Chip's Writing Lessons #54
Dear Readers: I apologize for the delay. The newsletter was briefly flagged by Tiny Letter's abuse prevention program. Why, I'm not sure, but today they said it was fine, and released it for sending. IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro on the irrelevance of prizes
Interview | 4 Questions with Brendan O’Meara
Craft Lesson | Time management for writers
Writing to Savor | “The Broken Front Line” by Ava Kofman, ProPublica
Tip of the Week | Take different roads
WRITERS SPEAK
“This is, by and large, how I’ve experienced prizes and honors throughout my career: I’m really proud and grateful to get these honors, because many, many writers who are as good as me or better don’t get these honors. So let me just say that I’m profoundly grateful for them. However, when I’m writing in my disheveled, untidy study, it’s got nothing to do with what I’m doing. I have a very lonely sense of success or failure. I’m trying to bring something into being and sometimes I can do it and sometimes I can’t.”
— Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature.
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH BRENDAN O’MEARA
Brendan O’Meara is the host/founder/producer of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, now in its ninth year, where he talks to people about the art and craft of telling true stories. He also produces Casualty of Words, a daily micropodcast for people in a hurry. He is an award-winning features writer, newspaper opinion page editor (until, as he says, he will inevitably get laid off), founder of podcast maker Exit 3 Media, and author of Six Weeks in Saratoga: How Three-Year-Old Filly Rachel Alexandra Beat the Boys and Became Horse of the Year. He’s wrapping up a memoir on his father and baseball called The Tools of Ignorance. He lives in Eugene, Oregon
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
I don’t think it can be understated that, One, there is no unilateral path through this morass and Two, knowing that, run your own race, embrace your own path, celebrate your path.
I got myself into a lot of “trouble” by thinking there was a singular path to writing fame and prestige and notoriety. It led me down a toxic path of jealousy, envy, bitterness and resentment that was compounded by the insidious rise of social media. “That person is doing what I want to do and here I am selling running shoes, writing slideshows (Winners and Losers from the Daytona 500 for $50), and he’s got a 3,000-word profile in Outside and he’s my age or younger and what the hell am I doing wrong and I bet he isn’t writing these terrible slideshows or stacking produce at Whole Foods and certainly Wright Thompson or Susan Orlean never had to do this. So if I was really ANY good at this, then why am I landscaping and doing reporting calls on my lunch break? Surely my heroes and peers weren’t doing this, right?
When my first book came out, the book deal came as a result of fitting a woman for shoes who knew an editor at the press who published the book.
Another job I had, doing calls on lunch breaks, won an award for this piece. basically while dirty from cleaning up hedges all day in Jersey City.
What you realize, often after a long, long, long time is that you can’t know someone’s privilege or the lucky break or the sheer titanic and singular focus others might possess. Or, more likely, they are doing unglamorous work to pay the bills (ghostwriting, content marketing, maybe a day job at Trader Joe’s) and they don’t post that on Instagram. All you see is the veneer of non-stop winning.
By stopping with the comparison game, and celebrating other people’s work as much or more than your own, you’ll find your time will come and someone else will look at you and think, “It looks like they’ve been there the entire time.”
There are more 10- and 15-year overnight success stories out there than you realize. In a culture that values precocity and youth above the grind and experience, run your own race and avoid 30-Under-30 lists like Covid.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
This might be a controversial statement but I’ll say it anyway as a double major in college and someone who earned an MFA in 2008: College doesn’t matter. A body of work matters.
Any job I have ever gotten was based on life experience and the body of work I amassed by showing up every day, drip by drip. Here, I made this.
I’m mentoring an 18-year-old high school grad. She’s very bright, is not enrolled in college, and by happenstance our paths crossed (she emailed a bunch of newspaper editors here in Eugene and I was the only one who responded to her). I’m working with her to build a body of work she can show clients or potential employers or editors because when you pitch an editor a feature, they never, never, never ask you where you went to school. They ask for your clips and whether you can deliver on what you’re promising.
College has a purpose, but make no mistake: Unless you’re studying to cut open human bodies, higher education has more in common with high school only with more drinking. Why accrue the debt if you can just do the work?
If you had to choose a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?
I write about horse racing quite a bit and there are horses who are plodders, who are slow out of the gate, trail the field, conserve energy, save ground, and do most of their damage (See Zenyata… “This! Is! Un! Be! Lievable!)—if they do any damage at all—late in the race. They let the “rabbits” and “speed balls” set blistering paces on the front end, wait for them to tire, then surge from the back of the herd. This echoes one of my favorite quotes from the run of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast when I first spoke with Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Rush, “I’m just a mule. I just show up every day and climb very, very slowly up that mountain.”
I’ve always been a bit of a late bloomer, one who has been frustrated by the precocious around me (which makes me bloom even later since I waste too much of time worrying about things outside of my control) and a culture that puts a premium on the precocious at the expense of those with more experience, those who need more time to hit their stride, or those who don’t reach exit velocity until they’re in their 40s or even 50s. Maybe older.
What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
“Don’t get writerly on me, Brendan.”
In the memoir I’m wrapping up, “The Tools of Ignorance: A Memoir of My Father and Baseball,” I’d have what I thought were nice painterly flourishes or pyrotechnic language befitting of a David Foster Wallace wannabe. (Note to wannabes of any ilk: There’s already a [FILL IN THE BLANK]. We need [YOUR NAME HERE].)
Prose doesn’t have to be lyrical or pretty to be artful. My editor telling me “Don’t get writerly” was saying me this: Surrender to the story. Tell the story straight. Get out of the way. Let the story be a warm bath you can sink into (Dammit! See?! I’m getting writerly!).
When you lock into the story, do your best to get out of its way and let it do the heavy lifting. The truth and relatability of the story will carry the reader.
There are stylists out there, but odds are you’re not Jimi Hendrix or Miles Davis or Wes Anderson. Do your best to fade into the background so the reader almost has no idea how they got from Page 1 to Page 324.
CRAFT LESSON | TIME MANAGEMENT FOR WRITERS
From 1972 to 1994, I was a newspaper reporter. Those two decades established patterns and work habits that often make it immensely difficult to control my writing life. Desperately trying, and often blowing deadlines made me a captive of the ticking clock.
I persist in trying to gain control of my time, my stories, and myself. Of course, I recognize that this is a laughable notion.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. That desire to exercise control—over gravity, the weather, people, our lives—is one of the hallmarks of Homo sapiens. Writing, like any creative endeavor, is a desperate attempt to wrest control, to impose order on chaos, to stop time, to play God, if you will.
Time management is one of the most important self-improvement techniques, but one least utilized by journalists. Writers too often feel enslaved by the clock, and the calendar, when, in reality, they can seize control of their time.
Complete this sentence:
If I managed my time, my stories, and myself better, I would be ______________________.
What did you write? “Less stressed,” “Getting better evaluations,” “Happier with my stories,” “Covering my beat more effectively”? “Published”? How about “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize,” or as one participant at a workshop cried out, “Married”?
There’s no right answer, just the articulation of dreams all of us have, dreams that can be achieved if we can use time as an ally. Here are some practical approaches that can help.
Build a “mountain of stairs.”
Think of your next story, whether it’s a daily, project, short story or book, as a “mountain with stairs—a set of smaller steps leading to the top,” advises Eviatar Zerubavel in his inspiring and practical guide, “The Clockwork Muse.”
Break it down into its components: A story consists of reporting and research, focusing, planning, drafting, revising, editing. Assign time estimates to each step. Then keep track of the actual time for those steps.
It will take you time and experience to be able to estimate accurately. Invariably, the tasks that we think take a long time can be accomplished more quickly, while those that we think are a snap take more time than we thought. Develop a more accurate gauge of your time.
Writers on deadline feel under the gun, but they don’t realize the power they have. After all, what can an editor do between the assignment and the delivery of the story except worry and pester? Talk about powerless!
Set your own internal deadlines. As a Washington correspondent working under often insanely tight deadlines, I realized the chances of making a factual error were high, so I set my own deadline. If the editor wanted my story at 5 p.m., I hit the print button at 4:45 p.m. and spent the time double-checking names, titles, quotes, facts and figures. When I hit the send button, I felt confident in the story’s accuracy, saving myself those middle-of-the-night horrors: “His middle initial was C!”
Work in brief daily sessions.
This is the key to productivity, says psychologist Robert Boice, who found that productive writers don’t chain themselves to their keyboards all day long. Instead, many follow the pattern of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon: “Keep a regular schedule, and write at the same time every day for the same amount of time.” Regularity, not overwork, is the key to productivity.
What most writers, especially journalists, do is binge. They procrastinate for hours, building up a steam of guilt, anger and rage that ultimately leads to indifference: “I don’t care how bad it is, I’ve only got 30 minutes left.”
Then, once they’re writing, they are afraid to stop. They write in a fury until deadline or just after, irritating their editors and ensuring that their copy will be hastily edited. They think that they’re preserving their flawless prose. Unfortunately, they’ve robbed their readers of a fresh eye that might notice a confusing sentence or important information buried deep in the story. And when it’s all done, they’re exhausted, stressed out and ready for a drink.
“Time is in the air you breathe,” said Peter Davison, the late poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly. “The writer who fills many shelves does not breathe more eagerly than the crabbed sufferer from writer’s block, but the two differ in the ways they use their oxygen.”
Don’t leave all the writing until the end of the day. Write an early draft to find out what you already know and need to know. Take time to focus and plan. Try writing through the entire story, hit the print button, and mark up the printout. Input the changes. On daily stories, work in 15- to 30-minute drafting sessions, then edit and revise. For projects, write before all the reporting is done. Write in sections. The key is to avoid bingeing.
Make friends with a clock.
A timepiece is a way to control the procedure even if you can’t control the material. For a long time, my preferred technology was a now vintage, I believe, Radio Shack Talking Timer, which counted down, up, and signaled time’s up with a series of beeps ranging from a car horn to a teakettle. These days I just set my alarms with my Amazon Alexa when blocked because, while I can’t control how well I write, one thing I can do is write quickly. Invariably, within the first 2 minutes I leap whatever hurdle my psyche has erected. I think that’s because fear and doubt build a mountain that we think we have to climb over when, in reality, it’s just a threshold. Free writing creates a threshold between the state of paralysis and the state of grace.
People confuse time management with an anal-retentive obsession with the ticking clock. In reality, time management demands infinite patience.
“Writing is a craft that takes many years to develop,” Sue Grafton, the best-selling mystery author, said in The Writer. “The publishing world is full of talented, hardworking writers who’ve struggled for years to learn the necessary skills. I counsel any writer to focus on the job at hand—learning to write well—trusting that when the time comes, the Universe will step in and make the rest possible. Writing isn’t about the destination—writing is the journey that transforms the soul and gives meaning to all else.”
None of us can guarantee that our stories will be brilliant. But we can control our time and when we do that we greatly improve our chances of achieving our dreams of success.
WRITING TO SAVOR | “THE BROKEN FRONT LINE” BY AVA KOFMAN, PROPUBLICA
If you want to read a masterful example of narrative nonfiction and investigative reporting, take the time to read “The Broken Front Line,” Ava Kofman’s remarkable account of the three weeks she spent embedded with two burned-out, but still idealistic and committed EMTs working punishing ambulance shifts in LA County’s poor and Covid-sickened Antelope Valley. If you want to learn the methods of such a creative, committed and brilliant reporter, spend time with the annotation I did with Kofman for Nieman Storyboard. Each paragraph of her story is a master lesson in the craft, each of her answers opens a window on the mind and methods of an exceptional journalist.
TIP OF THE WEEK | TAKE DIFFERENT ROADS
Always take a different route to and from work. You’ll discover stories you didn’t know existed.
— h/t Vidisha Priyanka
Washington Post political writer Jose A. Del Real was thrilled. A few weeks ago, he left his Washington D.C. apartment for the first time in a year and traveled by plane to California to report a story. Many journalists still work remotely, but like Del Real, more and more reporters are finally beginning to venture outside to do their jobs, as vaccinations increase and masks come off. There’s no better time to shake up your routine to find uncommon stories. Commuting routines may be efficient, but they’re also mindless as we drive that all too familiar route, focused on music, news or that favorite podcast. But we miss the chance to see neighborhoods in transition, what high school kids are wearing, new businesses or monstrous condos going up, all of which you’ll see with fresh eyes. Everything and everyone has the potential for a good story.
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.