Chip's Writing Lessons #62
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Andrew Sullivan on choosing to be edited
Interview | 4 Questions with Thomas French
Craft Lesson | Persuading children to talk
Writing to Savor | “Who is the bad art friend?” by Robert Kolker, The New York Times Magazine
Tip of the Week | Find story ideas in yourself
WRITERS SPEAK
“Editors are incredibly important to writers. Good writers always look to be edited. It’s the bad ones that don’t.”
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH THOMAS FRENCH
Thomas French, with his daughters Brookie and Greysi
FOUR QUESTIONS WITH THOMAS FRENCH
Thomas French teaches journalism at Indiana University. For nearly three decades before, French worked as a narrative project reporter at the St. Petersburg Times/Tampa Bay Times, specializing in serialized storytelling. Angels & Demons, a story about the murders of a mother and her two teen daughters while visiting Florida, earned him a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1998. French is also the author of four nonfiction books. Most recently, he and his wife, Kelley, co-authored Juniper, a book about the premature birth of their oldest daughter.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
I’ve learned so many things over the years. I’ve come to believe that one of the greatest things about being a journalist is that it asks you to keep learning something new all the time, every day. I guess the single most important lesson has been the realization that meaning lies everywhere around us and within us.
One time I asked a subject of mine—a self-taught scholar of many disciplines—what she liked to read for her own enjoyment. Her 12-year-old son, listening to the interview, blurted out, “She reads puppy books.” I asked what a puppy book was, and the boy grabbed a worn and dog-eared romance novel off the shelf—The Golden Barbarian, with the cover showing a young maiden melting in the arms of the aforementioned savage—and said, “You know, they fall in love, they get married, they have puppies.” Then he handed me the book with a knowing grin and said, “Check out page 192.”
I loved that this brilliant woman’s 12-year-old son knew where the dirty parts were in her romance novels. It was one of those details so beautiful that I knew right away it would end up in my final draft. But it wasn’t until much further down the road, after this woman ended her marriage and decided to raise their five children on their own—all because she was sure that there was another man waiting for her, a man better suited for her—that I realized I had missed the meaning of this woman’s devotion to her puppy books. She was lonely. She did not believe that the man beside her understood her or truly knew her or was right for her. She wanted to find someone who would love her the way she deserved, and by God, she found him not long afterward and married him and moved with him and the kids to a big house in France.
The mystery of who this woman was and what she truly wanted had been in front of me the whole time, hidden inside The Golden Barbarian. And I had missed it. I had overlooked all of these big things waiting inside this little detail.
It was just another reminder, one of hundreds over the years, that I need to pay attention to everything and look for the meaning hidden right in front of me.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
Okay, so I read this passage once in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso’s astonishing retelling and reframing of Greek mythology. It was an insight the writer had about the multiple versions of each myth and all the heroes and gods and goddesses.
“Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths,” Calasso wrote. “But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo.”
Those lines hit me like a thunderbolt. I was about 35 at the time, and I knew that in those few decades I had already lived several lives and had already died and been reborn several times. And if that was true of me, then it had to be true of all of us, not just mythical figures, but the human beings whose stories I was trying to chronicle. And when all of this washed through me, I realized I had a lot more digging to do in my reporting. Because up until then, I hadn’t recognized the multiplicity of each person’s experiences. I hadn’t seen it, because I hadn’t known to look for it, and once I did learn it, my reporting instantly went deeper.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?
Wow. On my better days, I guess I’d compare myself to someone who digs, a miner maybe. Anne Hull once scribbled me a note on a piece of scrap paper and gave me some advice that I’ve held onto tightly ever since. I hope she’ll forgive me for sharing it: Don’t turn back. Understatement. Insight. The scalpel. Tool into the past without misty eyes but with the compass and charts of an explorer. Tunnel there … As the boys in Princeton, W.V. say: Get dirty, brother.
What is the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
I’ve been extremely lucky in my writing life to have learned from so many great journalists. The best advice I ever received—and I received it from many—is the same advice I give myself every time on deadline and the advice I give every writer I work with, whether they’re doing a quick daily or burrowing inside a massive book: “Keep going.”
CRAFT LESSON | PERSUADING CHILDREN TO TALK
Any reporter who has tried to interview young children knows how laconic and reluctant they often can be. Even open-ended questions designed to initiate conversations are answered with “Yes", “No,” “I don’t know,” or worse, silence. But there’s hope.
For a decade, John Woodrow Cox, an enterprise reporter for The Washington Post, has perfected the art of persuading children to share their experience and thoughts about a fraught subject—their devastating experiences with gun violence as victims and witnesses to mass shootings and those traumatized even by a single death. In 2018, Cox was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a portfolio of his stories on the topic. He is the author of ”Childen Under Fire: An American Crisis,” a new, disturbing, but must-read book for gun owners and parents. In a recent interview, he shared his techniques with me.
“The first time you meet a kid they tend to go one direction or the other; either they desperately want your attention and want to talk to you and will say anything, or they don’t want to talk at all. They’re very shy and standoffish and pretty closed up,” Cox told me.
“I talk to them like an adult. I explain who I am and what I’m doing and why, that I work for a newspaper and I’m here to tell their story if that’s okay with them.”
He often likes to talk to kids “in the spaces where they’re most comfortable, which is frequently in their rooms because they want to show you their toys and the things they like the most. I’ve always used things like making sure my eye level is not higher than theirs. I don’t want to be above them physically, I don’t want them to think I’m an authority figure because I’m not. And I want them to know that they can always stop talking about something if they don’t want to talk about it.”
Repetition is another key technique, he said. The more he shows up, the more relaxed the children become. That’s his approach to reporting: “always show up and keep showing up...because good things happen in the reporting process when you’re there, and you’re there again and again and again.”
Cox recognizes that many reporters believe children will be recalcitrant subjects, but he’s found the opposite. “Ultimately, kids love attention, like any of us. If you’re sincere, and genuine in your interest, they can sense that and they’re often willing to open up, even about the hardest things they’ve been through.”
WRITING TO SAVOR | “WHO IS THE BAD ART FRIEND?,” BY ROBERT KOLKER, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
“Art often draws inspiration from life—But what happens when it’s your life? Inside the curious case of Dawn Dorland v. Sonya Larson” is this subtitle of this intriguing and thought-provoking longform narrative. It features two writers, one who donates her kidney to an unspecified person, and the other who writes a short story about the experience in ways that Dorland says veers close to plagiarism but is published to acclaim for Larson. Writer friends take sides, lawsuits ensue. The central question: What rights does a fiction writer have to appropriate another person’s experiences that they transform into art, and, in some cases (an early draft) repeat as verbatim prose? It’s a question that many writers, myself included, wrestle with. The story does a fine job addressing the issue and deeply portraying the two characters whose lives are upended by the dispute. In the end, it’s up to the reader to decide who is the bad art friend, which makes for an important, illuminating read.
TIP OF THE WEEK | FIND STORY IDEAS IN YOURSELF
Just as a flower begins as a seed, every story begins with an idea. The quality of your ideas will determine your success as a reporter. You can find story ideas everywhere. Mine them on your beat, public gatherings such as fairs and festivals, news releases, meetings of public bodies, on the street, your own publication, broadcasts and online sites. Classified ads can be a goldmine. But so can your own life, which few reporters tap into.
Use yourself as a resource. What are the health, political, financial, art and consumer stories that matter to you and your peers?
When I arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1989 to work as a national correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers, my wife and I were the proud parents of a baby girl and expecting twins. For the first time in my life, issues such as the safety of minivans and cribs were of interest. I translated that personal interest into news stories based on interviews with federal agencies, consumer groups, businesses and parents that found a home in hundreds of newspapers. Eventually, I was named the bureau’s first family beat reporter. Reporters can use their own lives as a template for stories, no matter what their beat. Kevin Merida, then with The Washington Post, was a new parent, the father of a baby boy, when he was covering the presidential election campaign in 1996. One night, he was shopping for supplies in a baby superstore in suburban Washington, surrounded by new and expectant parents. He decided that he was in the midst of an ideal focus group, a group of voters who would probably have very definite opinions about the campaign. He returned to the store and spent part of an evening interviewing parents. The best source of all may be yourself. Examine your life, and you can find a wealth of great story ideas.
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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