Chip's Writing Lessons #43
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Doris Lessing on Writing to Please Yourself
Interview | 4 Questions with Jack Hart
Craft Lesson | When Your Story Needs Shock Trauma
Writing to Savor | “Written on Skin” by Jessica DeFino
Tip of the Week | Find the thread of the story
WRITERS SPEAK
“You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life—the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”
— Doris Lessing
INTERVIEW: COLLABORATION IS THE KEY | 4 QUESTIONS WITH JACK HART
Jack Hart
Jack Hart is an author, writing coach and former managing editor at The Oregonian, where he also worked as a reporter, arts and leisure editor, Sunday magazine editor, training editor, and editor-at-large. He has additional reporting experience at two other newspapers, holds a University of Wisconsin doctorate in Mass Communications, taught at six universities, and was a tenured associate professor at the University of Oregon, where he served as the journalism school’s acting dean. In 2012–13, he served as director of the school’s Portland campus.
At The Oregonian, Hart worked as an editor on four Pulitzer Prize winners and was the solo editor on two of them. He also edited national winners of the American Society of Newspaper Editors writing awards, the Ernie Pyle award, the Scripps-Howard business-writing award, the Overseas Press Club awards, the Headliners awards, and the Society of Professional Journalists feature-writing award. He is the author of “The Information Empire,” a history of The Los Angeles Times; “Skookum Summer: A Novel of the Pacific Northwest”; “A Writer’s Coach: The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work”; and “Storycraft: A Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction” (second editions forthcoming).
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as an editor?
The most important thing I’ve learned is that collaborative editing with writers at the front end of the story process pays off with time saved at the back end. (Not to mention much better stories.)
What has been the biggest surprise of your editing life?
My biggest surprise was how critical structure is to great storytelling…and that even novice narrative writers who grasp the essentials of structure can produce national quality work.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as an editor what would it be?
As an editor, I aspire to be a seagull, effortlessly soaring on rising air currents provided by the writer.
What’s the single best piece of editing advice anyone ever gave you?
Resist the urge to start correcting the small stuff on your first pass through a manuscript. Instead, you should read the entire piece through thoughtfully, thinking hard about structure, theme, tone, and the other large questions that are far more important to reader impact than the easy copy-editing and polish corrections that can distract you on a first pass through a piece.
CRAFT LESSON: WHEN YOUR STORY NEEDS SHOCK TRAUMA
In emergency medicine, the “golden hour” is 60 minutes of high-powered professional attention that can make the difference between life and death. It’s a narrow window of time when care must be managed or the traumatically ill or injured patient is not going to survive.
Apply the theory of shock trauma on deadline, couple it with the process approach to reporting and writing, and you have an efficient method that can make the difference between a compelling news story and one that dies on the page.
At the risk of practicing literary medicine without a license, I’d argue that the writer and editor’s first task is to diagnose—identify what works and what needs work in a story—and then treat.
IDEA
DIAGNOSIS:
What is the idea behind the story? Is it newsworthy, timely, relevant, interesting?
What would a reader/viewer/listener say the idea is?
How can the story idea be improved/refined/clarified?
RX:
Identify the idea—a day in the life of an EMT during the Covid pandemic, the view from an immigration law office the day after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, decisions made at a municipal meeting—and use that to evaluate the relevance of the material in the story.
Move quickly from assignment to budget line (25-40 word summary of the story)
REPORT
DIAGNOSIS:
What questions does the reader still have about the story?
What additional reporting needs to be done? (Interviews, research, statistics, examples, explanation)
RX:
Mine your notes: You only want the best—the most illustrative anecdote, the most telling detail, the most pungent quote, the most revealing statistic.
Look for revealing details that put people on the page. The female police officer who wears “size four steel-toe boots.” The widow who sprays her dead husband’s aftershave on her pillow. “In a good story,” says David Finkel of The Washington Post, “a paranoid schizophrenic doesn’t just hear imaginary voices, he hears them say, ‘Go kill a policeman.’”
Use the five senses in your reporting and a few others: sense of place, sense of people, sense of time, sense of drama.
Brainstorm the reader’s questions. Find the answers or acknowledge that they’re unavailable. (“City officials say there are no statistics available on…”)
FOCUS
DIAGNOSIS:
What is the story’s single dominant message?
What would the reader say the story is about?
How could the story’s focus be improved/sharpened/revealed/supported?
RX:
Be ruthless about finding the heart of the story: An effective story has a single dominant impression.
Address the question, “What’s the story really about?” and answer it in one word.
Ask two questions that keep track of the focus of any story: What’s the news? What’s the point? They address the reader’s concerns: What’s new here? What’s this story about? Why am I reading this?
Decide on a focus early, but be willing to be flexible, to change with the information you report.
ORGANIZE
DIAGNOSIS:
What is the path of the story? Does it have a recognizable beginning, middle and end?
Are things in the right order?
What questions does each sentence, paragraph, box, answer? Are these the questions the reader will ask, in that order?
RX:
Write the end first. Once you settle on a destination, it’s easier to plan your route.
Move, cut, shift the elements of your story.
Try Rick Bragg’s “five boxes” approach. Bragg doesn’t outline his stories, but he does preach the value of the “five boxes” method of story organization:
The lead is the image or detail that draws people into the story.
The second box is a “nut graph” that sums up the story.
A new image or detail that resembles a lead and precedes the bulk of the narrative follows.
Material that is less compelling (background, statistics) but rounds out the story comes next.
The “kicker,” an ending featuring a strong quote or image that leaves the reader with a strong emotion goes last. (If you’re interested in an analysis of such a story, I read my email at chipscan@gmail.com and would welcome recommendations.)
DRAFT
DIAGNOSIS:
How is the story told: with scenes, summary, anecdote, quotes, attribution, statistics?
What additional material can be drafted or redrafted?
RX:
Write early: Find out what you know, what you need to know.
Write the end first. Most reporters concentrate on the lead. The ending is more important for time management for the writer. It’s also the reader’s last impression of the story. Make it count.
Put your notes aside before you start to write. “Notes are like Velcro,” says Jane Harrigan, former professor at the University of New Hampshire. “As you try to skim them, they ensnare you, and pretty soon you can’t see the story for the details.” Her advice: Repeat over and over, “The story is not in my notes. The story is in my head."
REVISE
DIAGNOSIS:
What are the stumbling blocks—spelling, style, accuracy—in the story?
How can the story be made more accurate, fair, balanced, compelling?
RX:
Raise the bar: is it good enough?
Select, don’t compress: Paragraphs, not words.
Are the sentences active by using action verbs?
Use punctuation as a tool?
Role play the reader. Step back and pretend you’re reading your story for the first time. Does the lead make you want to keep reading?
WRITING TO SAVOR: “WRITTEN ON SKIN” BY JESSICA DEFINO
The Modern Love column is one of The New York Times’ most popular features. It tells stories of love in all its permutations, usually in about 1,000 words. Competition for acceptance is fierce, but recently the editors solicited reader-submitted love stories in miniature, no more than 100 words. My favorite was this tiny love story by Jessica DeFino:
Written on Skin
My skin knew on our second date. It warned me that our connection was too quick, too intense with red, peeling patches across my cheeks and chin. (Dermatitis, dermatologists said, unsure of the trigger. Stress, maybe, or some unknown irritant. I dismissed it with prescription desoximetasone.) My skin knew the week before our wedding, swelling until my eyes shut tight, so puffy and pink and full of panic. My skin knew the moment it met my wedding band. The rash on my ring finger only left when I did, two years later. My skin always knew. Underneath, I did too.
I love what I think of as “iceberg” writing, where things are left unsaid but the meaning is clear. DeFino does a masterful job of tracking a relationship doomed to failure without saying it outright. She uses her skin as a stand-in for the doubts she has about a relationship that has its problems from the start and leads to ultimate dissolution after marriage. Fiction writers and poets can profit from her use of specific status details (prescription desoximetasone), repetition, pacing and variety of sentence length.
FAVORITE BIT
"My skin knew the week before our wedding, swelling until my eyes shut tight, so puffy and pink and full of panic."
TIP OF THE WEEK | FIND THE THREAD OF THE STORY
In a recent issue, I described how veteran Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell maneuvers the highwire act of deadline writing when he is covering a game. (At 71, he’s decided to forego covering the World Series for the first time since 1975 because of the pandemic.) But one piece of wisdom he imparted has stuck with me ever since I read it decades ago. It’s probably the best analogy employed to describe the importance of focus, and one whose spirit is worth embracing.
“The most important thing in the story is finding the central idea,” Boswell said. “It’s one thing to be given a topic, but you have to find the idea or the concept within that topic. Once you find that idea or thread, all the other anecdotes, illustrations and quotes are pearls that you hang on this thread. The thread may seem very humble, the pearls may seem very flashy, but it’s still the thread that makes the necklace.”
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Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
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