Week 26: Chip on Your Shoulder: Lessons on the Writing Craft
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“The Gulf Stream,” 1899 / Winslow Homer
WRITERS SPEAK
“If you keep working, inspiration comes.”
– Alexander Calder
Calder was a sculptor known for his innovative mobiles, kinetic structures powered by motors or air currents. He first gained attention in the 1920s. When he died at 76 of a heart attack in 1976, he was preparing a major retrospective exhibit. More than five decades of showing up in his studio, knowing that if he did the work, creativity would follow. If anyone has the credibility to make the case being there to do the work, it's this distinguished artist.
CRAFT LESSON: Dismantling your story’s scaffolding
One summer between college semesters, I spent a scary week standing on wooden scaffolding as part of a crew painting a triple-decker tenement house. I was relieved when the workday ended, and I could climb down from our perch 20–30 feet up in the air and regain the comfort of solid ground. The job done, we dismantled the scaffolding, packed the poles and platforms into our truck, and drove away, leaving a freshly-painted house looking, if not brand-new, a lot better than it did before we began.
As a writer, I use scaffolding in my work as well.
I could have used it to begin this post. In fact, it’s how I started my first draft:
This is a story about stories that begin with the phrase, “This is a story about…” That is, it’s a story about scaffolding.
What’s scaffolding?
Scaffolding is the “temporary framework of platforms and poles constructed to provide accommodation for workmen and their materials during the erection, repairing, or decoration of a building,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term.
In the writing trade, the poles and planks of scaffolding are words, phrases and sentences that help the writer build their prose. The difference between the folks in hard hats and those of us who bang on computer keys is that they dismantle their scaffolding while we, all too often, leave ours standing.
Writers—and our readers—would benefit if we took ours down, too.
This is a story about…
“This is a story about” is perhaps the most popular form of journalistic scaffolding.
In many cases, such as book reviews and marketing pitches, “This is a story about…” serves as a piece of necessary information. In news stories, however, it’s become the default lead, a quick, easy and clichéd way to begin a story, as well as a favorite and flabby device to convey the story’s theme.
Stories need focus. We need to know what the story is about to effectively report, organize, draft and revise. But let readers decide what your story is about based on the evidence you’ve presented in ways that illustrate and buttress the theme.
If you believe your story is about corruption, for example, ask yourself what is the best example you have—the building inspector who lives in a waterfront mansion paid for with bribes from developers?—and then use that information to craft a lead that engages a reader’s interest.
Scaffolding is an essential part of the writing process. But as my former editor, Julie Moos, pointed out, “Just because it’s part of your writing process doesn’t mean it should be part of my reading process.”
Too many writers are reluctant to dismantle the scaffolding they needed to get started, to continue, to move from one point to another. Scaffolding helps us focus, organize and assemble our ideas.
We put it up to get our stories down, but if we leave it there, we obscure the readers’ view with several varieties of pole and planks.
Some examples:
Questions. Here are three graphs in a deadline story I wrote about a rooftop drama when a police officer talked a man out of killing himself:
The two men talked for nearly two hours as the sun began to fade.
What did they talk about?
“You know, little things, even the way he shined his shoes,” Lawton said. “Anything to keep his mind off jumping or shooting himself.”
I must have thought the question was necessary, and the desk let it stand, too. But I don’t think the reader needs it. A reader’s mind is equally equipped at furnishing scaffolding to make the bridge between thoughts. Give the reader more credit. Cut the middle graph and the story is five words shorter, and, I think, more dramatic.
The two men talked for nearly two hours as the sun began to fade.
“You know, little things, even the way he shined his shoes,” Lawton said. “Anything to keep his mind off jumping or shooting himself.”
Transitions. In the 1970s, the Wall Street Journal influenced a generation of newswriters with front page features that drew on a stable of transitional phrases—“Indeed,” “to be sure,” “what’s more,” “moreover”—to move a story along. They sound authoritative, the verbal equivalent of a supercilious nod. In most cases, they’re unnecessary. Take “indeed”—shorthand for “as a matter of fact.” It’s an adverb, the dictionary says, “often used interjectionally to express irony or disbelief or surprise.” In many cases, it’s used unnecessarily, as well.
Asides. In my first draft, I used phrases such as “of course,” and “that is” to bridge my thoughts. I realize now that I was making these comments to the reader. “Scaffolding, of course,” is my way of saying “Hey, I know you know what scaffolding is, but I feel the need to present the definition for those who don’t." Didn't need to.
Some scaffolds play a valuable role in published work. For example, the hourglass structure story form relies on a device called “the turn.” It’s the part of the story that follows the lead and signals the reader a chronological narrative is about to begin. Usually, the turn is a transitional phrase that contains attribution for the narrative that follows: “According to police, eyewitnesses described the event this way” or “The corruption cases unfolded this way, law enforcement sources say.”
Scaffolding is what we usually produce when we’re trying to get our fingers and brains moving. It’s part of the process of transforming ideas into language. But why not give our readers the benefit of some additional effort?
“Northeaster” 1895, reworked by 1901 / Winslow Homer
TIP OF THE WEEK
Avoid beginning a sentence with a dependent clause.
They rob sentences of their energy and clarity. Not "While driving on Main Street yesterday, a tree fell on a motorist's car.—trees don't drive—but "A tree fell on a motorist's car as she was driving on Main Street yesterday." Subject-verb-object is the engine of narrative. It's also a dangling modifier, so the sentence has two gaffes.
BOOKBAG
Reporters never forget their first scoop, beating out the competition, no matter how trivial the topic. I still remember the rush I felt as a cub reporter being the first to report some incremental development in a zoning dispute in the small suburb that was my first beat. In hindsight, the news was trivial and perishable, but the excitement addictive.
As a rookie at the Baltimore Sun, Steven Luxenberg learned about “the fine art and adrenaline of scoops.” His mentor at the Sun was 24-year-old reporter Richard Ben Cramer, who “seemed to collect scoops the way a honey bee gathers pollen—instinctively and industriously,” Bearded and gravel-voiced, his stature was such that, at 24, he could refer to 23-year-old Luxenberg as “kid” without irony.
Ben Cramer’s prey was stories with “roof”—stories “powerful enough to blow the top off City Hall. Or the State House. Or police HQ,” Luxenberg recalls in an essay on Lit Hub. Cramer’s protege learned to hunt for, and be addicted by, the prospect of roof.
But Luxenberg’s views on scoops soured when he turned to narrative nonfiction in his book “Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation.”
“If scoops are the oil that keep a newsroom’s engine humming, they can just as easily ruin the rhythm of narrative nonfiction, especially narrative history,” he says. “The fastest way to slow down a narrative’s locomotive power is to stop the natural flow with a detour to a discovery.”
Luxenberg describes his shift in his attitude in “Why Newspaper ‘Scoops’ Don't Work in Narrative Nonfiction.”
His take is instructive and inspiring. He tells a good tale, even if it’s not a scoop.
"Rainy Day in Camp" 1871 1871 / Winslow Homer
CHIP IN YOUR EAR
Vietnamese hand-washing Tik-Tok song
MISCELLANY: This week’s art: Winslow Homer
Largely self-taught, Winslow Homer was a 19th-century painter and printmaker renowned for his marine subjects. Homer, who lived in Maine, wintered in the Bahamas and created “The Gulf Stream” (top) after a visit to the Island. In a scene of imminent disaster, the sailor “faces his demise on a dismasted, rudderless fishing boat, sustained by only a few stalks of sugarcane and threatened by sharks and a distant waterspout. He is oblivious to the schooner on the left horizon, which Homer later added to the canvas as a sign of hopeful rescue. Some art historians have read The Gulf Stream as symbolic, connecting it with the period’s heightened racial tensions. The painting has also been interpreted as an expression of Homer’s presumed sense of mortality and vulnerability following the death of his father.”
Winslow Homer
Homer was a reviser. When he originally showed “Northeaster” (“Nor'easter,” in New England parlance), a term for an exceptionally violent and long storm, “It included two men in foul-weather gear crouching on the rocks below a smaller column of spray. Even though the painting was well received and purchased by a leading collector of American art—George Hearn, who later donated it to the Metropolitan Museum—Homer reworked it to powerful effect.”
During the American Civil War, “Harper’s Weekly” sent Homer to the front, where he was assigned to the Sixty-First New York Volunteer Infantry. Nearly a decade later, he painted “A Rainy Day in Camp” from studies he had made during the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in April and May 1862. One critic remarked that the bedraggled mule at the right “tells the whole story” of the miserable conditions at Yorktown.
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art
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