Chip's Writing Lessons #66
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Marge Piercy on good work habits
Interview | 4 Questions with Mike Sager
Craft Lesson | 10 paradoxes of the writing life
Reading Matter | “From reporter to the corner office: A self-publisher’s maiden voyage,” by Chip Scanlan, Poynter Online
Tip of the Week | Accept critiques of your work
WRITERS SPEAK
“Good work habits are nothing more than habits that let you work, that encourage you to pay attention. Focus is most of it: to be fierce and pointed, so that everything else momentarily sloughs away.”
— Marge Piercy
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH MIKE SAGER
Mike Sager
Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter. For more than 40 years, he has worked as a writer, primarily for The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, GQ and Esquire. In 2010, he won the American Society of Magazine Editors National Magazine award for profile writing. A number of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired movies and documentaries, including Boogie Nights. The author of a dozen books and eBooks, Sager is also the editor and publisher of TheSagerGroup.net, a content brand that publishes books and eBooks, and produces video. For more info, see MikeSager.com.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
As a freelance or contract writer who has completed paid assignments in six consecutive decades, my basic guiding principle—both as a journalist in the field and as a writer interacting with editors—is an adaptation of something my mother used to tell me. It rose from her upbringing as one of the handful of Jews in a small southern town: “Don’t give them any more reason to hate you than they already have.”
It’s kind of the same with journalists.
Since the 1980s—when incidents like the Janet Cooke Pulitzer Prize fabrication and the advent of sensational news magazine programs like “A Current Affair” eroded the sheen and public confidence enjoyed by the once-heralded Fourth Estate, peopled by the likes of Walter Cronkite, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—journalists have begun to be perceived in a generally negative light.
Knowing this, I have always made it my simple priority to follow the Golden Rule: I do unto others as I would have them do unto me. A press pass does not exempt one from the basic rules of humanity. I would have no stories without my sources. No matter how depraved or despicable, everyone deserves my respect. They didn’t ask me to contact them so I could make a living and reputation off their stories. Hence, it is a privilege to report peoples’ stories, and I remember that.
As far as editors go, an editor can assign any given piece to a zillion different writers. From early on in my career, I’ve always handed in my longform pieces a day before deadline, written at least one word short of the assigned length. I make no excuses. I cut no corners. I follow the Kobe Bryant Work Ethic.
Upon receiving my edit, I edit rapidly and return—and even if I argue, I do what the editor wants. (With a few notable exceptions that have happened perhaps more recently, where I played my 40-years-of-experience card with Philistines and called foul, to better-or-worse results.) I’m super kind to fact-checkers, and very thankful for saving my ass on mistakes. I hew to the editorial chain of command. I act with humility no matter how wonderful I feel about myself on the inside (which is kind of how a writer must feel to do the work, no?). I make my expense account look neat. When an editor says jump, I ask “how high.” I aim to please.
And if the story doesn’t come out well, I get the last laugh. I change it back for the collection!
Journalism and writing have always seemed like a privilege and a blessing. So I have always tried to remember to be thankful, to do my best, and to act like a mensch, which is Yiddish, essentially, for a person who does the right thing.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
I remember clearly the day I decided to become a writer.
It was early in the morning on a Saturday, and I was walking across campus, heading from my room in the frat house—unlikely, I know, but actually one of the great influences on my life, spending four years in the close company of a family of 80 brothers unrelated by DNA—to an auditorium where I was to scheduled to take the LSAT, the standardized test for law school.
During the course of college, I’d found my happy place: a chair behind a desk, my fingers on a keyboard. For practical reasons, however, my parents and I had decided that if I wanted to be a writer, I should first go to law school, “in order to have a career to fall back on.” They’d done okay by me so far in my life and I was grateful. I listened and agreed.
That morning, on my way across campus, I heard the usual first person voice inside myself announce very clearly: I just want to see how far I can go.
Of course, I knew what I was talking about. I wanted to be a writer. I loved playing with words. I didn’t know anything about becoming a writer or even really what writers did, beyond type. But I knew that was the thing that made me the happiest.
It took three weeks of law school classes before I listened to my inner voice and quit.
So I guess you could say the biggest surprise of my writing life is having one. And that I have come this far.
As a collateral lesson, I began to learn how to listen to my inner voice. We all know, deep down, what it is we want. The trick is blocking out the noise of the expectations of others. The trick is willing yourself forward, even if it seems impossible.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?
The ant and the ram in the song “High Hopes.”
When I quit law school, I’d lied to my parents and told them the school agreed to hold my spot open in the next year’s class. My parents had their foibles, but they loved me fiercely and unconditionally. I had no choice but to succeed.
And I’m still trying.
What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
“A writer writes.”
CRAFT LESSON | 10 PARADOXES OF THE WRITING LIFE
1. Writing is magical, but it’s not magic. As a boy reading novels and dreaming of writing them, I assumed that the writers behind my favorite books were magicians or geniuses and I was screwed because I was neither. That all changed in the late 1980s when Donald M. Murray became the writing coach at The Providence Journal-Bulletin, where I worked as a reporter and struggled to write nonfiction using the tools that novelists wielded. Writing may be magical, Murray said at our very first seminar, but it’s not magic. It’s a rational process, a series of steps and decisions that every writer makes and takes, whatever the genre, length, or deadline: Idea. Focus. Report. Organize. Draft. Revise.
Most of all, he said, it’s a process of discovery. Murray became my best friend and mentor for 25 years, before his death 15 years ago this month. He was the most important influence on my life as a writer, teacher, and coach, and the same holds true for the thousands of his students who try to write and teach better every day. Still, as anyone who writes knows, there is a little bit of magic. You don’t know what you’re going to write until you write it down and then read it and see how it has to be rewritten.
2. To become a better writer, you must lower your standards. I know it sounds strange, a dissonant piece of advice. But there’s nothing wrong with that, especially if you make sure to put the bar up high before you publish. Freewriting—typing as fast as you can without stopping to judge—is the key. It’s the best way I know to avoid writer’s block and generate words that can be revised. Perfect is the enemy of good. Accept the faults of your first draft; it contains the promise of the final one.
3. To write well, you may have to write badly. At first. Writing is about one thing: revision.
4. The power of a story comes from what’s not in it. Powerful writing demonstrates what Ernest Hemingway referred to as the “iceberg” effect: What is below the surface–the interviews, drafts, false starts—is the hidden source of strength.
We write best from an abundance of material. I used to say I over-reported every story. When I left The Providence Journal, the systems people cheered when they could finally wipe out my digital files. I filled two rolling dumpsters of material when I cleaned out my files in Washington before I left to teach at Poynter in 1994. My editors would say I tried to turn every story into a project. But now I see it differently. I wasn’t over-reporting. I was under-thinking. I try to live by the iceberg principle now. The best stories are those that have a mountain of evidence below the surface. The challenge for the writer is to decide which is the best quote, the dramatic scene that illustrates the theme, and cut the rest without mercy.
5. The more personal you are, the more universal you become. Writers who use themselves as a source and resource have the greatest chance of connecting with the largest audience. Before you begin work on a story, ask yourself: What do I think about this subject? What do I know about it? My first impulse is to turn to Google, but there we find only information and language that’s already in the public domain. The smart writers I know start out by first tapping into their own private stock. What makes you sad? What makes you angry, happy? What turning points altered your life’s trajectory? Pick a subject and write a personal essay of 750 to 1,000 words—not how I spent my summer vacation—but tunnel deeper into your life.
6. To become an original, imitate others. You can discover your own voice by listening to other writers. Listen best by copying out their words. This practice horrifies some respected writers and teachers—write your own damn stories, they say—but if we were visual artists no one would look askance at us copying paintings of the masters to see how they use color and shadow and contrast. By taking literary modeling lessons, I learned how leads and scenes were constructed, and I discovered that writers like Rick Bragg rarely choose the default ending of the newspaper story—a quote. That kind of close study, I’m convinced, got me this cover story in The Washington Post, which I landed after copying out the leads of published stories by Walt Harrington, Madelaine Blais, David Finkel and Peter Perl.
7. It takes the greatest courage to admit you are afraid. Writer’s block is caused and reinforced by fear — fear of success as much as fear of failure. Compelling writing draws its strength from honesty about one’s limitations. If you want to know what you should write, ask yourself what are you most afraid of writing. Write that.
8. To tell a story of 1,000 words (or 100,000), you must be able to tell it in one word. Every story needs a single dominant message—a theme, defined as “meaning in a word.” To find it, I follow the advice of David Von Drehle, a brilliant writer for The Washington Post:
“At a time like that, you have to fall back on the basics: Sit down and tell a story.”
To do that, I freewrite answers to four questions Von Drehle asked himself as he reported and wrote:
“What happened?”
“What did it look like, sound like, feel like? Who said what? Who did what?”
“Why does it matter?”
“What’s the point? Why is this story being told? What does it say about life, about the world, about the times we live in?”
"Newspaper writing,” Von Drehle said, “especially on deadline, is so hectic and complicated—the fact-gathering, the phrase-finding, the inconvenience, the pressure—that it’s easy to forget the basics of storytelling. Namely, what happened, and why does it matter?” I’m convinced that his conclusion holds true for all types of writing.
I always add a fifth question, one that builds on the first four and helps me discover my theme—“What is my story really about?”—and answer it in a single word. I look for universal and emotional themes: desperation, corruption, despair, hope, passion, and the like that will resonate in readers’ minds and hearts.
9. The way to write a lot is to write a little. How do you climb a mountain? One step at a time. Brief daily sessions are the key to writing productivity. Writing requires energy and hope. The writer who binges, whether with alcohol or writing, ends up burned out. Louise DeSalvo, a writer and teacher, says writers have to develop a new relationship with time if they’re going to write longform, whether it’s nonfiction or fiction. That’s especially difficult for reporters addicted to daily bylines. But if you do it in brief daily sessions, you start stacking up the pages.
10. To be a success you must seek failure. The greatest rewards demand the greatest risks.
READING MATTER | “FROM REPORTER TO THE CORNER OFFICE: A SELF-PUBLISHER’S MAIDEN VOYAGE,” BY CHIP SCANLAN, POYNTER ONLINE
Have you ever thought of self-publishing, especially if agents and editors turn down your masterpiece? It’s a trip, I can tell you. You can read about my journey into this world, which appeared Monday on Poynter Online. It’s not just an account of my experiences self-publishing “Writers on Writing: Inside the lives of 55 distinguished writers and editors,” the first in a series of writing advice books drawn from this newsletter, but offers practical advice and information for those considering this alternative route to publication. I hope it’s a helpful read.
Jacqui Banaszynski, my editor and friend at Nieman Storyboard, on Wednesday posted a really interesting article about self-publishing and the forces that produced the DIY book movement, bringing her typical savvy to the subject.
She also kindly talked about my book, to which this Pulitzer winner contributed a fantastic interview.
TIP OF THE WEEK | ACCEPT SLINGS & ARROWS
Are you able to take criticism without feeling wounded, or do you reject any critique outright? The next time a friend or colleague offers you a suggestion or criticism, diplomatically or not, don’t just think that they don’t know what they’re talking about or don’t understand what you’re trying to do. Slow down instead. Carefully consider their comments. Ask yourself, honestly, if they have any merit. Hold your ground if you believe that you’re on the right track. But don’t hesitate to make a 180-degree turn if you come to the conclusion that they’re right. What you consider slings and arrows may in fact be the best advice you ever get.
BEFORE YOU GO
NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK AND KINDLE
“Writers on Writing: Inside the lives of 55 distinguished writers and editors” edited with an introduction by Chip Scanlan
“Chip Scanlan has hosted one of the greatest writing conferences you will ever attend.”
— Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools
COMING SOON: A companion book “Writers on Writing: The Journal”
My new book is drawn from my “Chip’s Writing Lessons” newsletter’s “4 Questions with…” interview series. I’ve edited a variety of these brief, but instructive and inspirational, conversations into a collection featuring Susan Orlean, Dan Barry, Valerie Boyd, David Finkel, Lane DeGregory, Kelley and Tom French, among others. Questions follow each chapter that you can address in your journal. (A companion book due out next week, “Writers on Writing: The Journal,” will provide one.) Together or separate, they make ideal holiday gifts for you and the writers, editors and readers in your life who are looking for ways to improve their skills and achieve their writing and reporting dreams or are interested in how great writing is made.
Please spread the word to sign up for Chip’s Writing Lessons.
Interested in personal coaching? Reach out to me at chipscan@gmail.com.
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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