Magpies, metaphors, killing your darlings and the power of details
Greetings!
One of the most profound lessons I learned from my mentor, the late Don Murray, was that “the more personal you are, the more universal you become.”
I hope that the personal obsessions about the writing craft reflected in Chip on Your Shoulder strike a chord within you. And that they may help you achieve your writing dreams.
Thanks for coming along and welcome to my new subscribers. I hope you all had a rewarding week writing, editing or reading. Have a great weekend!
All week long, I’d been consumed by the notion that this new enterprise has brought out the magpie in me.
Every day, I flit around the Internet, my bookshelves and the library, searching for shiny bits and pieces about the writing craft to share. As metaphors go, it wasn’t a bad one. A fresh quote. A richly told story. An intriguing interview with a writer. Shiny new ideas for posts about ways to improve your writing.
I imagined my MacBook to be the nest where I collected my gleanings and from which I, a traitor to my species, launched them into the world. And who was I to complain that magpies are among the most intelligent creatures on the planet.
So enamored was I that I even listened to the start of “The Thieving Magpie.” It's an 1817 opera based on the tale of a maid saved from the gallows when it’s discovered that the silver she’d been accused of stealing had actually been purloined by a local avian delinquent who’d been hiding the shiny stuff in the church tower.
And then, of course, the Internet had to go and spoil it all.
While searching for an image of a magpie (I settled on Monet’s wintry scene featuring a single bird perched on a gatepost, shown above), I stumbled upon across a 2014 British study that debunked the whole bloody thing.
Researchers, intrigued by the discovery of an engagement ring in a nest and the theft of keys, coins and a wrench from a garage, set out plates of tinfoil, half left shiny, the other painted matte blue, next to handfuls of nuts. And then they waited for the magpies to start shoplifting.
Not only did the birds ignore the metal items, glittering or not, the test also seemed to put them off their food. It turns out magpies are merely curious. Like me.
“We did not find evidence of an unconditional attraction to shiny objects in magpies, said lead researcher Dr. Toni Shepard. “Instead, all objects prompted responses indicating neophobia—fear of new things.”
Well, that’s not what I was looking for, although I did appreciate learning a new word for my nest collection.
Humbling as the experience was, it rekindled my respect for the lesson city editors drill into every cub reporter’s head: “Question all assumptions.”
It also reinforced the need of being open to finding out that the focus of a story can sometimes be quite different from what we first imagine. Writing, and journalism in particular, demands intellectual honesty above all. Even a magpie can grasp that.
CRAFT LESSON
“The greatest thing by far,” said Aristotle, “is to be a master of the metaphor.”
Misguided as my magpie metaphor was doesn’t detract from the value of this rhetorical device—which describes one thing in terms of something else, usually to stand in for a larger message.
“Viewing one thing in terms of another uncorks the human creative process,” Jack Hart says in “A Writer’s Coach: An Editor’s Guide to Words that Work."
“An especially apt metaphor surprises and delights. It opens new levels of meaning. It gives readers an incentive to move forward, confident that more rewards wait somewhere ahead.”
Hart was a master of editing Pulitzer Prize-winning narratives at The Oregonian, but he appreciates the metaphor in a breaking story.
One such: “Richard Harding Davis described the German army’s advance through Belgium as a river flooding its banks, a fog rolling toward someone looking out to sea.”
Or describing an architect in Erik Larson's nonfiction historical narrative "The Devil in the White City" as "a frown in a suit."
Hart encourages writers to develop the “metaphorical habit,” which “enriches your perception, helping you to see, hear, smell and feel the details of your environment more intensely.”
That’s why I used items like a loom, a tightrope, a net and seven other metaphorical tools in this week’s craft lesson, "Ten Ways To Prop Up Your Writing," I wanted to convey the idea of making connections, taking risks and digging deep into your reporting, among other lessons.
Metaphors like these can drive you, I hope, to look for your own. Net them as you would a rare butterfly and your prose will glitter.
INTERVIEWS
I grew up reading The Paris Review interview series, which began after World War II with such literary luminaries as E.M. Forster and Ernest Hemingway and continues with Alice McDermott, one of the most magical novelists writing today.
I've had the pleasure and privilege of talking with dozens of award-winning writers about their craft for the “Best Newspaper Writing” series at Poynter and now for Nieman Storyboard.
Besides reading their work, there’s no better way to learn about a writer’s working methods and philosophy about writing than to hear them talk about their craft.
For my blog, I settled on just three questions that I am posing to writers I admire.
“What’s the greatest lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
“What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
“If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer what would it be? (I just can’t get away from metaphors this week.)
Dan Barry, the master stylist of The New York Times, kicked off the series. It’s consoling to hear a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of several books describe how it doesn’t get easier and how, like me, he sucks at math. My favorite line focused on the "killing of darlings.”
Those are the lines, sentences, sometimes even entire chapters, that you’re in love with but either you or an editor come to believe have no place in your story.
They’re precious things, but I’ve learned to distrust them. Now if there’s something I can’t bear to part with—they’ve leaped out of my brain onto the page or I’ve wrestled them into submission—I realize they probably need to go.
And once they’re done away with, or as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the man who came up with the idea in the first place put it—”Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”—the story is invariably better.
R.I.P.
WRITERS SPEAK
First, there was Mike Gordon, who taught Tommy Tomlinson the “excruciating” but vital lesson of having your work read aloud to you. This past week, another unsung hero came to light in Tom Hallman’s telling of how he learned the power of details.
Dick Thomas, an assistant city editor at The Oregonian, would pepper the young reporter with a torrent of questions—“Are you sure it was a one way street,” “Are you sure the cop had a revolver and not a pistol”—that seeking out and verifying such details became second nature.
In the process. Hallman came to understand that details were capable of tapping into readers’ memory banks “to find things that will help them tell the story for themselves.”
The lessons paid off for Hallman, a senior writer at the paper, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, among many other awards, and for his readers.
When’s the best time to revise? The late English author John Fowles (“The French Lieutenant’s Woman”) had no doubts on this one.
What’s the easiest thing for the reader to do?
Barney Kilgore, the editor who transformed the Wall Street Journal into the powerhouse it is today, told a rookie named Michael Gartner the answer late one night as he toiled away on a story. The reply's worth keeping in mind as you craft or edit your own work.
For Chinua Achebe, the late, great African author of the classic novel, “Things Fall Apart,” the issue is not a word count, but whether or not you write regularly or not.
BOOKBAG: Highlights from this week's reading
“Five Scientists on the Heroes Who Changed Their Lives.” If like me, you’re always on the lookout for inspiration, this article, by five eminent scientists on their first influencers, is compelling and beautifully composed.
“A Brutal Murder, a Wearable Witness, and an Unlikely Suspect,” by Lauren Smiley, Wired, October issue. A murder with, of all things, the victim's Fitbit at the center of the mystery.
“‘Out here, it’s just me’: In the medical desert of rural America, one doctor for 11,000 square miles” by Eli Saslow, The Washington Post. The national shame of the “medically underserved” through the prism of a stylish, immersive profile by one of the finest storytellers working today.
FEEDBACK
Kristen Hare, a reporter at The Poynter Institute, my former employer, sent an insightful response to my inaugural post, “Tune Out Usuck FM And Free Yourself to Write."
“We talk a lot about imposter syndrome with our women's leadership training at Poynter, and I want to share how I've reframed it.
It's rocket fuel.
My belief that I'm really a fraud and people will figure it out eventually can either hold me back from really trying and, ultimately, become a self-fulfilling prophecy, or it can drive me forward to prove that stupid voice wrong. Most of the time, it's the latter.”
Thanks, Kristen!
Mark Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning health and science writer who specializes in narrative for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ,wrote to ask about Dan Barry’s “killing darlings” comment.
“What is a darling? Is it a turn of phrase you're proud of? Is a story always better without these? I heard Rick Bragg speak at the Providence Journal. He said, ”Every day do at least one thing in your writing that makes you feel like a writer, even if you're writing about a School Committee meeting.” So I struggle with those two sentiments.
I guess my question boils down to: how do you know if a darling is worth keeping? If you kill them all, aren't you left with something that has no voice? I think sometimes reporters tend to feel a bit uncomfortable when their writing is “beautiful.” Our first priority is delivering important information. But finding the beauty in language is one of the joys of reading."
I wish I had a good answer for you, Mark, but I appreciate and share your love of language and the joys of reading. If pressed, I’d say the language must serve the reader, not the writer. But perhaps the answer lies in the hands of the murderer. Only the writer can decide which darling to spare.
CHIP IN YOUR EAR
“Thunderstruck” by 2Cellos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT3SBzmDxGk
Rocking out with a duo of awesome classical musicians. And the video is a hoot.
"The Magpie" by Donovan. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSoxFWh6xG4
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May the writing go well!
Credits:
Gratitude/Lip on Unsplash
"The Magpie" by Claude Monet/Wikimedia Commons
Airplane/Michael Payne on UnsplashMicrophone/
Matt Botsford on Unsplash
Quote marks/ PNG MART
Woman reading/Evelyn Chong from Pexels
Feedback from Pexels
2Cellos and Donovan/Wikimedia Commons
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