Chip's Writing Lessons #55
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Tim Gautreaux on coping with bad writing
Interview | 4 Questions with Susan Orlean
Craft Lesson | The thief of time
Writing to Savor | “12 Seconds and a Life” by Mitchell S. Jackson, Runner’s World.
Tip of the Week | Tune your voice
WRITERS SPEAK
“I think what hampers a lot of writers is an inability to deal with their own bad writing. A lot of us write things that we don’t want to cut because we feel doing so is like sawing off a little finger. But if a patch of writing is overdone or irrelevant, it needs to come off—like an eleventh finger.”
— Tim Gautreaux
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH SUSAN ORLEAN
Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean is the author of eight books, including “The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup,” “My Kind of Place,” “Saturday Night” and “Lazy Little Loafers.” In 1999, she published “The Orchid Thief,” a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film “Adaptation,” starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. Her book “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” a New York Times Notable book, won the Ohioana Book Award and the Richard Wall Memorial Award. In 2018, she published “The Library Book,” about the arson fire at the Los Angeles Public Library. It won the California Book Award, the Marfield Prize, the USC Library Scripters Nonfiction Award and the Maxine Cushing Gray Award. It was also longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018.
Orlean has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, and has also contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone, Outside and Esquire. She has written about taxidermy, fashion, umbrellas, origami, dogs, chickens, and a wide range of other subjects. She was a 2003 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. She is currently adapting “The Library Book” for television. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
I’ve learned to be present—to really focus on the moment, absorb it and appreciate it. This applies both to writing and to life in general. We spend a lot of time as writers troubling over the right tape recorder and the right writing software and that sort of thing, when the quality of your attention is really all that matters. Being a writer requires being a “super-observer” and noticing more than other people might observe. The rest will just fall into place.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
How entrepreneurial you have to be! I never thought of myself as a small business owner, but that’s exactly what I am. That’s not a very romantic or artistic notion but it’s reality, and the better you are at running your business, the more you’ll be able to devote yourself to the more artistic aspect of your work.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?
I’m a widget-maker. The widgets I make happen to be sentences, and I run a little factory that churns them out at a steady pace.
What’s the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
Many years ago, my first great editor told me to look at my work as having three distinct parts: reporting, thinking and writing. They have to be done in that order; you can’t write until you’ve done your reporting and then—the crucial step that’s often overlooked—you have to think about what you’ve learned and what you’re trying to say about it. Only then can you put pen to paper. Writing is the end result of the other two steps. It’s the best advice I’ve ever been given, and I think about it all the time.
CRAFT LESSON | THE THIEF OF TIME
Over the years, I’ve met many writers with countless ideas for stories, magazine articles, novels and screenplays. Some have succeeded in finishing (and even publishing) their work, but many never survived the exhilarating flash of inspiration that launches a piece of writing. Oh, they’d begin with great hope, with a single line or a few paragraphs or pages. But stuck in a quicksand of doubt, they couldn’t go on. Doubt, that crushing emotion, overtook them. Writer’s block ensued. Nevertheless, they resolved to go on. Tomorrow, they promised. Over the weekend when I had free time. During the vacation that was coming up. Time after time, they did what many people have done since the beginning of time. They put it off.
The Romans, an Empire that had its beginnings before the birth of Christ, had a word for this failing of the human spirit: procrastinatus. Pro meaning “forward” and “crastinus” signifying “of tomorrow,” a linguistic origin transformed over centuries into the English procrastinate, “the act of intentionally putting off something that should be done,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. It took an English poet, Edward Young, to capture its essence. “Procrastination is the thief of time; Year after year it steals, till all are fled,” he wrote in “Night Thoughts,” a series of poems composed between 1742 and 1745, during the dark hours of night, when the anguish over abandoned dreams is greatest.
“Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience,” the writer James Surowiecki has observed. Of course, it’s not just writing that procrastination defeats. It’s the garage cleaning you’re always putting off, the mud-caked car that needs washing, the tax forms due in April, any number of tasks that nibble away, but still remain untouched. For writers, though, procrastination is the enemy of progress, the stomach-churning agony of being unable to move on and finish a story, no matter how exciting the idea, relentless the deadline, or disappointing the failure to act.
Over a career of five decades, I too became an expert at one of the most common of human failings, an ancient flaw that lies behind mountains of abandoned dreams, a towering torment of the half-finished, the half-done. Procrastination has been a companion at some point on nearly every writing journey I ever embarked on.
There are infinite ways to procrastinate: pace, video games, disappear into the black hole of social media, binge-watch, even tackle distasteful household chores. For me, one of the most successful approaches is to research. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the topic I’ve spent a lot of time studying—the craft of writing—is the one that’s kept me from doing the writing I should do.
Challenging as procrastination is, years of experience in my own work and helping other writers with theirs has taught me not to surrender to despair. Delay can be defeated.
The first step is to acknowledge that everyone procrastinates. All of us face tasks we’d rather avoid, whether it’s conducting that first interview, writing that first line, responding to an email, or just doing the dishes. Recognizing this reality means you must be ever vigilant for the telltale signs of resistance. For me, it’s the simple act of hesitation, realizing that my fingers are hovering over the keyboard, paralyzed.
In this case, my solution, one reached after years of procrastination, is to lower, nay abandon, my standards and type as fast as I can, thinking with my fingers, and trying to drown out the voice of doubt that clamors to be heard with the clatter of keys. What I wrote was immaterial. “I want to write a short story about a man struggling with dementia, but I have no idea how to start.” Or, “Damn, my post on procrastination is due tomorrow morning.”
This freewriting, I’ve discovered, is more than just throat-clearing; very soon, miraculously, prose begins to emerge. I begin to describe a man in his 70s, as his memory problems progressed from losing his keys, misplacing his wallet, and forgetting names to the terror of getting lost while walking his dog in what had been his familiar neighborhood. Not great, I tell myself, but it’s a start and it kicks me into gear and over many sessions, I draft and revise. I’ve reached the point of submission to literary journals, although, of course, I’m procrastinating about that.
But wait. Besides lowering your standards and freewriting, here are some other valuable techniques, their value bolstered by users’ comments.
1. Know tomorrow’s task today.
This is the technique that made my friend and mentor Don Murray one of the most productive writers I ever knew. Perhaps, he mused, the subconscious takes over when you assign yourself a task the night before.
“What surprised me is how much I feel better knowing that I know what I will be doing tomorrow. I’m the type of person who needs to write down everything or I’ll forget it. I find it reassuring and calming. It puts me in control and gives me a sense of order. I’m not as scatter-brained trying to remember everything at once.”
— Jane Kim
2. Follow productivity expert David Allen’s 2-minute rule: If you think a task will take you 2 minutes or less, do it now.
“What surprised me was how much I could get done in tiny chunks — maybe it wasn’t so much the sheer amount of work as finding mental space to tackle it.”
— Ellen Sung
3. Eliminate piles. Instead of letting paper stack up on your desk, either put it in folders or toss it.
“I learned that it is a lot quicker to find things when you don’t have to shuffle through 50 pages of other unrelated issues. I learned that filing is a good thing to combat the urge to pile things up. I had to do something with the papers, and filing was a good physical way of keeping from falling back into the bad habit.”
— Preston Smith
So let’s not tarry any longer. Don’t put it off. Gulp and go. Right now.
WRITING TO SAVOR | “12 SECONDS AND A LIFE” BY MITCHELL S. JACKSON, RUNNER’S WORLD
Running while Black was the crime that cost Ahmaud Arbrery his life in February 2020, when three white men, convinced he was up to no good, without provocation, shot and killed him in the street. Four months later, Runner’s World published an unforgettable story about the man and the lynching by Mitchell S. Jackson, a novelist. Jackson reveals the man and the murder in a braided narrative that leaves you knowing Arberey intimately as a loved son, brother and friend, a young man with dreams and who loved to run, but never called himself a jogger.
The other braid relies on police reports and other documentary evidence that recreated what happened that day in Glynn County, Georgia. At a time when violence against Black people dominates the news, Jackson crafts a narrative that will leave you heartbroken, angry and astonished at the writer’s brilliance. I’ll be doing an annotation of the story with Jackson for Nieman Storyboard and will share it with you when it’s published. (Thursday night, the story won the prestigious National Magazine Award.)
TIP OF THE WEEK | TUNE YOUR VOICE
“Voice,” the late writing coach Don Murray wrote in “Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work,” is the most important element in newspaper writing. As his protege for 25 years, I don’t think he’d mind if I added narrative nonfiction and fiction, especially given his tips below on how writers can tune the voice of their stories. “Reporting,” he says, “produces the accurate, specific, revealing material that is the raw material of good writing, but it’s voice that makes the reader understand and care…Voice attracts and holds readers, compels readers to think and feel.” Here are four questions he says writers must answer if they are to tune voice to the purpose of their story:
Is this the right word?
Is this the right word for the words just before it and after it?
Is this the right sentence for the paragraph?
Is this the right paragraph for the text?
BEFORE YOU GO
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May the writing go well, and may you be well.
Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
Black Lives Matter.