Week #25 Chip on Your Shoulder: Lessons on the Craft of Writing
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“Impression III (Concert)” / Wassily Kandinsky
Google Art Project
WRITERS SPEAK
“There is no one right way. Each of us finds a way that works for him. But there is a wrong way. The wrong way is to finish your writing day with no more words on paper than when you began. Writers write.”
CRAFT LESSONS: The long patience of writing
No one ever asks a guitar player how you become a guitarist. They know, without asking. You buy a guitar and you practice. For years. Until you learn how to play. If you practice hard enough and have the good fortune to be talented, you may even learn how to play well.
So why do people ask, “How do you write?”
If they’re readers, I think they’re understandably mystified. A good story may be magical, but writers are not magicians. A great novel may seem to be a work of genius, but most writers are not geniuses.
A writer is someone who writes. Full stop.
But that answer doesn’t satisfy many people who ask the question in the first place.
What they want is a rule book, one with secrets to a successful life as a writer, preferably one with the word "Secrets” in the title. They can find plenty of them. I’ve bought my fair share.
I think people hope rule books have the answer because they suspect the hard truth. Writing is a lonely occupation with no guarantee of success and no expiration date for the training period.
“Writing makes no noise, except groans,” the novelist Ursula K. LeGuin said, “and it can be done anywhere and it is done alone.”
It’s a lot easier to read a rule book than it is to sit in a room by yourself, struggling to free your imagination, to write from within, which is where all good stories and novels come from.
To write is simple:
You sit by yourself.
And you write.
And you rewrite.
For years.
But you don’t stop there.
You read other writers. You study what they do and try to figure out how they’ve done it.
How they make characters come to life on the page. Write dialogue that sounds the way real people talk. Craft sentences, paragraphs, scenes, stories, poems, scripts and novels that hold a reader’s attention from beginning to end. You try to adapt these lessons to your own work.
“Talent is a long patience,” the French novelist Gustave Flaubert said, “and originality an effort of will and intense observation.”
So you also study people. You eavesdrop on their conversations. You notice what they wear, how they walk and talk, how they show affection or disapproval. You take notes.
You become a student of human nature. You meditate on the human condition.
How do you become a writer? The same way you become a guitar player.
You do it.
“Points” / Wassily Kandinsky
Google Art Project
INTERVIEW: When a newspaper shutdown hits close to home
It was an all too familiar story. Another American factory closed down, the latest in a long line of declines in manufacturing battered by foreign competition and automation. This time it was the giant General Motors plant, the mainstay of Lordstown, Ohio. For Graig Graziosi, a reporter for The Vindicator in neighboring Youngstown, it was yet another example of what he calls the “hollowing of the American dream” in America’s Rust Belt.
Graziosi’s editor assigned him to cover the last days of GM Lordstown, little knowing as he worked the story that his employer, the 150-year-old Vindicator, was about to suffer the same fate. This past August, a few months after his story ran, the presses ran for the last time, a victim of anemic circulation and vanishing advertising.
In a highly personal longform essay, “When My Newspaper Died,” Graziosi chronicles his last days there while deftly telling the story of the paper’s demise with the end of a sprawling factory that gave its workers a middle-class lifestyle and created vibrant communities teeming with activity and rich with history. Youngstown is Graziosi’s hometown, and his story powerfully captures “a cycle of death and exodus” he’s witnessed over the years.
I interviewed Graziosi, now a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., about his essay, which was co-published by The Delacorte Review and Columbia Journalism Review, for Nieman Storyboard. An excerpt from our conversation is reprinted here with permission.
Chip Scanlan: You do a masterful job writing about others through the prism of your own story. How and why did you choose to approach the subject this way?
Greg Graziosi: Thank you. As a journalist, I’m most at home telling other people’s stories, so I think I naturally trend toward writing about other people even when I’m writing about myself. When I think of my time out west, for example, I think about the other people I lived with and their experiences as crucial elements of my time there. I couldn’t divorce their stories from my own and still tell the truth about that time of my life. Likewise, I couldn’t tell the story of my final weeks at The Vindicator without talking about the workers at Lordstown that dominated my life just before it happened.
I also wanted people to relate to my story. If I just wanted to write about myself, I have a journal. For something I’m creating for mass consumption, I want it to serve a greater purpose than simply a place for my thoughts to bounce around. I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling this way, so I tried to use the stories of those who could sympathize with my situation to strengthen the piece and give it a more universal appeal.
CS: After a career in a business where “I” can often be a dirty word, why did you decide to write a story in the first person? What were the challenges? The rewards?
GG: The story was always going to be a personal essay, so the first person perspective was pretty much built in from the start. I find most of the ways reporters try to write around the first person to be clunky and distracting. “This reporter” is just a bizarre way to communicate.
I’m pretty hostile to the distaste for the first person that we have in our business. I understand why we don’t write general news reports in first person and I’ve participated in endless conversations about language and objectivity. But first person writing is gripping, and intimate, and if I’m going to put myself out there, I figure I should just go for it and really try to bring the readers into my world as I’ve lived it.
In terms of challenges, the only one that stuck out was pacing. It can get boring quickly if you just have graph after graph of a writer pontificating, so you have to find ways to break it up. That’s why we jump across time periods or will momentarily shift the focus away from me to the UAW workers, or the Lordstown mayor, or the Jamaican immigrant for a moment. It’s like a relief cut when you’re woodworking.
CS: What was the difference and/or difficulty between writing about yourself versus about others?
GG: Writing about yourself can be tough because it’s not always clear what information is worth including. Moments you think are relatively mundane can be mined for gold and moments that are very defining in your mind sometimes just don’t fit. If you ask me what about the last several months was more world-changing for me — beginning a relationship with my girlfriend or sitting in a diner in Lordstown for an hour and eating a grilled cheese sandwich — I think it’s obvious I’d say my relationship. Yet that only gets a brief mention in my story, while my visit to the diner is like five graphs long.
I think it’s easier to write about other people for the simple reason that you have more emotional distance from the events being described, and can use that distance to exercise editorial judgment over which parts are critical to the narrative.
CS: I admire your use of metaphors and analogies. “It felt as though we’d gotten a call from the hospital alerting us that a terminally ill loved-one was nearing the end. We knew it was coming, but it didn’t make the news any easier to hear” and “My parents and I knew different cities. They knew Youngstown when it was alive and so mourned it in death. I knew only after it had been taxidermied and forgotten in the attic.” Compared to how you wrote for your newspaper, is this your natural style or did you feel you had more emotional access to your own story?
GG: I try to be careful with metaphors because it’s obviously easy to mix them and muddle your meaning, but I do think they’re powerful tools for helping build emotional familiarity with a concept. When I was writing for the newspaper I only wrote like that on a few occasions. But I would absolutely say the style you see in the CJR piece is indicative of my style when I’m left to my own devices.
Any skill I have at metaphor I have to credit to the many hours I spent listening to sermons back when I was a very active church-goer. Pastors almost always utilize some parable to segue into their weekly message, so I had weekly exposure to good and some not-so-good examples of how to weave a personal story into a larger message. During those days I used to lead a Bible study and would often try to replicate that style. It influences my writing to this day.
You can read the entire Nieman Storyboard interview here.
TIP OF THE WEEK
Cultivate a sense of wonder.
Good writers are forever astonished at the obvious, like a toddler pointing everywhere and asking, "What's that?" Bring a fresh perspective to your stories, giving them an excitement and energy that will captivate readers.
BOOKBAG
We live in uncertain, precarious times. Books can help alleviate the angst. A British survey that polled readers and non-readers found that readers felt "fewer feelings of stress and depression than nonreaders."
"Reading creates a parallel world in which personal anxieties can recede," the researchers concluded, "while also helping people to realize that the problems they experience are not theirs alone."
Mindful that the news — coronavirus, impeachment, nationalism, climate change — can do a number on our psyches, Jennifer Day, the Chicago Tribune's book editor, asked a wide-ranging group of authors what book they turn to in uncertain times as 2020 begins. Here’s a sampling of what they came up with:
“Beyond the Game: The Collected Sportswriting of Gary Smith.”
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” by Betty Smith.
“Hope in the Dark: Believing God is Good When Life is Not,” Craig Groeschel.
“Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection,” edited by James Crews.
“The History of White People,” by Nell Irvin Painter.
“Pride and Prejudice,” by Jane Austen.
“The Spinoza of Market Street,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
“Goodbye and Good Luck," a short story by Grace Paley, from "A Grace Paley Reader."
DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
Last week’s newsletter included an embarrassing gaffe. In the list of advice from “The Elements of Style,” by Strunk and White, I wrote, “Omit necessary words.” Obviously, it should have read “Omit unnecessary words.” My apologies.
“Romantic Landscape” / Wassily Kandinsky
Google Art Project
CHIP IN YOUR EAR
“Factory” / Bruce Springsteen
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May the writing go well.