Chip's Writing Lessons #71

Newsletter

IN THIS ISSUE

• Writers Speak | Steven Pinker on the reason behind incomprehensible prose

• Interview | 4 Questions with Elaine Monaghan

• Craft Lesson | “Tell me an article, Daddy!”

• Writing to Savor | “The Child Care Industry Was Collapsing. Mrs. Jackie Bet Everything on an Impossible Dream to Save It,” by Lizzie Presser, ProPublica

• Tip of the Week | Return to your research to stave off writer’s block

WRITERS SPEAK

“The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.” — Steven Pinker

INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH ELAINE MONAGHAN

Elaine Monaghan grew up in Scotland and joined Reuters’ graduate journalism training program in London in 1993. The international news agency posted her to Moscow, Kyiv, Dublin and Washington, where she followed Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell for three years. She decided that moving countries every two years was a bad parenting choice and became a Washington correspondent for The (London) Times, where she also penned a column, Abroad in America. She later co-authored a memoir with CIA officer Tyler Drumheller, a behind-the-scenes look at how the Bush Administration misled the public to justify invading Iraq. Monaghan covered foreign policy for Congressional Quarterly and wrote for CQ Weekly magazine. In 2014, she joined the faculty of The Media School at Indiana University Bloomington, where she teaches data, ethics, reporting and writing, and serves as coordinator for the school’s news reporting and editing concentration. She is a correspondent for News-Decoder, a not-for-profit news service and forum for young people, and co-education lead at the Observatory on Social Media.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?

I’ve loved reading and creating written words since I was a child. Fifteen years as a foreign correspondent, and a decade otherwise occupied in the trenches of journalism taught me that writing takes real labor. I might have churned stories out in minutes, but it felt like it was happening in slow motion. I sweated over every word, every sentence, every paragraph, and still lose sleep over that intro that wasn’t quite right.  In my 50s, I have turned my attention to creative nonfiction, memoir and autofiction. I still sweat over every word, though now I have the luxury of time and life experience, and now I often put it back on the shelf because I think it needs to mature for at least another couple of years. Does that make me a lesser writer than when I was a journalist being read by large audiences every single day? Not at all. I think I’m a much better writer now. 

The main lesson I’ve learned as a writer is that life is not a popularity contest. Put another way, if you are committed to telling stories with words on a page, and to improving your craft no matter who is watching, you are a writer. If people read you, that’s a bonus. 

What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?

In late 2019, after five years teaching writing and reporting at The Media School at Indiana University, I enrolled in a low-residency MFA program at Mississippi University for Women, determined to make space for a writing life. I was participating in my first writing workshop when the pandemic hit. I got sick and wrote about it. That’s how I had what I consider to be my first creative piece published in 40 years.

The most surprising thing about my writing life, though, is not that I had a 40-year gap in it that was filled with writing. It’s that choosing a writing life is not really about writing at all. It’s about friendship. It’s about the people I think of as my writing family, which includes my actual family both here in the US and back in my homeland, Scotland, the friends around the world I talk to in person, by phone, WhatsApp or Zoom, people I trust enough to look at my writing – to look at me, even if we’ve never met in person, which is often the case – and to care enough to tell me what works and what doesn’t. 

The most surprising thing about my writing life, then, is that it has taught me more than any other experience what true friendship looks like, and a big part of it is service, which I see in the idea of literary citizenship. Literary citizenship threads through my life, in friendship, teaching, learning and good neighborliness.

If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why? 

Squirrel.

I mean it as a noun and a verb. When I am writing, GReat! I am like the squirrels in my back yard running furiously up and down trees and sending acorns clattering across the roof. Sometimes they just stop and stare. Perhaps they’ve just had a brilliant idea about where to get their next stash of acorns, or maybe they’re puzzling over which tree to go to next. Sometimes they lose their grip on the acorns and they go flying. Sometimes they eat them on the spot.

Sometimes squirrels squirrel and hide their acorns in exactly the right place in the earth so they can find them later.

Some acorns get eaten right away and some don’t. The ones that get used up right away germinate fast or are damaged. The ones that get squirreled away are hardier and less imperfect. 

As I look for inspiration for stories now, it’s those hardier acorns that I go back to turn into stories with a longer shelf life. Much to my surprise, that process is immensely satisfying, even when my memories are imperfect because when turned into fiction or autofiction, some of those hardy acorns are pretty okay.

What is the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?

I could trot out all kinds of things I remember from my Reuters training from the unforgettably brilliant George Short, RIP. Here are two.

• When you don’t know what to write, just say what happened. (Recipe for lead-writing block on deadline. Saved me every time.)

• Lie, cheat and steal. (In a nutshell: Pretend you want one thing from an interview when really, you want that and something else; borrow and take brilliant structures and story ideas and make them your own.)

But George would also have told me to be kind and show respect to my fellow human, and no doubt did, though I don’t remember now and it would have probably sailed over my ambitious, 25-year-old head. 

CRAFT LESSON | “TELL ME AN ARTICLE, DADDY!”

Story.

 It’s a word that echoes in newsrooms every day.

“Great story today.”

“Where’s that story? You’re 30 minutes late!”

“Boss, I need another day/week/month to finish that story.”

 “Sheesh, how the heck did that story get on the front page?” (This always refers to another journalist’s work.) 

And the old standby: “Story at 11.”

 We call them stories, but most of what appears in print, online, and broadcast are articles or reports, says writing teacher Jack Hart.

Here’s an example from The Guardian about the Feb. 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine:

Fierce fighting broke out in Kyiv as Russian forces tried to push their way towards the city centre from multiple directions in the early hours of Saturday, and as the Ukrainian president, Volodomyr Zelenskiy, bluntly rejected a US offer to evacuate him from the country’s capital.

Articles present information about an accident, a public meeting, a speech, a contested Presidential election, or even a war. They’re a convenient way to convey information in a clear, concise, accurate fashion.

 But please, let’s not confuse them with stories.

 A story features characters rather than sources and communicates experience through the five senses and a few others: place, time and, most of, all drama.

 It has a beginning that grabs a reader’s attention, a middle that keeps the reader engaged and an ending that lingers. Scenes peppered with dialogue and a distinct narrative voice drive the action.

Here’s how Mitchell S. Jackson opened “Twelve Seconds and a Life,” his Runner’s World story about the murder of Ahmad Arbery, a Black man, by three white men in 2020 while jogging through their suburban Georgia neigbhorhhod.

Imagine young Ahmaud “Maud” Arbery, a junior varsity scatback turned undersized varsity linebacker on a practice field of the Brunswick High Pirates. The head coach has divided the squad into offense and defense and has his offense running the plays of their next opponent. The coach, as is his habit, has been taunting his defense. “Y’all ain’t ready,” he says. “You can’t stop us,” he says. “What y’all gone do?” The next play, Maud, all 5 feet 10 inches and 165 pounds of him, bursts between blockers and—BOOM!—lays a hit that makes the sound of cars crashing, that echoes across the field and into the stands, that just might reach the locker room. It’s a feat that teenage Maud also intends as a message to his coaches, his teammates, and all else that ain’t hitherto hipped: Don’t test my heart. Some of those teammates smash their fist to their mouth and oooh. Others slap one another’s pads and point. An assistant coach winces and runs to the aid of the tackled teammate. And the head coach, well, he trumpets his whistle. “Why’d you hit him like that?” he hollers. “Save that for Friday. Let’s see you do that on Friday.”

Jackson’s story won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for feature writing. 

Journalists must be able to write articles and stories. Each has its own challenges. Articles compress events and focus on newsworthy elements. Stories connect us with the universals of the human condition. They matter because they transport us to different worlds that reveal the personal and emotional realities behind the news.  

Articles have their place, but late at night, your child will never say, “I can’t sleep. Tell me an article, Daddy!”

 No, they beg to be lulled into slumber by a story.

 Instead, in much of news writing, we provide few if any of these.

 Instead of settings, we give readers an address.

 Instead of characters, we give people stick figures: “Goldilocks, 7, of 5624 Sylvan Way.”

 Instead of suspense, we give away the ending at the beginning using the inverted pyramid, the form which presents newsworthy elements in descending order and peters out at the end. 

 The challenge for today’s journalists is to write stories, as Joel Rawson, former editor of The Providence Journal, described it, that reveal the “joys and costs of being human.”

 STORYTELLING TIPS

         •      Newspapers are full of stories waiting to be told. Police briefs, classified ads, obituaries, the last two paragraphs of a city council brief; all may hold the promise of a dramatic story. Mine your paper for story ideas.

         •      Find the extraordinary in the ordinary stuff of life: graduations, reunions, burials, buying a car, putting Mom in a nursing home, or the day Dad comes to live with his children.

         •      Change your point of view. Write the City Council council story through the eyes of the Asian-American who asks for better police protection in his neighborhood.

•      Look for ways to drop storytelling features in your daily articles: a description, a scene, a snatch of dialogue.

WRITING TO SAVOR | “THE CHILD CARE INDUSTRY WAS COLLAPSING. MRS. JACKIE BET EVERYTHING ON AN IMPOSSIBLE DREAM TO SAVE IT,” BY LIZZIE PRESSER, PROPUBLICA

The inequities of the child care system are highlighted in the story of Jackie Thomas, a Missouri woman who started a home child care center after her grandson was beaten to death by her daughter’s boyfriend while he babysat the toddler. 

This compelling 2021 profile, a National Magazine Award finalist, trains its sights on Thomases' Sisyphean struggles to create a 24-hour child care center in neighboring Kansas for the children of working parents, some with two and three jobs. 

Presser sets up the conflict early—Thomas faces a court hearing to shut down her business largely because of understaffing caused by the coronavirus pandemic. She deftly weaves that thread to expose the racial prejudice that helped created today’s two child care systems, one for the middle class and rich and one for low-income working parents.

Like most of ProPublica’s sterling investigations of abuses of power by institutions, Presser’s story puts a human face on a larger problem, illuminating the social, political and economic forces underlying an issue of paramount importance to parents everywhere.

TIP OF THE WEEK | RETURN TO YOUR RESEARCH TO STAVE OFF WRITER’S BLOCK

 If you’re staring at a blank screen, unable to go on, or convinced that your story is a turkey, turn to a step earlier in the process: your reporting.

After studying the work habits of successful writers and helping academic writers stymied in their efforts to finish dissertations and books, psychologist Robert Boice discovered that when they returned to their notes and research materials, they found their way back to the initial excitement of their discovery or interest in the story.

In your notebooks or interview transcripts may lurk the quote or fact that breaks the logjam or a line, theme or a passage that propels you forward.

BEFORE YOU GO

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