Chip's Writing Lessons #53
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | George Saunders on underestimating the intuitive
Interview | 4 Questions with Lonnae O’Neal
Craft Lesson | Feel like a fraud? Join the club.
Tip of the Week | List 80 memories
WRITERS SPEAK
“The biggest thing I’ve learned about writing is that we tend to underestimate and marginalize the irrational, intuitive aspects of it. The difference between a so-so writer and a good one, or a good one and a great one, is in the quality of the intuitive decisions she’s able to make at speed.”
— George Saunders
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH LONNAE O’NEAL
Lonnae O’Neal
Lonnae O’Neal is a senior writer for ESPN/The Undefeated, specializing in the intersection of race, sports and culture. In 2018, she was a top-five winner in the Associated Press Sports Editors contest. She was a two-time 2019 National Association of Black Journalist’s Salute to Excellence Award winner for projects and general reporting. Prior to joining The Undefeated, where she is a senior writer, she was a Washington Post reporter and columnist for two decades, during which time her recognition included the 2016 first-place winner of the Society for Features Journalism award for excellence in commentary. In 2000, O’Neal won the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism award for distinguished work in the coverage of race and ethnicity in America. That same year, her feature story “White Girl” was the subject of a special broadcast of ABC’s “Nightline.” She is author of “I’m Every Woman, Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood and Work.”
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
Humility. I’m always clear that there’s so much I don’t know about the subjects I’m writing about and about the writing process itself. Being mindful of that allows me to stay open to the lesson, to the parable, to the source, to the quote that you’re going to miss if you think you’ve heard everything, or that you know so much. It keeps you present all the way through to the end of the interview, when somebody finally trusts you enough to give you a nugget, or send you a document. It allows you to see and hear poetry in details people often take for granted. Finally, it can make you obsess about being accurate, contextual, brave, because people don’t have to trust you with their stories.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
As a young writer, I was so afraid, I couldn’t bring myself to start a story with my name, my byline. I came to realize there was something to that. That it was an old newspaper convention that you don’t file with a byline, it’s something given to you. I used to think the more I wrote, the easier it would get, but that has not been the case.
I’ve written just about every kind of story there is, often on deadline, and while that’s given me a skill set, those butterflies, that first shiver when I get an assignment, or when I finally sit down to write it, has never left me. I’ve just learned how to write anyway. It’s helpful in that I can tell students, don’t wait until you’re not afraid. That’s not the signal you’re looking for. That’s not the permission you seek. Instead, acknowledge the fear, breathe through it, phone a friend, set a timer, come up with a routine that takes you through what the great Washington Post writer, Henry Allen, used to call the Stations of the Cross. And then, if you’re lucky enough to have a little time before you file, sometimes even time to just read what you wrote, you can find all these places where you get to soar. And if you’re very lucky, that can make all the suffering worth it. Ar least until the next time!
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?
I think I’m a singer. Sometimes I get these notes in my head and I reach for them. Or perhaps it is an arrangement that finds me whispering into a voice recorder at 4 in the morning, or scribbling sentences on napkins. Once, or twice, or three times, when I hit my highest notes, it can feel like I’m talking to God. But mostly, I just feel like I have this thing in me that I have got to sing out, even if nobody is listening. I used to say even if nobody is paying me, but of course, that was when I was young, and just made of emotion.
What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
I’ve never forgotten when the great Donna Britt told me that writing is a sustained application of ass to chair. Beyond that, my favorite piece of advice is to read. Read constantly, read everything, share what you’ve read when something speaks to you. It will give you metaphors, it will help you connect dots, it will help you fall truly, madly, irrevocably in love with words. Also, one more thing, the incomparable Jabari Asim, a former Post colleague and now director of the MFA program at Emerson College, introduced me to “The Little Man at Chehaw Station.” He used the Ralph Ellison essay to remind me that there is always a critic, someone who knows more than you, on any subject you write about, and you must do enough research to gain authority (and the knowing, if not respect, of this little man) at whatever level you are writing. He folded the lengthy disquisition about standards, and quality and the duty of the artist into convenient shorthand. “Chehaw!” Jabari sometimes urges me. It’s a reminder to never ever simply coast on pretty words. To always go deeper.
CRAFT LESSON | FEEL LIKE A FRAUD? JOIN THE CLUB.
The other day, a writer friend, brilliant, creative and multiple award-winning, complained about the impossible. She said she often felt like an imposter.
I didn’t have to ask how that could be. You’re not alone, I told her. I’m uncomfortably aware of the syndrome, having suffered from it basically every time I start a new piece of writing—“This is the day,” a voice in my head declares with conviction, “they found out you’re a fake.”—and encountering it more times I can count in five decades as a writer and more than a quarter-century teaching and coaching writers.
This time, I decided to revisit and flesh out my research on the topic, which I initially posted when this newsletter was in its infancy. If you’ve ever felt like an imposter, I hope it helps.
“I have a crisis around every single story I write—that I’ve lost an ability, that I’m just flailing this time.”
That’s Taffy Brodesser-Akner talking.
She’s a writer whose angst might surprise you. Before she joined The New York Times Magazine as a staff writer, Columbia Journalism Review called her “one of the nation’s most successful freelance writers,” including simultaneous gigs at the Times Magazine and GQ. Oh, and she’s also the author of a best-selling debut novel, “Fleishman Is In Trouble.”
So how could someone this successful feel this way?
Psychologists have a name for this affliction: imposter, or fraud, syndrome. In 1978, psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes coined the term to “describe an experience of feeling incompetent and of having deceived others about one’s abilities.”
The paradox of imposter syndrome is that it often targets high-achieving success stories. Writers like Brodesser-Akner, astronauts, actors and First Ladies.
"I have written 11 books but each time I think, ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now,’” the legendary Maya Angelou once said. “I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.”
“There comes a point when you think, ‘How did I get here,’” mega-film star Tom Hanks said. “When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me.
In 2009, Michelle Obama was speaking at a sold-out event, promoting her new book, “Becoming.”
"I still have a little impostor syndrome,” she told the crowd. “It never goes away, that you’re actually listening to me. It doesn’t go away, that feeling that you shouldn’t take me that seriously. What do I know? I share that with you because we all have doubts in our abilities, about our power and what that power is."
Best-selling novelist Neil Gaiman tells a story about feeling lucky to have been invited to a party, “a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things."
He started talking to a “very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, ‘Just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.’”
And then Gaiman said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.” Gaiman was cheered by the encounter. “Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.”
It may be hard to feel sorry for these success stories. When’s the last time you set foot on the moon? Walked the red carpet? Lived in the White House. Stop whining.
But consider this: Every time they succeed, they’re terrified whether they can do it again and, if not, will be exposed to the world as the frauds they’re convinced they are.
Sound familiar?
It should, because imposters don’t have to be stars. Imposter syndrome targets everyone from the neophyte struggling with their first stories, to the consummate pro with credits to die for.
I think of it as the “Who am I?” syndrome that pesters all of us with doubts about our worth or abilities.
"Who are you to think you can write a novel or a narrative series or a screenplay,” the inner critic hisses. “You’ve never written one. You never went to journalism school or have an MFA in Creative Writing. Just who the hell do you think you are, you charlatan?”
Right about then, your fingers stop typing.
Here’s the thing, though.
Learning that wildly successful people often feel like great pretenders can be very liberating. If they can feel this way sometimes, maybe, I tell myself, I’m not such a loser after all.
All of us at one point or another—every day perhaps, every story, every draft or revision—may face that moment that we’re convinced we are a failure and today is the day “they” (whoever “they” are) will find out.
To succeed, you have to push back against the cries of “imposter” that ring in your head when you start a story, or face the fifth revision. They can drown out creativity, stifle optimism and stop a promising project in its tracks.
Years ago, I had an idea for a book. I did a lot of work on it, but eventually, I lost faith in it and myself. You’ll never get it done, I told myself. And even if you do no publisher will want it. So I quit. Years later, all I feel is regret. That’s the curse of imposter syndrome.
If that’s the penalty, what’s the reprieve? What can a successful “imposter” teach those of us who may not cash the same paychecks but have the same creative dreams and the same emotional misgivings?
What works for Taffy Brodesser-Akner is something she acknowledged to a New York Times interviewer “will sound nuts."
When she was in film school in the 1990s, the seminars often focused on “the hero on his (always his) journey in the face of adversity…in moments of great stress.” She learned an invaluable lesson.
“I think if you look at every single moment of adversity or self-doubt in your life and imagine yourself as the hero of a 90s movie—a thriller, a rom-com, a satire, whatever—it’s easy to answer the question: What does the hero do next? You figure that out and do it. It always amounts to the same thing, which is to rise up and do the hard thing anyway.”
I wish I had that mantra sounding in my head when I hit a wall on that book project. But it’s never too late. Even if you do feel like a fraud sometimes, that advice may be just what you need to combat imposter syndrome.
So join the flock of frauds out there. (Pssst. Most of us feel this way sometimes.) And prove yourself wrong.
Standing behind the mask of every imposter is a hero.
TIP OF THE WEEK | LIST 80 MEMORIES
Before “Minari,” a Korean language film about a family struggling to run a farm in Arkansas Ozarks, won a slew of awards this year, including an Oscar for best supporting acress and a Globe Globe for best foreign language film, it was a list of 80 memories set down by writer/director Lee Isaac Chung.
Chung was trying to decide on his next project when he sat down in a library and made the list. By the time he finished, “With each memory,” Chung recalled in a Los Angeles Times essay, “I saw my life anew, as though the clouds had shifted over a field I had seen every day. After writing 80 memories, I sketched a narrative arc with themes about family, failure and rebirth.” After I heard Chung describe his process in an interview with “Fresh Air’s Terry Gross” I started making a list about my memories of the painful time I spent in Africa as a callow 21-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in 1971–72, a subject I’d been trying and failing to recount in a memoir. I’m up to 97 and feeling more optimistic than ever before.
Whether you’re stymied by a memoir or novel that is calling you, or you’re daunted by a mountain of reporting for an investigative project or a piece of narrative nonfiction, follow Chung’s example and make a list of 80 memories. You may just learn that you have more than enough for scenes, dialogue or fresh details to push past the obstacles that are keeping you from writing.
BEFORE YOU GO
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.
May the writing go well, and may you be well.
Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
Black Lives Matter.