Chip's Writing Lessons #46
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Chris Solomon on realizing you may know more than you think
Interview | 4 Questions with Moni Basu
Bookbag | “The Writer’s Book of Hope”
Tip of the Week | The value of looking back
WRITERS SPEAK
"I find essays really difficult. I don’t know if I have anything to say or not. Half the time it amounts to nothing and it stays in a notebook, sometimes for years. But sometimes I have something that’s sort of interesting as I sit down and work on it. That’s the most satisfying part about being a writer. Realizing maybe you know more than you think you do. I find that extremely satisfying.”
- Chris Solomon
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH MONI BASU
Moni Basu
Moni Basu is the Michael and Linda Connelly Lecturer in Narrative Nonfiction at the University of Florida. She prefers Prof B. Basu worked as a reporter and editor for 35 years before becoming a full-time professor. She still writes as a freelancer, and her most recent work has been published in the Bitter Southerner and Flamingo magazine. She is also a distinguished professor of practice in the narrative nonfiction MFA program at the University of Georgia. She loves terrific storytelling.
Her 2012 e-book, Chaplain Turner’s War (Agate Publishing) grew from a series of stories on an Army chaplain in Iraq. A platoon sergeant gave her the name “Evil Reporter Chick,” and she was featured once as a war reporter in a Marvel comics series. Basu’s work has been recognized with national and international accolades, but she is most proud of her latest award: the 2020 University of Florida Teacher of the Year.
Born in Kolkata, India, Basu grew up straddling two cultures, which explains her interest in exploring the complexities of race, ethnicity and identity. English is not her first language, and she has never taken a class in journalism.
What is the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
I am still learning every day. So, can I list more than one important lesson? First: You can’t ever write what you don’t know. In other words, you have to report the hell out of a story in order to tell it well. Second: Good things come to all those who wait. We, as journalists, are programmed to break news and often, we are not paragons of patience. But slowing down and giving your characters breathing space can yield gold. Third: I used to think I had to travel the world to tell a compelling story. But stories are everywhere. You just have to look in the right places.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
I had hoped (foolishly) that writing would get much easier with age and experience. I was wrong and it was a rather unpleasant surprise. I thought this profession was like many others – that the more you do it the less daunting your job becomes. I have certainly become a better writer after 37 years in journalism but with that improvement, the bar has been set higher.
I still feel trepidation when trying to making sense of the story I just reported. I am terrified of not doing my characters justice. But perhaps fear is a good thing in that it keeps hubris at bay.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?
Fabulous question! I am a chef who gathers interesting ingredients to prepare a delicious dish but never follows a recipe.
What’s the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
When I was covering the Iraq war and felt overwhelmed, my editor, the great Jan Winburn, told me: “Just write what you see in front of you.” It was her version of E.B. White’s advice: “Don’t write about man. Write about a man.”
BOOKBAG | THE WRITER’S BOOK OF HOPE
Let’s be honest, all writers hope for success, for publication, for riches and fame. But many days we drag ourselves into a chair, open a blank screen and forge our way through doubts and despair that keep us from writing.
But there is comfort for writers in “The Writer’s Book of Hope: Getting from Frustration to Publication” by Ralph Keyes.
Keyes is a master writing coach and indefatigable student of the craft who has written a collection of useful and inspiring books about writing. For me, “The Writer’s Book of Hope” is his most inspiring.
Keyes draws on hundreds of real-world examples of writers writing, failing, getting up and trying again, and ultimately succeeding. These anecdotes are the basis of hope that every writer can seize upon, especially at those moments when all seems lost.
“Frustration is the natural habitat of writers at every level,” Keyes says. “I’ve felt it… So does anyone who aspires to write.” He tells fledgling writers that they are not alone.
Samuel Beckett’s first novel was rejected by 42 publishers? A dozen agents chose not to represent J. K. Rowling? Beatrix Potter had to self-publish “The Tale of Peter Rabbit?” These are grounds for hope. “There are many more,” Keyes says.
It’s striking, and comforting, how many successful writers wrestle with hopelessness as they struggle to write. Hope, that urgent desire for something good to happen, “is the essential ingredient, as crucial to a writer as similes and semicolons,” Keyes says. "A simple nod of reassurance can keep us going when every nerve ending says, STOP! ENOUGH! I SURRENDER!
We can write without a computer, typewriter, desk, pen, or even paper (some excellent writing has been done in prisons on matchbook covers and toilet tissue). The one thing we can’t write without is hope. Hope is to writers as oxygen is to scuba divers. No writer can survive without it.
Besides discipline, writers need encouragement. For Saul Bellow, a Nobel laureate in literature, “every book is his first book,” his longtime agent, Harriet Wasserman, recalled. “And he is always the first time writer welcoming reinforcement.”
Keyes describes a conversation with William Zinsser, author of the classic “On Writing Well.” At work on his latest book, Zinsser confronted a manuscript returned by his longtime editor with several pages of suggested revisions. “Zinsser was taken aback,” Keyes recalls. “He searched in vain for any words of reassurance in his editor’s commentary. Did this man like the manuscript? That was the first question Zinsser put to his editor, followed by remonstration for not including any encouraging words in his critique. “Don’t think just because I’ve been doing this so long I don’t need encouragement,” said Zinsser.
What’s the hardest part of being a writer? It’s not getting your commas in the right place, Keyes writes, “but getting your head in the right place. Where help is really needed is in the area of countering anxiety, frustration, and despair.”
That means doing the work.
“The Writer’s Book of Hope” is replete with examples of desperation, not from aspiring writers, but successful ones like mystery writer Sue Grafton, short story master Alice Munro, who writes short stories compared to Anton Chekov despite constant despair, and even the 19th-century master Gustave Flaubert, who endured daily torments that nonetheless produced “Madame Bovary.”
In Keyes’ book, hope comes from the inspiring examples he assembles of successful but often hopeless writers who, despite their fears, pushed onward, even if the day’s output was but a sentence, like novelist and essayist Gail Godwin. Her piece, “The Watcher at the Gate” captures the doubts that plague her despite her success and is an inspiration for every writer struggling with lack of hope.
“Simply staying there when more than anything else I want to get out of that room,” she says. “It sometimes means going up without hope and without energy and simply acknowledging my barrenness and lighting my incense and turning on my computer. And, at the end of two or three hours, and without hope and without energy, I find that I have indeed written some sentences that wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t gone up to write them.”
A crucial way to locate hope, Keyes says, is to avoid what he calls “discouragers.” These are the teachers and guidance counselors who throw cold water on an aspiring writer’s dreams. They’re the friends and strangers who ask “Yeah, but what do you really do?” or “Don’t quit your day job!” They are often the enviers who wish they had a creative passion.
Instead, look for what Keyes labels “encouragers.” These include family, teachers, colleagues, mentors, agents, writers groups, editors, readers. Inspiring examples of these relationships abound in “The Writer’s Book of Hope.” For Keyes, it was a teacher and his agent who provided that boost. “Finding the right encouragers at the right time,” Keyes concludes, “is one of the developing writer’s most important tasks.” An encourager, whether it’s a spouse, sibling or teacher who tells you you’re a good writer or that you can finish your story or an editor or agent who gives you the tools to finish a project, helps make you the writer you want to be.
In five decades as a writer, I have been fortunate to have many encouragers who gave me hope: a supportive spouse, siblings, editors and readers. It took time, but I also learned to avoid discouragers. I’m sure there are encouragers in your life. You may have to search for and locate them, often through trial and error. Along with writing and submitting your work despite rejections, finding people who believe in you are the best ways to locate hope, that elusive ingredient that separates the would-bes from the writers who keep trying.
“Hang in there,” Keyes urges. “You’d be surprised by how many successful writers were once discouraged ones.”
You can be one of them. Don’t give up. I have hope in you.
TIP OF THE WEEK | THE VALUE OF LOOKING BACK
Journalism, by its very nature, focuses on the now, the events and people who are making the news. But there’s another invaluable approach. In the “Writing to Savor” section of this newsletter last week, I highlighted the tour de force narrative written by Dan Barry and Annie Correal of The New York Times, who chronicled the small band of Queens neighborhoods that became the global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020.
The virus had already burned its way through five poor communities by the time they began reporting, but their effort led to harrowing stories of five victims whose ordeals they were able to document tragic detail. That led to a narrative reconstruction, “The Epicenter,” a story that demonstrates what Barry told me in an annotation of the story in Nieman Storyboard: “There is always value in going back.” This is what historians do, mining the past for stories that illuminate the human condition.
As you search for story ideas or examine your inventory of tips and story possibilities, ask yourself what events or developments or impact of news subjects have been covered as breaking news, but would benefit from a trip to the past, to investigate the conditions and decisions that led to their existence. Revisiting a story can pay off with powerful new and unexpected accounts.
BEFORE YOU GO
DONATE: If Chip’s Writing Lessons helps you, please consider backing its production. Any amount would be welcome. And many thanks to our current supporters. Send to PayPal: chipscan@gmail.com. Thank you.
Please spread the word to sign up for Chip’s Writing Lessons.
Browse the newsletter archive. To reach earlier issues, scroll to the end of the archive page, where you will find arrows that help you scroll back and forth between them.
Question? Comment? Suggestion? Email me at chipscan@gmail.com, or send a reply to this newsletter.
Stay safe. Keep your distance. Wash your hands. Wear a mask.
May the writing go well, and may you be well.
Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
Black Lives Matter.