Hi folks,
Here are this issue’s Extras for my generous paid subscribers. Thanks for being valuable supporters of Chip’s Writing Lessons and my work. This is a long one, so you’ll need to look out for the link at the end of the email that says “clipped” and click on it to read everything I hope you enjoy them.
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | John Bennet on nut grafs
Interview | 4 More Questions with Kim Cross
Craft Lesson | Writing with your nose
Tip of the Week| Three questions to be a lifelong learner
Book World | Ears Perked again
Help Royal Hospitallers save lives in Ukraine
WRITERS SPEAK | John Bennet on nut grafs
“A piece with a nut graf is like a documentary with a voice-over—it means you haven’t got it all on film.”
-John Bennet, R.I.P.
This quote, from longtime New Yorker editor and teacher John Bennet, who died last week, will raise hackles. (Read inspirational tributes to him here and here.) In 2019, I participated in an online discussion of the device—a paragraph(s) high up in a story that tells the reader what the story is about and why they should care to read it. I kicked it off by dissing it in narratives, bolstered by Pulitzer Prize-winning John Branch of The New York Times. Jacqui Banaszynski, my editor at Nieman Storyboard and another Pulitzer-winning narrative writer, came back with a resounding jab. Then she asked writers and editors to weigh in as part of a digital roundtable that she called a “Nutcracker Suite.” Between them all, your head may start spinning, but it’s a debate that’s worth having and wisdom from brilliant folks worth taking in.
INTERVIEW | 4 MORE QUESTIONS WITH KIM CROSS
Kim Cross is the author of “What Stands in a Storm,” a narrative nonfiction account of the biggest tornado outbreak in history, and "The Stahl House," an intimate biography of one of the most famous homes in the world. A full-time freelance writer, she has bylines in Outside, Bicycling, Nieman Storyboard, and other magazines. When she’s not writing, she’s mountain biking, fly fishing, or exploring some glorious place without phone reception in Idaho. Her nonfiction narrative, “Noel + Leon, a True Story from the Middle of Somewhere” won the Gold Lowell Thomas Award for foreign travel reporting from the Society of American Travel Writers, was named as one of the Best of 2020 in the Sunday Longread and was included in David Brooks’ annual Sidney Awards. Her magazine piece, “My Month of Doing 100 Wheelies a Day,” appeared in Outside. She is at work on a book-length narrative nonfiction account of a famous FBI kidnapping and murder case. Don’t miss Kim’s original Four Questions interview.
What's the most memorable story you ever wrote and what were the lessons you learned from producing it?
My most memorable story is NOEL + LEON (aka "What happens when two riders trust the rides of their lives to the magic of the universe"). It was a story so delightfully astonishing that when I first heard about it, I assumed it was an urban legend, that it couldn't possibly be true.
It was a story about two strangers—an American and a Brit—who decided, independently, to ride a bicycle, solo, across Eurasia. One rode east. The other rode west. By chance, they bumped into each other at almost the exact midpoint, at a teahouse in the middle of the desert in Kazakhstan.
There, they realized they were doing the same journey in opposite ways. It would not have been the story it was if their names had not also been opposites: NOEL + LEON.
Because of the nature of this story, and their names, and the fact that they were almost antithetical in many ways—their personalities, their reasons for doing the journey, their expectations of the universe—I decided to write this story as a sort of "true fable," and I thought it would be neat if I could structure the story as a palindrome. It starts and ends in the middle, and alternates POV between NOEL and LEON to form a palindromic pattern: M-L-N-L-N-L-N-L-N-L-M. It was my own personal whim, a silly conceit and a challenge that, if I pulled it off, should be invisible to the reader.
For various reasons—mostly the challenge of finding a magazine and editor daring enough to trust me to pull this off—the story took five years to bring to fruition. During that time, I figured Noel (who lives in Wisconsin) and Leon (who was teaching in China) would either lose patience with me or, in Leon's case, drop off the grid entirely.
I also worried that my palindromic structure might not work. To pull it off I had to break the narrative with a flash-forward that let the reader know "we're skipping the middle, the part where they meet, but we'll get there in the end, and I promise the payoff will be worth it..." without causing unnecessary confusion or frustration. If it didn't serve the story and the reader, I was prepared to throw it away.
So I wrote two versions of the 6,000-word narrative: one structured chronologically, and one structured as a palindrome. I told my editors—Leah Flickinger and Matt Allyn at Bicycling—that they had to make the call.
They decided it worked.
For fun, I embedded 22 palindromes throughout the story, like easter eggs. Some are words, some are numbers, and some are phrases. My self-imposed rule for this wordplay was, none of could be gratuitous. (There was no "kayak" in this desert story.) They shouldn't draw attention to themselves, and should be invisible unless someone is looking. (No one, to my knowledge, has found all 22.)
What did I learn from this story? So many things.
First, if you fall in love with a story, don't ever give up on it. My pitch was rejected many times by editors who just didn't get it, or couldn't see a place for it in their publication. (It took longer to land the pitch than it took my characters to pedal 10,000-plus miles!) I never lost faith that it was incredible story, and that I could pull off my unorthodox approach, if only I could convince an editor to trust me.
Second: With good sources and meticulous reporting, you can write vivid, cinematic scenes, set in places you've never been, as convincingly as if you'd been there. In addition to Leon's day-by-day blog and Noel's time-stamped Flickr stream, I used Google Earth to track their intersecting paths across the hemisphere. I was able to download Noel's GPS bread crumbs to see his path and determine where he was at every minute of every day.
I was able to zoom in and see the very teahouse where they met in the middle of the desert. You can even go back in time...
Here's what it looks like now-ish:
And what it looked like when they met:
Third: When the occasion feels right, be playful in your writing. I do a lot of "serious writing" about heartbreaking things, about tragedy and resilience and redemption. The empathy that makes me good at that also makes it somewhat unhealthy, because I carry a lot of people's pain and secrets inside me. This story was joyful and fun to write. It involved a LOT of tedious work, but writing it was pleasurable, in the same way that a long hike up a mountain summit is pleasurable. It was a puzzle wrapped in a riddle and deep-fried in wordplay, with a dash of yin and yang.
2. Vanity Fair called your book "THE STAHL HOUSE
CASE STUDY HOUSE #22 The Making of a Modernist Icon," "Sumptuous… a startlingly intimate document, chockablock with family snapshots, that goes beyond steel decking, glass walls, concrete caissons, and the geometry of H columns and I beams. It’s a love song to a global icon that was, for the residents themselves, no museum." What surprises did you encounter along the road to publication?
That no matter how well covered your subject may be, deep research will always turn up fresh and fascinating information. The Stahl House is one of the most famous houses in the world, written about in more than 1,200 articles and books. I worried I wouldn't find anything new to say. However, digging through Stahl family archives and interviewing family members, architects, historians, and filmmakers revealed facts and stories-within-stories that added a lot of nuance and texture to the history that many Modernist architecture fans and experts think they already know.
Also: Sometimes it's good to be an outsider. When the Stahls approached me about writing their book, I'd never heard of the Stahl House or the Case Study House program. I was terrified that the architectural academics and experts would eat me alive. That fear motivated me to work extra hard in my research. Which led to my discovery of an architectural riddle that I was surprised no one had solved before: How is this house, famously cantilevered over a cliff in the Hollywood Hills, actually attached to the cliff? I made a trip to the Getty Research Institute and spent hours studying Pierre Koenig's architectural plans, which showed how he "edited" the house to get the permit approved by the city of LA. With help from an architectural historian based in the UK, I found an answer that surprised many experts.
You have a special knack for getting people—I'm thinking of the boy in your New York Times piece, "Freedom Wyoming,"—to talk. What tips would you offer those wanting to become better interviewers?
Start by finding common ground with someone, no matter how different your political beliefs, upbringing, faith, education, age, or world view may be. It's not an "interviewing technique." It's the art of being a good human. We all share something, whether it's a fondness for mint-chocolate-chip ice cream, the breathless thrill of jumping into cold water, or the awe of looking up at stars and wondering what exactly makes them twinkle. It's one of my favorite things in life: Meeting a stranger and finding an authentic and surprising moment of, "No way, me too!"
Interviewing kids can be challenging. Ask lame questions and you'll get lame answers or an insouciant shrug. Dive into their world, and let them be the guide. Want to play baseball with a soccer ball? Swing like mad—and giggle when you miss. Wanna jump on the trampoline? Play crack the egg. Want to come see the creek? Roll up your pants and get your feet wet. Most of all, notice. Their choices, actions, longings, and most treasured possessions can articulate things about them that they don't yet have the ability to convey in words.
What writers, stories and books are you looking to for inspiration these days?
I never thought I would say this, but trial transcripts can be surprisingly thrilling to read. I've read more than 2,000 pages of a murder trial, and they're not only a wonderful source of verifiable information—facts delivered by subjects under oath—but also a lesson in how to interview for scene. The lawyers press for detail and clarification in a laborious and painstaking way because they're trying to create a cinematic narrative in the minds of the jury. That's exactly what I want to do as a narrative nonfiction writer! When I'm reporting, this level of detail rarely comes out in the first interview, because you're working to establish the beats of the story, the pivotal moments, the chronology of what happened. So having it all done for me by expert interviewers, and transcribed by a court reporter, feels almost like cheating.
Even when I'm in work mode, I try to end the day with a little pleasure reading unrelated to work. I've been enjoying Rachel Carson's nature writing immensely. She's best known for her book Silent Spring, which triggered outrage about pesticides and led to the creation of the environmental movement. But her nature writing shows a combination of elements I aspire to—scientific expertise, literary writing, and a childlike sense of wonder.
CRAFT LESSON | WRITING WITH YOUR NOSE
A nose for news. In journalism, the phrase means the ability to sniff out the newsworthy from the trivial. Good reporters have one. Give them a whiff of corruption and they’ll root it out like a pig rooting for truffles. Narrative writers uncover conflict and discover compelling characters.
Write with the senses, editors and writing teachers demand. The best writers do that, providing readers with vivid images and resonant sounds.
But hunt for a smell in news stories and most days you’ll come up empty.
“Smell,” wrote the blind and deaf writer Helen Keller, “is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.”
Pick a smell and it will take you back to times past, remembered places. I need only catch a whiff of patchouli oil and it’s the 1960’s again.
“Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences,” Diane Ackerman writes in “A Natural History of the Senses.” “Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.”
All of us have a lengthy catalog of smells that make us remember and feel. So why are we so reluctant to employ them in our writing?
Ackerman makes the case that the problem is in our head, in the connections that link our sense of smell with the parts of the brain where language forms. She calls smell “the mute sense, the one without words.”
Richard Price, the novelist (“Clockers”) and screenwriter (“The Color of Money”), writes powerfully with his nose.
His novels reek, in the very best sense of the word. His olfactory prose offers a master class for journalists intent on bringing this vital sense into their own stories.
The italicized passages are from Price’s novel, “Samaritan.”
THE MADELEINE EFFECT
For French novelist Marcel Proust, taste was the bridge between present and past, captured in a legendary scene in his classic novel, “Remembrance of Things Past.” Dipping a madeleine, a small shell-shaped pastry, into a cup of lime-flower tea, enables the narrator to recreate in his mind intense memories from his childhood.
In the gritty world of Price’s urban New Jersey wasteland, the smell of cafeteria food is an equally powerful time transporter.
“Straightening up, he was struck with a humid waft of boiled hot dogs and some kind of furry bean-based soup that threw him right back into tenth grade.”
SENSE AS PLACE
“A greasy aroma drifted down from the third-floor food court — spare ribs and Cinnabons…”
SMELL AS CHARACTER
“Danielle then embraced Ray. She was sporting some kind of vanilla-musk body spray, the scent so dense that it made him dizzy.”
SMELL AS MOOD
“It was cold, the city-borne breeze damp and acrid, still damp with dread after all this time.”
LEARNING TO SMELL
1. Breathe In.
“Each day,” Ackerman writes, “we breathe about 23,040 times and move around 438 cubic feet of air. It takes us about five seconds to breathe—two seconds to inhale and three seconds to exhale—and, in that time, molecules of odor flood through our systems.”
Our antiseptic age seems designed to rob us of smells or confuse our nose with synthetic concoctions that mask noxious chemicals with the aromas of the orchard.
Cultivate your sense of smell by using it as much as you can.
2. Name that smell.
We can detect over 10,000 odors, Ackerman says.
I’ve asked writers and editors to develop a catalog of smells. Here’s a sampling:
New wood
Lilacs
Horse manure
Dried seaweed
After summer rain
Coffee with cream
Freshly-mown grass
3. Describe the smell.
Modifiers can heighten a smell’s impact. Price regularly uses them in his olfactory details. (Words are in bold for emphasis.)
“The air smelled of sea funk and overturned earth; the only thing Ray loved about living in Little Venice, the raw and heady scent made him think of new beginnings, of second and third chances to get things right.”
4. Find the Source.
Don’t just inhale the world. Identify and describe the smell and the memory or feeling it evokes. “Apartment 27 smelled like years of sweat and Lemon Pledge and perfect bacon,” wrote Anne Hull in the St. Petersburg Times.
BOOK WORLD | EARS PERKED AGAIN
At last! Audible.com, the biggest purveyor of audiobooks, with 200,000 titles of every thinkable category, just gave the quality control green flag for 33 Ways Not To Screw Up Your Journalism, which I narrated. It’s available now for just $4.99 on Amazon. Slim enough to put in your purse or jacket pocket, the book, a 3-hour read, also fits perfectly in your ears.
TIP OF THE WEEK | THREE QUESTIONS TO MAKE YOU A LIFELONG LEARNER
No matter what experiences—reporting or writing—there are three questions that make you a lifelong learner.
After an interview, a freewrite, a draft, a revision, here’s what you ask and answer in a freewrite.
1. What did I learn from this experience?
Each story is a writing workshop in miniature, full of lessons learned that you can apply to future stories.
2. What surprised me about it?
Good writers are forever astonished at the obvious, like a toddler pointing everywhere and asking, “What’s that?” Surprises will enable you to bring fresh perspectives to your writing, giving it an excitement and energy that will captivate readers.
3. What do I need to learn next?
Smart writers never stop learning. A draft may teach you that discovery is the joy of writing while a revision may demonstrate the power of re-seeing a story and gaining the distance needed to improve it.
HELP UKRAINIAN PARAMEDICS SAVE LIVES
Royal Hospitallers, Ukrainian's brave volunteer paramedic battalion, save lives every day. Please support them here!
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As always, thanks for reading and contributing. May your writing go well.