Chip's Writing Lessons #61
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Arthur Miller on embarrassing yourself
Interview | 4 Questions with Sean Tanner
Craft Lesson | Devote yourself to outlining
Writing to Savor | “Final Salute,” by Jim Sheeler, The Rocky Mountain News
Tip of the Week | Become your own fact-checker
WRITERS SPEAK
“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”
— Arthur Miller
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH SEAN TANNER
Sean Tanner
Sean Tanner is a rising star in the Irish literary scene. His work has appeared in The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, The Lonely Crowd, The Holly Bough, The Forge Literary Magazine, and The Moth Magazine, among others. In 2017 he won the Hennessy New Irish writing award for first fiction, and in 2018 he received the John McGahern Award for Literature. In 2021 he was awarded a full literature bursary (scholarship) from the Arts Council of Ireland.
What is the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. What there is, though, is a reluctance to write poorly. I think sometimes you just have to turn on the valve and clear the crap out of the pipes before you can get the good stuff. Once I realized this, the whole thing became a lot easier for me.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
All of it, I guess. Any kind of success I’ve had has been a surprise to me. Every time I get an acceptance, I am surprised and elated. I remember my first big acceptance, I genuinely thought it was a prank. I thought it was some cruel friend having a laugh at my childish ambitions. I googled the email I got the acceptance letter from and everything. This is not uncommon either from what I hear. How much success will it take to convince me I am a capable writer? A lot, probably.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?
I guess I’d be like the intrusive drunk who has no respect for your personal space, the one who leans in too close and breathes whiskey fumes in your face while whispering some illicit confession, hoisting an unwanted confidence upon you, as you listen appalled and embarrassed.
What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
I think you can apply this to any artistic endeavor, not just writing. It’s a quote from the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk: “A genius is the one most like himself.” Not saying I’m a genius or anything, but this struck me as important when I read it, and to me it says something important about voice and integrity, and how that translates onto the page.
CRAFT LESSON | DEVOTE YOURSELF TO OUTLINING
There are many ways to find the order that is right for your story.
Make a list of what you want to say.
What piece of information should be at the beginning?
What piece of information should be at the end?
What belongs in the middle?
Ask the questions the reader will ask and put them in the order they will be asked.
Assign values to quotations.
Then there is the outline, the writer’s tool that summarizes the main points or important details before you write your story. It’s a map, a guide.
I’m not talking about the type, festooned with Roman numerals, that your teachers demanded during your school days. Yuck! But especially when the story is narrative nonfiction, an outline allows the writer to pull back from the mass of notes, interview transcripts, scenes, quotes, statistics, observations and other material collected during the reporting phase.
If your interest is fiction, before you write a novel or short story, the outline lays out the important scenes before the drafting begins.
Whichever method you choose, order is a crucial part of the writing process.
I recently encountered an extreme method of outlining from a writer who describes herself as a “devoted outliner at the start.” Lizzie Presser is a reporter for ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative news organization. I interviewed her about her story “The Black American Amputation Epidemic,” one of two pieces that won her the 2021 National Magazine Award for Public Interest.
I asked Presser to unpack her writing process as part of an annotation for Nieman Storyboard, which posted the story along with my interview. The resulting conversation amounts to a master class for anyone interested in the challenging but immensely rewarding form, and the art and craft, of the outline.
For this story, Presser told me, “I printed out hundreds of pages of interviews and transcribed scenes and tried to read through them within 24 hours so the material was fresh in my mind. I usually outline on a computer, but in this case, there was so much that I wanted to use that I started cutting up paragraphs and quotes and details and laying them out on the floor. This is the most difficult and the most exciting part of the process for me. I’m trying to craft a narrative with suspense at the same time as I’m trying to construct a logical argument. Once I’d laid out my outline on the floor, I left it there for weeks as I tried to write through it. I would move pieces around on the floor to see how changes would play.”
Granted such efforts demand time—in Presser’s case, she spent a total of two months to report and write her story—that may be beyond the reach of many writers. Still, there’s no reason why you can’t try a limited approach for a daily story or a takeout due in a week. Whatever your deadline, Presser’s approach to outlining longform stories is inspirational and instructive.
More importantly, it contains lessons of value to those who practice as well as those who aspire to model such excellence. Even if you lack the resources Presser had, there are nuggets of methodology that you can still apply to your next story. At the very least, you can devote yourself to outlining, choosing which approaches to take that best suit the time and reporting you have collected. Even on deadline, a simple outline can map a story that enables readers to understand its meaning and message through a coherent structure.
WRITING TO SAVOR | “FINAL SALUTE,” BY JIM SHEELER, THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
Journalism lost one of its greats when Jim Sheeler died in September at the age of 53. An acclaimed obituary writer and beloved teacher at Case Western Reserve University, Sheeler won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for “Final Salute,” which followed the heartbreaking journeys of Major Steve Beck as he delivered the worst news possibles to relatives of Marines killed fighting the Iraq War and followed the flag-draped coffin until their burials. Sheeler later expanded the newspaper story into a book that was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
The story package, featuring powerful photographs by Todd Heisler, now at The New York Times, appeared before the age of newspaper digitization. However, the Denver Public library preserved a digital copy. You’ll need to increase the font to make out the text with some eyestrain, but it’s well worth the effort. For $1.90 on Amazon, you can also find the prize-winning story, along with an in-depth interview I had the honor to conduct with Sheeler for Poynter’s Best Newspaper Writing 2006–2007.
It’s hard to read the story without weeping. Re-reading our conversation, I was struck by what he said about his emotional response to this heartrending story. “I cried a lot during the reporting—and the writing, but I never write with the intention of making someone else cry,” he said. “All I had to do was write down what I saw.”
The lesson I took away was to write down what you saw, what happened. You have no control over readers’ responses, but if you cry, they probably will, too.
TIP OF THE WEEK | BECOME YOUR OWN FACT-CHECKER
After writers turn in their stories at The New Yorker, the magazine’s professional fact-checkers get to work. In a recent interview, staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar said the magazine “has a very rigorous fact-checking process that really involves re-reporting the piece.”
That of course is a luxury most writers don’t have; they must be their own fact-checkers. Usually, that means matching the facts—quotes, statistics, etc.—with their notes and interview transcripts and the other sources they relied on. That’s good, but it doesn’t go far enough. Pulitzer prize-winning narrative writer Tom French became his own fact-checker. Like The New Yorker’s counterparts, he made it a regular practice to return to each of his sources to in effect re-report his story. In an unusual and controversial move, he shared his stories, particularly his longform narratives, with his sources, either providing them with drafts or reading back quotes and sections in which they appeared. In some circles, journalistic horror ensued. Ceding control to sources, as they saw the practice, was an ethical infraction. What if the source denied what they had said, or insisted on deleting or denying facts?
But French found that the opposite was true. Not only did his sources correct errors and misimpressions, but more often they added new information that made his stories richer. (I learned about his approach when we were colleagues in the features department at the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) in the mid-1980s.) If, like many writers, you lack a fact-checker, I suggest doing the job yourself, as French did. Even on deadline, there’s often a little time to get back in touch with a source. Read their quotes back to them to make sure they’re accurate. Share what you wrote about them.
Yes, copy editors, especially good ones, will serve as fact-checkers but, inundated with multiple stories, only to a limited degree. A caveat: I’m not sure I’d do this with politicians and other media-savvy sources; they may want to rewrite your story in ways that are inaccurate. But for people who aren’t used to talking with reporters, I think it’s a fair and wise approach. So re-report your story, as New Yorker fact-checkers do. I’m convinced that the process will pay off with dividends you can’t imagine. Your stories will not only be accurate, but much richer.
In the spirit of fact-checking, I reached out to Tom French to see if my recollection of his process was accurate. He generously responded with an answer that touches on a number of important points. Here’s his response:
“I would add that I performed these checks with my editor’s advance knowledge and permission, also that I usually did not go over the entire stories with them but focused on the sections where they were mentioned. I also made it clear, going in, that my editor and I were not handing over control of the story. If there was something that upset the sources or concerned them, I wanted them to share it so we could consider their points before publication. But I made no promise on changing the story to mollify them.
“Often the sources’ concerns were small and understandable, and I found it easy to address those questions without compromising the story in any way. There were a few times when they wanted me to cut something important, and in those cases, I explained to them why those details would stay in the published version. Almost every time—I can think of only a couple exceptions in decades of fact-checking—the sources understood. They didn’t necessarily feel happy about the decision, but it was clear to them that I had listened and truly weighed their points.
“Every single time I used this method, the sources found multiple errors, most of them small but still important and most of them borne from assumptions I didn’t even realize I was making—which meant I would probably not have discovered those errors on my own. They also offered their opinions as to when I got something factually correct but had missed an important point; again, I often ended up concluding that they were correct.
“As you mentioned, my sources often opened up even further during the fact-checking and offered me new details and insights and even entire scenes that I hadn’t been aware of. In two projects, I found my endings—fantastic, powerful scenes—in these sessions.”
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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