“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”
“This is a story about…”
“…takes no holidays.” Fill in the blank” Death, Crime. I confess I wrote a story that began “Fire takes no holidays.” My only excuse: I was young and very stupid.
How about a line that follows a lead about a person who exemplifies a trend:
“… is not alone,” as in “Chip is not alone. He’ one of millions of people worldwide who think their ideas are worth blogging about”.
Does your novel or screenplay feature a rebel without a cause, a snarky girl who saves the day, or estranged parents brought together after their child is kidnapped?
Every one of these examples is a cliché, a tired, overused phrase, or stereotyped plot or character that are the refuge of writers too lazy or weak to come up with something original. They’re annoying, too.
Clichés are flabby. They weaken the power of prose. They can cost you readers who are looking for writing that is fresh.
Paint-by-numbers Writing
In “The Sound on the Page: Great Writers Talk about Style and Voice in Writing,” the finest book on style on my bookshelves, Ben Yagoda defines cliché, broadly, as “the use, either unconscious or in an attempt to write colorfully or alluringly, hackneyed or worn out words, phrases, or figures of speech.”
Yada yada yada
Only time will tell
Back in the day
Mother of all…
Clichés are an understandable refuge when you’re struggling to make meaning out of words, especially on deadline.
When you’re drafting a story, the public domain of words and phrases from popular culture automatically pops into the top of your conscious mind. Before you throw in the towel give up and throw your laptop out the window, cut yourself some slack, don’t be too hard on yourself. In a way, reliance on clichés is not your fault.
“Clichés are prominent features of everyone’s first drafts…” Yagoda writes. “How could they not be? We hear and read them all the time and our brains are filled with them.”
“You can certainly get your point across through clichés,” he concedes. “Iindeed, part of their appeal is the way they allow a nearly effortless, paint by numbers communication.”
But clichés are deadly, and “their first victim,” he says, “ is thought.”
Clichés deaden the mind. They ignore the reader’s demand for originality.
Too many writers choose ready-made prose, George Orwell says in his influential 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” “gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else.”
In Orwell’s oft-quoted list of writing rules, avoid clichés tops the list.
“Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”
Clichés aren’t limited to news writers, Yagoda says, though they are prime offenders. They’re a trap for writers of other forms, too.
“Journalists’ worst writing comes at points when they haven’t done enough reporting and have to fudge or generalize; critics and essayists when they haven’t fully worked out their points or are parroting someone else’s; novelists when they haven’t done the imaginative work necessary to make types and stock situations into real people doing real things.”
Ernest Hemingway once said what the writer needs is a “built-in shit detector.” I’d add a built-in cliché finder.
To dodge clichés, ask yourself if you’ve ever heard a phrase before and where you heard it. Check dictionaries to make sure you’re using it correctly. The Urban Dictionary is especially useful for time-worn slang; it provides the history of usage, tracing “my bad,” for instance to the 1995 movie “Clueless.” Two decades of “my bad” have transformed a clever phrase into a cliché.
Your ears may be the best weapon you have.
If writing is all about revision, then “revision is all about reading,” Yagoda says. “And you need to be a good reader to hear your own clichés and the other ill-advised compositional decisions you’ve made.”
Reading aloud increases your chance of recognizing and deleting the commonplace words and phrases that deadline writing or first drafts generate. It also exposes you to original expression that can be a model of expression.
My bad
Jump street
Get go
Achilles’ heel
Before you use a phrase you think is original, check the Internet or your own publication’s archives. A producer at WLS-TV in Chicago created a wonderful list of clichés that reporters and producers could check their scripts against before airtime.
I like The Internet’s Best List of Clichés. Check your stories against its comprehensive list of clichés, bromides, and buzz words. Right now “deep dive,” meaning a through examination of a subject is hot in business writing and journalism.”
I’m beginning to see it more and more in headlines and copy (I used it recently). It has a nice alliterative ring, but I’ve resolved to avoid it in favor of something more original, if I can identify one.
Finally, turn a cliché around. Years ago, I read a business story in the early about computer sales that used “hearts and minds,” a phrase that came into currency during the Vietnam War five decades earlier! It screamed cliché. I thought about it for a minute and thought it might have worked better as ”win the hearts, minds, and modems.”
Avoiding leads is a full time job for writers who care that their prose is as original as they can make it. In the writing improvement bible, “On Writing Well,” William Zinsser sets the standard for “cliché detectors.”
“You will never make your mark as a writer,” he says, “unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive.”
Lately, I’ve been plagued by gremlins, those mischievous sprites that cause problems when you’re trying to get something done without fault.
Just recently, I submitted a freelance article that, after several revisions, had finally been accepted for publication. I copyedited it. I ran spellcheck. Several times.
I hit send and then — it’s always the case, it seems — gremlins popped up, smirking, their job done.
A missing article.
A misplaced quotation mark.
A word repeated twice in the same sentence: “that that”
Minor stuff, sure, but the kind of errors that keep writers up at night, worrying whether they got things right. The kind that makes an editor wonder she’s been dealing with an amateur all along and won’t make the same mistake twice.
These are the kinds of mistakes you see in a newspaper, a book or on a website that make you wonder what else they got wrong. Like facts. Or quotes.
I’d made another big mistake. I’d lost touch with Moira.
Moira is Irish, a young woman with a lilting, though slightly robotic voice. She lives inside my MacBook Pro, nestled under the System Preferences. Moira is a text-to-speech feature, a digital proofreader that, when I have the brains to use her, makes my copy cleaner, smoother, less prone, if not always immune, to rhetorical gaffes.
Moira is a young Irishwoman with a lilting, though slightly robotic, voice. She lives inside my MacBook Pro, nestled under the System Preferences.
Moira is a text-to-speech feature, (TTS) a digital proofreader that, when I have the brains to use her, makes my copy cleaner, smoother and less prone, if not always immune, to gaffes.
All I need do is go to the Dictation and Speech feature in System Preferences, choose among number of voices, select a key to activate TTS and I’m ready to roll.
Moira reads everything I define, from Word and Google documents to emails and text on Web sites, as soon as I simultaneously hit the control and K keys. Hit them again and she pauses in time for me to correct my mistakes.
Losing touch with Moira brought to mind a column I wrote in 2013 extolling the virtues of text-to-speech. Reading it over, I recalled all the advantages TTS offers. (As you’ll see, I’ve switched loyalties from Alex, my first, very robotic-sounding first TTS reader, to the accented tune of Moira.)
“In the three years that TTS has become part of my editing toolkit, Alex has improved my writing, bolstered accuracy and made my stories more graceful. Text-to-speech lets me hear my stories, simultaneously comparing them with the written version, allowing me to detect flaws of word choice, pacing and grammar that I can change on the fly.
When I listen carefully to Alex, he tells me when “know” should be “now.” He guides me to unnecessary sentences and paragraphs. I still rely on the spell and grammar checker, but Alex always manages to find lingering mistakes. I relied on him for every word in my latest book that already had the benefit of a first-rate copy editor. Alex still found missing words, homonyms, such as “then” and “than,” and things I revised but then neglected to delete my original mistake. These days, I let Alex “edit’ my copy before I even activate spell-check.
The brain conspires to keep us from getting things right. We make unconscious errors based on our kinesthetic memory that preserves motions and explains why we can ride a bicycle for the first time since childhood and, after a few wobbles, confidently pedal away. It stores keystrokes as well, which is why I habitually spell judgment with two e’s.
Romance novelist Carolyn Jewel, I noted back then, raved in a testimonial about Text Aloud, her preferred TTS. Hearing her work read aloud by a computer kept her from “supplying meaning that isn’t really there. Lots of writers recommend literally reading one’s work aloud because it’s a great way to catch clunky phrases and repetitive bits. I tried that once, but it’s pretty hard on the voice, and it still doesn’t solve the issue of your eyes and brain conspiring to ‘fix’ typos for you.”
Reading aloud works really well, especially if there’s someone to read to you. But when that’s not possible, text-to-speech is a valuable substitute. Five years after I wrote that column, I’m still a fan of TTS. I’ve started using it again, reacquainting myself with Moira and marveling at the way she keeps the gremlins at bay. I recommend it highly. If those gremlins pop up, I can only blame myself.
PS. Since I first wrote about TTS, Microsoft has vastly upgraded its TTS feature, once vastly inferior to the Apple version. Windows 10 is now on par. One caveat: no Moira.
In 2006 I was living in a stripped-out Chevy van in a Denver, Colorado Walmart parking lot with a Rottweiler and a cat. Three years later, I was in England at Oxford University, speaking at TED Global courtesy of Dan Pink, bestselling author and former head speechwriter for former Vice President Al Gore.
How did I go from one place to the other in such a short amount of time? Simple. By writing for my life. One of the things that only a handful of people know about me is that at the time I was competing to speak at TED Global, not just attend it, I had two TED talks prepared and accepted. Organizers had to choose the one they did and decided on it because it best fit that year’s theme — on being invisible.
The talk I didn’t give was entitled “Writing for My Life.” It was writing for my life in a competition Dan Pink hosted that landed me in one of three spots as a finalist.
In the last days I stayed up all night writing a free ebook to be a give away to would-be voters in an online competition. The ebook was the next chapter I suggested adding to Dan Pink’s best-selling book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. It was part of my strategy to get people’s attention, and to win the popular vote and the attention of motivational speaker and business blogger, Seth Godin.
( https://seths.blog/2009/01/traffic-magnets/ ) With a little bit of Seth’s help, I won the contest that got me to TED. Then I was offered the chance to compete to win a slot to speak at TED.
Once I was notified I’d be talking at TED Global 2009, I began to write my TED talk. That same week I had received word about another essay contest for a book by Tim Russert, at the time a Senior Vice President of NBC. That win led to more opportunities and an agent.
Writing, like I say, literally saved my life. This post is not the talk, “writing for my life,” but it’s based on it.
Since 2009 I’ve realized that when we write with authenticity about anger, fear, betrayal, and the things that move us, scare us, and challenge us, we heal. I know this to be a fact.
How It Began
I began writing for my life at the age of 10. My father would get drunk, come into my room with his belt in hand, commanded I strip off all my clothes, and then he’d beat and molest me for no reason other than he felt like it. One day I said, out of the blue, “Let me write a paper about why you shouldn’t do this.” He stopped short, belt in hand.
He started college at age 30. A shoe salesman, a high school friend had come into his shoe store one day. He asked him what he was doing, and he told him he was a dentist. My father came home that day, declared if “that dumb ass could graduate from college and medical school, he could too.” He listed the house for sale that day, and a year later was enrolled in the University of Tennessee. At the time he came into my room, he had just graduated from dental school and was working on a post-graduate degree. He’d been the first in his family ever to graduate from high school, and with six years of higher education finished and more in the wings, he was nuts about school. He was always studying or writing papers.
He listened to me, appeared to think about it for a few minutes, then said, “Okay.” I worked on the one and a half page paper for over an hour then left my room and took it to him. He was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking sweet tea and eating a sandwich. He read my essay, looked solemn for a moment, then suggested a few changes. He never beat me again. I had to write a lot of papers for the next four years, but my writing saved me.
Since then, I’ve written a lot — both to save my life and the lives of others. I avoided homelessness earlier in life by entering a short-story contest for the local newspaper and winning a turkey and $50. I landed a job with the paper shortly after that and saved my housing situation.
I wrote about ‘Buddy,’ a golden Labrador whose owner, a runner, was going to have the dog put down rather than give him up to a home where he wouldn’t be able to run every day. His owner was moving out-of-state, and Buddy couldn’t go with him. He loved running too much and would be miserable confined to a yard. His owner reached out to the newspaper in one last attempt to find a new owner. The editor thought it was a stupid story, not really newsworthy, and so he gave it to me, the “new guy.” So, I wrote for Buddy’s life. I wrote about Buddy’s “last run,” and the “last sights, last treats, last hugs” he encountered along the way he and his owner ran every day. The story ran, and another runner adopted buddy within 24 hours. The outpouring of letters and calls surprised the editor and the newsroom.
I wrote for me, for others, and I wrote when others had stopped writing. The year was 1989, and a local sailor came to the paper wanting to tell his story about the explosion of the USS Iowa only weeks before. I listened as he cried, describing the scene. He was the first man into the turret and recalled having to break limbs of dead sailors to get them out of the turret. My stories reignited interest in the explosion. The Navy claimed two gay sailors having a lover’s quarrel had set off the explosion — even though both men were married and shipmates claimed the men were not gay. Their wives lost all benefits because the Navy ruled the explosion and their involvement a “crime,” and closed the case. Then my story ran — not just locally, but nationally. The media attention forced the Navy to reopen the investigation and reverse their decision (although never admitting they were wrong) The widows of the two sailors accused of wrongdoing received death benefits after all.
I’m not bragging. I’m using examples from my life to show you how powerful writing can be if we understand what it can do. Writing is more than just entertainment, amusement, or education. It can heal us, strengthen us, and change us if we let it. When non-profits write for funding, when lovers write love notes, when those with mental health issues write to exorcise their demons, they’re all writing for their lives. No matter what your situation is, you can write for your health, healing, and life too.
How To Write For Your Life
Millions of us write every day. We write emails, Facebook posts, texts, reports, and proposals. We write for work, for school, for family and friends. But we rarely “write for our lives.”
What does it mean to “write for your life”? Define it how you will, but I say “writing for your life,” means writing to be heard and to make a difference. Being heard means someone understands you, gets you, and your message touches them, changes them, pulls them up short and makes them think, or take a second look.
Understand your end goal and keep it in front of you. I was at a writer’s conference with a client of mine this past August. We were talking about her daughter being worried that her classmates wouldn’t all like her unless she fit in better (clothes, hair, etc.). I asked her what her daughter’s “end game” was — did she want to be liked, or want to be an actress? Once you know what your end game or ultimate goal is, you can ignore the distractions and rabbit trails all around you and focus on your message and getting it heard. Her daughter wanted to be an actress — and that would mean doing things that guaranteed not everyone would like her — like being true to her hairstyle and fashion and music sense. When you know what your end goal is, everything that won’t help you reach that goal is no longer important.
Cry, but Turn Off the Tears in Your Writing. I was working with another client on her memoir. It read like a year’s worth of therapy notes — tears, pain, grief, and anguish. It was cathartic for her, wrenching for the reader who committed to reading it, but nothing anyone else would find a “good read.” Readers, I explained, aren’t looking for more of what they’ve experienced. They’re looking for solutions, insights, awareness, and tips and stories on how you escaped the pain, how you healed, how you survived.
When she changed her narrative from victim to survivor, and seriously looked at how she had gotten out of her abusive relationship she began to write differently. She wrote about how she found the strength to move out of state, and how she learned to take care of herself. In her writing, she found the strength she’d always taken for granted and integrated all her broken pieces into one whole — her book. She chose not to publish it, but simply cherish it and refer back to it. Sometimes we don’t need an audience. Sometimes we just need to listen to ourselves.
When you write for your life, write to show where you’re strong, why you matter, what you stand for, not why someone should rescue you or how pitiful you are. Not only does that kind of writing become a part of you, but it also gets into your brain and changes your perception of yourself. It heals you. There’s nothing wrong with crying, or with sharing your journey, your past, or your pain. Just do it in such a way people understand it doesn’t define you. It happened to you, and you’re dealing with it.
Be Authentic. Your history and the details of your story don’t have to have all the elements and drama for a made-for-television-movie. The story just has to be real and to be you. When Buddy’s owner came to the newspaper, he was looking for someone to adopt his dog, so he didn’t have to put him down. It was a love story, not a tragedy. I didn’t embellish, or plead, or try to convince anyone they should adopt him. I just told the story and detailed a day in the life of a dog who loved to run with his master. When you tell an authentic story, readers get it. You don’t need special effects, or “spin,” or tricks. You don’t need to manipulate them into feeling something you assumer or think they “should” feel. You just need to be real.
Don’t have a scripted ending. One of the things my clients worry about is crafting their ending before they’ve even begun to write the book. Don’t. The ending will take care of itself if the story is authentic and pulled from your heart. Trust yourself and the process to let it play out. Don’t try to control the ending. Let it emerge. You might be pleasantly surprised by how good it is.
Don’t question whether it’s “good” or “newsworthy” or important. If it’s important to you, it will be important to those who matter, and those who share your pain, insight, thoughts, or wisdom. While working for Media General, I started my first blog, http://apublicdeath.blogspot.com/2007/06/christopher-scott-emmett.html. I was selected in a journalist’s lottery to attend and watch the execution of Christopher Scott Emmett. Emmett was convicted in October of 2001 for the capital murder of co-worker John Langley in Danville, Virginia. I was pressured to write about being a pro-or-anti death penalty. But the fact was, I didn’t know what I believed. Having been a police officer briefly, and worked for the Boulder, CO prosecutor’s office, I had the background and exposure to murders. But I didn’t know where I stood on the topic of the death penalty. So, I chronicled my journey, my doubts, my fears, my questions, and my experience.
You don’t have to an ending, a position, or a scripted narrative to write for your life. You just need to have something to say that you desperately want others to hear. And, if you’re not sure what it is you want others to hear, write it anyway. The purpose will emerge.
Becky Blanton was a TED Global speaker in 2009. A journalist for 23 years, Becky is and has been a full-time ghostwriter for ten years since her TED Global talk. She has worked with three-time bestselling author, publisher, and corporate ghostwriter Melissa G Wilson of Networlding.com for more than six years. Becky is also a developmental editor for business books and business memoirs for CEOs, Fortune 500 companies, and business speakers. Right now, she’s writing to save herself again. She has a paralyzed vocal cord as a result of a common cold virus and hasn’t been able to speak for six months. Without surgery to correct it, she’ll never talk again. Writing for one’s life can take many forms, but all of them heal. Hope always finds a way.
Sometimes the most memorable stories you write are the ones that you, not an editor, assign
Before turning to teaching, I made my living as a journalist for 22 years, while freelancing for magazines on the side. As a professional writer, most of my stories were pieces that an editor wanted.
But there have been other stories, a precious few, that taught me more than any others about writing and myself. They too, were assigned by me. They were written on “spec,” launched hoping for success but without any specific commission.
In the days before electronic submissions when manuscripts were printed and submitted in manila envelopes, this was also known as “over the transom.”
Writers with more pluck than luck were known to toss their unsolicited manuscripts after office hours through a hinged window on the top of an editor or publisher’s door, left open to let hot air out before air-conditioning, hoping their story might make its way to the top of the slush pile that greeted the officeholder in the morning.
These are the kinds of stories I’m talking about, stories no one asked for, but which you have to write anyway and hope someone may find them of value.
Many people say they want to write, but they don’t know what to write about. Looking back at the stories that I am proudest of, I can detect a central fact about each of them. They are pieces that only I could have written. That realization led me to a rule I try to live by: Do the writing only you can do.
What follows is a description of those experiences, adapted from an essay first published in “The Writers Handbook 1997.” As I revised it this week, I realized that its lessons hold true some two decades later. I put them to work recently when I stumbled upon a story that I thought was interesting. I reported and wrote it on spec and then had the good fortune to sell it to Columbia Journalism Review. Over the Gmail transom.
Keeping the faith
When one of my relatives was in the midst of a painful divorce, I found myself wondering how children react to their parents’ separation. What came to mind was one of those “What if” questions that drive many writers, in this case, “What if a little girl made an inventory of every item in her father’s study the day before he moved out of the house?”
I made some notes, wrote drafts, discarded them, and tried again. I was working full-time as a newspaper reporter and the piece sat in my desk drawer, sometimes for years. I wrote other short stories, but always found myself returning to that one.
Many, many drafts later, I finally reached a point where I was willing to send it out. A long list of publications rejected the story, including Redbook, and I can’t say I blame them. I knew that it still wasn’t good enough. But in my heart, the story never died.
I kept at it: reading books about children and divorce, rewriting draft after draft, even asking my brother-in-law to drag a box of his business school textbooks out of the attic so I could copy down the titles.
And then the fates intervened: A newsroom colleague who had written award-winning fiction suggested that the story ended on page 10 of my 12-page manuscript. I made the cut and then another friend persuaded his agent, for whom short fiction normally wasn’t worth peddling, to send it around again. This time, the editors at Redbook liked the story. “Safekeeping” became my first national fiction publication.
The story ends after Emily, a precocious 12-year-old who became the main character of my story, has faked an upset stomach to stay home and record every item in the den occupied by her departing father, just as I had envisioned it all those years ago.
How many times have you said to yourself, “That would make a great story,” but then let the idea succumb to the doubts that plague most writers? Anyone who wants to be a writer must learn to ignore the carping and criticism of the inner voice that tells us we have no talent and that our ideas are insipid, worthless.
She imagined making a scrapbook, like the one Mrs. Markham had everyone make of their class trip. She would paste in the list of everything in his den, all the books, the pictures, the furniture. Paste in the pictures she’d taken. Write captions underneath. That way, even if her father took everything away, she would always remember what it looked like. And when he finally came home, she would surprise him. He would return, carrying all his boxes back into the den, and he would try to remember where everything went. He’d be standing there, rubbing his chin, when she walked in with the scrapbook. “Daddy, your books go here. Schoolbooks on the top shelf, paperbacks on the next one. That chair? Put that right over there. No, no, your diploma goes on that wall. Here let me show you,” Emily would say, taking charge.
How many times have you said to yourself, “That would make a great story,” but then let the idea succumb to the doubts that plague most writers? Anyone who wants to be a writer must learn to ignore the carping and criticism of the inner voice that tells us we have no talent and that our ideas are insipid, worthless. I’m proud of my Redbook story for a variety of reasons, but what makes me feel best is that I never gave up on my idea.
A friend describes me as “sports-challenged” because I have so little interest in sports. I like to point out that I might care about the World Series or the Super Bowl if my coach had given me a full uniform when I played Little League.”
For years, hearing people laugh when I recounted my comic adventures as an uncoordinated, pint-sized athlete, I used to wonder if it might make a good story, but then the voice in my head would whisper, “no one cares” about my life on the bench. That was before I resolved to do the writing only I can do.
This time I sat down and put the anecdotes on paper. On the day Super Bowl XXIX was played, my essay, “Stupor Bowl,” appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine. It recalled the days three decades before when “I was small and scrawny, a clumsy flop at tennis, golf, back-yard football, you name it. I lagged behind the pubescent progress of my friends, whose voices were deepening, whose chins were sprouting hairs, who really needed to wear jockstraps.”
Silence the inner critic. Keep faith in your ideas because they are the ones that will set you — and your stories — apart.
Dangerous Territories
“We’ve got the O.J. 911 tapes,” the disc jockey promised. “Coming up after these messages.”
Like other commuters on this July morning in 1994, I was hooked. When the playback finally came over my car radio, I heard Nicole Brown Simpson’s voice —fed-up, frightened, resigned; but that wasn’t what brought tears to my eyes. It was the voice in the background — the shouts of her husband, O.J. Simpson, the former football great and pitchmen accused of murdering her — out of control, choking on contempt and rage.
I knew that sound. I had heard it echoing off the walls in our house. I’ve
felt the lump of remorse that screaming at the top of my lungs leaves in the
back of my throat and the pit of my stomach. “I have to write about this,” I
thought. “But I don’t want to.”
Like most journalists, I feared the word “I.”
I was warned off the first person at the start of my career by a chorus of voices — a jaded competitor at my first paper, a fearsome city editor, skeptical colleagues. “Reporters don’t belong in their stories. That’s what bylines are for.” They added, “Besides, nobody cares about your personal life. If it was really interesting, some reporter would be writing about you.”
I didn’t need both hands to count the times I used the first person in
twenty years of reporting: a deadline account about a stint volunteering at a
mental hospital during a state workers’ strike; a recollection of a year in the
Peace Corps; a Father’s Day message to my unborn daughter; a travel piece about
the search for a soldier’s grave in Europe; a brief stint as a fill-in
columnist. But in all of these I stayed back, my presence little more than a
personal pronoun.
Writing about yourself is often difficult for reporters and editors whose work focuses on others. But writing about yourself, honestly, even painfully, can make you a better reporter and editor: more empathetic, more skilled, better able to spot the universal truth in the individual story.
Writing about yourself is often difficult for reporters and editors whose work focuses on others. But writing about yourself, honestly, even painfully, can make you a better reporter and editor: more empathetic, more skilled, better able to spot the universal truth in the individual story.
Unlike the column, which usually delivers judgment on others, or the feature which focuses on someone other than the writer, or the op-ed essay which explores an issue or situation, the personal essay is not detached. It trains its sights on the writer’s own life and the writer’s emotional, psychological and intellectual reactions to the most intimate experiences.
“The personal essayist,” Phillip Lopate says in “The Art of the Personal Essay, “looks back at the choices that were made, the roads not taken, the limiting familial and historic circumstances, and what might be called the catastrophe of personality.”
In essays and books, my mentor, the late Donald M. Murray, plumbed the painful parts of his life, including a dark childhood and the death of a child. “What makes you mad,” he advised writers searching for what to write about. “What makes you happy? What past events were turning points in your life that you’d like to understand?”
Every writer has a territory, a landscape of experience and emotional history unique to them. Like any landscape, there are safe havens and dangerous places. I could easily have written a light-hearted piece about being the father of three girls, one that made me look good. But the topic that needed exploring, I knew, was my darker side: my temper with my kids. The essay I wrote begins with this painful scene:
It’s late at night, and I’m screaming at
my kids again. Yelling at the top of my lungs at three little girls, lying
still and terrified in their beds. Like a referee in a lopsided boxing match,
my wife is trying to pull me away, but I am in the grip of a fury I am
unwilling to relinquish. “And if you don’t get to sleep right now,” I shout,
“there are going to be consequences you’re not going to like.”
Lary Bloom, editor of Northeast, the Sunday magazine of The Hartford Courant and author of “The Writer Within: A Guide to Creative Nonfiction,” puts the form to a rigorous test. “You don’t have a personal essay unless you have a religious experience,” he says. “Then it’s the task of the writer to recreate that moment.”
For me, that meant trying to recreate an unforgettable moment that occurred when I was a boy. I became convinced it held answers to my own battles with anger. It wasn’t an excuse; my behavior was inexcusable.
I am no more than 9, and I am standing just outside our family kitchen. My father has come home drunk again. He is in his mid-40s, (about the age I am today). By now, he has had three strokes, landmines in his brain that he seems to shrug off, like his hangovers, but which in a year will kill him. He has lost his job selling paper products, which he detested, and has had no luck finding another. He and my mother begin arguing in the kitchen. Somehow he has gotten hold of her rosary beads. I hear his anger, her protests, and then, suddenly, they are struggling over the black necklace. (Has he found her at the kitchen table, praying for him? I can imagine his rage. “If your God is so good, why are the sheriffs coming to the door about the bills I can’t pay? Why am I broke? Why can’t I find a job? Why am I so sick? Why, dammit? Why?”) Out of control now, he tears the rosary apart. I can still hear the beads dancing like marbles on the linoleum.
First published in The Boston Globe Magazine, the essay was reprinted in the Sunday magazines of the Detroit Free Press and The Hartford Courant. One reader attacked a magazine for publishing a “self-described child abuser.” Former co-workers were horrified. But for every negative reaction came letters or phone calls: “I wish my father was still alive so I could show it to him,” or “I’m going to share this with my siblings,” and “I saw myself in your story.” Eventually, it was published in two anthologies, including “Telling Stories, Taking Risks: Journalism Writing at the Century’s Edge.” And, eventually, I got therapy.
Years later I wrote an essay about another secret I had to write about, kicking a 25-year addiction to marijuana. It opened this way:
On New Year’s Eve 22 years ago, I smoked my last joint. I smoked my first in ’68, blissfully inhaling the Woodstock generation party line: `Pot’s not addictive and harmless compared to booze.’ But alcohol killed my father when he was 46, so I turned my back on his drug of choice; smoking grass when I could get it. And I started getting it a lot during a lonely stint in the Peace Corps. A bowlful banished homesickness and transformed yam paste into gourmet fare. I liked everything about pot—my purple bong, my rolling papers—especially how it made me feel; witty, wise, with it. But I also used dope as a shield, girding myself for parties with a smoke-induced cocoon.
As time passed I was crashing more than flying. Pot short-circuited my motor control. It sabotaged short-term memory. It inspired creative brainstorms that never went past the idea stage. Along with the munchies, I got paranoia, irritability and an ominous clanging in my chest. The happy circles passing around joints thinned as the ’70s became the ’80s. I knew I should quit but was afraid. Pot was never a gateway to harder drugs; just a crutch I convinced myself I couldn’t do without. My wife provided the moment of truth: `I’m not having kids with a pothead.’
I tried going cold turkey before, but the monkey always climbed back on. This time I got help. A psychologist showed me how hypnosis curbed cravings for marijuana’s dubious pleasures. I rechanneled my energies into rehabbing our old house and writing fiction. I discovered that parties without paranoia were actually fun. I won’t say I was never tempted, but at 35, I wanted to be a father more.
At the beach two summers ago I spied a baggy with distinctive green contents. I opened it. Like a whiff of patchouli, the scent carried me back. Briefly, the urge to roll a doobie swept over me. Then, like a wave, it receded. I emptied the bag, and the wind scattered the stems and dried leaves.
Smoke-free for two decades, I still worry the monkey will show up again, not for me, but for my three teen-age daughters. I always kept this part of my past a secret from them. Not anymore.
Explore a dangerous region of your writer’s territory by writing a piece
nobody can write but you.
Letting The Story Speak
It was a dream assignment. The Washington Post Magazine assigned me to write a profile of the first Vietnamese graduate of West Point. Tam Minh Pham was a young man who marched with the long gray line of cadets in 1974, returning home just in time for the fall of his country and six years imprisonment. But his American roommate never forgot him and, 20 years later, marshaled his classmates to cut through bureaucratic red tape and bring their buddy to America for a new life.
It didn’t take much reporting for me to decide that this was a powerful story, worthy of the length of a cover piece. The only problem: the top editor didn’t agree and I was advised to keep it short. But when it came time to write, I had trouble holding back. I decided to write the first draft for myself and worry about length later. I began this way:
As usual, bribes loosened the guards’ tongues. Another transfer was coming.But this time, after four years in jungle camps guarded by the North Vietnamese army, the inmates were going to a prison run by the Cong An, the security police. When he heard the rumor, Tam Minh Pham knew what to do. For years, he’d heard the stories about the cruel men in yellow uniforms who took people away in the dead of night, about the torture, the killings. He waited for the camp to quiet down and the night air to fill with the scent of cooking fires, and then he crept out of his bamboo hut to the garden.
There, buried under the tiny plot where he was allowed to plant vegetables, was an American ammunition box filled with journals he’d kept about his experiences at West Point, writings, if discovered, would probably cost him life.
That opening scene went on for another 500 words, much too long for the kind of story I knew the editor was expecting. Fortunately, he was willing to take a look. A few days later, word came back that some changes were needed; “The Liberation of Tam Minh Pham,” now scheduled for the cover, needed to be longer.
The quickest way to lose an editor’s interest is to give them something different than expected. At the same time, writers need to let the story speak if they are going to produce stories that break barriers for themselves and their readers.
The quickest way to lose an editor’s interest is to give them something different than expected. At the same time, writers need to let the story speak if they are going to produce stories that break barriers for themselves and their readers.
Tapping Your Private Stock
We were on our honeymoon in Europe, a month-long trip that had already taken us to Germany, Holland and Paris. Now with a week left before we headed home, we were making good on a promise to a friend: to visit the grave of a man we had never met, who had died in a war fought before my wife and I were born.
Pfc. John Juba, the half-brother of our friend back home, had died in the 1944 Normandy invasion, but no one in his family had ever seen his grave. Finding it took two train trips, four cab rides, and visits to three cemeteries before we finally stood in front of the marble tombstone in the Brittany countryside where the soldier was buried.
In my hand was a bouquet of white roses that an elderly farmer had let us cut from his garden. Beside us stood a man named Donald Davis, the cemetery’s superintendent. In “The Young Who Died Delivered Us,” the account of our search, I described the moment this way:
The graves at Brittany lie beyond the Wall of the Missing __ 4,313 white crosses and Stars of David lined up on a manicured field like a marching band at halftime. Five varieties of grass keep it green all year round. The cemetery was empty and so quiet we could hear the rain falling on the flower beds bordering the graves…I laid the flowers in front of the cross and knelt to take a picture for his mother.
Wait. Davis bent down and turned the bouquet around so the flowers faced the camera. Otherwise, all you’ll get is a picture of the stems. Every trade had its secrets.
Rest in peace, John, I said under my breath.
We are deluged today by what novelist and short story writer A. Manette Ansay (“Read This and Tell Me What It Says”) refers to as “public domain” images and language; clichés, commonplace descriptions and derivative plots that blur any attempts at originality. Draw instead on your individual experiences by tapping the “private stock” of experience, memory, and feeling that is inside you.
We all have stories that only we can tell. Search for the particulars, the telling details, and observations that give resonance and meaning to your story, that set it apart, and your chances of producing a piece with universal appeal are strong.
We all have stories that only we can tell. Search for the particulars, the telling details, and observations that give resonance and meaning to your story, that set it apart, and your chances of producing a piece with universal appeal are strong.
In my case, the story of that pilgrimage to a soldier’s grave has paid off with the publication of “The Young Who Died Delivered Us” in six different Sunday newspaper magazines as well as a reprinting in a popular textbook. But most rewarding were the letters from readers who saw themselves in our search. Wrote one man who helped lay out the cemetery where John Juba is buried: “You seem to have caught the feelings experienced by us who were there.”
Spreading the Word
It was an offhand comment from an interview subject. I was reporting a story for Knight-Ridder Newspapers about guns and children when Mary Steber of Liverpool, N.Y., told me that she and her suburban family had never worried about guns until their 14-year-old son, Michael, was shot to death while watching a football game at a classmate’s house. The friend’s father, a retired policeman, kept a collection of firearms in an unlocked closet.
“You warn your kids about sex and drugs and alcohol and getting in a car with a stranger,” Mrs. Steber said. “Yet guns were never mentioned in our house. We never thought of it as a problem.”
Now whenever Michael’s siblings visit a new friend, they make a point of reassuring their parents, “Don’t worry, they don’t have guns.”
When I heard that, I thought, “What a great message for parents.” Our own daughters had just reached the age of sleep-overs and visits to their friends’ homes. Before we let them pay a visit, we started asking parents of our kids’ friends, “Do you have guns in your house?”
Almost every day, it seemed, the news reports yet another shooting of a child with a gun left unattended. Perhaps the Steber family’s common-sense approach, if heeded by enough parents and gun-owners, might save a life.
To spread the word, I wrote an essay I called “It’s 10 p.m.; Do You Know Where Your Guns Are?” and began sending it around to newspaper op-ed pages. So far, its child-protecting message reached readers of The Christian Science Monitor, St. Petersburg Times, and the Orlando Sentinel.
Is there a message you think needs to be heard? A story in your “private stock” that needs tapping? A tale that’s telling you how it must be written? A dangerous territory worth exploring? An idea you’ve never lost faith in? Ask yourself, “What’s the writing only I can do?” And then do it.
Worrying is an occupational hazard for artists. Writers fear they’ve lost their touch, that their last story was just that and that they’ve run out of ideas. Or they write an opening that seems to work and then they get stuck, and don’t know how to continue or where to end.
Frank O’Connor, the legendary Irish short story writer, didn’t worry when he started composing a short story. They would eventually fill a dozen collections and appeared regularly in The New Yorker magazine for nearly two decades until his death in 1966.
“I don’t give a hoot what the writing’s like; I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it,” he told a Paris Reviewinterviewer in 1957, at the height of his fame.
“Rubbish” on the page or screen would terrify most writers, but O’Connor knew that it wouldn’t decompose because he was a passionate, some might say obsessive, believer in the power of revision.
Revision, from the Latin for “look at again,” is the final and most important step of the writing process. Writing is all about revision.
O’Connor revised, “Endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.” In one collection, he said, “there are stories I have rewritten 50 times.” He continued to revise stories even after they were published.
We discover our stories by writing them. And we make our meaning clear by revising them.
Revision is a gift to writers who are wise enough to take advantage of it.
Instead of worrying, why not ask questions that can drive your next revision and produce your final draft?
Is my story:
Clear?
Accurate?
Fair?
Well-organized, with a beginning that grabs a reader’s attention, a middle that keeps the reader engaged and an ending that lingers in the reader’s mind?
Are my characters believable?
Does the dialogue sound the way people speak to — and past — each other?
Are the descriptions vivid, full of sensory details that trigger brain imagery?
Do my scenes start in the middle of the action? Do they have a beginning, middle, climax and resonant ending?
Have I left any unanswered questions?
Too many writers jump the gun. They begin judging their work before it’s ready for critical consideration. Draft first. Get your story down no matter how flawed you think it is. Only then is it time to take the opportunities revision offer.
We discover our stories by writing them. And we make our meaning clear by revising them.
That’s why my advice to writers fearful that their story is a pile of rubbish is to follow the example of Ned Rorem and Frank O’Connor.
Don’t worry. Write first. Leave the judging until later.
The punishment of Sisyphus, on an antique jar/Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich
Why do you write?
What brings you to your desk every day?
Do you seek fame?
Fortune?
The Pulitzer Prize?
There’s nothing wrong with these goals.
But sometimes, the going gets rough and your dreams seem far out of reach. Your latest story just got its tenth rejection, an editor just turned down your pitch, an agent said try elsewhere. Or you’re supposed to be writing but are just spinning your wheels,; you hate your latestsdraft but you don’t know how to fix it.
At times like this, it can be useful to consider why you chose this life in the first place.
Who wouldn’t want Hollywood or a famous literary agent with a stable of writers you admire to come calling? Who wouldn’t be thrilled to land a coveted assignment based on the strength of your news stories?
I certainly harbored those dreams of glory and success as I toiled as a newspaper reporter, later wrote short stories, a screenplay and a full-length play. I imagined my name in lights on Broadway. Still waiting.
The reality is that you have no power over how your work will be received. You can only control what you write. Everything after that is up to other people.
So why should you bother? Writing is hard, lonely work. It keeps you from your family and friends. It robs you of time to leisurely watch the world go by. If you’re not careful, it can suck the life out you.
It can be tedious, especially when you’re struggling to find the right architecture for your story. Writing can be an uphill slog as you build your characters into vivid, believable creatures or render scenes that bring drama and comedy to life.
It can be especially hard when a story you’ve been working on for months just won’t come to life. It has good points, a beginning that came out of nowhere, or a voice or point of view that you’re proud to reveal.
But the middle is a muddle and no matter how hard you try the ending is flat.
I wish I wasn’t speaking from experience, but I am, so as I look at this latest short story for perhaps the 20th time, I find myself asking, why bother? It would be so easy to throw the drafts into the trash, hit the delete button and move on. I understand Amazon has openings in its fulfillment centers.
There’s only one reason to write
There’s only one plausible reason why anyone would commit to this life: you love the craft of writing for the sake of it. It’s the single most important reason why you, or anyone, would — or should — choose this path.
It’s not only for the talented, but for those who understand that, as the French master Gustave Flaubert said in a letter to Vincent van Gogh, “talent is a long patience and originality an effort of will and intense observation.”
And then I realized why I keep trying. Because sitting at your desk trying to make meaning out of words brings meaning to your own life and, if you’re fortunate, to others who read your work, even if for now, it’s a small but loyal audience of family and friends.
Knowing why you write can help you when the struggles seem Sisyphean, a burden as overwhelming as the one the doomed Greek king was forced to carry up a hill every day only to see it roll down.
Writing demands resilience as much as talent and discipline. And the rewards are elusive.
So it can be helpful and inspiring to learn why other writers have answered the question that plumbs their motivation.
Why others write
Joan Didion answered it in an essay called, “Why I Write.”
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
Flannery O’Connor, the Southern writer, said she wrote “because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”
Aerogramme Writer’s Studio collected the thoughts of twenty-one writers who answered the questions in a variety of ways. As a former investigative reporter, one of my favorites came from the British journalist George Orwell:
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
Indian author Nitya Prakash also has others in mind. He is motivated by a desire to tell untold stories, to give voice to the voiceless and to heal.
“I write,” he says, “for those that have no voice, for the silent ones who’ve been damaged beyond repair; I write for the broken child within me…”
These are all valid and valuable reasons to write. They helped after I asked myself why I write after a long and exhausting day, juggling freelance assignments, blogging, coaching and trying to find time to work on my own writing.
I shouldn’t complain. I’m grateful for the gigs and the freedom to write.
Even so, it’s a feeling we all have when facing a story is the last thing you want to do.
There has to be an easier, less stressful way to spend my time on earth. I’m pretty sure you say the same thing from time to time.
That’s why the reason that spoke to me most deeply as someone who spends his days at the keyboard came from the writer and activist Gloria Steinem. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”
Come up with reasons to write
But I knew I had to come up with my own answers to understand what compelled me to get me through the days when I imagined I could be happier doing something else.
I write because:
I have to.
It makes me feel whole.
It exercises my brain.
It fuels my creativity.
It feeds my soul.
It immerses me in the life of the mind.
It fills my psychic bank with optimism and hope.
It makes me money, not much, but green stuff nonetheless.
It makes me feel like an artist, an explorer, a seeker of truth.
It deepens my understanding of the human condition.
It makes me see the art of the possible.
It’s a gift I have to keep deserving.
I hope some of my reasons help you decide why you should write. But you should come up with your own.
All of us are storytellers, whether we do it with a pencil and paper, a laptop or a video camera. It’s in our DNA, the human impulse to create, to remember someone familiar or to create someone you’ve never imagined before you sat down to write.
Ask yourself: Why do I write? The answers will keep you going when all seems lost and you wonder why you’re spending your days and nights wrestling with words.
The quote has become the default ending in journalism and readers and writers are all poorer for it.
The other day I randomly picked some news websites, clicked on stories, and scrolled to the bottom. Try it yourself. Open a story, and let your eyes drift to the end. There they are, those disembodied voices that bring way too many news stories to a close.
“It’s just an interesting old building.”
“People are scared,” Covington Allison said. “County government should make sure all people are taken care of. … Do the the right thing.”
“Some of these nighttime collisions are due to chance, but much more often the nocturnal migrants are lured to their deaths by the lights,” the lab reports.
Ending a story with a quote is a reflex action, understandable, especially in the crush of deadline, but overused to the point of cliché. Worse, the kicker quote deprives writers — and more important, readers—of other, more effective ways to make their stories memorable.
In the world of newswriting, leads get most of the attention, but endings are equally, if not more, important.
If leads are like “flashlights that shine down into the story,” as The New Yorker’s John McPhee once put it, endings can be eternal flames that keep a story alive in a reader’s head and heart.
Ending a story with a quote is a reflex action, understandable, especially in the crush of deadline, but overused to the point of cliché. Worse, the kicker quote deprives writers — and more important, readers—of other, more effective ways to make their stories memorable.
At the end of her three-part narrative series, “Metal to Bone” in the St. Petersburg Times, Anne Hull used a fact instead of a quote to convey the impact of a street crime on a woman police officer.
Lisa rarely thinks of Eugene, although she refuses to leave her back exposed, even while having dinner at a restaurant. Her back is always against a wall.
“You can’t have a decent story if it doesn’t leave you with a strong feeling or sense of image,” says Rick Bragg, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
Two stories end in quotes. A profile of the southern Sheriff who persuaded a mother to confess that she drowned her two children and blamed a black man for the crime concludes with a comment from the cop: “Susan Smith is smart in every area,” he said, “except life.”
A story about an Alabama prison for elderly and disabled inmates ends with a comment about undertaking students at a local university who prepare prisoners’ bodies for burial:
“They make ’em up real nice,” the warden said.
In a profile of a black Indian of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Bragg certainly had the material to use the same device.
Mr. Bannock sits and sweats in his house, working day and night with his needle. He has never had time for a family. He lives for Fat Tuesday.
“I need my mornin’ glory,” he said.
Most writers would have ended the story there with that colorful quote, but Bragg chose a detail instead that struck the chord of his theme: one man’s devotion to a tradition larger than himself.
A few years ago he had a heart attack but did not have time to die. He had 40 yards of velvet to cut and sew.
There are several reasons why, when faced with a blank space at the end of a story, most reporters plug in a quote.
One is expediency; it’s a quick and easy way to finish.
Anxiety is another possibility for rookies and veteran journalists alike. The ending will leave the reader with the most definitive statement on the takeaway from the story. It feels “safer,” and less like editorializing, to put that on a source than yourself as the reporter. But no one knows a story better than the writer; it’s their right — and responsibility — to end the story in a way that has the most accurate and powerful impact.
But there’s another subtler explanation, that has to do with the process of reporting.
Reporters often begin in the dark, uncertain about the meaning of the events or issues that they must chronicle or explain. At least once during this confusing journey, the reporter hears — or reads — something that produces a moment of sudden clarity.
The words jump off a page or emerge from a source’s mouth and into the notebook or audio recorder, and suddenly the reporter grasps the meaning. The squawky violin plays a true note. The piece slides into the puzzle. All that’s missing are the quote marks.
And the very next thought is, “Whew! I’ve got my ending!”
That moment helps the reporter understand the story, but it doesn’t have the same effect on the reader who hasn’t come along on the same journey of discovery and who needs different kinds of information to satisfactorily complete the reading process.
“My advice to young people is to know what your ending is before you start writing.”
Ken Fuson, Des Moines Register
“A good ending absolutely, positively, must do three things at a minimum,” says Bruce DeSilva, former Associated Press writing coach.
Tell the reader the story is over.
Nail the central point of the story to the reader’s mind.
Resonate. “You should hear it echoing in your head when you put the paper down, when you turn the page [or scroll down the screen.] It shouldn’t just end and have a central point,” DeSilva says. “It should stay with you and make you think a little bit. The very best endings do something in addition to that. They surprise you a little. There’s a kind of twist to them that’s unexpected. And yet when you think about it for a second, you realize it’s exactly right.
“My advice to young people is to know what your ending is before you start writing,” says Ken Fuson, one of the greatest stylists at the Des Moines Register.
In some cases, the writer just needs to reorganize. Take that kicker quote and move it up higher, to buttress a description, or punctuate a section. Find something else that reinforces the story’s theme. Think harder about the ending. Write the ending first so you’ll have a destination to aim for. Or at least know what it is.
Ideally, every story should build to a logical conclusion, and the best stories should have endings that resonate beyond the last word.
Sometimes, a quote ending seems the most appropriate way to bring a story to a close.
In his October 2019 story about a Wisconsin county doctor who has spent decades in a small town, and became an expert treating Amish families with rare diseases, Mark Johnson of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel uses a kicker quote to explain the doctor’s decision to stay local instead of moving to the city. “Yet it is just this setting,” he says in the final paragraph, “that has allowed it to become one of the most interesting practices I could ever have imagined.”
Whatever ending you choose, don’t make it an afterthought. Very few readers will return to that brilliant lead you sweated over. The last thing they’ll read, if you’ve done your job right, is the end. Make it count.
The story recounts the mysterious death of Song Yang, a Chinese immigrant sex worker who dies during a police raid. At the end of the story, her mother pays a tribute. It doesn’t end with a quote. Instead:
One evening, Shi paused outside a building where some women were offering massages to passing men. Raising the drooping bags held in her hands, she explained that she had just left the food pantry at the Episcopal church on Main Street, where she had recently been baptized. She said the pastor had emphasized the importance of sharing what you have.
The mother placed a bag of sweet potatoes in the doorway that had once been Song Yang’s domain. It was an offering of sorts, a gift to women like her daughter. Then she was gone, assumed into the Flushing blur.
I asked Barry, in a recent interview for Nieman Storbyoard, why he chose that ending.
“If I’m going to take the reader through 9,500 words,” he said, “the last sentence better be goddamn good. It has to be worth the journey.”
I blew it with an ending more than once, but one sticks in my head.
It was a story about Joe DeMilio, a man who smoked all his life, woke with a cough on Thanksgiving and by the following Mother’s Day he was dead from lung cancer.
When I interviewed his widow, Marie, at their home, I asked for a tour. (Reporting tip: always ask for a tour. You can find revealing details that enliven a story and speak volumes about character.)
In their bedroom, Marie looked at the bed she shared with her husband for decades. I ended the story with Marie talking to me.
“It feels like one big nightmare,” she says. “Maybe I will wake up, and he will be in bed with me. But I know it’s not going to be so. Would you believe it? I take his aftershave lotion and spray it on his pillow just so I can smell him. Just the smell of it makes me feel like he’s with me.”
I’ve regretted that kicker quote ever since. How much stronger the story, I think, had it ended with a narrative ending:
“It feels like one big nightmare,” she says. “Maybe I will wake up, and he will be in bed with me. But I know it’s not going to be so.” Before she gets in bed at night, Marie DeMilio sprinkles her husband’s aftershave on her pillow. Just to feel close to him.
Next time, before you hit send, ask yourself if you can’t find a replacement for that quote ending, one that will linger in your readers’ minds.
Adapted from a column which appeared on Poynter Online
Writing may start in your head, but it has to come out of there, onto the page or the screen.
For that to happen, you have to sit down with a pen and notebook or in front of a computer.
Not everyone recognizes that.
Jericho Brown, a poet and head of the creative writing program at Emory University, posed this question to a class the other day: if you show up for other people—for dentist appointments, making sure kids get to school on time, etc.—why can’t you show up for yourself, to write?
Some might say laziness, but that’s a facile explanation. More likely, it’s resistance, the fear that there’s no point. I have no ideas, you think. I don’t know how to keep going. I’m just no good.
They’re understandable worries, but you have to fight them.
Whatever the reasons, you have to turn up. That’s the only way you can come close to achieving your dreams. It takes discipline, as even the most successful writers have learned.
“I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning,” says Anne Tyler, whose discipline has produced 22 novels. “If I waited till I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.”
Tyler doesn’t wait for a muse, that mythical source of inspiration for the creative artist. Like other successful and productive writers, she turns up.
“I go to the office every day and I work. inspiration itself is not something I have any control over.”
Nick Cave
“I go to the office everyday and I work,” says musician Nick Cave. “Inspiration itself is not something I have any control over.”
Depending on the needs of your family and your work life — if writing is, as it is for most, a second job — you may not be able to write every day. Sometimes a few days or a week may go by, although the longer between sessions, the greater the chance of losing momentum.
To turn up regularly, you’ll need to find—or steal—writing time when you can. An example from my writing life can show you one way.
When I had a job that demanded 10-12 hours a day and a family with a toddler and twin infants, the only time I could write was first thing in the morning when the house was asleep.
I would brew a cup of strong tea and make my way downstairs, careful to avoid squeaks that might awake my sleeping family, to the basement where, crammed into a corner, I had installed a desk and chair.
I usually had less than an hour before I had to get ready for work. I would make notes, draft passages and revise on my desktop and hit save.
I then took a Metro subway to the National Press Building in Washington DC, where I worked as a newspaper reporter. The ride was just 30 minutes long, but I decided to take advantage of that time as well.
I had been inspired to do so after reading that Scott Turow finished his best-selling crime thriller, “Presumed Innocent,” on his commute to Chicago where he worked as an assistant U.S. attorney.
“I wrote 26 to 28 minutes a day,” he told an interviewer after his success. “It doesn’t sound like a lot, maybe, but if I hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“I wrote 26 or 28 minutes a day. It doesn’t sound like a lot, maybe, but if I hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Scott Turow
At the time, I had been working, without much success, in my pre-dawn basement sessions, on a short story about a sports-challenged mother thrust into the role of coach one Saturday at her daughter’s Little League game.
I don’t have a clue where the idea came from, except for the fact that I am sports-challenged with a boyhood history of humiliating days on the baseball field.
But drawing on those experiences, and armed with a legal pad, I found myself drafting with ease as the subway made its subterranean way to my day job. Perhaps because it seemed less permanent than words flickering on my computer screen.
There were mornings when I had to use my commute to keep up with work, but I managed to finish a complete draft in a few weeks. I then spent a few more weeks revising it, marking up a printout I carried in my briefcase. Turning up to write was paying off.
After I finished the story, I sent it to magazines.
Soon, I had a tidy pile of rejection slips. I assumed I had exhausted all the possibilities.
“I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning. If I waited till I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.”
Anne Tyler
The experience taught me a vital lesson about my craft that I hope you’ll take to heart. It doesn’t matter whenever, wherever, or for how long you write. At dawn. On your lunch break. Before bed. On a park bench. In a coffee shop or your home office. Or the subway.
You don’t have to write for very long. But you must stick with it. Try not to miss a day, or you’ll lose momentum. Very soon you’ll have a draft you can revise and that book chapter, essay or story will be that much closer to completion.
What’s most important is that you never stop turning up to write. As often as possible. That way “the muse” knows where to find you.
CRAFT QUERY: How do you make sure you turn up to write?
Using a tape recorder has taught me my most important lesson of interviewing: to shut up. It was a painful learning experience, having to listen to myself stepping on people’s words, cutting them off just as they were getting enthusiastic or appeared about to make a revealing statement.
There were far too many times I heard myself asking overly long and leading questions, instead of simply saying, “Why?” or “How did it happen?” or “When did all this begin?” or “What do you mean?” and then closing my mouth and letting people answer.
People hate silence
It took a long time but eventually, I learned an important lesson: people hate silence. It makes them uncomfortable. And when they’re being interviewed, they’re especially sensitive to a reporter’s behavior. They’ll answer your question and then wait for the interruption that almost always follows. If you don’t butt in, they will keep talking.
There’s a great scene in the 1976 movie, “All the President’s Men,” when Robert Redford, as Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, is asking a Republican businessman how his $25,000 check ended up in the Watergate money trail. It’s a dangerous question, and the source is skittish. “I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, he says.
Woodward remains silent; you can almost see him praying, “Tell me, please.” But he restrains himself and, suddenly, the man blurts out a damaging truth and then can’t stop. Before long, he’s implicated a top Nixon campaign official in the coverup. The moral here: To get people to talk, we need to learn the power of silence and master the art of listening.
Effective writers know they need to get their sources to reveal themselves, to provide the information they need for their stories, and, most important, to offer the human voices that bring a narrative to life.
“Silence opens the door to hearing dialogue, rare and valuable in breaking stories,” says Brady Dennis, of The Washington Post.
Two types of quotes
James B. Stewart in “Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction” draws a distinction between “contemporary quotes — the journalism staple, spoken in answer to a reporter’s question — and “narrative quotes,“ uttered as dialogue or snatches of a character’s speech.
Contemporary quotes have their place. In many cases, the only way reporters can get a quote from President Donald Trump is to ask a question and capture his shouted response over the din of whirring helicopters of Air Force One.
Narrative quotes are much more revealing and require a reporter’s listening ear that is capable of snatching the butterfly of dialogue as it floats through the air. Good stories combine the two types.
“They weren’t fancy women,” said their sister Billie Walker. “They loved good conversation. And sugar biscuits.”
Just 11 words, in quotes, yet they speak volumes about the victims. That’s a powerful contemporary quote, but Gettleman also listens for narrative ones, too.
As the service closed, relatives walked slowly back to their pickups. Gettleman captures a four-word narrative quote that
reflects the region’s dialect and the minister’s concern for his flock.
”Y’all be careful now,” the pastor said.
Learning to listen
“Learning to listen has been the great lesson of my life,” David Ritz wrote in The Writer.“
“You can’t capture a subject or render someone lifelike, you can’t create a living voice, with all its unique twists and turns, without listening. Now there are those who listen while waiting breathlessly to break in. For years, that was me.”
Ritz learned to embrace the idea of “patient listening, deep-down listening, listening with the heart as well as the head, listening in a way that lets the person know you care, that you want to hear what she has to say, that you’re enjoying the sound of her voice.”
That’s what an effective interviewer learns to do.
Shut Up!
For decades, historian Robert A. Caro has been convincing people who knew and worked with the notoriously private President Lyndon B. Johnson to open up. His secret: silence.
“In interviews, silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it,” Caro writes in “Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing,” his illuminating book about the reporting methods behind his magisterial biographies of LBJ.
Caro employs a strategy other interviewers would be wise to adopt.
“When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write “SU” (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of “SU”s.”
During your next interview, ask your question. Then:
Shut your mouth.
Wait.
If you have trouble, count to 10.
Write “SU!” in your notebook.
Make eye contact, smile, nod, but don’t speak.
Let your sources do the talking for you.
You’ll be amazed at the riches that follow.
May the interviewing go well.
Comment question: How do you get your sources to open up?
Journalists, like all writers, draw connections between disparate events and developments. They fashion mosaics from an overwhelming number of bits of information, details and facts. And, often, the journalist must do it in a matter of hours, if not minutes.
Think fast. Think on your feet. React to events as they unfold.
To do it well demands quick intelligence and a talent for critical thinking. If you can’t think, smart and fast, you can’t report well, and you certainly won’t write well.
Trying to write a story, without figuring out what you’re trying to say, whether it’s a news piece, a novel or screenplay, is like hacking your way through a jungle with a butter knife: frustrating and fruitless.
Trying to write a story, without figuring out what you’re trying to say, whether it’s a news piece, a novel or screenplay, is like hacking your way through a jungle with a butter knife: frustrating and fruitless.
That’s where questions come in. They are the machete that hacks through a landscape tangled with the quotes, statistics, details and other facts that sprout up as you report or draft.
One question looms above all: what is my story about?
Finding The Central Idea
“The most important thing in the story is finding the central idea,” Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell says.
“It’s one thing to be given a topic, but you have to find the idea or the concept within that topic. Once you find that idea or thread, all the other anecdotes, illustrations and quotes are pearls that you hang on this thread. The thread may seem very humble, the pearls may seem very flashy, but it’s still the thread that makes the necklace.”
To unravel the thread requires the writer to focus, a vital component of the writing process, sandwiched between developing ideas and reporting the story, drafting and revising the text.
You should begin that quest for meaning even before you start interviewing or researching. While that sounds counterintuitive—how can I know what my story is about before I report?—writers are most successful when they first draw on one of their most crucial sources: themselves.
That way, they tap into their own humanity and can search for the universal messages that will connect their stories to everyone.
An example
Say, for instance, there’s a controversy in your community because the school board is considering cutting funds for after-school arts programs. Tonight, you’re assigned to cover the meeting when it will come to a vote.
Obviously, you can’t predict the future, but you are already an expert about some things.
You’ve gone to high school, for starters. You probably took an arts class. Maybe you played in the steel drum band, built sets for a play or sang in the glee club.
You already possess some knowledge about your subject, enough to launch a quest for the focus of your story, or theme, as your literature teachers called it.
It’s the spine without which your story is just a blob of unformed information of little interest and use to your audience.
It’s the heart that makes your story beat with power.
It would be nice to be able to just ask yourself, “What’s the theme of my story?” and come up with a ready response.
But if you’ve ever had an editor ask you that question and found yourself stumbling over your words, you know how difficult it can be to answer.
Four Questions…And One More
“Newspaper writing, especially on deadline, is so hectic and complicated—the fact-gathering, the phrase-finding, the inconvenience, the pressure—that it’s easy to forget the basics of storytelling,” says David Von Drehle, who writes a national political column for The Washington Post, “Namely, what happened, and why does it matter?”
Regardless of medium or genre, these are the challenges all storytellers face.
Von Drehle posed four additional questions that will enable you to begin the quest for focus even before the meeting starts.
1. Why does it matter? 2. What’s the point? 3. Why is this story being told? 4. What does it say about life, about the world, about the times we live in?
You could easily start muttering the answers to yourself or tell a colleague or editor what you think.
Open a file or flip to a fresh page in your notebook and start writing as fast as you can. Don’t stop if you misspell a word, or get punctuation wrong. There will be time to fix that. Spend your time recording your thoughts as they fly off your fingers.
I’ll show you what I mean. Warning: It’s messy, but I’m just trying to get my thoughts down as quickly as possible. If I used any of this in the story, I can quickly fix the mistakes.
For the first three focusing questions, write for 15 seconds.
because arts enrich kids’ lives. helps them experience the world beyond their own lives become full richer human beings
point is that arts matters in education. It matters as much as math and science and sports and PE
Told because parents and students need to be alerted that these critical programs may be cut depriving
For the fourth question, write for 20 seconds. I’m giving you more time because I think it’s such a brilliant question.
4. At a time when school are so much about sports, arts take a back seat and students are cheated of the chance to act, paint, etc.Sports get the money. Unfair, Wrongheaded.
Just think. What if every story you write or read answered—or addressed—that question?
What if readers, viewers and listeners knew they would be on the receiving end of such knowledge?
Perhaps the news industry wouldn’t be in as much trouble as it is.
Too often, news writing is poorly focused, if focused at all, badly organized, shoddily written and barely edited.
But offer high-quality information produced by a thoughtful writer and it will be greeted by an eager, built-in audience.
“People come to a newspaper craving a unifying human presence—the narrator in a piece of fiction, the guide who knows the way, or the colleague whose view one values,” Jack Fuller writes in his book “News Values: Ideas for an Information Age.”
The same holds true for news sites, magazines, podcasts and the myriad ways news and information is delivered.
People crave meaning in the short stories, nonfiction books and novels they read and the dramas they watch as well.
Von Drehle’s questions provide the opportunity to furnish these valuable commodities of knowledge and wisdom. They also enable you to answer the most important question, the one your audience (and your editor) will ask.
What’s my story really about?
That’s why I added a fifth question to Von Drehle’s excellent list.
What’s my story really about—in one word?
This time you only get five seconds to answer it. Don’t worry. I just want a one-word answer.
5. Deprivation (Notice how it was embedded in one of the earlier answers. And that’s my answer. Yours may be different.)
Why one word?
Of all the definitions of theme, my favorite is “meaning in a word.” The strongest themes are emotional, resonant, universal.
Betrayal.
Redemption.
Corruption.
Hope.
“Money,” “cuts” and “funding” are topics, not themes. You have to dig deep for this answer, (hence really) not settle for the facile label that may tell you what the story is about on the surface, but doesn’t reveal all its complexities.
“It’s one thing to be given a topic, but you have to find the idea or the concept within that topic. Once you find that idea or thread, all the other anecdotes, illustrations and quotes are pearls that you hang on this thread. The thread may seem very humble, the pearls may seem very flashy, but it’s still the thread that makes the necklace.”
Thomas Boswell
With your focus in mind, you can now go outside yourself for specifics.
Don’t just talk to school officials; ask students and their parents how they would be deprived or what would be lost if the funding for the arts was cut. Chances are you’ll head into the meeting with lively anecdotes, examples and quotes.
Someone who might not want to read a story about a school board meeting might be interested in how public officials are planning to deprive students of subjects that enrich their lives.
Never stop searching
Of course, the search for focus doesn’t end when you answer those questions before you head out on an assignment or start a new writing project.
Events can change. The protest your editor said he witnessed on the way to work could be a new farmer’s market.
The school board, pressured by protests by students and their families, could in fact vote to increase arts funding.
Be mindful that the focus might change and hope you have enough integrity to say, “It’s not the same.”
That’s why you should freewrite answers to the five questions at every step of the process:
Before the reporting
During the reporting
After the reporting
Before the writing
Before the revision
Before you scream “Impossible!,” remember I only asked you to freewrite for a total of 70 seconds.
One minute and 10 seconds.
Heck, most reporters waste way more time than that trying to craft the “perfect lead” only to make a mess of the rest of the story because they ran out of time.
And don’t dismiss freewriting simply because it’s easy. Bear in mind that you’re drafting words that may make it into your finished story.
Finding your theme will drive your reporting, your writing and revising.
Most important, these five questions will enable you to find the heart of every story you write.
Every story has a heart. Your job as a writer is to find it.
