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

I saw that Dan Barry said that a big lesson for him was that the process gets harder.  That feels true. But for me the process has gotten easier. I am not Sisyphus kicking that stone downhill.  But I feel that I am at least rolling it on a level plain. But it only gets easier if you are willing to relearn the big lessons with each project.  I’m talking about books now.  I’ve written six in twelve years.  I have a process that I borrowed from Bill Howarth’s description of John McPhee.  I need my raw material, my index cards, my file folders, my bulletin board. If I try a shortcut, if I lean too heavily on my experience, if I try to dance over a step, I usually crash to the bottom of the staircase.  Use the process. Follow the steps. Trust the process. You have to trust. Even if it’s not going well at this moment, keep at it. Realize that the imperfection you feel right now is necessary. There was a great bowler from Texas named Billy Welu who used to be a color commentator for televised bowling tournaments.  He would point out that some bowlers with big hooks needed to roll the ball at the edge of the gutter in order for it to curve into the pocket for a strike. “Trust is a must,” he would say in a Texas drawl, “or your game is a bust.”

What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?

My biggest surprise as a writer came when I was about 30 years old. It surprised me again when I was about 60 years old.  This had to do with my personal and professional identity. That is, how I identified myself. I meet people all the time who say, “I’m not a writer, but I am working on a novel.”  Or “I write reports at work all day, but I’m not saying I’m a writer.” I play rock and roll piano. And on occasion I hit a golf ball. I am not Jimi Hendrix or Tiger Woods, but I feel comfortable calling myself a musician and a golfer.  I was trained in graduate school to become a young English professor. And I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation about Chaucer, but I did not consider myself a writer. I became a newspaper writing coach, but did not call myself a writer. In 1979 I had about 250 bylines in the St. Petersburg Times.   Finally, it hit me: “You know, Roy, maybe you could be a writer.” It feels crazy in retrospect: becoming a writing coach BEFORE I embraced the identity as a writer. Thirty years later, I could easily say I was a writer and a teacher of writing. Then it happened again. I wrote the book “Writing Tools” – followed by five more with Little, Brown.  LB published Emily Dickinson! “Holy shit,” I thought, “I’m not just a writer – I’m an author!” If you write, you’re a writer. If you auth, you’re an author.

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

I am fascinated by the work of Phoukhoun Phimsthasak, a woman who made her way from Laos to America.  She has an amazing personal story of escape, rescue, renewal, and hard, hard work. My wife and I know her as Jane.  She does manicures and pedicures. As I metaphor, I can think of myself as a nail specialist. I work with an elaborate tool set, and a process that has a set of predictable steps, with some special challenges and surprises along the way.  My mission relates to both utility and beauty, but also to listening and public service. It’s also about relationship building and referral, because there are a lot of nail specialists out there and many of them are good. But I want you to keep coming back to me.

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Roy Peter Clark is senior scholar at the Poynter Institute. He has taught writing at every level — to schoolchildren and Pulitzer Prize- winning authors — for more than forty years.  A writer who teaches and a teacher who writes, he has written or edited 19 books, including “Writing Tools”, “The Glamour of Grammar, “”Help! for Writers,” “How to Write Short,” and “The Art of X-Ray Reading.”  His latest — a writing book about writing books — is due out in January:  “Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser.”  He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, hits a golf ball now and then, and plays keyboard in a blues band .

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

Listen. Sounds basic but in the hustle to get out the news, sometimes it gets lost. It’s OK and even a good habit to allow long pauses in an interview. Quiet moments give the subject a chance to reflect. It’s hard to stifle the impulse to fill that space with a follow-up, clarification or comment, but sometimes that moment produces a deeper response. I learned this essential lesson while working with my colleague, Dave Killen, a film editor, on a documentary series. He needed people’s answers to trail off naturally. As the interviewer, that meant less give-and-take in favor of a more intentional effort to allow more space between questions. Some of the richest responses emerged from those pauses.

What’s been the biggest surprise of your reporting life?

It’s humbling to be trusted with someone’s story, especially if it involves sexual assault. I’ve written a lot about victims of sex crimes and other crime victims still coping with deep trauma and an unsatisfying criminal justice system. Their faith in institutions and in people is often shaken or even shattered. Trusting me, a journalist and stranger, with their accounts is a big leap of faith and a reminder of the critical role we play as truth-tellers. 

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

I’d say my career has been a dark mirror of sorts. I’ve spent most of my 26-year career reporting on crime and justice. I’ve written about white supremacists, bad cops, predators and serial killers. The dark side of human nature — greed, rage and power — intrigues me. I chalk that up to growing up in Rhode Island in the 1970s and 1980s where public corruption and organized crime were always page one news.

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Noelle Crombie is an enterprise reporter at The Oregonian. She has reported extensively on crime and justice. She reported and wrote “Ghosts of Highway 20,” a 7,000 word narrative and 5-part documentary series focused on the victims of serial killer who targeted vulnerable women along U.S. 20 in Oregon. From 2012 through 2016, she led The Oregonian‘s groundbreaking cannabis coverage, which focused on government accountability. Before coming to The Oregonian in 1999, she was a reporter for The Day in New London, Connecticut. She grew up in Rhode Island and received a bachelor’s degree in government from Smith College. 

Craft Query: How would you answer these questions?

May the writing go well.

Photograph by Beth Nakamura/

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

The thing that unlocked writing for me—writing of all kinds, but fiction especially—was so simple it feels almost silly to type it out: finish things. For years, I thought of myself as someone who wanted to be a writer; for years, I maintained an archive of partial chapters belonging to novels I would one day write. But it wasn’t until I zoomed way in, wrote short, and shared what I’d written with others that I actually started to learn and improve. Turns out, a story can totally be four paragraphs long! And a four-paragraph story, unlike four paragraphs of a notional novel, is something you can meaningfully discuss. A four-paragraph story can be a stepping stone to a two-page story, then four, then twenty. I’d never have gotten to the novels if I hadn’t started and finished the really short stuff first.

What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?

Translation! When I was drafting my first novel, I never even bothered to imagine translation. Maybe that’s because all of my writing before that had been for a blog, and who’s ever going to translate your blog? Maybe it’s because simply getting published in the U.S., in English, seemed an extravagant enough vision. In either case, when my first novel wast ranslated into other languages, it upended my sense of what I’d produced. Not only a series of sentences, but a plan—a detailed blueprint — for another creative mind to render something onto the page. I don’t think I’m quite good enough a writer to “write for translation” yet—to keep that future transformation in my head as I’m drafting the original in English — but I’d like to get there.

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

This might just be my last novel Sourdough talking, but… I think I’m a fermenter?? My process is: throw a lot of stuff together — ideas, sentences, experiences, feelings, all from my notebook, where I am always jotting — and mix it up. Then, let it sit, and watch as life begins to bloom in the interstices. If a real-life fermentation is often powered by yeasts, then this metaphorical digester’s engine is imagination, which feeds on the real, stretching it 120% and rotating it through six dimensions before spitting it out as a name, or a phrase, or a scene. I can trace this process back to blogging, which has that same magpie spirit, and maybe also to journalism! I remember hearing journalists talk about “saving string”—a terrific phrase —and this is just a version of that, except that I’m intentionally tangling up the strands.

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Robin Sloan’s first novel, “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore“, was a New York Times Best Seller, translated into more than twenty languages. His latest novel, “Sourdough,” was published in 2017. With his partner Kathryn Tomajan, Robin produces California extra virgin olive oil under the label Fat Gold. He lives in Oakland and works out of the Murray Street Media Lab in South Berkeley, down by the railroad tracks. From 2002 to 2012, he worked at the intersection of media and technology, first at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, and then at Current TV and Twitter, both in San Francisco.

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

It doesn’t get easier. In fact, I find that the process gets harder. I expect more of myself than I did as a young newspaper reporter, and so I am increasingly more conscious of all that is at play, even on deadline: the choice of words, the rhythm of language, the avoidance of preciousness, the necessity of clarity — the killing of darlings.

What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?

The biggest surprise to me is how writing often seems like mathematics. Let me start by saying that I used to work as a waiter at a church bingo hall. The manager would give me two dollars to start the night. For three hours I would collect tips by hustling coffee and doughnuts to women shouting “Shake up those balls” whenever O-66 was called. And then, at the end of the night, I’d have $1.85. Which is a long way of saying I suck at math. I hate math. But writing to me often seems like calculus. Trying to crack some code, only with words, not numbers. This noun plus this adjective plus this verb minus this adverb equals part of an equation, the solution of which is revealed only when I think I have it just right. Which often means I’m still fifteen cents short.

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

How about a woodpecker, constantly banging his head against a tree — or desk — digging away, deeper and deeper, over and over, in search of coming upon something worthy. Instead of a delectable insect, a perfect word. And yes, I know, woodpeckers also peck to make nests and attract mates. So maybe a better metaphor is the Occasionally Successful Sisyphus. Sweating it out in Hades, he struggles to push that boulder uphill. And every once in a rare while, he thwarts Zeus and reaches the top.

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

It came from Tom Heslin, who in the early 90s was the investigations editor at the Providence Journal. I was working on a multi-part series about a banking scandal, and I sent him a version of one of the stories – perhaps too quickly because I was eager to get it in the paper and move on. As I remember it, his advice came across the Atex message system. And all it said was: “Slow it down.”Those three words have had a profound impact on me, and I’ve interpreted them in different ways over the years (recognizing all the while that they might not easily apply to deadline stories). Slow it down in digesting the material you’ve gathered. Slow it down in the time you spend to craft your long-form narrative. But, most of all, slow it down when it comes down to time – to moments that, when carefully and concisely shared, can add dimension to character development or to a tick-tock. This happened, this happened, this happened – wait, let’s take another beat on this moment – and then this happened and this happened…By slowing it down, you move yourself even further from stenography. You become a storyteller.

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Dan Barry is a longtime award-winning reporter and columnist for The New York Times and an author.  In addition to sharing a Pulitzer Prize with former colleagues at The Providence Journal, he has received, among countless other accolades, a George Polk Award; an American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting (for his coverage of the first anniversary of Sept. 11); a Mike Berger Award for in-depth human interest reporting; and the PEN/ESPN Literary Award for Sports Writing. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize: once in 2006 for his slice-of-life reports from hurricane-battered New Orleans and from New York, and again in 2010 for his coverage of the Great Recession and its effects on the lives and relationships of America. His books include “The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland,,” “Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game,“City Lights,” “Pull Me Up:’ A Memoir,” and most recently,  “This Land: America, Lost and Found.”

May the writing go well.