve worked with over the years.
“I’m at the point in the process where I feel I have utterly failed,” one wrote me. “(Not only that, I am a talentless hack and a fraud, etc. etc.). I can’t see what is wrong with the draft or how to fix it. Please send help.”
I know how you feel, I wrote back, because I’ve been there, more times than I’d like to count, and will probably be in that place many times in the future—in the despairing trough of near-completion.
I was able to offer her a solution, one I developed to help me move from draft to revision. It’s an eight-step revision strategy that I came up with as a way to push back the negative feelings I had about my draft.
I know it will sound mechanical, and it is—deliberately so. At this point, writers are burned out, stressed. Their confidence has ebbed. I know this state of mind very well, and have learned that resorting to a mechanical process distracts me from my despair and forces my brain to come to my aid. It’s time to ditch the muse and bring out the toolbox: a printer and a pen.
More than anything, revision demands distance. There are two types: temporal and physical. The first is time. When the novelist John Fowles finished a draft, he would put in his desk drawer, sometimes for months. (Try selling that to your editor!)
The other, more realistic approach, is the printout, a physical product separate from the screen, where pixelated prose tends to look perfect.
To go the distance on a piece of writing, you need to separate yourself from it enough to see it with the eyes of a reader—a stranger to the text instead of the creator. In fact, you need to stop being the writer for a while and assume the role of reader.
Here’s the way that works for me.
1. Hit the print button. The first step in achieving distance is to change the medium. We see words on a page differently than those on my computer screen. A cognitive scientist could probably tell me why, but the fact remains. I find it easier to detect flaws and possible fixes on a printout than when I am staring at the electrons in front of me. Open the draft and hit print.
2. Listen up. “The ear is a wonderful editor—and usually a much sharper, smarter and livelier editor than the eye,” says Stephen Koch in “The Modern Library’s Writing Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction.”
Read your story aloud, slowly, or, (my preference), ask someone to read it to you. During the reading, sit on your hands and keep your mouth shut; this means you can’t write on the draft or comment or respond, just listen.
Koch paints an unforgettable scene in the life of Charles Dickens. His daughter Mamie “was once granted the unique privilege of spending several days reading and resting on a sofa in her father’s very closed-door study while he worked.” Normally, nobody watched Dickens at work, but Mamie had been sick, “was her daddy’s darling,” and promised to keep still.
As a grown woman, Mamie recalled her father, oblivious to her presence, begin “talking rapidly in a low voice.” Even away from his desk, he would “whisper the emerging cadences aloud,” Koch says.
“Take it from the greatest,” Koch advises. “You will hear what’s right and wrong on your page before you see it.”
3. Mark up. Read the draft a second time aloud, or silently to yourself, but now every time something strikes you—a criticism, a question, a change—make a check mark at that point in the manuscript. Nothing more. You’re just recording a response to something in your story. It may be something you like, something that confuses you, something you’d change or delete, or move.
By now, your draft is getting messy, but that’s not a bad thing.
4. Count down. Draw a circle next to every mark you’ve made. Number them. Here’s an example from a magazine article I was revising using this method.
5. Remind yourself. Beside each number, write down why you flagged that word or passage. You will remember why you made the mark. For example, you might jot down, “cut this,” “check this with source,” “move this up,” “spelling,” “lead” or “kicker?” If the change is easy—deleting a word, correcting spelling, make it. Use arrows or slash marks to guide you.
6. Count up. Number the changes. Guesstimate how long each will take you to deal with each of them and write the number next to it. Five seconds. A minute. A half-hour of reporting. If you haven’t already guessed, I’m trying to make a game of it. Anything to keep me moving past the feelings of dread and despair a draft can inspire.
7. Get moving. Place your marked-up draft by your screen. Open up the file and start revising. After every change, hit save. (Always hit save, unless you use Google Docs and it does the job for you!) Keep moving. Delete. Add. Cut and paste. X out each circle when you’re done. If you get bogged down on one, just skip over it and move on to the next. Move quickly. You don’t want to lose momentum. You may not be able to solve every problem in this revision. But you may the next time around, or, as I’ve found, the problem has been solved.
8. Rinse and repeat. Once you have gone through the entire list, hit print again. Repeat until you are satisfied, or you have to give up this story to your editor. While this method is especially helpful for long term stories, there’s no reason you can’t do it on a daily deadline, especially when you leave time for revision, instead of wasting precious minutes trying to craft the “perfect” lead. On very tight deadlines, I’ve managed to hit print once, read the story over for problems and make changes in 15–20 minutes. You don’t have time not to.
This print, markup and revise method works because it helps furnish the psychic distance needed to address the problem you and many other writers face: I can’t see what is wrong with the draft, or how to fix it.
Sometimes we can spot a problem in our writing without immediately knowing the solution. Some problems we may not be able to identify beyond a vague sense that “it’s just not working.” But we owe it to our stories to find out why. We must diagnose first if we have any hope of coming up with a good fix for the problem. And then fix it.
TIP OF THE WEEK | STAND ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
“Whether they know and admit it or not, all writers without exception work under the influence of other writers,” says Stephen Koch in “The Modern Library’s Writing Workshop,” which, as you can see, is one of one of my go-to bibles for instruction and inspiration for any kind of storyteller. That’s why reading, studying and learning from other writers is so crucial to a writer’s development. Read widely—fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, poetry—looking for examples of excellence. Learn from the best, whether they’re best-sellers, prizewinners or creators of work that’s received critical attention, even if sales figures don’t match reviewers’ thumbs-ups. Be alert to what effect the words have on you, and then study how they were achieved and mirror those lessons in your own work. “Don’t ask whether you are going to be influenced by other writers,” Koch says. “Ask how…Other writers will teach you how to write and they’re going to keep on teaching you as long as you keep going.”
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Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
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