Chip's Writing Lessons #50
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Harlan Coben on the persistence of insecurity
Interview | 4 Questions with Sally Jenkins
Craft Lesson | The best writing advice: a roundup from 50 issues
Writing to Savor | “Final Salute” by Jim Sheeler, Rocky Mountain News
Tip of the Week | Stash your notes
WRITERS SPEAK
“Every book I write, I still say, each time, ‘This book sucks, and the one I did before was great. How did I lose it?’ And then five minutes later, I’m like, ‘This book is great!’ All that insecurity goes on and on and on. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. I think when that goes away, it’s probably time to stop.”
— Harlan Coben, who has 75 million books in print
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH SALLY JENKINS
Sally Jenkins
Sally Jenkins is a sports columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post. She was previously a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. She has been named the nation’s top sports columnist by the Associated Press Sports Editors four times and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. In 2013, she earned a first-place AP award for “Do No Harm,” an investigative series, co-written with Rick Maese, on medical care in the National Football League. She won the 2021 Red Smith Award for “major contributions to sports journalism,” the same prize her late father, sportswriter Dan Jenkins, won in 2013. Jenkins is the author of 12 books, four of which were New York Times bestsellers, most recently the No. 1 “Sum It Up,” with legendary basketball coach Pat Summitt. She is also the author of “The Real All Americans,” the historical account of how the Carlisle Indian School took on the Ivy League powers in college football at the turn of the century and won. Her work has been featured in Smithsonian, GQ and Sports Illustrated. A native of Texas, Jenkins graduated from Stanford and lives in Sag Harbor, New York.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
That there is no such thing as writing without discipline and structure. Inspiration is almost a mirage. It’s not that it doesn’t exist; it does. But if it’s not married to method, regimen, it’s useless, it’s just a scrap of paper floating on a breeze, flying away from you. What makes something conveyable is the regular work. You have to sit in the chair for at least two to four hours for something worthwhile to happen. And it’s a stunning thing: if you will do that, if you’re willing to sit there fearfully but faithfully in front of a blank white screen and just try for a few hours, then you will produce a page or a few pages that are fixable, improvable, until they become coherent.
But then you have to revise. And then revise again. The difference between a first draft and a second draft is about a 35% improvement. And the difference between the second draft and the third draft is another 35% of improvement. So, if you’re doing the basic math, 70% of what happens comes after the initial inspiration. Those revisions are like eating day-old oatmeal. Frequently when I read over my first draft I feel like crying. Sometimes I do cry – because I’m a cat-in-yarn incompetent who can’t organize a simple sentence. But at the end of the second draft, I’ve at least untangled the string. And after the third, I’m not happy but I’m not mortified. And I know that I at least worked at it, so I can hold my head up over that.
And then, a lot of times, it’s published and other people tell me they like it, and I re-read it, and I think, “Well that was pretty good. I’m pretty proud of that because I know how I worked at it.” I have one strength and one strength only as a writer: I work at it.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
The things that come out of my head. That’s the biggest surprise of all.
I am stunned at the words that come unlooked for. I mean stuff just appears – and you don’t have any freaking idea why or how. It writes you. That’s why you have to sit in the chair for four hours. Because you don’t know what will happen, when the invisible thing that really holds the pen or hits the keys starts moving. I have used words I didn’t know I knew.
I’m also surprised at how everlastingly scary it is, to sit there and court incompetence and to take chances with words. You’re almost never punished for taking those chances. That’s surprising. If you take the chance—and revise with discipline—then the chance will reward you with quality. I read something once that the songwriter Paul Simon said. He said, I’m paraphrasing, there’s a point where you’re stopped and scared, and you have to tell yourself, what are you so scared of, and move past it. And then the good things come.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?
I am a prisoner breaking rocks with a shovel. Like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, saying, “Yeah Boss,” while I chop at the ground.
What’s the single best piece of advice anyone ever gave you?
Two pieces. One was from my Dad. “Don’t ever let a thing out of your hands until it’s as good as you can make it,” he said. He meant within the confines of a deadline, of course. But he also meant, you do your best every time out; don’t you ever mail it in.
And then there was Tony Kornheiser’s advice to me as a young writer at The Washington Post. “You’re only as smart as the people you talk to,” he said. Which also stuck. You have to seek out smart people and you have to listen, and you have to store up all the information, as well as the thoughts and words, that come from that.
CRAFT LESSON | THE BEST WRITING ADVICE: A ROUNDUP FROM 50 ISSUES
Chip’s Writing Lessons celebrates its 50th issue today. To mark it, I’ve rounded up answers to a question I posed to writers and editors in their “Four Questions With” interviews: What’s the single best piece of advice anyone ever gave you? Here’s what 10 of them had to share.
“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.” — Tommy Tomlinson
“Boil your story down to a sentence. If you can’t do that, your story is likely to ramble and lose its theme. If possible, boil the story down to a word. Write the sentence or word on a Post-It note and keep it visible until you’re done with the story. That always helps me stay on point.” — Rosalind Bentley
“Often in long narratives I think of two rules for the opening: 1. The reader should have an almost immediate sense of why this is important (somewhere between the second graph and the sixth). 2. The reader should care about your characters before things happen to them and before they do things.” — Mark Johnson
“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.” — Jack Hart
“Lary Bloom, who I worked for at Northeast Magazine at the Hartford Courant, once said to me: “Don’t be the editor of the greatest unpublished work.” What that meant was take a risk to like something, to champion it and polish it and then publish it. You’ll never face criticism for the manuscripts you turn down; no one will see them. As an editor, you have to open yourself to scrutiny for what you choose to publish, and then stand behind it. That’s your job!” — Jan Winburn
“Report, report, report, to earn the right to take charge, to make choices, to run a rope from post to post, stretched taut, taking and using what serves the story and moves it forward, from beginning to middle to end, while unsentimentally leaving behind what does not.” — Michael Kruse
“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.” — Moni Basu
“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.’” — Maria Carrillo
“I think the best advice I ever got about writing was from Gene Roberts, who used to say that every good story should be brimming with “color, quotes and anecdotes.” As I recall, one of Gene’s first editors at the Goldsboro (NC) News-Argus was blind, and he demanded that Gene’s stories make him see. — Bill Marimow
“Many years ago, I took a writing workshop at my local YMCA with Sonia Pilcer. Sonia assigned weekly prompts and, on the first day, wrote on the blackboard: WRITE. WRITE STUPID. WRITE UGLY. WRITE. Along with Sonia’s advice, the number of stories required in week-long intensives led by terrific teachers like Nancy Zafris and Pam Painter (who sometimes demanded two stories a night), dispelled the notion that you must produce something good every time. I still find it nerve-wracking to be among a new group of writers, especially writing to prompts. What will they think? But I cling to that initial advice. Writing is a craft you get better at by doing, even doing badly.” — Nancy Ludmerer
WRITING TO SAVOR | ‘FINAL SALUTE’ BY JIM SHEELER, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
Each door is different. But once they’re open, Beck said, some of the scenes inside are inevitably the same.
“The curtains pull away. They come to the door. And they know. They always know,” he said.
“You can almost see the blood run out of their body and their heart hit the floor. It’s not the blood as much as their soul. Something sinks. I’ve never seen that except when someone dies. And I’ve seen a lot of death.
“They’re falling — either literally or figuratively — and you have to catch them.
“In this business, I can’t save his life. All I can do is catch the family while they’re falling.”
That passage is drawn from the opening of a remarkable, timeless story. In 2006, Jim Sheeler of the Rocky Mountain (CO) News won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for “Final Salute,” his poignant portrait of Major Steve Beck, a Marine “casualty assistance calls officer” and the heart-wrenching work of Marines tasked with informing families that their loved ones are coming home in flag-draped caskets and shepherding them until they hand over the flag at the soldier’s funeral, and often beyond.
I had the privilege of interviewing Sheeler for “Best Newspaper Writing 2006–2007.” I introduced the conversation this way: “Over the course of a year, Sheeler immersed himself in this world of pain, one tempered by military rituals that have no politics, only devotion to duty. His reporting, bolstered by an uncommon collaboration with photographer Todd Heisler, enabled him to construct a narrative built on intimate and painful scenes, which enabled us to witness the cost of war and the courage and compassion that bind soldiers and the families they leave behind.” Fifteen years after the story first appeared, it remains a master lesson in reporting, writing and structuring narrative nonfiction. (Three years after its publication, Sheeler expanded it into the book “Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives.”
TIP OF THE WEEK | STASH YOUR NOTES
A lesson worth repeating: Before award-winning feature writer Lane DeGregory of the Tampa Bay Times sits down to write, the first thing she does is stash her notes in her car or kitchen. “Put away your notes,” she says. “The story isn’t in your notebook. It’s in your head. And heart.”
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