Chip's Writing Lessons #47
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Barry Lopez on persistent thinking about story
Interview | 4 Questions with Mark Johnson
Craft Lesson | A blueprint for building compelling scenes
Writing to Savor | ‘My Favorite Dessert’
Tip of the Week | Tend FOIAs like a garden
WRITERS SPEAK
“The reader only wants one thing: the reader wants a wonderful story and if you can’t tell the reader a wonderful story then you’re not writing…so when I’m traveling what I’m thinking about primarily, 99 percent of the time. is the elements of a story, how can I make a story about this.”
- Barry Lopez, RIP
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH MARK JOHNSON
Mark Johnson is a health and science reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel where he has worked since 2000. Previously he worked in three bureaus at The Providence Journal Bulletin. In 2011, he was part of a team in Milwaukee that won The Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. On three other occasions, he has been part of teams that were Pulitzer finalists. Before becoming a health/science reporter, he covered general assignment, driving to New York to cover the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks and flying to Houston to cover the space shuttle Columbia disaster. He is co-author of the book “One in A Billion: The Story Of Nic Volker And The Dawn Of Genomic Medicine.” He also played guitar in the Rockford, Illinois, punk band The Bloody Stumps. He is married to writer/editor Mary-Liz Shaw. They have a son, Evan, who composes music—not punk.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
The greatest lesson I’ve learned is that writing is an endlessly humbling enterprise. I didn’t go to journalism school, so I tried to learn journalism by reading the best stories I could find. Before the Internet, I wrote away to great writers to get copies of their best stories: David Finkel, Anne Hull, Wil Haygood, Paul Salopek, Tom French, John Camp, Jacqui Banaszynski, Barry Bearak, Hank Stuever, Dan Barry, G. Wayne Miller, and on and on. I still do this if I can’t get access to a great story. The first step was reading these stories and figuring out what the writers did and did not do to make their stories great (what you cut turns out to be hugely important). The second step was trying to do in my own work what these great writers were doing, which was very difficult. But the real lesson came in seeing that as my writing improved, so did everyone else’s. The bar got higher and higher. I widened the universe of writers I tried to learn from: J.M. Coetzee, E. Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Svetlana Alexievich (the great Belarusian journalist). As my writing has inched forward I’ve seen the horizon stretch farther and farther away, which is both exhilarating and humbling. That’s been the greatest lesson I’ve learned. You never really arrive at your destination.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
I’m constantly surprised at how much people will share with you if you are willing to have a real conversation—in other words, to listen and share things about your life too (without making the interview about you). We all carry secrets. After a while, the carrying becomes a heavy burden. People look for someone they can share the burden with, usually just someone who will listen for a few hours. They don’t expect a reporter to solve their problems. I think they want us to be intensely interested and empathetic. When we do those things, there seems no limit to what people are willing to share. Early in my career, I had a young woman tell me that she lost her virginity on the basement steps of her high school (her school was not pleased to learn this). Recently, I had a heart surgeon tell me the vivid recurring nightmare he has—he is in a cabin in the forest trying to perform heart surgery on his son on the kitchen table using ordinary silverware. As a side note, I always ask people about their dreams. It’s fascinating how our thoughts and experiences play out while we’re asleep.
If you had to choose a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?
I think what I’m trying to do is build a nest. I have to get this collection of odds and ends to fit together into something solid. I don’t want too many bits sticking out. I certainly don’t want the thing to collapse and take others down with it. In the end, I hope to make something that is inviting, warm, comfortable to settle into. It may sound a bit strained as a metaphor, but it’s the best I can come up with.
What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
The piece of advice I’ve gone back to again and again over the years has been one I received from G. Wayne Miller at The Providence Journal. Though a total superstar, Wayne was always very generous with me, looking over story drafts and offering advice. Once I was working on a story about a man who got shot in a bar. He was a regular at the bar and that night happened to be sitting in the stool where the owner usually sat. Earlier, the owner had tossed some young men from the bar who had made threats. The young men returned and fired shots from outside the bar through a window, hitting this guy who was sitting where the owner usually sat. The wound paralyzed this man.
I thought the sheer horrible luck of the shooting would be enough to make the reader feel enormous sympathy for the victim. Wayne read my lede and said “The reader has to care about your main character BEFORE the character gets shot". That probably seems like such an obvious thing. I embarrassed to say it had not been obvious to me at the time. The fix was relatively simple. I mentioned that the guy who got shot was a used car salesman and father of three who visited the bar most days after work. I should probably have said more. But at least the reader could see this man—a guy with a job and a family just relaxing at a bar, not having any reason to fear for his life. That little extra information helped to ensure readers would not switch off their empathy simply because the victim was drinking at a bar. So often in long narratives, I think of two rules for the opening:
The reader should have an almost immediate sense of why this is important (somewhere between the second graph and the sixth).
The reader should care about your characters before things happen to them and before they do things.
CRAFT LESSON | A BLUEPRINT FOR BUILDING COMPELLING SCENES
Scenes are the building blocks of powerful fiction, narrative nonfiction and screenplays. An effective scene stands on its own—a taut episode featuring characters, dialogue, description and tension that is one part of a mosaic that reveals the action and themes that make up the entire work. With them, you have an engine that drives your story. Without them, you’re stuck with writing that is nothing more than a lifeless encounter between characters.
By way of definition, a scene is a single dramatized event, uninterrupted by summary and a change in setting.
Many writers have trouble writing scenes. As a young writer, I found that much of my fiction was told in summary rather than dramatic narrative. “Telling a story,” I found, took much less effort than “showing” and my stories suffered as a result. It wasn’t until I learned how to write scenes that my stories began to be published.
Of course, summary narrative has its place, to describe characters and bridge passages of time, except in scriptwriting, which relies exclusively on scenes. Scriptwriters generally don’t have access to those two tools (with the rare exception of voice-overs or a soliloquy.)
To write successful fiction, the writer must learn how to “intuitively or deliberately build their scenes,” says Albert Zuckerman, a book doctor who has shepherded two dozen novels onto best-seller lists and taught playwriting at Yale, and has important things to say on the subject.
“Somewhere in the first few lines or paragraphs (or carried over from an earlier scene) a question is subtly (or not so subtly) raised,” Zuckerman says “In Writing the Blockbuster Novel.” That question must be answered with a climactic moment. Zuckerman offers important advice to these writers. Take your manuscript and select two or three substantial scenes. Does anything in the text “raise a question that sets up suspense that is then dealt with or resolved in the scene’s climax.” If not, decide on what your climax should be, “write it, and then find a way to prepare for it.”
The same holds true for narrative nonfiction, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Franklin writes in his essential handbook, “Writing for Story.” “In the realm of structural construction your concern will narrow to the practicalities...of scene-setting and building, pacing, action sequencing and the other techniques that will allow the reader to slide easily through your story,” Franklin says.
Film can be an effective teaching tool for writers learning to craft powerful scenes in narrative nonfiction. Katie Engelhart is a documentary film producer who has written a powerful new book about assisted dying, “The inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die,” that focuses on people with terminal illnesses, mental anguish and dementia who want to end their own lives even though in many states it’s illegal. Barred by law, hospitals and doctors, some rely on sympathetic doctors and activists willing to help them make a peaceful final exit.
"I think that working in film has helped me to see things in scenes, when I’m reporting—and then, later, to string those scenes together in a way that feels vivid and motivated,” she told me in a recent interview. “Other writers know how to do this instinctively, but I’m not sure I’m one of them. I needed to learn.”
A superb example of scenes in a film can be found in the screenplay for Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather,” based on Mario Puzo’s novel; it’s a sequence of scenes that asks the question of whether Michael Corleone will summon the courage to murder the family’s rival mobster, Virgil Sollozzo, and the corrupt police captain who broke Michael’s jaw after Don Corleone was ambushed in the street by Sollozzo’s thugs. In an earlier scene that foreshadows what’s to come, Michael arranges for a gun to be hidden in the bathroom of the restaurant where he and Sollozzo are to meet to discuss a truce.
Later, on a moody dark night, Sollozzo picks him up outside for a ride to an Italian restaurant. In a brief moment of foreshadowing, Michael tells his father’s rival, “I’m going to straighten everything out tonight. I don’t want my father bothered anymore.” Sollozzo believes a truce is in the offing, but Corleone knows better. Then, in perhaps the film’s tensest scene, an obviously torn and frightened Michael excuses himself to the bathroom and returns with the gun. But facing the two men, he hesitates as he wrestles with the morality of what he is about to do before making up his mind. The story reaches its climax when he shoots them in the face, drops the gun and flees to a waiting car. You can watch the sequence of scenes here.
WRITING TO SAVOR | ‘MY FAVORITE DESSERT’
I began nearly every writing workshop with the same assignment: freewrite about your favorite dessert in 10 minutes. My goal was two-fold: to demonstrate the power of lowering your standards and the value of critical thinking. Not only did participants have to write about key lime pie or their grandmother’s apple crumble, they had to answer the question, “What’s my story really about—in one word, identifying the theme of their story. It couldn’t be “cake” or “Mom” but something universal that revealed the human condition, like “nostalgia” or “loss.” It was always a fun kickoff, especially since few workshops include any writing at all. I always wrote along with the group, always the same dessert, but the prose changed every time. I hope you’ll indulge me if I reprint my latest version, 480 words long, which was recently published in the literary journal sweetlit:
My older sister, Sharon, waits until I climb upstairs to bed. I am nine, but in the morning I will be ten. She and my mother set out the ingredients on the kitchen counter: a long yellow box of Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers, the charcoal rims peeking through the cellophane; a carton of chilled Hood heavy cream, and the tiny bottle of vanilla extract, intoxicating to sniff, bitter on the tongue.
Daddy had been gone since March, and we were marooned on an island, buffeted by grief, submerged rage and bill collectors haranguing my mother on the phone at all hours and banging on the back door.
She begins with the cream, upended in a mixing bowl, and a flow of the vanilla’s amber drops. We don’t have an electric mixer, but to me Mom has wrists of steel. No whisk, just a long, wooden spoon, that she whirls in a blur until stiff, spiky peaks poke through.
He was 46, dark-haired, handsome, and mother will say, charismatic. He could halt a cocktail party by walking in the room. But he was doomed by uncontrollable drinking, skyrocketing blood pressure and refusing to take his pills. He had three strokes, landmines in his brain that he seemed to shrug off, like his hangovers. He lost his job, which he detested, selling brown paper towels dispensed in department store restrooms, and had no luck finding another.
Sharon takes over. She spreads a teaspoon of the sweetened cream on each wafer and stacks the sandwiches in a row on a white china plate. It grows late. I sleep in the bedroom I share with my three brothers. There are eight of us, four boys, two girls, Mommy and Ga, her 80-year-old mother. We cram a rental with four bedrooms and a single bathroom we compete for. My little brother and I shatter the garage windows with rocks.
They blanket the log with the remaining cream.
He was shaving for a job interview when the fourth stroke struck. Ga found him slumped on the bathroom floor.
My grandmother calls it an icebox, though there is no block nestled near the top. They slide the cake onto a shelf. Sharon gets to lick the spoon. She is my senior, by 18 months. We scrap like junkyard dogs; she leaves scarlet fingernail scrapes on my arms. So why this surprise, I will wonder, except to comfort a sad little boy?
They clean up and go to bed.
We buried him on a stinging wintry day huddled under dishwater clouds.
Overnight, the cream soaks into the crackers, turn them soft and moist, chilled and crumbly with each forkful, deliciously bittersweet, like these memories.
My children have grown up with this tale, timeless after six decades. Our eldest, Caitlin, maintains the tradition. Each birthday, she presents me with an icebox cake, an alchemy of chocolaty cream and a sister’s love. You may see it differently, but the theme, as I see it, is comfort. Or perhaps sacrifice or generosity. It’s a toss-up really. Thanks for reading.
TIP OF THE WEEK | TEND YOUR FOIAS LIKE A GARDEN
Every reporter should know how to file a Freedom of Information request, known informally as FOIA, when public officials refuse to provide information you need to write your story. If you’ve never done so, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press offers a complete guide to help you get legal access to public records and open meetings under so-called sunshine laws, sunshine being the best approach to expose concealed important public information. But filing the request is just the first step on a road filled with obstacles: interminable delays, denials and exorbitant copy and research costs imposed by recalcitrant state and federal officials. Katherine Boo, an investigative journalist whose work bolstered by information secured with FOIA requests, documents the lives of people in poverty. Her advice: Pepper FOIA officials with frequent calls and emails for updates and argue against exorbitant fees. Be patient but persistent. Don’t let your demands wilt in a bureaucratic thicket. Nourish them with constant attention until you harvest the information you seek.” Tend your FOIAs like a garden,” says Boo, whose awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
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Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
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