What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
It doesn’t get easier. In fact, I find that the process gets harder. I expect more of myself than I did as a young newspaper reporter, and so I am increasingly more conscious of all that is at play, even on deadline: the choice of words, the rhythm of language, the avoidance of preciousness, the necessity of clarity — the killing of darlings.
What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
The biggest surprise to me is how writing often seems like mathematics. Let me start by saying that I used to work as a waiter at a church bingo hall. The manager would give me two dollars to start the night. For three hours I would collect tips by hustling coffee and doughnuts to women shouting “Shake up those balls” whenever O-66 was called. And then, at the end of the night, I’d have $1.85. Which is a long way of saying I suck at math. I hate math. But writing to me often seems like calculus. Trying to crack some code, only with words, not numbers. This noun plus this adjective plus this verb minus this adverb equals part of an equation, the solution of which is revealed only when I think I have it just right. Which often means I’m still fifteen cents short.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?
How about a woodpecker, constantly banging his head against a tree — or desk — digging away, deeper and deeper, over and over, in search of coming upon something worthy. Instead of a delectable insect, a perfect word. And yes, I know, woodpeckers also peck to make nests and attract mates. So maybe a better metaphor is the Occasionally Successful Sisyphus. Sweating it out in Hades, he struggles to push that boulder uphill. And every once in a rare while, he thwarts Zeus and reaches the top.
What’s the best piece of advice anyone ever gave you?
It came from Tom Heslin, who in the early 90s was the investigations editor at the Providence Journal. I was working on a multi-part series about a banking scandal, and I sent him a version of one of the stories – perhaps too quickly because I was eager to get it in the paper and move on. As I remember it, his advice came across the Atex message system. And all it said was: “Slow it down.”Those three words have had a profound impact on me, and I’ve interpreted them in different ways over the years (recognizing all the while that they might not easily apply to deadline stories). Slow it down in digesting the material you’ve gathered. Slow it down in the time you spend to craft your long-form narrative. But, most of all, slow it down when it comes down to time – to moments that, when carefully and concisely shared, can add dimension to character development or to a tick-tock. This happened, this happened, this happened – wait, let’s take another beat on this moment – and then this happened and this happened…By slowing it down, you move yourself even further from stenography. You become a storyteller.
Dan Barry is a longtime award-winning reporter and columnist for The New York Times and an author. In addition to sharing a Pulitzer Prize with former colleagues at The Providence Journal, he has received, among countless other accolades, a George Polk Award; an American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting (for his coverage of the first anniversary of Sept. 11); a Mike Berger Award for in-depth human interest reporting; and the PEN/ESPN Literary Award for Sports Writing. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize: once in 2006 for his slice-of-life reports from hurricane-battered New Orleans and from New York, and again in 2010 for his coverage of the Great Recession and its effects on the lives and relationships of America. His books include “The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland,,” “Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game,“City Lights,” “Pull Me Up:’ A Memoir,” and most recently, “This Land: America, Lost and Found.”
“During the revision period I try to keep to some sort of discipline. I make myself revise whether I want to or not; in some ways, the more harsh and dyspeptic one feels the better—one is harsher with oneself. All the best cutting is done when one is sick of the writing.”
“Of the many definitions of story, the simplest may be this. It is a piece of writing that makes the reader want to find out what happens next. Good writers, it is often said, have the ability to make you keep on reading them whether you want to or not—the milk boils over—the subway stop is missed…But 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.”
You’re ready to write. The coffee steams on your desk. The computer hums. Inspiration awaits. You lower your fingers to the keys.
Then you hear it. A whisper in your ear.
“You suck.”
What’s that? Where did that come from?
“You suck!” it repeats. The hiss is louder.
Wait a minute. It’s coming from inside your head.
“You can’t write. You’re a loser.”
And now you’re sitting there, fingers paralyzed, your coffee growing cold.
Sound familiar?
For years, I agonized over my writing. Pen hovering over the blank page. Fingers paralyzed above the keyboard.
I used to think it was just me, a profane newspaper reporter whose potty mouth delivered this warning when I started to write.
“You suck, Chip”
Then after years leading writing seminars and coaching hundreds of writers, I discovered I was not alone. Writers all over, including some whose names will surprise you, hear the same negative refrain.
“I’m afraid of failing at whatever story I’m writing—that it won’t come up for me, or that I won’t be able to finish it.”
That’s Stephen King talking. Yes, that Stephen King.
“I have never completed anything in my life to my absolute and lasting satisfaction.” That’s John Cheever, who wrote some of the 20th centuries’ most celebrated novels and short stories.
“You’re an incompetent,” your inner voice may say. “You can’t write. That piece you published yesterday? Your news stories, narratives, novels, screenplays, memoirs? All a fluke. You’re a fraud. Why didn’t you go to law school like your parents wanted?”
Whenever I imitate this voice, at writing seminars, conferences, one-on-ones, it’s greeted with knowing chuckles.
It’s a rueful laughter, though, because we know how much pain that voice has caused. How many stories it’s stopped dead in their tracks. How many writing dreams sit moribund in hard drives. How many unfinished drafts hide inside desk drawers.
An editor at the Los Angeles Times heard it so often she told me it was like a radio station—USUCK FM—playing inside her head all day long.
“The Fraud Police” is the name Neal Gaiman’s wife, Amanda, gave to the voices of self-doubt plaguing her best-selling husband. They are the security guards outside the station that’s home to USUCK FM.
The Watcher at the Gate
USUCK FM is a presence that lives inside all of us, a refrain of pessimism that keeps us from discovering the writing only we can do.
Tommy Tomlinson knows that voice well.
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Tomlinson was a multiple award-winning columnist for The Charlotte Observer. He’s published in Esquire, and Sports Illustrated, and anthologized in “Best American Newspaper Writing” and twice in “Best American Sports Writing.”
“It’s that voice,” he writes, “that tells you you’re not good enough, the voice that wonders why you ever believe in yourself, the one that leans into ear when you’re facedown on the ground and tells you you’re a failure. There are no ads on USUCK-FM and no music. There are only public service announcements. There’s no point you’ll never make it. Don’t even try.”
Gail Godwin, the best-selling novelist and essayist, calls her inner critic “The Watcher at the Gate” that keeps guard over her creativity and prevents her from writing.
“It is amazing the lengths a Watcher will go to keep you from pursuing the flow of your imagination,” she wrote in a 2000 essay. “Watchers are notorious pencil sharpeners, ribbon changers, plant waterers, home repairers and abhorrers of messy rooms or messy pages. They are compulsive looker-uppers. They are superstitious scaredy-cats. They cultivate self-important eccentricities they think are suitable for ‘writers.’ And they’d rather die (and kill your inspiration with them) than risk making a fool of themselves.”
Lower Your Standards.
William Stafford never heard the voice of self-doubt. He woke up before dawn every day and wrote. Before he died in 1993 at the age of 79, he had written thousands of poems, and published scores of books. He was never blocked because he located the transmitter for USUCK FM: impossibly high standards.
“I believe that the so-called ‘writing block’ is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance. One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing.”
I’ve come to believe in Stafford’s counsel so much that I don’t just lower my standards. I abandon them. I allow myself to write as badly as I can.
I advise you to do the same. Lowering your standards is a way to sneak past the watcher at the gate and tune out USUCK FM.
At first.
I always add that caveat. You have to lower your standards to break through writer’s block.
Drafting is where you discover your story, your voice, your characters, the building blocks that will erect the edifice of your imagination.
After the draft, you have to be the toughest critic of your own work, checking that the spelling is correct, that your news story is accurate, fair and balanced. That your characters are full-bodied, their motives clear, the conflict established from the get-go, the climax stunning. That’s what revision is for and why it’s so important. But this assessment, as Stafford says, comes after you’ve written.
“Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper, not eternal bronze: let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. No one will rush out and print it as it stands.”
Jacques Barzun
Freewrite Your Way to Fluency
Lowering your standards is a good idea—in theory. But how do you apply it?
Freewriting.
It’s a writing strategy developed by Peter Elbow, who believed that writing called on “two skills that are so different that they usually conflict with each other: creating and criticizing.”
His solution: put your fingers to the keys or pick up your pen and begin writing.
As fast as possible.
No stopping.
No pausing to find just the right word.
No worries about spelling or punctuation, at times even sense. (I can hear your inner critic screaming, “Stop!” Pay no attention. Keep going.)
The trick is to type so fast that the clacking of the keys drowns out that voice.
“Freewriting helps with the root psychological or existential difficulty in writing: finding words in your head and putting them down on a blank piece of paper.”
Peter Elbow
You’ll be surprised by what happens. “The way I start writing is always the same,” said Cynthia Gorney, when she was writing award-winning features for The Washington Post. “I start to babble, sometimes starting in the middle of the story and usually fairly quickly I see how it’s going to start. It just starts shaping itself. “
At first my freewritings aren’t very coherent. I may start by writing, “I have no ideas or energy. Not a clue what to say.” But if I persist even if it’s just for ten to fifteen minutes, the Watcher lifts the gates, USUCK FM stops playing and prose worth reading appears on the screen.
Ever since I started lowering my standards by freewriting, I’ve achieved more success than ever before.
I write faster. I agonize less. I have more time for revision. I publish more.
If you want to switch the dial on your writing radio station, I suggest you let your creator create by lowering your standards.
Put that into practice by freewriting, generating drafts that can be turned over to the critic. Don’t be afraid to babble at first. The critic is always waiting , when you give it the chance, to make your writing better.
“Just start typing and don’t stop,” says social media consultant Sree Sreenivasan, who’s embraced the practice. “Keep going without hitting the backspace even if you have errors. This opens your mind and forces you to get something down. You can always rewrite.”
Use the clock as your ally. Pick a subject. The story, novel chapter or screenplay that won’t budge. Agree to freewrite for 15 minutes, then gulp and go. You’re just going to talk to the page, think with your fingers and connect with that voice that is truly you, without your inner critic interfering. Whenever you’re blocked, make this your solution.
Type fast, so fast that you can slip past the DJ at USUCK FM before he has time to cry out, “Hey, you, come back here! You suck!”
Lower your standards and you won’t.
Craft Query: What do you do to tune out USUCK FM?
May the writing go well.
Photograph by Alex Blăjan courtesy of unsplash.com
“Not only do I read aloud, my editor reads aloud. During the process, Mike Gordon will read the story and pick out things he wants to talk about, and then he’ll call you over to his desk and you just sit there and he reads the story aloud, and it’s excruciating. It’s excruciating and incredibly powerful at the same time because you immediately see all the places where you’re slowing down because he can’t read well out loud. So if he’s not reading it well, then I’m probably not writing it well. So you go back and try again until you get it to flow a little better.”
Writing teacher Donald M. Murray liked to say that when he read something that inspired him, “my hand itches for a pen.” “Writers,” he once wrote, “read to be inspired, to see the possibilities of language. They learn most about writing by writing, but they learn a great deal by reading.” If you’re having trouble finding inspiration or are stuck in place, choose a “sacred text.” It could be anything from Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets or the King James Bible to a novel or short story collection by one of your favorite authors. Read for pleasure. When something strikes you as wonderful, copy it out. See if you can apply its lessons to your own work. As I mentioned in the last issue, I’ve steeped myself in the “Collected Stories of John Cheever.” His diction has inspired me to work harder on my own word choices. His carefully woven sentences prod me to write with greater complexity. Reading writers whose work I admire helps me see what works in my own writing and what needs work. It can do the same for you.
