Author: chipswritinglessons_harnwk

Warning: May Keep You Up All Night

Bookbag

A lot of great news and I’ve been remiss in not sharing it with you all. I’ve just published a new book, “Writers on Writing: Inside the lives of 55 distinguished writers and editors.” Available on Amazon.com as a paperback and Kindle version, it’s a collection drawn from the “Four Questions with… interviews that appeared in this online space over the past two years. The book also contains 111 writing prompts you can respond to in your journal. (Every writer should have one).

In a few days, that gap will be filled with “Writers on Writing: The Journal,” which comes with 55 inspirational quotes, 55 coaching tips and the 111 journal writing prompts, along with 3-4 blank pages you can use to record your thoughts, observations, story ideas, poems, stories; the sky’s the limit.

Having been dissatisfied with the marketing and promotion of my first three books, I decided to leap into the world of self-publishing with these books. And what a trip it’s been. You can read about my adventures—here and here— and walk away with a solid grasp of what self-publishing entails. 

In his foreword, Roy Peter Clark, author of “Writing Tools” and “Murder Your Darlings,” offered fulsome praise for “Writers on Writing”:  “By asking four questions to 55 of our finest writers and editors, Chip Scanlan has hosted one of the greatest writing conferences you will ever attend.” 

But as someone who stayed up late as a child, “sneak reading” with a flashlight under my bed covers, I was most heartened by a reader complaint on my Facebook page: “Chip, I got my book Monday and I’m a little bit mad at you because I stayed up way too late reading it! You did a great job.” Oh well, I’ll just have to take it on the chin.:)  

As a self-publisher, I have to wear many hats. So I’m going to don my publicist hat for a moment to suggest that the two books are ideal holiday gifts for you and the writers and readers in your family and among your friends. They’re instructive, entertaining and inspiring. Writing teachers, at all levels, will find them useful to engage their students in the process of writing. Writing groups would find grist for lively discussions. Amazon is shipping them at a rapid pace, sometimes the very next day, Perhaps they should come with a warning on the cover: May keep you up all night reading.                                  

Happy Holidays,

Chip                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Craft Lesson: Keeping a Writing Workshop’s Spirit Alive

Craft Lessons

Over the years, I’ve attended dozens of writing workshops. I’ve taught at some, while at others, I sat in the audience, scribbling furiously as craft tips tumbled from the lips of accomplished writers and editors.

I’d come home, pockets crammed with business cards, piles of handouts, scraps of paper with jotted emails and reading lists, a notebook bulging with quotes and a contact high from a day or weekend surrounded by inspirational talk about my craft.

Invariably, however, the excitement would wither and I’d forget the great lessons I learned. 

The other day, I came across a column I wrote for Poynter Online after a National Writer’s Workshop in Hartford in 2003. Until the early aughts, Poynter teamed up with newspapers around the country to stage these weekend-long gatherings that brought writers and speakers together to share crucial lessons about writing and editing. Reading over the piece, I realized that keeping track of a speaker’s central message could keep alive the spirit of those heady two days. Here are ten lessons that stuck:

1. Identify an ambition. For Mark Bowden, author of “Black Hawk Down” and other best-selling narrative nonfiction, the secret of success lies in his habit of thinking big and doing stories that scare him. Try his method and pick a story “you’re not sure you can do.”

2. Figure out what your editor wants. “Editors are looking for ways to say yes,” said Debra Dickerson, who told the story of her rise from sharecropper’s daughter to best-selling writer. One easy way: ask your editor what she wants from you.

3. Put a snatch of dialogue in your next story. “Dialogue makes you feel like you’re actually there,” said literary journalist Walt Harrington. Start listening — and writing down — what people say to each other, whether it’s two council members battling over a proposal or two kids talking about their favorite Harry Potter “Bertie Bott” jelly beans. You can do the same with physical description, a scene, or any of the other elements of storytelling.

4. Dig out your copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Lynn Franklin advised writers to do what scientists do: “stand on the shoulders of giants.” Harper Lee’s classic tale of racism in a southern town is full of lessons about how to write about characters and place; John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” can teach you how to foreshadow and William Faulkner’s short story “The Barn Burning” is rich with lessons about symbolism, rhythm and pace.

5. Think like a storyteller. Ask the kinds of questions that Lisa Pollak, the former Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer for the Baltimore Sun, poses to herself:

• Who in this story has something at stake?

• Who is most affected?

• Who is nobody paying attention to?

• What about this story moves me? (Pollak’s favorite)

6. Get in the game. More than one writer this past weekend asked “How do I break in … on a magazine, writing creative nonfiction, the job market, writing a risky personal story?” There’s only one way, and that’s to take the first step — submit a story or a pitch — and not be deterred when you get rejected. Rejection is part of the writing life, and may not have anything to do with your story; your piece may really not meet a publication’s needs at this time. One Hartford speaker, small press publisher and novelist Ira Wood, counseled against heeding criticisms in rejection letters: consider rewriting only if you see a definite trend in editors’ responses. So write that pitch, finish that story even if you worry no one else will care or pick a subject that interests you and start reporting.

7. Become a document freak. That’s what helped Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Kiernan, who teaches at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, share the award for explanatory journalism with her colleagues while at the Chicago Tribune. Follow the paper trail–court records, police reports, transcripts–and then mine them for the details that are a storyteller’s gold.

8. Stop introducing the person with the camera as “my photographer.” R-E-S-P-E-C-T for your newsroom’s other craft disciplines, said Poynter’s visual journalism leader Kenny Irby, is the key to better collaboration and news storytelling.

9. Pick a perennial. Want to take a stab at the kind of riveting storytelling that Oregonian Pulitzer winner Tom Hallman Jr. talked about? Lower the risk by volunteering for one of those assignments journalists grudgingly have to write about every year (post-Thanksgiving shopping day, the day-after Christmas stampede to return presents, the circus comes to town, etc.) and use the occasion to try a narrative — a story that follows a store manager, or a bored husband, a circus first-timer. (Make sure you file a sidebar with the obligatory numbers, Chamber of Commerce quotes, etc.).

10. Before you write, ask The Washington Post’s David Von Drehle’s four focusing questions.

  • What’s the point?
  • Why does it matter?
  • Why is this story being told?
  • What does it say about life, the world, the times we live in?

Add one more: What is my story about in a single word? When you’re done, you’ll have a theme for your story and will likely have the first draft of a nut graf that sums it up for your reader.

The next time you have the good fortune to attend a writing workshop, take good notes. After the bloom fades, the lessons that captivated you but that you may have lost track of are there again for the picking.

Let Others Speak: Four Questions with Valerie Boyd

Interviews
Valerie Boyd/Photo by Jason Thrasher

Valerie Boyd is a professor of journalism and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Georgia, where she founded and directs the low-residency MFA Program in Narrative Nonfiction. She is author of the critically acclaimed Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, which was hailed by Alice Walker as “magnificent” and “extraordinary”; by The Boston Globe as “elegant and exhilarating”; and by The Denver Post as “a rich, rich read.” Formerly arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Valerie has written articles, essays and reviews for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Bon Appetit, Creative Nonfiction, The Oxford American, Essence and Atlanta Magazine, among other publications. She is currently senior consulting editor for The Bitter Southerner magazine. Valerie has spent the past several years curating and editing a collection of the personal journals of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker. “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker” will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2022. Valerie’s edited collection, “Bigger Than Bravery: Black Writers on the Pandemic, Shutdown and Uprising of 2020,” also will be published in 2022.

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?

The most important lesson I’ve learned as a storyteller—as both a writer and an editor—is to be quiet enough to let others speak. Even if I am the narrator, or the lead storyteller, every character has a story, every person in the room has a voice—and every story deserves space to unfurl, every voice deserves a listener. My job is to listen, to amplify, to synthesize, to distill. 

What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?

The biggest surprise of my writing life has been my development as an editor and a teacher of writing, alongside being a writer myself. Writing is often a solitary pursuit, and one stereotype of the writer is that of an isolated, anti-social hermit. A genius perhaps, but still a lonely hermit. Yet I revel in my connections with others and I deeply value collaboration and community. So I have pleasantly surprised myself by fashioning a writing-adjacent career that allows me to preserve my precious solitude as a writer while also calling forth community. In this way, I can be selfish with my writing time and simultaneously generous with my offerings to others as an editor and teacher. For me, this is so gratifying. In 2015, writer/filmmaker/world-changer Ava DuVernay tweeted something that became instantly quotable T-shirt material, and it certainly resonated with me: “If your dream only includes you, it’s too small.”

If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?

I think of myself as a producer. Whether I’m working as a writer or editor, my role is to bring all the cooperative components together to produce an amazing, moving, memorable show.

What’s the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?

The best piece of writing advice I ever received was also wonderful life advice. I was about to go on my first book tour, and the novelist Tina McElroy Ansa advised: “Always eat breakfast.” A book tour, like a life, can be so unpredictable, she suggested. Who knew if you’d have time to eat along the way? So feed yourself—whatever that may mean for you—before you rush headlong into the day. That advice has resonated with me through huge challenges in my life: If I can just feed myself, first thing, I’ll make it through whatever the day brings.

Craft Lesson: The Transformation of Documentation

Craft Lessons


When I started reporting for a tiny daily newspaper in 1972, a notepad, pen, manual typewriter, camera and a landline telephone were the only tools I had to collect information for my stories.


Those analog days are long gone. Today, a panoply of new information sources and outlets cram the reporter’s toolbox as well as prosecutors. We saw it with the prosecutions of the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrectionists whose own videos, text messages and emails were used to confirm their guilt.

We see it regularly in stories where journalists, especially during the COVID 19 lockdown, had to use their ingenuity to report stories from their homes.

To illustrate a family riven by a mother who bought into post-2020 Presidential election and QAnon conspiracies, Washington Post reporter Jose A. Del Real, unable to travel, relied not just on traditional phoners, he “also mined digital communications, sifting through hundreds of anguished Facebook posts, emails and text messages the siblings exchanged with each other and with their defensive mother,” I wrote in a Nieman Storyboard annotation of the piece. “Del Real uses them to build an escalating series of scenes, giving his story a revealing, epistolary quality, reminiscent of 19th-century letters between families and friends.” 


Jason Fagone, a narrative writer with the San Francisco Chronicle, went a step further. In “The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.,” he spliced his three-part series with eerie conversations, generated by a web robot powered by a supercharged artificial intelligence program, between a man grieving the death of his fiancee and her A.I. chatbot.


Mitchell S. Jackson won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for his story in Runner’s World about the life and death of Ahmaud Arbery who was killed running while black in a Georgia suburb. Jackson, a novelist, created a vivid reconstruction by culling a New York Times visual investigation of smartphone videos of the murder taken by one of the three white men accused of murdering Arbery.

Of course, journalists have been mining public databases for decades and continue to use these digital warehouses to buttress shocking investigations. (I used one in the late 1980s to expose the dearth of arson convictions in Rhode Island when I worked for the Providence Journal-Bulletin.)

But social media, smartphones and the lightning speed of the Internet often outpaces such time and labor-intensive projects now.

This new brand of journalism signals an important warning to today’s journalists. If you’re not constantly moving beyond traditional information sources and searching for innovative new ones, you’re cheating your audience of journalism that reflects a landmark transformation of documentation that has revolutionized storytelling. And you’ll be left behind.

An Act of Generosity: Four Questions with Bronwen Dickey

Interviews
Photo by Rebecca Necessary

Bronwen Dickey is the author of Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) and a contributing editor at The Oxford American. Her essays and reporting have also appeared in Esquire, POLITICO Magazine, Newsweek, Outside, Men’s Journal, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, Garden & Gun, Popular Mechanics, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Artist’s Residency Fellowship, a Hearst Editorial Excellence Award in reporting, a Lowell Thomas Award in travel journalism, and in 2017 she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in feature writing. She lives in North Carolina, where she teaches journalism at Duke University.

What’s the greatest lesson you’ve learned as a writer?


When I was in college, I thought the point of writing was to impress people with all the big words I knew and all the fancy things I could do on the page. I was always grasping for others’ approval, as though the Big Arrow of Life were pointed in one direction: Toward me. I wanted to be a Writer more than I wanted to write, and that made me miserable. 
That’s one of the reasons I prefer to speak about the craft in terms of “skill,” not “talent.” Skill is something you can learn and perfect if you care enough to put in the effort, whereas talent feels slippery and mysterious. The same goes for “work” vs. “inspiration.” If I waited to write until I was “inspired,” I’d never type a single word. But work? That I can show up for, again and again. 
Over time, I’ve come to understand that nonfiction storytelling is not a performing art. It’s not about praise or acclaim or literary pyrotechnics. If you think about it that way, you will always feel like a failure. The best writing is not about the writer. It’s an act of generosity. It’s a humble and imperfect gift one person offers another, a way of saying to a bunch of strangers you will probably never meet, “I went out exploring and I learned something incredible. Do you have a second? I’d love to share it with you.” That’s the greatest lesson. That the Big Arrow points the other way. 

What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?


That the work never gets easier. Never, ever, ever. The more you do it, the more possibilities you see in front of you, and that can make you crazy. You just have to show up and plow your acre the best you can.
As I tell my students, every story is a house, but every story doesn’t have to be Versailles or the Taj Mahal. It can be a cozy one-room cabin.  Your job, as the architect of the house, is to 1) make sure the roof doesn’t cave in and 2) make it comfortable enough that a stranger might want to spend some time there. That’s it! 


If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?


I’m a dependable, non-judgmental tour guide through the rocky—and occasionally perilous—territory of the subject. 


What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?

“You have to love it. Because if you don’t, the people who love it will kick your ass.” — Chris Jones


“Write what you want to say. The questioning, the changing, the editing…that all comes later.” — my dad

Craft Lesson: Write Around the Margins

Craft Lessons

Finding time to write is a constant challenge in most writer’s lives. Except for the fortunate few whose bestsellers keep them afloat, most of us search—and often—fail to find free moments for dreaming of ideas, structuring, composing, and revising the stories that are closest to our souls.

 
As an inveterate listener of The New York Times Book Review podcast, I was heartened the other day to read the Review’s editor, Pamela Paul, touch on the subject in a recent interview.


“I don’t get to write during the day because my day job is overseeing book coverage…and editing,” she said. “That means writing is squeezed into the margins of my days.” Along with motherhood, hers is a full life, so it’s interesting to see what borders exist that enable her to find time to write books. She’s published several, the most recent being, “100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet.”


“Pre-COVID,” Paul said, “I did most of my writing on the train to work. Initially, I persuaded myself that I would only need to work one-way. That delusion was quickly dispelled by reality, and when I’m writing a book, it generally takes up much of the weekends as well.”


Paul also writes essays or short pieces for her paper and those are written “in a fury of inspiration. It spills out quickly and prevents me from sleeping.”


But what if you commute by car, are already kept up at night by your baby’s squalling, or simply need a good night’s rest to function during the day? What if much of the weekend is taken up by chores, family time, dates, etc? Where can other margins be found? Here are a few possibilities:

  • Set the alarm an hour early to write while the rest of the house is asleep.
  • Pass on lunch with colleagues to eat at your desk and use the rest of the time to work on your novel, short story or essay. 
  • Carve an hour or two for yourself on the weekend, which leaves the rest of the 48 hours to accomplish everything you couldn’t do during the week. 
  • Write in short bursts. It’s amazing how many words you can type in 15 minutes if you lower your standards and remarkable to see how quickly you can generate a rough draft ready for revision.
  • Finally, take a hard look at how you spend your days. How many hours do TV sports consume? Scrolling through Instagram and TikTok?  How much time spent binge-watching “Squid Game” could you devote to writing?

If you’re too wiped out at the end of the day—I get that—at least try putting down your phone and take your draft—either on your laptop or better still, a printout—to the couch or your favorite chair and start marking it up. This sort of task switching, I’ve found, is energizing. Afterward, I can’t wait to make the changes. 


Just as margins exist on all sides of the page, so do borders of time in our lives. The smart writer looks for—and takes advantage—of them.

Say Yes to Things: Four Questions with Kelley Benham French

Interviews
Kelley Benham French

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about writing?

That writing is an extension of your lived experience, and no number of all-nighters at the computer or overtime shifts in the newsroom will bring maturity, wisdom, empathy or perspective to your work. It’s hard to describe something you’ve never felt. It’s hard to truly listen unless you’re willing to be changed. The writers I admire have rich and messy lives. So, say yes to things. Say yes to walking instead of driving, to loving something you are bound to lose, to spending time with someone lonely, to booking the cheap ticket at the last second, to doing whatever the thing is you would do were you not afraid.

What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?

That I’m still doing it. Like everyone, I started out sure I’d fail or be forced into PR by poverty. I am a serious introvert, and I wasn’t sure I could do the reporting, honestly. But it turns out that introversion is just one more tool. I’ve had an amazing time doing work I cared about for people I admired. I met the smartest, quirkiest, fiercest, most loyal people and married one of them. I’ve made plenty of money. I have always felt good about this thing that I devoted my professional life to. It’s an honorable and important thing.

If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?

I’m Chicken Little. I worry a lot, and fret and brood and pace and sulk, and then while I’m painting the garage or trimming the dog’s toenails, I’ll get a piece of an idea, then another piece, and another. So when I’m writing, it always looks like I’m not writing, and I always feel like I’m going to die or get fired. I don’t sit down at a keyboard until I have to, but by then, it all just comes out of me and it’s fine. This really annoys my husband, by the way.

 What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?

Two cheers for understatement – Mike Wilson

Kelley Benham French is senior editor for narrative and special projects at USA TODAY and a professor of practice in journalism at Indiana University. She spent a decade at the Tampa Bay Times, where she was a 2013 Pulitzer finalist. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with her three daughters and her husband, the writer Thomas French.

Craft Lesson: Persuading kids to talk

Craft Lessons

Any reporter who has tried to interview young children knows how laconic and reluctant they often can be. Even open-ended questions designed to initiate conversations are answered with “Yes”, “No,” “I don’t know,” or worse, silence. But there’s hope.

For nearly a decade, John Woodrow Cox, an enterprise reporter for The Washingon Post, has perfected the art of persuading children to share their experience and thoughts about a fraught subject—their devastating experiences with gun violence as victims and witnesses to mass shootings and those traumatized even by a single death. In 2018, Cox was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a portfolio of his stories on the topic. He is the author of “Childen Under Fire: An American Crisis,” a new, disturbing, but must-read book for gun owners and parents. In a recent interview, he shared his techniques with me.


“The first time you meet a kid they tend to go one direction or the other; either they desperately want your attention and want to talk to you and will say anything or they don’t want to talk at all. They’re very shy and standoffish and pretty closed up,” Cox told me.


“I talk to them like an adult. I explain who I am and what I’m doing and why,  that I work for a newspaper and I’m here to tell their story if that’s okay with them.”

Cox often likes to talk to kids “in the spaces where they’re most comfortable, which is frequently in their rooms because they want to show you their toys and the things they like the most. I’ve always used things like making sure my eye level is not higher than theirs. I don’t want tobe above them physically, I don’t want them to think I’m an authority figure because I’m not. And I want them to know that they can always stop talking about something if they don’t want to talk about it.

Repetition is another key technique, he said. The more he shows up, the more relaxed the children become. That’s his approach to reporting: “always show up and keep showing up…because good things happen in the reporting process when you’re there, and you’re there again and again and again.”


Cox recognizes that reporters believe children will be recalcitrant subjects, but he’s found the opposite. “Ultimately, kids love attention, like any of us. If you’re sincere, and genuine in your interest, they can sense that and they’re often willing to open up, even about the hardest things they’ve been through.”

THE MEANING HIDDEN IN FRONT OF ME: FOUR QUESTIONS WITH THOMAS FRENCH

Interviews

Thomas French with his daughters Brookie and Greysi

Thomas French teaches journalism at Indiana University. For nearly three decades before, French worked as a narrative project reporter at the St. Petersburg Times/Tampa Bay Times, specializing in serialized storytelling. Angels & Demons, a story about the murders of a mother and her two teen daughters while visiting Florida, earned him a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1998. French is also the author of four nonfiction books. Most recently, he and his wife Kelley co-authored Juniper, a book about the premature birth of their oldest daughter.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?

I’ve learned so many things over the years. I’ve come to believe that one of the greatest things about being a journalist is that it asks you to keep learning something new all the time, every day. I guess the single most important lesson has been the realization that meaning lies everywhere around us and within us. 
One time I asked a subject of mine – a self-taught scholar of many disciplines — what she liked to read for her own enjoyment. Her 12-year-old son, listening to the interview, blurted out, “She reads puppy books.” I asked what a puppy book was, and the boy grabbed a worn and dog-eared romance novel off the shelf — The Golden Barbarian, with the cover showing a young maiden melting in the arms of the aforementioned savage —- and said, “You know, they fall in love, they get married, they have puppies.” Then he handed me the book with a knowing grin and said, “Check out page 192.”
I loved that this brilliant woman’s 12-year-old son knew where the dirty parts were in her romance novels. It was one of those details so beautiful that I knew right away it would end up in my final draft. But it wasn’t until much further down the road, after this woman ended her marriage and decided to raise their five children on their own — all because she was sure that there was another man waiting for her, a man better suited for her — that I realized I had missed the meaning of this woman’s devotion to her puppy books. She was lonely. She did not believe that the man beside her understood her or truly knew her or was right for her. She wanted to find someone who would love her the way she deserved, and by God, she found him not long afterwards and married him and moved with him and the kids to a big house in France.
The mystery of who this woman was and what she truly wanted had been in front of me the whole time, hidden inside The Golden Barbarian. And I had missed it. I had overlooked all of these big things waiting inside this little detail.
It was just another reminder, one of hundreds over the years, that I need to pay attention to everything and look for the meaning hidden right in front of me.


What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?

 Okay, so I read this passage once in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso’s astonishing retelling and reframing of Greek mythology. It was an insight the writer had about the multiple versions of each myth and all the heroes and gods and goddesses.
“Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths,” Calasso wrote. “But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo.” 
Those lines hit me like a thunderbolt. I was about 35 at the time, and I knew that in those few decades I had already lived several lives and had already died and been reborn several times. And if that was true of me, then it had to be true of all of us, not just mythical figures, but the human beings whose stories I was trying to chronicle. And when all of this washed through me, I realized I had a lot more digging to do in my reporting. Because up until then, I hadn’t recognized the multiplicity of each person’s experiences. I hadn’t seen it, because I hadn’t known to look for it, and once I did learn it, my reporting instantly went deeper.


If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?

Wow. On my better days, I guess I’d compare myself to someone who digs, a miner maybe. Anne Hull once scribbled me a note on a piece of scrap paper and gave me some advice that I’ve held onto tightly ever since. I hope she’ll forgive me for sharing it: Don’t turn back. Understatement. Insight. The scalpel. Tool into the past without misty eyes but with the compass and charts of an explorer. Tunnel there . . . As the boys in Princeton, W.V. say: Get dirty, brother.


What is the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?

 I’ve been extremely lucky in my writing life to have learned from so many great journalists. The best advice I ever received — and I received it from many — is the same advice I give myself every time on deadline and the advice I give every writer I work with, whether they’re doing a quick daily or burrowing inside a massive book.
“Keep going.”

Craft Lesson: Devote yourself to outlining

Craft Lessons

There are many ways to find the order that is right for your story. 

Make a list of what you want to say.

What piece of information should be at the beginning?

What piece of information should be at the end?

What belongs in the middle?

Ask the questions the reader will ask and put them in the order they will be asked.

Assign values to quotations.

Then there is the outline , the writer’s tool that summarizes the main points or important details before you write your story. It’s a map, a guide.

I’m not talking about the type, festooned with Roman numerals, that your teachers demanded during your school days. Yucck! But when the story, especially, is narrative nonfiction, an outline allows the writer to pull back from the mass of notes, interview transcripts, scenes, quotes, statistics, observations and other material collected during the reporting phrase.

If your interest is fiction, before you write a novel or short story, the outline lays out the important scenes before the drafting begins.

Whichever method you choose, ordering is a crucial part of the writing process.

I recently encountered an extreme method of outlining from a writer who describes herself as a “devoted outliner at the start.” Lizzie Presser is a reporter for ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative news organization. I Interviewed her about her story, “The Black American Amputation Epidemic,” one of two pieces that won the 2021 National Magazine Award for public interest,

I asked Presser to unpack her writing process as part of an annotation for Nieman Storyboard, which celebrates the art and craft of narrative nonfiction. The resulting conversation amounted to a master class for anyone interested in that challenging but immensely rewarding form and the art and craft of the outline. 

For this story,” Presser told me, “I printed out hundreds of pages of interviews and transcribed scenes and tried to read through them within 24 hours so the material was fresh in my mind. I usually outline on a computer, but in this case, there was so much that I wanted to use that I started cutting up paragraphs and quotes and details and laying them out on the floor. This is the most difficult and the most exciting part of the process for me. I’m trying to craft a narrative with suspense at the same time as I’m trying to construct a logical argument. Once I’d laid out my outline on the floor, I left it there for weeks as I tried to write through it. I would move pieces around on the floor to see how changes would play.”

Granted such efforts demand time — in Presser’s case, she spent a total of two months to report and write her story–that may be beyond the reach of many writers. Still, there’s no reason why you can’t try a limited approach for a daily story or a takeout due in a week. Whatever your deadline, Presser’s approach to outlining longform stories is inspirational and instructive.

More importantly, it contains lessons of value to those who practice as well those who aspire to model such excellence. Even if you lack the resources Presser had, there are nuggets of methodology that you can still apply to your next story.

At the very least, you can devote yourself to outlining, choosing which approaches to take that best suit the time and reporting you have collected. Even on deadline, outlining can map a story that enables readers to understand its meaning and message through a coherent structure.