William of Occam was a 14th century philospher, monk, and — few people realize — police reporter for the Occam News. (Okay, I made that last one up.)

He is remembered as the father of the medieval principle of parsimony, or economy, that advises anyone confronted with multiple explanations or models of a phenomenon to choose the simplest explanation first. Why Occam’s Razor? Because scientists use it every day or because it cuts through the fog of confusion are two explanations I’ve heard.

“If you hear hooves, think horses,” is one way to understand the principle. Or put another way, Keep it Simple, Stupid. K.I.S.S.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my introduction to Occam’s Razor came in my early 20s, when I was working for a crummy little newspaper and dreaming about becoming a writer, but doing more dreaming than writing,

A friend introduced me to a published writer. I asked her how I could become one, too.

First, she said, you have to read all the time. Read everything — books, stories, newspapers, magazines. Everything. Read. Read. Read.

Okay, I nodded. What else?

You have to write, she said. All the time. Every day. Write. Write. Write.

I leaned forward expectantly, waiting to hear the rest of her advice.

That’s it, she said.

“Thanks a lot,” I remember thinking. “For nothing.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but she was right. If you want to be a writer you have to read all the time and write all the time. It’s as simple as that.

Being a callow youth, I couldn’t accept it. There had to be more to it than that. Some magic formula.

But there really isn’t.

Want to write a story? Sit down and start writing. And then start revising.

Want to get published? Submit that story to a magazine or a literary journal. Write a novel or a screenplay. There’s no guarantee you will succeed, although it’s a safe bet that if you never try you won’t make it either. It’s that simple, and difficult, but well worth the challenge.

What many writers I meet seem to want and need is permission.

Can I do this? Can you do that? Is it okay to…?

My answer is always, yes. Yes, you can. It may suck, you may fail, you may get rejected, but the only way you’ll ever find out is by trying.

Want to write well? Follow George Orwell’s six rules from “Politics and the English Language.”

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Heed the prescription of “The Elements of Style” by Willian Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. A sampling from the classic text:

1. Make every word tell.
2. Omit necessary words.
3. Use parallel constructions on concepts that are parallel.
4. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas.
5. Use definite, specific language

And finally the simple advice I try to heed for compelling writing.

• Use short words.
• Short paragraphs.
• Short sentences, but don’t be afraid to vary length for pacing and style.
• Go on a “to be” hunt,’ striking out passive instances of “is, was, was.” Replace with action verbs.
• Search “ly” for unnecessary adverbs.
• Trim bloated quotes.
• Spell checks. Cliche check.
• Read aloud.
• Research. Revise. Rewrite. 

Looking back, I wish that writer had been more specific with her advice. Certainly, constant reading and writing and critical ae critical to becoming a writer. but there is so much more to becoming a published writer.

Like her counsel, some of this advice is obvious. But there’s a reason that scientists and other investigators continue to cite Occam’s Razor, more than 600 years after his death. It’s that simple.

Craft Query: What writing advice do you follow?

May the writing go well.

“Photograph by Josh Sorenson courtesy of unsplash.com

I’m bleary-eyed as I write this. Late last night, I finished several weeks of binge-watching “The West Wing,” all 156 episodes of the nostalgic political series, which ran on television for seven seasons between 1999  and 2006, dramatizing the Democratic presidency of liberal Joshua “Jed” Bartlett and his young, idealistic staff. 

The show has become a kind of televised comfort food for many Americans as the country is swamped by partisan bickering.

The plots are captivating, the dialogue, like its characters, is whip-smart. But while I watched the show for enjoyment, I also viewed it through the prism of a writer interested in story structure. What I found especially fascinating was a particular approach to storytelling that I think can be useful to writers of fiction and nonfiction: digressive narrative.

This is a stylistic device that writers employ to provide background information, describe the motivations of its characters and heighten suspense. They’re sudden detours from the story at hand. 

Writer/creator Aaron Sorkin uses the tool throughout the series, but its power is especially evident and instructive in the first two episodes of the second season. 

 “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen” is a two-parter about an assassination attempt on President Bartlett and its aftermath. Using quick cuts, Sorkin toggles between the shooting by white supremacists that wounds the President and Josh Lyman, his deputy chief of staff, and a separate storyline: the creation of an upstart campaign staff that launched the obscure New England governor into the highest office in the land. (You can watch parts one and two on You Tube; Sorkin’s scripts for parts one and two are also available.) 

Novelists and nonfiction narrative writers also use digressions.

J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher In the Rye,” is replete with these departures from the main plot, mirroring the manic personality of its rebellious teen hero, Holden Caulfield.

Digressions seem to stray from the main topic, but their purpose is to heighten the reader’s understanding. A famous one is Holden’s fixation with a pair of nuns he meets at a restaurant. He helps them with their suitcases, feels badly that they are eating just toast and coffee, and gives them a ten dollar donation.

 “That’s what I liked about those nuns,” he reflects. “You could tell, for one thing, that they never went anywhere swanky for lunch. It makes me so damn sad when I thought about it, their never going anywhere swanky for lunch or anything. I knew it wasn’t too important, but it made me sad anyway.”

The nuns reappear in his consciousness as he worries about their poverty. At the novel’s end, he looks for the nuns, wondering if he might run into them collecting donations. Like many digressions, Salinger’s focus is on minor characters. In this case, their only purpose is to tell the reader more about Holden and his concern with morality that is a major theme. 

Nonfiction writers also turn to digressions. In “The John McPhee Reader,” editor William Howarth describes how the narrative nonfiction master’s “diving into the loops and stalls of digression, circling the main subject for a while” that “works his characters into a suspenseful plot.”

Many writers, like Sorkin, use digression as flashbacks. Others like McPhee take literary off ramps from their main story for informative digressions on everything from geology to roadkill. But sudden interruptions have other uses as well.

 “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America,” is Erik Larson’s nonfiction book about two warring enterprises—building and murder—during the construction of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. 

To tell the twin stories, Larson relies on repeated digressions, alternating the story of how the Exposition came to be with a more chilling tale of H.H. Holmes, a serial killer at loose in the city. Each story is powerful in their own right, but switching between them makes for a relentless read. It’s hard to lose interest when you have two suspenseful narratives that you can braid into a single story, which is why digressions can be such a useful narrative strategy.

I didn’t know the term at the time, but as a reporter for the Providence Journal Bulletin in 1981, I employed a digressive narrative to heighten suspense and give background information.

“In Sorrow Thou Shalt Bring Forth Children” opens on Jackie Rushton, a young woman about to give birth in a local hospital. An encounter with a nurse convinces her that the birth has gone terribly wrong. “I’ve lost the baby,” she tells herself. “The baby is gone.” The story then switches to the past as I use a digression to take Jackie and her husband Rob through courtship, marriage and parenthood and a new pregnancy. The section ends at a baby shower when Jackie’s water breaks. After the digression dispenses with the requisite back story, the main narrative picks up from the opening scene and without interruption follows Jackie and Rob through a perilous night when they don’t know if their baby will live or not. 

Not everyone is a fan of the device. “It’s really hard to jump back and forth in time without giving the reader whiplash,” says New Yorker contributor Jennifer Kahn. Alice Mayhew, the legendary Simon & Schuster editor who died in February at 87 after a storied career bringing best-sellers to print, wasn’t a believer, either. She was known, according to a 2004 profile, for “unsentimentally pruning away digressions, even when — especially when — they are hundreds of pages long. Mayhew’s faith in chronological organization is said to be nearly religious.”

I think you can overdose on them, but used judiciously and with skill digressions, can engage readers who may welcome these temporary departures from the main plot. They’re certainly worth studying. You can start with The West Wing’s “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen”  or “The Catcher in the Rye” and then experiment with your own stories. Have fun!

This post appeared originally in Nieman Storyboard.

We celebrate the winners of elections. Cheer Super Bowl victors and the rising stock market. 4.0 grades and 800 SAT scores get our attention and praise. So do bestseller lists, the National Book Awards and the Pulitzers.

In our success-driven culture, it’s hard to accept that failure, not triumph, is a routine part of the writing craft, a constant in a writer’s life.

Sometimes we get lucky and the first draft is the final one. Sometimes the fates shine upon us and the first lead we write sings. Sometimes the agent or the editor says yes. 

But on the journey to make meaning with words, we often stumble. The draft is a jumble, the language sinks rather than soars. Rejection follows submission, sometimes so frequently, it’s easy to lose heart, to give up rather than try and lose. Failing is never fun, but it’s essential for those who practice the craft of writing, indeed any art form. 

I’ve been giving failure a lot of thought recently after discovering “The Fail Safe,” a new podcast devoted to writing and failure. Its creators aim to explore “how today’s most successful writers grapple with and learn from failure.” If you’re feeling like one, its guests offer a bracing dose of reality, as well as a modicum of comfort. 

”Being an artist depends necessarily on a  great tolerance for failure. It’s impossible to make art unless you give yourself permission to fail every day.“ That’s Garth Greenwell, author of the best-selling, critically-acclaimed, novel ”What Belongs to You” speaking in the inaugural episode. 

In the second, novelist and short story writer Chris Boucher spoke about the decade it took to write his first novel, “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.” “If there wasn’t daily failure there was almost-daily failure for a long time,” he said. Boucher didn’t have a plotline for two years. A recent short story went through more than 30 drafts before it was published. “There are so many dead ends, so many false starts,” he said, “that I consider it part of the practice.”

.

Samuel Beckett “came to believe failure was an essential part of any artist’s work, even as it remained their responsibility to try to succeed,” Chris Power wrote in a Guardian essay about the revered modernist novelist and playwright. Beckett couldn’t find a publisher for his first novel. Sales for the short story collection he plundered from the book tanked.

But Beckett refused to surrender to the despair that accompanies failures. 

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter,” he famously wrote in his short story  “Worstword Ho.” “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Failing better eventually brought him success, including a Nobel Prize for literature.

When I consider my own failures— the rejected stories, the elusive prizes, the novel abandoned and the play that I never sent out because I was afraid of rejection — it tends to make me more anxious than depressed. Will the writing well run dry?  Will I ever achieve all my dreams? What I took away from the first two episodes of “The Fail Safe” is that failure and anxiety are strands in the DNA of the artistic life. But there is a way to combat them. 

“The only strategy for making that anxiety bearable,” said Greenwell, “is showing up every day to do the work. Whether the work shows up or not is out of your hands, but you can show up for the work to happen.” After that, he said, the rest is all luck.

These writers have helped me redefine the nature of failure. It is not losing out on prizes or even publication.

“What failure means for a writer is to stop writing,” Greenwell said. “The only thing we have control over is showing up to do the work.” 

“And that,” he added, “means giving ourselves as many possible chances as we can to be lucky.”

So I’ll give myself more chances to be lucky and hope you’ll do the same by doing what successful writers do no matter how many failures they face. They show up and do the work. They court failure every day, hoping for victory.

I started the day in the usual way, dressed and took my dog for his morning walk, brewed a cup of sweet Black Irish tea, quickly scanned the news and then opened a file labeled “Diary 2020.”

I wrote for about ten minutes. 

Jan. 21. 44 degrees this morning. Arctic by Florida standards, Parka, watch cap, gloves to walk Leo. Didn’t blow smoke but the wind cut like a knife through butter. Strange dream last night, David M., lanky, ginger nasty piece of work, tricked me into going to NYC with Neal, only Neal didn’t come and it turned out we were going to help someone move. Met the mother who told their kids they could have “a doughnut and three hot dogs for breakfast.” The work was overwhelming and I tried to quit but he kept tricking me into more. Finally, he stole my shoes and that was it. I ditched him. Only problem, when I looked up, I didn’t know where I was. NYC was foreign territory of high brick buildings. Wanted to go home but felt I should visit the art museum. Found myself in a maze of a mall. Fortunately, Leo’s barking woke me up. Having trouble with the novel. Still keeping to daily sessions but having trouble writing a page a day. Need to follow the advice in today’s post — answer the six questions to drive plot. For some reason, am having trouble switching from pantsing. The sky is a wintry, pale blue. The trees wave slowly, like a monarch parading through commoners in a gilded coach. Axios reports cell phones are banned during the impeachment trial. They’ll be twitching like a junkie jonesing for a fix. Today’s task: draft post about the importance of keeping a diary. 

If you haven’t already guessed, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to keep a diary. It’s not the first such promise. I have at least a dozen notebooks, dated early in the year. But soon the entries peter out and the diary’s forgotten.

The other day,  however, I stumbled upon a quote that made me think I needed to start anew this year.  In a Paris Review interview, the late British novelist John Fowles says, 

“I am a great believer in diaries, if only in the sense that bar exercises are good for ballet dancers: it’s often through personal diaries—however embarrassing they are to read now—that the novelist discovers his true bent, that he can narrate real events and distort them to please himself, describe character, observe other human beings, hypothesize, invent, all the rest. I think that is how I became a novelist, eventually.”

More than one writer agrees with Fowles, I found, thanks to an entry from Maria Popova’s excellent blog, “Brain Pickings.”

Keeping a diary, writers cited by Popova reveal, is an essential part of a writer’s life.

It’s a daily task that exercises the writing muscles, an early morning foray into the unconscious journeys of dreams and observations that can surprise and inspire further writing.

Today’s entry, for example, gives me a description of a departure from Florida’s sunny climate, a caustic take on a high school classmate I could use in the novel I’m composing. What I would do with that bizarre breakfast I don’t know. but I have it stored for future retrieval. 

But a diary’s prose need not be polished. “The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice,”  the English writer Virginia Woolf said. “It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.”

Looking over today’s entry, I cringe at the cliches, the gaps that make the stories within incomplete. But I like, “lanky, ginger,” as a way to describe this high school classmate and the addict metaphor for the U.S. Senators denied their cellphones. There are seeds that might sprout someday.

I’m comforted if this post, flawed as it is, inspires you to launch a diary. Brenda Ueland, author of the writing advice classic, “If You Want to Write.” advises writers to “Keep a slovenly, headlong, impulsive, honest diary…You will touch only what interests you.”

The act of keeping a  diary, what Popova called “this private art,” is an essential discipline. Madeleine L’Engle (“A Wrinkle in Time“) has three rules for aspiring writers: Read, write and keep a diary or a journal as some refer to it. 

John Steinbeck kept a diary while he was writing “Grapes of Wrath.” The opening was prosaic for a novel that would win the Pulitzer Prize and was cited prominently when Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

May 31, 1938: “Here is the diary of the book and it will be interesting to see how it works out.” he wrote in an entry published in “Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath.”

Later, when he shifted to writing “East of Eden,” Steinbeck began each day by writing a letter to his editor, Pascal “Pat” Covici,”a practice chronicled in “Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters.” It was a warm-up exercise that the author used a baseball image to describe–“a way of getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game.”

“If you want to write,” L’Engle says, “you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair.”

Thanks to these writers, this year I’m sold on the idea. I hope to make it a part of my morning routine, along with walking the dog and sweet tea. I urge you to consider doing the same, keeping it slovenly, headlong, impulsive and honest. Not a bad way to start a writer’s day.  

I’m too young to make it as a writer.

I’m too old.

Excuses, excuses. These two defenses cripple many writers from doing the work it takes to produce a novel, screenplay, a poem, a nonfiction book or article or an enterprise story. 

I’ve heard—and made—them over the years. They keep writers from achieving many of their writing dreams which is a darn shame. 

I’ve sat with writers who, with sincerity and some madness, make them. Here’s what I want to tell them:

Langston Hughes published his first major work when he was 19. Stephen King, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were 20. 21: Bret Easton Ellis and Mary Shelley. 22: Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury. Worried you’re too young? Read the rest of this list.

James Michener wrote 40 books after he turned 40.  Raymond Chandler was 43 years old when he published his first novel, “The Big Sleep.” Anna Sewell started writing “Black Beauty” when she was 51; she was 57 when she sold the book. Frank McCourt published his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Angela’s Ashes” when he was 66. Harriet Doer’s first novel, “Stones of Ibarra” won the National Book Award. It was published when she was 74. Worried you’re too old? Read the rest of this list.

Here’s another potent excuse, one fueled by what psychologists call the “Victim Mentality.” 

I’m quitting because I was rejected. Do you think you’re the first?

“First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?” That was the response of one of the multiple publishers who turned down Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” .

“An irresponsible holiday story that will never sell.” That was the rejection Kenneth Grahame received for his classic “The Wind in the Willows.”

“An endless nightmare. I think the verdict would be ‘Oh don’t read that horrid book.’” H.G. Wells got this rejection for “The War of the Worlds,” still in print more than a century after it was published. 

Joseph Heller got 22 rejections for his satirical masterpiece “Catch-22.” One of them read, “I haven’t the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say. Apparently the author intends it to be funny.” For more on famous authors and their rejections, read the rest of the list here. 

There are lots of other excuses writers make. I’m too tired. My friends give me a hard time because I don’t have time for them. I’m not inspired. Revision means I’ve failed. I don’t have enough time.

Go ahead and use them. You’ll get nowhere fast.

But here’s what I’d rather say. Challenge them. You can make time. Mothers write during their baby’s nap time. When I was working demanding jobs, I got a lot done just by setting my alarm a half-hour early and writing. Scott Turow wrote the first of his best-selling thrillers, “Presumed Innocent,” on the train to his job as a federal prosecutor.

Good friends understand. Inspiration happens when you’re at your desk. And revision offers unlimited chances to make your writing better.

 Excuses try to release a person from blame. When it comes to writing, as with many other endeavors, most of the time there’s no one to blame but yourself. It’s easy for me to say take responsibility, but what I’d rather say is you don’t need to make excuses. Do the work.

“Getting good as a writer, or any kind of storyteller, seems to me a lifelong pursuit,” says Jacqui Banaszynski, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and editor of Nieman Storyboard which celebrates narrative nonfiction. “And one that demands we realize there is always another level to reach and dare ourselves to take some creative risks as we get there.”

Keep that counsel close. Dare yourself. And just bear in mind that if there’s anything the history of publishing demonstrates, it’s that writing success has no shelf life, and there’s no accounting for taste. 

There are two types of writers: plotters, who plan out their story, sometimes in great detail before they begin, and “pantsers,” who prefer to write without knowing the outcome in advance,  content to sit at their desk and discover as they go along. I’m one of the latter.

But recently I pulled a book from my shelves that has led me to reconsider my approach. “Plot” is a 1988 primer by Ansen Dibell that takes a comprehensive look at this crucial element of storytelling. 

“Ask someone what the plot of their favorite novel or story and they will tell you what happened in it. That’s useful shorthand when the conversation is about finished stories, but when it comes to writing one, it’s like saying “that a birthday cake is a large baked confection with frosting and candles,” Dibell says. ” It doesn’t tell you how to make one.”

“Plot,” says Dibell, “is built of significant events in a given story — significant because they have important consequences.” She gives two examples. Taking a shower isn’t a plot, nor is braiding your hair. Neither have any consequences. They are incidents.

But if it’s Janet Leigh stepping into the shower while homicidal maniac Tony Perkins waits to pounce in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” or the mega-long braid that is going to let a prince climb up the tower where Rapunzel is being held by a witch, these mundane incidents are transformed into plots. 

For two months, I’ve worked nearly every day on a novel. I’ve written scenes and dialogue — the foundations of dramatic narrative — and summary narrative that leaps across time and space. But until I read Dibell’s book and other sources that discuss plotting, I didn’t realize I may just have been spinning my wheels because I didn’t ask some critical questions before I started.

1. Is there something at stake? Plotting is the way you show things matter.
2. Have I identified a protagonist, the person, in writing coach Jack Hart’s words, “makes things happen”?
3. Can I summarize my plot in a sentence, the shorter the better, even if it takes hundreds of pages to play out?  Two more examples from Dibell. “A group of British schoolboys, attempting to survive after their plane crash lands on a tropical island, begins reverting to savagery. That’s the plot of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.” “The police chief of a New England vacation community, although terrified of the ocean, sets out to destroy a huge killer shark.” “Jaws.”
4. Have I established the sequence of events “that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves,” which is two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative writer Jon Franklin’s definition of story.
5. Have I identified plot points, “any development that sends the story spinning off in a new direction,’ in screenwriting teacher Robert McKee’s formulation? These will help me plan my story trajectory.
6.  Is my story going somewhere? Do I have an ending in sight, or at least in mind? Knowing your ending allows you to establish foreshadowing that can help build suspense and forge your story’s meaning.

Pantsing is fine for some writers, and has worked for me in the past, mostly with short stories when the journey is relatively short. But as the word count of my book rises, I realize I’m not sure where I’m going. And I don’t feel like spending a lot of time creating a spineless mass of prose that I may end up jettisoning or face a massive rewrite.  With these questions in mind, I’ve decided to stop spinning and start thinking first, pansting less and plotting more. If you’re struggling with a story, you might want to do the same. 

When I think of the hundreds of writers I have coached over the years, the best ones impressed me with their intellect and creativity. But what stands out most are not these strengths, important as they may be. Instead, it’s their attitude that makes them special in my eyes.

Three decades of working with writers and editors have convinced me that attitude—a way of thinking that is reflected in a person’s behavior matters more than talent.

“Most people place an undue emphasis on talent,” influential designer Milton Glaser said. “I don’t doubt that it exists, but talent is essentially a potential for something. The issue is really not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire and persistence. Talent without these things vanishes and even modest talent with those characteristics grows.”

Talent may open the door, but attitude gets you inside the room. And as legendary coach Lou Holtz said, “The attitude we choose is by far the most important one we make every day.”

A good attitude can pay off. That was the case for David Maraniss when he was writing investigations and series at The Washington Post. When news broke, he was one of the first to pitch in. “Even if I’m doing a series,” he once told me, “I say, ‘Look, if you guys need me, I’d be happy to do something.’ I try to be in a position to say yes, and I try to volunteer so that I can have enormous freedom the rest of the time.

“I find that so many reporters keep banging away at their editors and having frustrating confrontations about what they have to do or don’t have to do. I’ve always found it much more effective to do what I want to do by doing some things for them.

“I like newspapers, and I love to write on deadline. And so I volunteer. But one of the reasons I do that is so that there’s a fair exchange, where they know that I’m always around when they need me, and then in return, I get a lot of freedom the rest of the time to do what I want to do.” Maraniss has gone on to write a string of best-selling critically acclaimed books.

Writing is a craft. It relies on a set of skills: the ability to generate ideas, excellence in reporting and researching, writing and revision (and more revision), understanding structure, and facility with language, syntax and style. Mastery requires years of study, work and, above all, patience. Malcolm Gladwell famously estimated that achieving mastery in many fields requires 10,000 hours of work. True or not, there’s no doubt that becoming a good writer takes an enormous expenditure of time and effort. Without the right attitude and the willingness to do that work, the chances of success are slim to none. 

In a field where so much — success and rejection for starters — is out of the writer’s hands, attitude is the one thing that we can control. We can decide whether to procrastinate or write every day no matter how uninspired we feel, give up or commit to one more revision, try our hand at a different genre, or learn from other writers rather than be consumed with jealousy about their achievements.

Inspired by the wisdom of Maraniss, coach Holtz and designer Glaser, I found myself musing about the nature of attitude and its importance to writers, including myself, who seek success. It’s a list I printed out and keep close as I work. I hope it may be of value to you.

• Attitude matters more than talent.
• Attitude makes the difference between giving up or sticking with a story.
• Attitude means making one more phone call, writing one more draft and burrowing into that draft one more time to refine and polish your story.
• Attitude means a collaborative relationship with editors rather than a toxic one.
• Attitude sometimes means submerging your own interests to contribute to the greater good.
• Attitude means submitting a story again the same day someone rejects it.
• In the end, attitude is what makes the difference between failure and spectacular success.

When do you write? First thing in the day or last?

It depends on the writer, of course.

But many highly successful writers, whether by habit or belief, seem to find mornings to be the most productive time. Neuroscience backs them up.

An admittedly unscientific search culled through interviews with working writers, quote collections and an excellent book, “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work,” by Mason Currey, revealed repeated examples of writers choosing break of day.

“Get up very early and get going at once,” was the preference of poet W.H. Auden. “In fact, work first and wash afterwards.” Mornings were the rule for Nobel laureate Saul Bellow who would write for 3 to 4 hours at a sitting.

When Ernest Hemingway was working on a story, he said, “I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.

Pre-dawn is the preference for Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. When I’m in writing mode for a novel,” he says, “I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. 

Not every writer has the freedom or the inclination for morning writing. Exiled to military school at 15, J.D. Salinger wrote his early stories at night under his blanket by flashlight. “There’s a mislaid family of readers and writers at night,” Matt Shoard wrote in a survey of nocturnal writers. And nighttime writers are a passionate, if somewhat cranky lot. Maybe it’s the caffeine.

“Is it the peace and quiet? asked Stephanie Meyer who wrote “Twilight” mostly at night. Nighttime composition is also the preference of Danielle Steele, Jacquelyn Mitchard and Barack Obama. Allison Leotta used to write her legal crime thrillers before work as federal prosecutor. But that changed to nights after she became a mother.”Now,” says Leotta, “the sound of a softly snoring baby triggers a Pavlovian response in me to start typing.”

For every nighttime writer, though, there seem to be many more who prefer early morning, close to dream sleep when the unconscious still lurks.

Brain science suggests that a morning writing schedule is geared to creativity. Moderate levels of the stress hormone cortisol aid focus. It also helps that willpower is strongest at the start before the day’s stresses sap it. The writer can rely on the prefrontal cortex, which governs planning, decision-making, problem-solving, self-control, and acting with long-term goals in mind.

The routines of successful writers suggest that they’ve discovered, without a degree in neuroscience, the power of the morning writing session.

Children’s novelist Lloyd Alexander woke at 4 a.m. to write because, he said, “you are closer to the roots of the imagination. At the end of the day the edge is off—You’re not the same person as you were in the morning. “

Barbara Kingsolver described a routine that starts before dawn. “Four o’clock is standard. My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it’s because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head. So getting to my desk every day feels like a long emergency.”

“Four o’clock is standard. My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it’s because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head. So getting to my desk every day feels like a long emergency.”

Barbara Kingsolver

Of course, some writers have no choice. Work or family demands may make it impossible to start work first thing. You may have to steal time; drafting at your desk over a quick lunch, after dinner, when the kids are in bed. Crime writer Leotta also writes when her baby is napping. I know writers who work late at night after the house is quiet. They may sacrifice sleep but meet their daily quota.

I’ve tried both times of the day, and while I sometimes find afternoons are productive, in the end I’ve come to prefer the early morning quiet before the day’s responsibilities intrude. Otherwise, as the day goes by my willpower and energy wilt. I keep in mind the words of Goethe, the German master: “Use the day before the day. Early morning hours have gold in their mouth.”

Daytime writers like Italo Calvino, the Italian journalist and fiction writer, feared the effects of nighttime writing which keep their mind moving when they preferred it would rest. “I’m terrified of writing at night,” he told an interviewer for The New York Times, “for then I can’t go to sleep. So I start slowly, slowly writing in the morning and then go on into the late afternoon. “

You may want to experiment, toggling between day and night to discover your best writing time. But if you choose AM over PM, here are suggestions to get you moving and writing.

• Wake up. Get up. If you’re’ the type who tends to overlseep, don’t hit the snooze alarm. Brew your coffee or tea, take it to your desk.
• Quarantine yourself. Susan Sontag vowed in her diary to tell people not to call her in the morning and she resolved not to answer the phone. Lock your office door. David Margolick uses Flents Quiet Please foam earplugs to buffer the din outside his Manhattan apartment while he’s working on his books about comedian Sid Caesar and scientist Jonas Salk.
• Start off easy. If you begin first thing trying to write a masterpiece, writer’s block will likely ensue. Begin writing in your journal, making notes for the day. Read “sacred texts.” from the Bible to your favorite novel or poem, writings that inspire you to start your own compositions as the sun comes up.

May the writing go well.

Photography by Nick Morrison courtesy of unsplash.com

On the surface, Ernest Heminway’s iconic 1927 story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” is about a man and a woman having a conversation and drinking together while waiting for a train.

Lurking beneath the surface, however, is the question between the two over whether the woman will have an abortion. The words “pregnant” and “abortion” are missing.

The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.
“The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said.
“It’s lovely,” the girl said. 
“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”
The girl did not say anything.
“I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.”
Then what will we do afterward?”
“We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.”

At work here is his theory of omission, or more colloquially, “the iceberg theory of writing.”

It’s found in chapter sixteen of Hemingway’s nonfiction book about bullfighting, “Death in the Afternoon,” when he segues into reflections about the writing process.

“A good writer should know as near everything as possible,” Hemingway writes. That knowledge, he qualifies, should not necessarily show up in the story.

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“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who emits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

When the lookouts were on the Titanic on April 14, 1912, what they feared was not the jagged tops of ice that broke the surface of the North Atlantic but the mountain beneath.  

The same principle holds in writing. What makes a story powerful is all the work —the process approach to writing — that lies beneath. It isn’t wasted effort, as many of us fear, but instead constitutes the essential ingredient that gives writing its greatest strengths. We write most effectively from an overabundance of material. 

“Read before you write”

In “Reporter,” the 2018 memoir by Seymour Hersh, the famed investigative reporter, would spend “hours in libraries or newspaper morgues, (the home of newspaper clippings in the days before the Internet) finding everything he could in the way of background,” Don Nelson writes in a review of the book for Nieman Storyboard. For journalists and fiction writers, the “core lesson” is “read before you write.” 

Donald M. Murray kept a large trash can by his desk when he was freelancing for Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post and other so-called “slick” magazines of the 1960s. He noticed that when the trash can overflowed with discarded material, the stories were better. They were worse if he found himself diving in to find something — anything — to fill space.

 David Finkel filled up lots of notebooks when he was a staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine. 

“I tend to write down everything I see, even if it’s something like, ‘2 rocks off to left- sedimentary??-resemble poodle.’ My hope is that as the reporting process continues, the significance of my notations will emerge. Usually, that doesn’t happen. Out of a 50-page notebook, I’ll have five pages of possibly usable quotes, ten pages of other possibly usable notes, and 35 pages of hieroglyphics.”
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Finkel was an experienced feature writer, and later, a prize-winning author. He had more freedom than a reporter covering a meeting, say, or a speech, who has to file a story within an hour. (Finkel, who later went on to win a MacArthur “genius” fellowship,  is also overly modest; many reporters who admire his stories and books would be happy to find in their notes what he considers “hieroglyphics.”) 

When Wall Street Journal reporter Alix Freedman found her notebooks filled to bursting, she remembered an editor’s description of journalism’s essential challenge: “Distill a beer keg’s worth of information into a perfume bottle.”

As a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, Freedman was accustomed to amassing a vast amount of material, more than enough to support her findings. She could spend months on a story, easily filling that metaphorical beer keg. Notwithstanding, the Journal’s news hole, the amount of column space available for the day’s edition, had its limits, even for front page blockbusters.  

Freedman came up with a method to meet the challenge. On a sheet of paper, she listed all the facts, quotes, statistics, scenes, examples and themes she’d uncovered in her reporting. She gave each one a letter grade, like a schoolteacher marking up tests. 

Only the A’s made it into her story.

Her aim, she said, was to “maximize impact,” to use “not just an example but a telling example. Not just a quote but a quote on point.”

Writers aren’t always sure what information will prove to be important, so they tend to fill their notebooks or drafts with an overabundance of material. Much of it never will appear in the final story.

The power of a story comes from what’s not in it.

May the writing go well.

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There’s nothing worse than turning in a story and then being summoned by your editor who peppers you with questions you failed to answer. What hospital were the victims sent to ? What are their conditions? Did police lodge any charges? What was the name of the school principal? What was the name of the dog?

As a rookie reporter covering fires and accidents, I carried a checklist to make sure I got all the information I needed, or at least could answer the questions my editor might have. Over time, they became second nature, although I still jotted questions down before I headed out to a crime scene or accident? Better safe than sorry.

When a story was more complicated than a two-alarm fire or a car crash with injuries, I needed more than ever to make sure my story was complete. To cover all the bases.

Recently, I interviewed David Margolick about a story he wrote about a loud and noxious building project in his Manhattan neighborhood. The reporting was meticulously and richly detailed, from the health effects on neighbors — human, canine and feline — to the construction process and the description of the owners’ plans for an ostentatious underground entertainment center.

I was astounded by the lengths he went to to report the story. Given his history as a longtime contributor to Vanity Fair, former legal affairs writer for The New York Times and six-time book author, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Still, the lengths he went to were remarkably thorough. They display a consummate professional at work.

I sought out the presidents of the block associations on West 69th St., where the mansion will go, and West 68th St., where I live. I asked them for the names of residents closest to the construction site. To make sure I got diverse points of view, I asked those people for additional names, and also spoke to random people on the street. I went to several block association events. I also needed to identify the husband and wife who are responsible for the project, since they are hiding behind a corporate shell. This was something that virtually no one in the neighborhood had yet managed to do, but I did in surprisingly short order.

Because the man in the couple is a French businessman, I hired a French-speaking researcher to check the French and Belgian papers for information about him. Because she is a jazz singer, I checked out various musical websites, including a podcast in which she expressed great concern for rocks, trees, animals, air and various other entities her vanity project has disrupted. I never spoke to them, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Apart from contacting publicists, I reached out to all three architects who’d worked on the project; the owners’ lawyer; their representative on the construction site; one of their fellow investors in various cultural productions they’ve backed; and the Juilliard School, where he’d been a trustee, and set up a scholarship for struggling jazz musicians. (The violinist forced to flee because of the disruption — a move that set her back $5,000 — might have appreciated some of that largesse.)

Margolick’s remarkably comprehensive approach brought to mind a reporting rubric, one far more complete and sophisticated than the checklist from my cub reporter days. They are six elements that William E. Blundell devised for himself when he was writing and editing page one stories for the Wall Street Journal  and later shared as an influential writing coach in his classic guide, “The Art and Craft of Feature Writing.”

He described them in “Best Newspaper Writing 1982,” the year he won the award for best non-deadline writing. Blundell said he used these six areas to organize his material. “A few of these things are of interest, and others may not be, but I always consider all six of them,” he said.

1.      History. When did this start? Who started it? What are the pivotal events on a timeline? Does my main theme development have roots in the past? What are they?

2.      Scope. What is the extent of the problem? How many people are affected? How much money is at stake?

3.      Central reasons. Why is this happening? What are the economic, social or political forces that created it, influence it, threaten it?

4.      Impacts.“Who is helped or hurt by this,” Blundell said, “and to what extent and what’s their emotional response to it?”

5.      Gathering and action of contrary forces. “If this is going on, is somebody trying to do anything about it, and how is that working out?” Blundell said.

6.      The future. “If this stuff keeps up,” he said, “what are things going to look like five or 10 years from now, in the eyes of the people who are directly involved?”

Blundell used the six points to organize his reporting before he wrote. I think they can be equally valuable earlier in the process; Margolick demonstrates the value of going the extra mile in your reporting.

Blundell’s six points provide a roadmap for this kind of comprehensive research, reporting, and interviews.

Whether you’re on a daily deadline or working on a longer project like a magazine article or nonfiction book, they offer powerful assistance with the reporter’s never-ending challenge: developing expertise needed to write with clarity, completeness, accuracy and, above all, authority.

May the writing go well,