What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
The thing that unlocked writing for me—writing of all kinds, but fiction especially—was so simple it feels almost silly to type it out: finish things. For years, I thought of myself as someone who wanted to be a writer; for years, I maintained an archive of partial chapters belonging to novels I would one day write. But it wasn’t until I zoomed way in, wrote short, and shared what I’d written with others that I actually started to learn and improve. Turns out, a story can totally be four paragraphs long! And a four-paragraph story, unlike four paragraphs of a notional novel, is something you can meaningfully discuss. A four-paragraph story can be a stepping stone to a two-page story, then four, then twenty. I’d never have gotten to the novels if I hadn’t started and finished the really short stuff first.
What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
Translation! When I was drafting my first novel, I never even bothered to imagine translation. Maybe that’s because all of my writing before that had been for a blog, and who’s ever going to translate your blog? Maybe it’s because simply getting published in the U.S., in English, seemed an extravagant enough vision. In either case, when my first novel wast ranslated into other languages, it upended my sense of what I’d produced. Not only a series of sentences, but a plan—a detailed blueprint — for another creative mind to render something onto the page. I don’t think I’m quite good enough a writer to “write for translation” yet—to keep that future transformation in my head as I’m drafting the original in English — but I’d like to get there.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?
This might just be my last novel Sourdough talking, but… I think I’m a fermenter?? My process is: throw a lot of stuff together — ideas, sentences, experiences, feelings, all from my notebook, where I am always jotting — and mix it up. Then, let it sit, and watch as life begins to bloom in the interstices. If a real-life fermentation is often powered by yeasts, then this metaphorical digester’s engine is imagination, which feeds on the real, stretching it 120% and rotating it through six dimensions before spitting it out as a name, or a phrase, or a scene. I can trace this process back to blogging, which has that same magpie spirit, and maybe also to journalism! I remember hearing journalists talk about “saving string”—a terrific phrase —and this is just a version of that, except that I’m intentionally tangling up the strands.
Robin Sloan’s first novel, “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore“, was a New York Times Best Seller, translated into more than twenty languages. His latest novel, “Sourdough,” was published in 2017. With his partner Kathryn Tomajan, Robin produces California extra virgin olive oil under the label Fat Gold. He lives in Oakland and works out of the Murray Street Media Lab in South Berkeley, down by the railroad tracks. From 2002 to 2012, he worked at the intersection of media and technology, first at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, and then at Current TV and Twitter, both in San Francisco.
“it helps to abandon hope. If I sit at my computer, determined to write a New Yorker story I won’t get beyond the first sentence. It’s better to put no pressure on it. What would happen if I followed the previous sentence with this one, I’ll think. If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you’re writing humor.”
Journalists, like all writers, draw connections between disparate events and developments. They fashion mosaics from an overwhelming number of bits of information, details and facts. And, often, the journalist must do it in a matter of hours, if not minutes.
Think fast. Think on your feet. React to events as they unfold.
To do it well demands quick intelligence and a talent for critical thinking. If you can’t think, smart and fast, you can’t report well, and you certainly won’t write well.
Trying to write a story, without figuring out what you’re trying to say, whether it’s a news piece, a novel or screenplay, is like hacking your way through a jungle with a butter knife: frustrating and fruitless.
Trying to write a story, without figuring out what you’re trying to say, whether it’s a news piece, a novel or screenplay, is like hacking your way through a jungle with a butter knife: frustrating and fruitless.
That’s where questions come in. They are the machete that hacks through a landscape tangled with the quotes, statistics, details and other facts that sprout up as you report or draft.
One question looms above all: what is my story about?
Finding The Central Idea
“The most important thing in the story is finding the central idea,” Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell says.
“It’s one thing to be given a topic, but you have to find the idea or the concept within that topic. Once you find that idea or thread, all the other anecdotes, illustrations and quotes are pearls that you hang on this thread. The thread may seem very humble, the pearls may seem very flashy, but it’s still the thread that makes the necklace.”
To unravel the thread requires the writer to focus, a vital component of the writing process, sandwiched between developing ideas and reporting the story, drafting and revising the text.
You should begin that quest for meaning even before you start interviewing or researching. While that sounds counterintuitive—how can I know what my story is about before I report?—writers are most successful when they first draw on one of their most crucial sources: themselves.
That way, they tap into their own humanity and can search for the universal messages that will connect their stories to everyone.
An example
Say, for instance, there’s a controversy in your community because the school board is considering cutting funds for after-school arts programs. Tonight, you’re assigned to cover the meeting when it will come to a vote.
Obviously, you can’t predict the future, but you are already an expert about some things.
You’ve gone to high school, for starters. You probably took an arts class. Maybe you played in the steel drum band, built sets for a play or sang in the glee club.
You already possess some knowledge about your subject, enough to launch a quest for the focus of your story, or theme, as your literature teachers called it.
It’s the spine without which your story is just a blob of unformed information of little interest and use to your audience.
It’s the heart that makes your story beat with power.
It would be nice to be able to just ask yourself, “What’s the theme of my story?” and come up with a ready response.
But if you’ve ever had an editor ask you that question and found yourself stumbling over your words, you know how difficult it can be to answer.
Four Questions…And One More
“Newspaper writing, especially on deadline, is so hectic and complicated—the fact-gathering, the phrase-finding, the inconvenience, the pressure—that it’s easy to forget the basics of storytelling,” says David Von Drehle, who writes a national political column for The Washington Post, “Namely, what happened, and why does it matter?”
Regardless of medium or genre, these are the challenges all storytellers face.
Von Drehle posed four additional questions that will enable you to begin the quest for focus even before the meeting starts.
1. Why does it matter? 2. What’s the point? 3. Why is this story being told? 4. What does it say about life, about the world, about the times we live in?
You could easily start muttering the answers to yourself or tell a colleague or editor what you think.
Open a file or flip to a fresh page in your notebook and start writing as fast as you can. Don’t stop if you misspell a word, or get punctuation wrong. There will be time to fix that. Spend your time recording your thoughts as they fly off your fingers.
I’ll show you what I mean. Warning: It’s messy, but I’m just trying to get my thoughts down as quickly as possible. If I used any of this in the story, I can quickly fix the mistakes.
For the first three focusing questions, write for 15 seconds.
because arts enrich kids’ lives. helps them experience the world beyond their own lives become full richer human beings
point is that arts matters in education. It matters as much as math and science and sports and PE
Told because parents and students need to be alerted that these critical programs may be cut depriving
For the fourth question, write for 20 seconds. I’m giving you more time because I think it’s such a brilliant question.
4. At a time when school are so much about sports, arts take a back seat and students are cheated of the chance to act, paint, etc.Sports get the money. Unfair, Wrongheaded.
Just think. What if every story you write or read answered—or addressed—that question?
What if readers, viewers and listeners knew they would be on the receiving end of such knowledge?
Perhaps the news industry wouldn’t be in as much trouble as it is.
Too often, news writing is poorly focused, if focused at all, badly organized, shoddily written and barely edited.
But offer high-quality information produced by a thoughtful writer and it will be greeted by an eager, built-in audience.
“People come to a newspaper craving a unifying human presence—the narrator in a piece of fiction, the guide who knows the way, or the colleague whose view one values,” Jack Fuller writes in his book “News Values: Ideas for an Information Age.”
The same holds true for news sites, magazines, podcasts and the myriad ways news and information is delivered.
People crave meaning in the short stories, nonfiction books and novels they read and the dramas they watch as well.
Von Drehle’s questions provide the opportunity to furnish these valuable commodities of knowledge and wisdom. They also enable you to answer the most important question, the one your audience (and your editor) will ask.
What’s my story really about?
That’s why I added a fifth question to Von Drehle’s excellent list.
What’s my story really about—in one word?
This time you only get five seconds to answer it. Don’t worry. I just want a one-word answer.
5. Deprivation (Notice how it was embedded in one of the earlier answers. And that’s my answer. Yours may be different.)
Why one word?
Of all the definitions of theme, my favorite is “meaning in a word.” The strongest themes are emotional, resonant, universal.
Betrayal.
Redemption.
Corruption.
Hope.
“Money,” “cuts” and “funding” are topics, not themes. You have to dig deep for this answer, (hence really) not settle for the facile label that may tell you what the story is about on the surface, but doesn’t reveal all its complexities.
“It’s one thing to be given a topic, but you have to find the idea or the concept within that topic. Once you find that idea or thread, all the other anecdotes, illustrations and quotes are pearls that you hang on this thread. The thread may seem very humble, the pearls may seem very flashy, but it’s still the thread that makes the necklace.”
Thomas Boswell
With your focus in mind, you can now go outside yourself for specifics.
Don’t just talk to school officials; ask students and their parents how they would be deprived or what would be lost if the funding for the arts was cut. Chances are you’ll head into the meeting with lively anecdotes, examples and quotes.
Someone who might not want to read a story about a school board meeting might be interested in how public officials are planning to deprive students of subjects that enrich their lives.
Never stop searching
Of course, the search for focus doesn’t end when you answer those questions before you head out on an assignment or start a new writing project.
Events can change. The protest your editor said he witnessed on the way to work could be a new farmer’s market.
The school board, pressured by protests by students and their families, could in fact vote to increase arts funding.
Be mindful that the focus might change and hope you have enough integrity to say, “It’s not the same.”
That’s why you should freewrite answers to the five questions at every step of the process:
Before the reporting
During the reporting
After the reporting
Before the writing
Before the revision
Before you scream “Impossible!,” remember I only asked you to freewrite for a total of 70 seconds.
One minute and 10 seconds.
Heck, most reporters waste way more time than that trying to craft the “perfect lead” only to make a mess of the rest of the story because they ran out of time.
And don’t dismiss freewriting simply because it’s easy. Bear in mind that you’re drafting words that may make it into your finished story.
Finding your theme will drive your reporting, your writing and revising.
Most important, these five questions will enable you to find the heart of every story you write.
Every story has a heart. Your job as a writer is to find it.
“Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt. If I write rapidly, putting down my story exactly as it comes into my mind, only looking back to check the names of my characters and the relevant parts of their back stories, I find that I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that’s always waiting to settle in.”
“You learn to write the same way you learn to play golf. You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the Muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely-inspired—it’s hard work.”
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life — and that is why I succeed.”
“Generally, I don’t attempt to produce a certain number of words a day. The discipline is to work whether you are producing a lot or not, because the day you produce a lot is not necessarily the day you do your best work. So it’s trying to do it as regularly as you can without making it—without imposing too rigid a timetable on your self. That would be my ideal.”
I’m always on the lookout for stories about inspirational people. The finest ones introduce me to women and men and ideas that I’m not familiar with and which deepen my knowledge of the human condition.
Often, and this is the best part, they end up inspiring me to take action or to look at life in different ways.
It features five pre-eminent scientists—Alan Lightman, Hope Jahren, Robert Sapolsky, Priyamvada Natarajan, and Caleb Scharf—writing about the individuals who helped them find their calling.
I like reading about science, neuroscience especially, but as a generalist, I find much science writing hard to decipher. I admire it when scientists can talk about their work or themselves in accessible fashion. And I admire writers who can help scientists connect with the lay reader.
The article by the five scientists reminded me of a conversation I had with Amy Ellis Nutt, of The Washington Post and one of the best science writers working in journalism today.
While at the Newark Star-Ledger, she wrote an award-winning series, “The Seekers,” which explored five of the biggest unanswered questions in science by focusing on the scientists trying to answer them.
In an interview for “Best Newspaper Writing 2003,” I asked Amy how she was able to get her cerebral subjects to talk about the beginning of their passion.
“‘Was there a moment, a time in your life, when it sort of all came together for you, when you realized what you wanted to do?’” Almost all of them had a moment. (Astronomer) Wendy Freedman said it was out on the lake looking at the stars with her father. Almost all of them had that, and it was beautiful.”
Amy Ellis Nutt
“It sometimes took a little coaxing,” she told me. She succeeded by asking each one the same question.
“‘Was there a moment, a time in your life, when it sort of all came together for you, when you realized what you wanted to do?”
“Almost all of them had a moment.” Nutt said. “(Astronomer) Wendy Freedman said it was out on the lake looking at the stars with her father. Almost all of them had that, and it was beautiful.”
If you’re profiling someone, it’s a great question to ask?
“Was there a moment in your life when you realized that you wanted to be a teacher/nurse/investment banker/programmer…?
It’s the kind of question that can crack an interview wide open.
Each of the five stories in this collection is beautiful. These scientists are also gifted writers. They summon their mentors to the page with vivid imagery.
Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman described how his mentor looked 50 years ago:
“The photo shows a man in his late 20s, about 5 feet 6, slight in build, dark hair beginning to thin, dressed in a button-down shirt and blue sweater, and a Mona Lisa smile.”
Their disciplines can be mind-spinning. Hope Jahren studies stable isotope biogeochemistry, but when she writes about the influence of Helen Keller, she speaks a language of the thrill of discovery that writers familiar with that joy can grasp.
“Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen?
If there’s a better description of what it feels like to wait for the mass spectrometer to spit out the first data point of a brand new experiment, I can’t imagine what it would be. However, that passage wasn’t written by a chemist, or a physicist, or a biologist … it was written by a 20-something woman who could neither see nor hear.”
Lessons about science, learning, teaching, and heroes imbue these five stories.
Reading them will leave you with a question: who inspired you to become a writer?
May the writing go well.
Photography by Fabian Møller courtesy of unsplash.com
Every trade has its secrets, every job has its tools: the carpenter’s hammer and saw, the plumber’s wrench, the painter’s palette and brushes. In Shakespeare’s time, actors used to carry bags that contained the tools of their art: makeup, costumes, and props that enabled them to switch in and out of character as the drama on stage demanded.
Props are indispensable to create the illusion of reality. As a writer and coach, I’m always searching for ones that will help me create the magic that is good writing, whether it’s a news story, magazine article, personal essay, or fiction.
Props is also an abbreviation for propeller-driven airplanes. Whether they’re on the stage or in the air, props are my metaphors for mental skills and attitudes that will help you achieve excellence in your writing.
Here are ten of them that will keep you aloft and prop you up when the ride gets bumpy.
1. A tightrope. If you’re going to be a writer, you need to take risks. Writers need to be counterphobic, that is, do what they’re afraid to do.
Lee Child, author of the phenomenally successful Jack Reacher series, is familiar with the challenge.
“The beginning of a new book feels like stepping off a cliff into the abyss,” he says. “A long free-fall. One of these days, I’m going to end up flat on my face.”
He does it anyway.
If you’re going to be a writer, you need to take risks. Writers need to be counterphobic, that is, do what they’re afraid to do.
Walk a tightrope every day. Where is the one place in town you’ve never been because you’re afraid to go there? ? It may be a housing project, or it may be the boardroom of the biggest bank in town.
Try a new approach to writing a story. Write a poem even if you’re not a poet.
Ask yourself every day, “Have I taken a risk?”
2. A net. The best writers cast trawler’s nets on stories. They cast them wide and deep.
They interview 10 people to get the one quote that sums up the theme. They spend half a day mining interviews for the anecdote that animates the story.
They hunt through records and reports, looking for the one detail that explains the universal or a fact that captures a person or event.
To write the “Ghosts of Highway 20,” a riveting five-part cold case reconstruction about a serial killer, The Oregonian‘s Noelle Crombie and her colleagues Beth Nakamura and Dave Killen “pored over thousands of police reports and court records.”
Anne Hull of the St. Petersburg Times described a female police officer in Tampa as “a brown-haired woman in a police uniform and size-4 steel-toe boots.” A telling detail, drawn from weeks of observation, “can help explain the sum of a person,” Hull says. In this case, she said, it was “the Terminator meets a ballerina.”
3. Someone else’s shoes. Empathy—the ability to feel what another person feels, to walk in another’s shoes—is the writer’s greatest gift, and perhaps most important tool.
“Compassion is largely a quality of the imagination,” says the Colombian doctor and activist Héctor Abad Gómez. “It consists of the ability to imagine what we would feel if we were suffering the same situation.”
Pulitzer winner Richard Ben Cramer, talking about the reporting he did in the Middle East in the late ‘70s, says he tried to give readers a sense of what it was like to be living in a situation of terror, of life on the edge: “It’s very hard to know what someone would feel in a situation unless you at least feel something of it yourself.”
4. A loom. Writers weave connections for their audiences.
We connect the police report at the station house to a burglarized home in a poor neighborhood.
We connect City Hall with the sewage project.
We connect the characters in our fiction with action, dialogue and point of view.
Writing is a process of making connections, of discovering patterns.
Weave literary threads in your stories, mixing up short sentences with long ones.
Break up the pace with single-line paragraphs in your fiction and essays.
Rely on analogies, similes and metaphors to convey difficult topics, using these devices to connect with your readers’ imaginations.
In her story about the August 2019 mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, The NewYorker’s Paige Williams used one such rhetorical device to describe a moment after the shooting started.
“One man ran so hard that when he face-planted on the sidewalk he skidded, like a baseball player sliding into second.”
Williams spotted the movement on a surveillance video; “it immediately reminded me of a baseball runner,” she told me. Similes “can make an unfamiliar situation familiar to a reader. A simile involving physical force can impart feeling/sensation.”
5. A zoom lens. Good writers go in close on a subject and then in a single nut graph pull back to reveal, in Nieman Storyboard editor Jacqui Banaszynski’s words, “a tiny bit of context that sets your story in a bigger world: perhaps politics, economics, history, culture.”
Writers need to go in very close. There’s a famous passage in a column by columnist Jimmy Breslin about the light coming in and glinting off a mobster’s diamond pinky ring. Pay attention to the barely noticed details.
David Finkel of The Washington Post and a MacArthur Fellow said he tries “to look at any site that will be the focus of a narrative passage as if I were a photographer. I not only stand near something, I move away. For the long view. I crouch down, I move left and right. I try to view it from every angle possible to see what might be revealed.”
6. Six words.”Tell your story in six words,” is the advice that Associated Press feature writer Tad Bartimus used to give.
By reducing it to the single phrase, shrinking it almost to a line of poetry, you can capture the tension of the story.
You can do it in three words or just one word as long as they sum up the theme of the story.
One classic example, perhaps the shortest short story ever written: “For Sale: Baby shoes, never used.”
7. An accelerator pedal. ”There are some kinds of writing,” William Faulkner said, “that you have to do very fast. Like riding a bicycle on a tightrope.”
This is the voice that says, “You’re an incompetent. You can’t write. That story you wrote yesterday? You’ve lost it. You haven’t done the reporting today. You’re a loser.”
To trick the watcher at the gate, write as fast as you can, which leaves you more time to revise. Take off and don’t look back. Caution: avoid this on highways.
”There are some kinds of writing that you have to do very fast. Like riding a bicycle on a tightrope.”
William Faulkner
8. Scissors. Or their electronic equivalent: the delete key. In “The Elements of Style,” William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White say, “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat the subject only in outline, but that every word tell.”
Less is more.
How many gallons of maple sap does it take to make a gallon of maple syrup?
Between thirty and forty. New Englanders say.
Boil away the sap.
Don’t be afraid to cut things from your story. If you’ve done the reporting, they will be there, just as the nine-tenths of an iceberg rests below the surface of the sea, a “theory of omission” coined by Ernest Hemingway..
9. A trash can. Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize-winning writer, once said, “If you see something is no good, throw it away and begin again. A lot of writers have failed because they have too much pity.”
“If you see something is no good, throw it away and begin again. A lot of writers have failed because they have too much pity.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Writers will have little pity for sources, but feel sorry for the weakest prose because it flows from our keyboard.
. “Hey!” a reporter will protest, “I spent two hours on that lead. I can’t throw it away.” Yes, you can, and if it doesn’t work, you should. Try again, faster this time.
Remember Singer: “I say that a wastepaper basket is a writer’s best friend. My wastepaper basket is on a steady diet.”
10. A bible. These are the sacred writing texts you read for guidance or inspiration. Books or stories that you keep nearby when you’re getting ready to write and are trying to go to the next level of excellence.
The Bible with a capital “B” helps writers, too.
Joan Beck, the late columnist for the Chicago Tribune, “always read a couple of chapters in the Bible every morning. Whether I’m working or not. Those cadences get imprinted in your brain. When you write, you tend to write in those kinds of patterns and rhythms. The cadences—but only in the King James Version—are so effective. You use them as sort of a touchstone.”
When stumped, take inspiration from writers you admire. Here’s a sampling of what I read for inspiration.
“I guess it gets back to being a police reporter and working for this editor. His name was Dick Thomas, and he was an assistant city editor. You would send in a story and he would call back and say, “Are you sure that was Southwest Portland?” “Are you sure it was a one-way street?” “Are you sure the cop had a revolver and not a pistol?” It was beaten into you. You didn’t want him to call and when he called, you’d better have the answer. Working under that system for so many years, I learned to ask all the questions and to really look at the details. At first, it was just a matter of having the details for my story. As I got more into feature writing, I realized that the details were like little bombs going off. They could do so many things in the story and say so much in a way that I, as a writer, could not. I want the readers to do a lot of work for themselves and I want to tap into what’s inside their memories, their histories, and find things that will help them tell the story for themselves.”
