On beginnings, the “you suck” voice, the power of story and reading aloud
The first day of school when you’re surrounded by a crop of kids who you hope will be friends and not bullies and you face a new teacher you pray will be a wellspring of affection and influence and not an ogre.
The first day at work when you hunt for the coffee machine and the restroom, struggle to remember the names of a squadron of strangers and fight the terror that they made a mistake hiring you.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but beginnings suck.
But not always.
On Monday, when I launched my new blog, Chip on Your Shoulder: Craft Lessons from Writing Coach Chip Scanlan, (chipswritinglessons.com) I had the inaugural-hope-the-whole-thing-doesn’t-flop sweats.
Would it drop like a stone in the swirling ocean of online content?
Would technical glitches doom its beginnings? (One almost did. Apologies to the first batch of first newsletter subscribers.) If you’re reading this, my first newsletter, it means we fixed it.
Perhaps it’s because I’m long out of middle school and this new venture is one of my own making, this beginning has been a joy, abetted by Casey Frechette, my friend and technical guru who designed this WordPress site and who has helped every step along the way during the months of gestation.
Friends and strangers have had nice things to say, and so far I count 66 subscribers among the reading public here. Thank you all!
I hope their numbers will grow as I continue to pump out posts every week that instruct, inspire and entice, followed by a newsletter that recaps the week's craft lessons and offers a reading list and soundtrack for the week ahead.
Thanks for coming along for the ride! If you like what you read, I hope you’ll spread the word, and if you have any questions, won’t hesitate to reach out to chipscan@gmail.com or go to the
"Ask Chip" tab on the website.
And now to the week that was.
You don’t have to suck anymore
It’s not on the radio dial, but that doesn’t mean we don’t tune it in when we start writing.
It usually plays just one internal refrain: “You Suck.” Sometimes it alternates with “Loser” by Beck. The song is a loop, really, a chorus of negativity that resounds when we put our fingers to the keyboard: “You can't write. Sure, you had a good story yesterday, but that was a fluke. You're a fraud. You suck.” Over and over and over.
I’ve certainly heard that voice in my head. I heard it this week as I resumed work on a short story that’s been making my life miserable.
Heard it when I wrote this newsletter. Heard it when I wrote my first post, “Tune Out USUCK FM AND FREE YOURSELF TO WRITE.”
I chose to write first about USUCK FM because self-doubt is an occupational hazard for writers.
It never ceases to amaze me how some of the most talented and successful writers—Stephen King, Gail Godwin, Neil Gaiman, Tommy Tomlinson—can think they're no good, even after they've done so well.
It’s the “impostor syndrome” at work, the misguided belief that we are not worthy to be writers.
But we are, and all it takes is writing to prove it.
Fortunately, there's a solution: freewriting. When your fingers hang there, paralyzed, you have to just tell yourself, “Lower your standards.”
Heck, abandon them, as I do, and start typing as fast as you can.
A miracle happens. Your mind switches to another station, one streaming creative thoughts and language that sings.
Oh sure, some of it’s messy, but you’re writing now, not standing still.
And there’s always revision to make clean things up. That’s what I’ve been doing here, and hoping the end result won’t suck.
(I pledge to be less profane in future newsletters. Old habits, ingrained in newsrooms and the golf course where I caddied as a boy, die hard.)
Writers Speak
The paintings at the Lascaux Caves, in southwestern France, demonstrate that man’s urge to tell stories is at least 17,000 years old. With minerals dug from the earth to create a palette of earth tones and airbrushed pigment spread through hollowed bones, they paid tribute to the animals they hunted for sustenance or revered.
The caves came to mind when I posted my first quote about the writing craft, as I’ve been doing for years on Facebook and Twitter, and will continue on Chip on Your Shoulder.
I came across it years ago in the introduction to a summer fiction issue put out by The New Yorker. I fell in love with editor Bill Buford’s take on the enduring power of storytelling. An excerpt echoes the work of our Paleolithic ancestors toiling underground to tell the stories of their time:
“Stories also protect us from chaos, and maybe that’s what we, unblinkered at the end of the 20th century, find ourselves craving. Implicit in the extraordinary revival of storytelling is the possibility that we need stories—that they are a fundamental unit of knowledge, the foundation of memory, essential to the way we make sense of our lives: the beginning, middle and end of our personal and collective trajectories. It is possible that narrative is as important to writing as the human body is to representational painting. We have returned to narratives—in many fields of knowledge—because it is impossible to live without them.”
As a contributor to Nieman Storyboard, the site devoted to narrative and edited by Jacqui Banaszynski, I can attest to the staying power of storytelling—writing, as Buford says, “that makes the reader want to find out what happens next.”
If there’s a goal for writers, that’s one of the most important to aim for.
Since the week's theme seems to be about voices, my second quote of the week is from Tommy Tomlinson, author of the powerful memoir, "The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America."
Tommy takes us back to his days as an award-winning newspaper columnist when he had to undergo the "excruciating" experience of listening to his editor read his story back to him. Painful as it was, it made Tommy a better writer. We all should be so lucky to have a Mike Gordon in our lives.
Reading aloud was a big feature behind the award-winning Oregonian series, “The Ghosts of Highway 20,” says writer Noelle Crombie. Her editors, Margaret Haberman and Therese Bottomly and Crombie took turns reading aloud the five-part series. Crombie told me:
"I could hear how well the story flowed and hung together or if there were echoes of a particular word in a graph that I'd missed in my countless readings and revisions. There were times an editor would stop and say—wait, how do we know this or I'm tripping over this graph because of such-and-such. In “Ghosts” we could hear how those kickers landed. We took turns reading each chapter aloud. I think we spaced the readings out over several mornings so we would come to them fresh. As a reporter, I could hear how the story sounded and whether the way I'd organized it made sense. These are all little things that I missed in the blur of reading the story to myself over weeks and weeks.”
Bookbag
“Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.” - Lena Dunham
Stories that captured my attention this week:
As an inveterate reviser, I loved “Charles Dickens Couldn’t Stop Revising ‘A Christmas Carol’,” Jessica Leigh Hester’s fascinating piece in Atlas Obscura about the 19th-century master’s incessant revisions when he took his classic "A Christmas Carol" on a reading tour in America.
1619: Searching for Answers: The Long Road Home” tracks a black American woman’s trip to Angola in search of ancestors pressed into slavery. Written by USA Today’s Deborah Barfield Berry and Kelley Benham French, it’s a meticulously rendered tale of exploration that documents the terrible fate of African families, and the uplifting story of a descendant who discovers inspirational truths about her past on a journey to her homeland.
Fans of fiction writer Alice McDermott (“Charming Billy,” “That Night” and “A Bigamist’s Daughter” will be enchanted by her interview in the latest Paris Review. (A subscription is required, but with its catalog of interviews dating back to Ernest Hemingway, it’s worth the price, IMHO.) Even if you don’t know her work, her reflections on the craft and her writerly discipline are worth the time. My favorite:
“If there’s anything fun about composing a novel—and on many days, I’m not sure there is—it’s in finding the architecture of a story. The sentence-making is blood, sweat, and tears, but discovering the shape—the arrangement of the puzzle pieces, of the various acts and scenes—is a challenge more akin to solving a crossword than opening a vein.”
America’s mass shootings consumed my existence last week as I produced interviews for Nieman Storyboard with two journalists who wrote deadline accounts from Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas. The stories, featuring “What Dayton’s Mayor Wants America To Learn From Her City,” by Paige Williams in The New Yorker, and “As his daughter lay in a pool of blood in an El Paso Walmart, a pastor held fast to his faith,” by David Montero of The Los Angeles Times," are tours de force in covering tragedies under impossible pressure.
Williams’ interview is a semester’s worth of learning about narrative reporting and writing, while Montero reveals how the inspiration of film and the engine of empathy can produce an intimate portrait of grief.
Chip in Your Ear
The late, great singer-songwriter Phoebe Snow provided a nonstop soundtrack as I wrote this week with “Rock Away,” courtesy of YouTube. A song that makes you say, “Alexa, repeat track.”
Nut graph or no not graph
For journalists, this device—one to three paragraphs nestled under the beginning of a story—is a subject of intense and sometimes rancorous debate. Does it help or hinder the reader? On WriteLane, a podcast hosted by Pulitzer winner Lane DeGregory with deputy enterprise editor Maria Carrillo of the Tampa Bay Times, I made the case that nuts belong in news and trend stories.
In narratives, however, where flow and pacing are paramount, a nut graf emits the beep-beep of a truck backing up, waking the reader from the vivid continuous dream that good storytelling creates.
As always, may the writing go well.
Chip
PS. If you miss a newsletter along the way, never fear. Every week’s edition can be found here.
Credits:
Photograph of hopscotch grid by Jon Tyson courtesy of unsplash.
Photograph of vintage radio by Csongor Schmutc courtesy of unsplash.
Horse depicted in Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne, southwestern France, dated to the Upper Palaeolithic period. Public domain image.
Photograph of man reading by Varun Gaba courtesy of unsplash.