Chip's Writing Lessons #52
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Jhumpa Lahiri on the writer’s need for assertiveness
Interview | 4 Questions with Kim Cross
Bookbag | Richard Rhodes on exorcising the fear of writing
An Anecdote to Savor | Mike Sager on writing is editing
Tip of the Week | Says vs. said
WRITERS SPEAK
“Writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do...Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me.”
— Jhumpa Lahiri
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH KIM CROSS
Kim Cross
Kim Cross is the author of “What Stands in a Storm,” a narrative nonfiction account of the biggest tornado outbreak on record. A full-time freelance writer, she has bylines in Outside, Bicycling, Nieman Storyboard, and other magazines. When she’s not writing, she’s mountain biking, fly fishing, or exploring some glorious place without phone reception in Idaho. Her nonfiction narrative, “Noel + Leon, a True Story from the Middle of Somewhere” won the Gold Lowell Thomas Award for foreign travel reporting from the Society of American Travel Writers, was named as one of the Best of 2020 in the Sunday Longread and was included in David Brooks’ annual Sidney Awards. Her most recent piece, “My Month of Doing 100 Wheelies a Day,” appeared in Outside.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
That “no” doesn’t always mean “no.” Sometimes it just means “Not right now.”
I’ve come to realize that so much of landing a pitch has to do with timing: what’s going on in the news and the world; what the editors have on their lineup; the gestation of a story that’s still unfolding in real life. I wrote a true crime book proposal that almost sold in 2014 (the deal fell through). I was disappointed, but didn’t throw it out entirely, because my gut said the timing wasn’t right. Today, the market is way different for true crime, so I’m reconsidering that story.
I’ve found that sometimes a story can’t be rushed. It almost feels like it has a will of its own, and no matter the writer’s agenda or skill, it can’t be written until the story is ready. I know this sounds a little woo-woo, but my instincts on this have almost always been right. I have pulled eight-year-old story ideas out of a folder named “Rejected” and sold them when the time and venue and fit was just right. I guess the hard part is knowing which ideas are worth resurrecting and which should stay in the “rejected” folder.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
That my non-writing life would intersect with my writing life in such unexpected and integral ways. J-school instilled the belief that it was unprofessional or even narcissistic for writers to put themselves in the story. But some of my most successful stories—not only in terms of professional recognition but responses from readers who related—have been personal essays. When an essay about fishing with my late father was selected for Best American Sports Writing, I was flabbergasted: I didn’t know fishing was a sport, and had never considered sports writing, despite being a competitive athlete since the age of nine. This also opened the door to a niche that had never even occurred to me, and made me realize an expertise I never even knew I had. Now I write quite a lot about bicycling and fishing—two passions that don’t feel like work to me!
If you had to choose a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?
One of the first things that came to mind is a home-builder. Everyone does it differently, but for me, a narrative starts with a blueprint: a plan for the story structure. And, as with building a house, the plan often evolves as the product starts to take shape. After I lay the foundation and frame the walls (.ie. complete the rough draft) I do a walk-through to see if the rooms are in the right place. If not, this is the time to tear down walls, move windows, and decide you don’t need that extra room. Only then do I start fleshing out the story, hanging drywall and mudding over the seams (which can be an exquisitely frustrating process). Last comes round after round of polishing: adding trim and paint colors (which sometimes change). Those last rounds of finishing touches—word precision, activating verbs, tightening prose, tinkering with cadence and flow—are when the magic happens.
For me, narrative structure—the sequence of scene, summary, and exposition—is the foundation of a successful story. When a house is well designed, a stranger can walk in and, without help, figure out where to find the bathroom or the kitchen. Likewise, a story should keep the reader feeling effortlessly oriented.
What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
Mike Wilson, whom I consider my Jedi Master, taught me the importance of restraint. Particularly when writing emotional stories, where there’s a risk of being maudlin or cliché. The bigger the emotion, the smaller you need to write. My personal measure of success for most stories is whether it makes a reader feel something, so I try to stir up a universal emotion through details so concrete and singular that they’re the antithesis of cliché. Instead of describing the emotion, try, as Hemingway advised, to write “the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion.”
BOOKBAG | RICHARD RHODES ON EXORCISING THE FEAR OF WRITING
You want to write. You want others to read your words, praise and publish them. You imagine yourself sitting in a chair, effortlessly churning out copy. You dream of submitting your work. And yet you can’t. You’re paralyzed.
You’re not alone. The world is full of writers who can’t summon the courage to start or to finish a story. For years, I was one of these, and on many days, I still am. The dreams of a novel and a memoir, a dramatic TV series. lie dormant. haunting me. An unfinished story that I thought had promise sat in my hard drive, unfinished. All it would take is opening the file and start typing. And yet I put it off.
At times like this, I turn to Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author, whose book “How to Write: Advice and Reflections” is an inspiring guide through the emotional minefields of the writing craft. I recently revisited the book, culling the most persuasive elements of his case about fear.
Before a career that would spawn several books, including one that recounts the making of the atomic bomb that won him the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, fear blocked Rhodes every step of the way.
“If I began a short story or worked on a novel in the evening at home I drifted into trance states and couldn’t push through, couldn’t continue and finish,” he writes, “I had writer’s block before I became a writer. Nor was the quality of what I was writing even close to what I wanted it to be. I wrote Joycean or Faulknerian pastiches; when I tried to write in my own voice I overworked my sentences to the point of affectation. I was three hands clapping. I was too tight.”
Sound familiar?
“You may not suffer from such a condition,” he goes on, “but many people who want to write have difficulties getting started similar to mine. I know because I notice their response in the audience when I lecture about writing and mention fear: they look relieved.”
The affliction starts early.
“Most of us were punished for telling stories when we were children,” Rhodes says, “which inhibited verbal invention with a flinch of shame. We learned in school that the rules of language are rigid and the standards of literature insurmountably high. So we storied away effortlessly among ourselves but went blank when the teacher asked us to open our notebooks and write. Unless you’re a paragon of self-confidence, such conditioning has its effect on you. Nor does society encourage the buoyant hypnotic state where the creative imagination floats.”
“Fear,” Rhodes continues, “stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do?”
The only solution, he writes, is to “write your way beyond your fear.” And the only prescription, oft told, is “to plant your ass in the chair.”
Fortunately, Rhodes goes beyond that bromide to offer additional advice.
“When the fear is upon you,” he says, “write for yourself. It doesn’t matter what you write as long you do it regularly. Set aside an hour or a half hour daily or as often as you can. If you don’t think you have time, keep a record of how you spend the quarter hours of your day and see where you can borrow (most people spend most of their time outside of working hours watching television).”
Here are two others tips Rhodes offers to battle anxiety and promote productivity:
“Steal an hour from sleep on alternate early mornings if there’s no other choice.”
“Use writing equipment you’re comfortable with—a pencil, a pen, a typewriter, a computer.”
And if even initial efforts inspire fear, Rhodes advises blocked writers to move into a “comfortable frame: write a letter to a person you trust and file the letter (or mail it, if you prefer).” He reminds us that Tom Wolfe wrote his first Esquire piece as a letter to his editor. Rhodes suspects that Wolfe, a pioneer of nonfiction narrative who was a newspaper reporter at the time, chose the approach “because the pomp of writing a magazine piece was inhibiting.” The editor did one cut: he removed the salutation and published the piece.
There is much in Rhodes’ book to admire and learn from, from his suggestions of keeping a writing journal to advice on the business of writing, along with a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at his journey from a fear-ridden hopeful to a hugely successful and productive writer. But there’s one piece of counsel that has stuck with me. Reproduced in large type and laminated in a single page, it rested on my writing desk for years where its wisdom prodded me to bust through writer’s block many times. It’s worth the price of the book alone.
“If writing a book is impossible, write a chapter. If writing a chapter is impossible, write a page. If writing a page is impossible, write a paragraph. If writing a paragraph is impossible, write a sentence. If writing even a sentence is impossible, write a word and teach yourself everything there is to know about that word and then write another.”
It may be the wisest piece of writing advice I’ve encountered. After re-reading Rhodes’ book. it inspired me to finish that short story and while I’ve yet to find anyone willing to publish it, I’m proud of the way it pushed back the fear of failure. I trust it can help you on those days when fear stands in your way.
AN ANECDOTE TO SAVOR | MIKE SAGER ON WRITING IS EDITING
Mike Sager is a writing legend, a bestselling author and award-winning reporter. He’s been called “the Beat poet of American journalism.” For more than 40 years he has worked as a writer for The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, GQ and Esquire. The author of a dozen books and eBooks, Sager is also the editor and publisher of The Sager Group LLC, a consortium of multi-media artists and writers.
In the late 1970s, though, he was a fledgling copy boy turned reporter at The Washington Post. Last week, prompted by novelist Ann Patchett’s declaration in Issue No. 51 of Chip’s Writing Lessons that “Writing must be separate from editing, and if you try to do both at the same time nothing will get done,” Sager sent a rich reply.
“The best thing about all these writers’ edicts is that they are entirely personal. Like I don’t believe this at all.
“If you ask me, writing IS editing. You vomit up words that are kind of close and then you edit them to perfection.”
He then shared this story from his rookie days at The Post.
“I was on deadline once, hard on deadline with a Sunday story. This was when we still had typewriters and six ply. A letter had been smuggled from the Iran hostages and I must have been the only reporter on duty that day in the Wa Po newsroom. Next thing I know I’m typing a front page story with Ben Bradlee STANDING OVER ME WAITING for the pages.
“I finish my first page, pull it out of the machine with the familiar lovely sound of well-oiled gears singing, and, instead of giving it to Bradlee I did what I always did..... proceeded to pencil my draft.
“When I put in a fresh page and started TYPING MY EDITED LEDE AGAIN, I thought he was gonna have a heart attack.
“I guess I was 22.”
TIP OF THE WEEK | SAYS VS. SAID
In the previous issue, I made the case for using the verb “said” as speaker attribution, also known as a dialogue tag. But what about “says,” a favorite of feature writers who use the present tense to convey that the story is unfolding before the reader’s eyes? It’s a subject of debate. Some editors and critics abhor its familiarity and consider it an overindulgence because stories occur, by temporal default, in the past.
But Jan Winburn, editor of Pulitzer Prize-winning features, has no problem with its present tense.
In a feature story, particularly one in which a reporter is writing in scenes and describing the actions and thoughts of a character (as opposed to quoting a source), I think any technique that helps keep the reader immersed in the moment is useful. And I think the present tense is one strong method for doing that. So “says” would be applicable, as would present tense throughout. It makes the use of active verbs come easily. And active verbs are the muscles of good writing."
As a feature writer, I often employed “says,” believing that it subtly conveyed the action was happening in real time before the reader’s eyes. The bottom line: When it comes to this issue, it depends—on your intent, your paper’s style, your editors’ preference and how those verbs of attribution sound on the page.
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Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
Black Lives Matter.