Harry Truman once said: “Being a president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or he is swallowed.”
Actually, Truman’s insight holds for the rest of us too. Living even ordinary lives can be like riding a tiger. But the lesson from Daniel Kahneman’s masterpiece, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is different. Truman says presidents have to rise to the frantic challenge of riding a tiger. But Kahneman tells us we need to get off the tiger and control our own pace.
Kahneman, a psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics, has died at the age of 90. His influence spans not only the social sciences (economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, and more) but also business and the arts. Where the pioneers of psychology and economics often fell back on their wits, he did the hard work of experimentation and data analysis.
Kahneman worked with his friend and colleague Amos Tversky for decades before Tversky died in 1996. Undoubtedly, the two would have shared the Nobel Prize had Tversky lived long enough.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes two minds or “systems” that govern how we operate in the world.
In System 1, based on our more primitive brain, we are constantly reacting to the world—even when we don’t know what happens. We evolved to have fast-twitch responses to events in the world. Until modern times, people faced constant danger when they ventured out to hunt or explore frontiers beyond their home base. To respond before they suffered a calamity—like getting eaten by a tiger—they reacted instantly. Humans responded by fight, flight, or freeze. This is a crisis approach to life. It’s useful when trying to survive in a wild and dangerous world. But it’s less helpful in modern times, when we overreact to even minor “crises” in our lives. Too often, we overreact to the words of actions of a family member, coworker, peer, or another driver. Hello, road rage.
Which brings us to System 2, the slower, more deliberative mode of thinking. Even though we are reactive creatures, we also have the capacity to slow down and carefully consider situations and problems. When someone cuts us off in traffic, we can overreact by nonking, shouting, or making a rude gesture. Or we can make an effort to pause, let the “crisis” pass, and decide how our better self should respond. Usually, we can just let a crisis pass. Then, if it makes sense, we can think through what just happened. If there’s an actual problem to be solved, we can break it down and decide what makes sense to do. We can collaborate with others.
Thinking, Fast and Slow builds on this foundation. But the heart of the book is a detailed discussion of the biases that we humans have. And oh boy, are we ever biased—and not just for people like us and against outsiders. We have “availability bias” (the tendency to rely on readily available information), “confirmation bias” (seeking information that confirms existing beliefs), “anchoring bias” (relying too much on what we learn early), and “loss aversion” (the tendency to prefer avoiding losses over making equal or greater gains).
That’s just for starters. Kahneman’s book shows that in every aspect of our lives, we fall back on primitive ways of understanding and action. So how do we deal with it? Acknowledge the power of System 1 and then nurture and develop System 2.
This book requires that you settle in for some concentrated reading—System 2 reading, if you will. But for anyone who wants to understand how humans really think and act, you can’t do any better.
When Alfred Hitchcock roamed the sets of his movies, he could be seen with a small book called Plotto. With this book of prompts, storytellers can connect 15 characters types (listed in Column A) to 62 conflict situations (Column B) and 15 consequences (Column C). In a sense, Plotto is a guide for mix-and-matching the elements of a story.
Published in 1928 by William Wallace Cook—who used it to write an endless series of pulp novels—Plotto was responsible for the greatest stream of thrillers, this side of John Grisham. A former lawyer named Erle Stanley Gardner used Plotto to create a series of pulp novels featuring Perry Mason. Those novels sold 170 million copies and inspired the classic radio, film, and TV productions.
Enter Eric R. Williams, a screen/virtual reality writer who also teaches storytelling at Ohio University. His book The Screenwriter’s Taxonomy goes far beyond Plotto. In this fascinating guide to genre, Williams lays out 260 different elements of stories, arranged on a hierarchy that looks like this:
Super-Genres: These 11 basic categories (Action, Crime, Fantasy, Horror, Life, Romance, Sci-Fi, Sports, Thriller, War, Western) establish the basic expectations for stories.
Macro-Genres: These 50 story contexts show different “worlds of the story” (from Addiction to Workplace), each with its own distinct settings, values, and patterns of behavior.
Micro-Genres: These 199 details help to give further definition to the 50 Macro-Genres (e.g., a Legal Macro-Genre could have a Micro-Genre of Courtroom, Investigation, Tales of the System, or Underdog/Whistleblower).
All this might remind you of the old barb about academic analysis—that it’s an endless process of figuring out “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” In other words, it may seem like nothing more than mind-numbing insider-speak. Occam’s Razor, it ain’t.
But wait. This typology offers a brilliant way to understand stories and how they work. It’s a great way to brainstorm stories and to create a great plot.
Williams suggests using his story-generation machine in three stages:
Start by looking at the 50 Macro-Genres. What kind of world do you want to explore? The world of Addiction? A Gangster story? A Love story? Maybe a Procedural? How about a Romantic Comedy?
Now look at the kinds of stories you can tell within your Macro-Genre—in other words, look at the Micro-Genres. If you want to tell a Love story, figure out what kind. You have five basic choices: Disguise (think Roxanne), Nonconventional (Her), Obsession (Fatal Attraction), Traditional (Emma), and Unrequited (Remains of the Day).
Now, decide what Super-Genre you want to use. Theoretically, once you have picked your Macro-Micro combination, you could tell 11 different kinds of stories. If you wanted to tell a tale of Unrequited Love, for example, it could fall under the Super-Genre of Action, Crime, Fantasy, Thriller, and seven other Super-Genres.
If this still feels overwhelming, that’s OK. Life is complicated, right? Williams estimates that his system could produce as many as 187,816,200 permutations of story types. But never mind.
My advice is to get the book, download a handy cheat sheet, and let your imagination roam over these three levels of story categories. Whatever you do, don’t rush.
This is not simple. But the more you work with it, the more you understand the internal mechanisms of stories. Lucky for me, I had an opportunity to talk with Eric R. Williams about his approach to genre. Here’s a transcript of our talk, edited for brevity and clarity.
We might think about genre in business terms. A corporate brand is essentially a promise. The brand says to the buyer of Corn Flakes or iPhones or UnderArmour: This is what you can expect if you enter this world.
Or look at it as a niche. It’s a way of zooming down to the most elemental or unique aspects of whatever we’re talking about. So a smartphones are a niche of the telecommunications business, along with flip phones, land lines, and even Zoom.
When you’re writing a film, just like when you’re creating a product, you are trying to meet the promises that you’ve made to your audience. With The Screenwriters Taxonomy, I wanted to help writers specify different elements that they’re going to be working on creatively. I realized that genre is just so broadly used that it’s lost its meaning. As storytellers, genre (as a concept) has to be useful.
In essence, I believe, genre is about character, atmosphere, and key expectations of the story. So if I’m doing a War movie, it’s going to be the us versus them, right? It’s going to be soldiers against those conspiring against the soldiers—other soldiers or people in a foreign land or political opponents.
So, what’s atmosphere? Well, where is the war going to take place? Here are some options: probably a contrast between foreign lands and back home, right? We’ll probably see some sort of combination of battlegrounds, training grounds, and the spaces in between. Atmosphere also includes props and costumes (so, in War, we’ll see uniforms and weapons and war machines and symbols of peace and patriotism).
We also know what’s going to happen in a war movie, right? We know the basic tenets and themes of stories of War. Sacrifice and survival, patriotism and camaraderie, and the effects or war on society and the individual. That sort of stuff, right? That what we expect in a war movie? Not all of it—not all at once, but some of it.
And we know these key tentpole scenes: Battles and injuries and captives and freedom. Decisions of life and death. Questions of rank and leadership. Themes of Us versus Them. We know thematically a handful of areas that we might explore in a war movie. We pretend that each war movie is unique. But they’re not. Not really.
Looking at your 11 Super-Genres, that’s one of them. Suppose we want to do a War story that’s a Comedy, like M*A*S*H. So we have a war with different ways people are fighting each other. The ongoing fight between the North Koreans and South Koreans is an obvious level. Another level is the dumb bureaucrats and martinets against ordinary people who are just trying to survive. So we have a comedy that falls in the Super-Genre of War. And then we look at the 50 Macro-Genres.
The War Super-Genre typically has multiple characters. Maybe a big band of brothers going off and fighting. But what else are we exploring besides war? You might have someone who, in a B plot, has left his family behind. So now we have a Family story as a Macro-Genre. And we can take that further by exploring the Micro-Genre of the Family story: is this a story that tests the family bond? Or is this a story about a family dealing with loss? Or has war created a feud within the family?
Or let’s take this war Super-Genre in a completely different direction with a Macro-Genre of Time Travel. We could have a war movie with all the typical trappings you’d expect, but then what would happen if one of the soldiers discovered a time-travel mechanism? All of a sudden, in the second act, it becomes a War story with a character who can travel forwards and backwards in time. Now you’ve paired your Super-Genre of War with a Macro-Genre of Time Travel. In essence, that’s what Kurt Vonnegut did with Slaughterhouse Five—except that the character Billy Pilgrim didn’t have a time machine, he was just unmoored in the time-space continuum.
You could also have Addiction—a character who is addicted to X, Y, and Z. During the course of the battles, he overcomes that addiction—or he becomes addicted. You can weave those thematic or personal stories (the Macro-Genre) into that larger Super-Genre in a variety of ways. So there’s 50 Macro-Genres, probably more. You can put any one of those 50 Macro-Genres into any of the 11 Super-Genres.
So one or more of the 50 Macro-Genres can be combined with any of the 11 Super-Genres. What’s the sweet spot for the number of Macro-Genres that might go with a Super-Genres like War or Romance or Life or whatever? Is it three or …
Off the top of my head, I’d shoot for two or three. Obviously, when you start telling stories with more characters, you might to pull more Macro-Genres. It’s also important to note that any of the 11 Super-Genres can act as a Macro-Genres. For instance, the 2021 film Cherry takes Crime as a Super-Genre, then mixes it with War and Addiction and Love Story as its three Macro-Genres to create a really amazing and complex character study.
It depends on the clarity of the expression. If by having four or five or more Macro-Genres, the story flies off in too many different directions, that could confuse the audience. The ultimate test is to have a core that holds everything together.
That’s exactly right. And I would add that, just because there’s some sort of storytelling element, that doesn’t mean it’s a Macro-Genre. Just because one of our soldiers wants to get home to his sweetheart, that doesn’t make it a Love story. Just because somebody is addicted to heroin, that doesn’t mean that it’s an Addiction story. For a Macro-Genre to emerge, you actually have to explore the character, locations, and story expectations of that Micro-Genre.
Do the Super-Genres have to have their own mini arcs? You hear people talk a lot about the B story. That B story is a complete mini-story unto itself, but it’s subordinate to the main story. Is that the ultimate test of whether you should think of it as a Macro-Genre—whether it helps contribute to the main story or theme?
That’s a great way to put it. The Macro-Genre really needs to be a B story (or even a C story).
If we think of genre as a promise, the B story and C story have to help fulfill that promise—not just for the genre, but also for the setup, right?
In the opening scene of The Godfather, it’s about family, it’s about loyalty, it’s about control. But to me, the main moment is Michael telling Kay, “This is my family, but it’s not me. I’m getting out.” So the big question is: Can a guy like this escape the vortex of a crime family? Everything gets back to that issue: How total is the experience of a crime family?
To me, this is the central difference between Super-Genre and Macro-Genre. Coppola is telling a Crime story (the Super-Genre) which also has elements of a Love story between Kay and Michael (the Macro-Genre). However, it would be possible for someone to take the exact same characters and situations and change the film into a Romance between Kay and Michael, right? That would change how those scenes are told.
If this was a Romance, it might start with Michael and Kay driving into the wedding. Little do we know about this guy who’s in love with his new girlfriend and is bringing her to meet the family. Well, the family is actually—nudge nudge, wink wink—a crime family. That changes everything. Now we have a Romance (Super-Genre) combined with a Gangster story (Macro-Genre). One way to think of Super-Genre is to ask: “How are they advertising this film?”
When I’m walking into a movie theater, looking at all of those movie posters, am I going to see Godfather: The Romance? If that’s the Super-Genre, then I want to see Kay and Michael deciding whether their marriage is going to work out, because that’s going to be our central set of expectations since it’s a Romance and not a Crime movie, right? But of course, as Coppola and Puzo imagined it, Kay and Michael’s love story becomes a secondary element in the Crime Super-Genre.
A movie involving the mafia doesn’t necessarily have to do with organized crime. Analyze This, for example, is not really about organized crime.
No, that’s a Day in the Life story, with Gangster elements. Day in the Life is the Super-Genre and Gangster is the Macro-Genre. It’s similar to the TV series The Sopranos. The brilliant thing that David Chase did with that series it that he chose a different Super-Genre. He made it a Day in the Life story as his Super-Genre, and then used Family and Gangster as Macro-Genres. See how that changes the focus of the piece?
Genre also forces you to be particular, specific. We all have an innate human urge for storytelling. But we also have a huge human tendency toward summarizing and generalizing. A niche forces us to stay specific.
A lot of it has to do with the medium. Film and television are hyper-specific, right? We get into these details because we can actually see it on the screen so we have to be specific. In that opening scene of The Godfather we see a room with specific actors doing specific things in a specific environment. The detail exists for us to point at and agree to: Brando petting a cat and discussing murder. Mario Puzo’s novel has a certain amount of detail, but you can still allow your mind to wander. For instance, Puzo can write, “the men talked about justice for Bonasera’s daughter” and the idea doesn’t need details the way that a filmed scene needs details.
One of one of the problems with biopics is that they try to do too much rather than getting specific. Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, for example, covers a huge sweep of time. Might it have been better to focus on one element of the story, like Malcolm’s break with Elijah Muhammad or his trip to Africa or his time in jail? Then you could have a tight theme, a strong story arc, with the details that really get it.
Yeah, I would buy that. Spike Lee tried to cover a lot of ground in three and a half hours. The story of Malcom X might have been better served by exploring a smaller section of his life in more detail. But keep in mind, the movie came out in the early 1990s and that was the biggest canvas Spike Lee had to paint that story. Now you could take that same story and stream it as a 12-part series and add a lot more specificity and detail.
In his interviews with Truffaut, Hitchcock said something to the effect of, “I have this funny idea of creating a movie not out of characters or situations, but out of scenes. And then I try to think about what would happen in the scenes.”
That all goes back to genre, because those are the audience’s expectations when they buy a ticket. You can subvert some of those expectations. You could have a gangster movie that takes place in space. But you have to set that expectation up for your audience so that they know that, okay, the theme and the characters are all going to still be a gangster movie, but people are going to be wearing funky futuristic costumes because the story takes place in outer space. Dark City, Dredd, Elysium, and maybe even Tenet would be good examples of Gangster movies that subvert our expectations by placing the story in outer space.
Similarly, if your audience is expecting to see a Western, they don’t expect the story to be in New York City. That just goes to say that if you’re trying to tell a Western and it’s surrounded by skyscrapers, you’re probably starting in a hole.
It could be a fish-out-of-water story. But that’s but that’s a different story. That’s a different niche or a different genre as well.
I’m all in favor of subverting expectations. If we’re going to tell a Western, we could start it in New York and make it out of fish-out-of-water story. But they better get out west by the second act or your audience is going to be wondering why the film was billed as a Western. Remember Back to the Future III. It becomes a Western as soon as Michael J. Fox gets catapulted into the past. It doesn’t start there, but we knew, going in, that’s where they’re going.
If you’re a hierarchical thinker, you probably start with the Super-Genres and then work down. But maybe if there’s a kind of Macro-Genre situation that you really love, you can start there.
I would almost always start with the Macro-Genre. People think in Macro and Micro terms. They’re specific. And their stories bubble up.
We have been talking about Gangster stories, so let’s continue along that line. You might be drawn to telling a Gangster story—be it from the anti-hero’s POV or the lawman’s POV—but that’s just a starting point. Next, ask whether it’s a Western or Sci-Fi or Fantasy or whatever. I mean, it’s possible to have a Gangster Western (3:10 to Yuma) or a Gangster Sci-Fi (The Dark Knight) or even a Gangster Fantasy film (The Forbidden Kingdom).
A story is only as good as its details. That requires research. You might think you know a subject. A young writer might know a lot about high school theater. But those aren’t the details that are going to tell the story. They have to somehow still do research to get the details for other aspects of the story.
Right. They also have to understand the details of the characters that populate those stories. If you’re doing a story about a high school musical, you might have a drama teacher who is going through a divorce and he’s torn because the topic of the play is about children while he’s in a custody battle in court in his real life.
As a writer, you might know everything in the world about high school musicals, but what do you know about divorce and custody battles? To tell this part of the story in your musical though, you’re going to have to write scenes about what that person is going through. And that’s the research you need.
You can’t create that high school drama teacher unless you know something about relationships and the awkward stuff that goes on between divorcing couples and how their friends and families react to each other. There’s a million things that you need to know, besides the world of theater.
Typically, I find that my Macro- and Micro-Genres help me to identify what to research. I might have enough of a general idea about the tropes of my Super-Genre to start imagining my screenplay. But when I dig into the details of the Macro- and Micro-Genres, then I need more specificity to create those characters and the nuance that makes them unique and interesting.
Let’s talk about beats. Robert McKee, in his Story Seminar, does a complete showing of Casablanca. He analyzes the bazaar scene, where Ilsa goes out and looks at fabrics and Rick comes out and tries to atone for his bad behavior the night before. Every moment of dialogue moves that scene forward—and not just the scene, but the whole story. (See this discussion.)
But it’s not just whether it moves the story forward. Sometimes we want a thematic beat that helps us understand the context, the values of the people in the story. Even if it doesn’t change the story, a moment can be valuable for revealing something about the character.
There’s a scene in Black Mass, about the Boston mobster White Bulger. There’s is a scene where he convinces one of his henchmen, Stephen Flemmi, to strangle his girlfriend to death in the trunk of a car. There’s really no other reason for this scene other than to create a distaste for Whitey Bulger.
You see, there’s also this idea of primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are what the character is thinking. Secondary emotions are what the audience is thinking. In that example, Whitey Bulger is smiling. He’s happy. He’s like, ha ha.
So the primary emotion is Bulger’s twisted glee. Then there are those beats that hit a switch in the audience’s heart or mind. In this case, hopefully, the audience is horrified by Bulger. That’s the secondary emotion. Secondary emotions are super important because they’re not very many of them. But when they when they hit, they carry this weight. So they don’t necessarily move the story forward. But thematically, and contextually, they play a crucial role in the story.
No writer has ever escaped the curse of writer’s block.
You sit at the keyboard, immobilized. You thought you had something to say. You thought you had the words. You thought that persevering would help. But your ideas are stuck, like the water that won’t move in a stopped-up faucet. If you’re lucky, if you keep adjusting the hot and cold spigots, you’ll get a blast of water. But the chances are that it’s just a filthy torrent of dirty water: worthless dreck.
So what do you do when the faucet stays stopped up–or, even worse, when the words flow but they’re all terrible?
There are three causes of writer’s block: psychology, research, and perfectionism. Let’s look at each one in turn.
Writer’s Block 1: Psych Out!
Writer’s block is usually known as a psychological malady. Writers are, after all, simultaneously egotistical and insecure. They think they’re the king of the world and the worst pretenders and fakers ever.
Steven Pressfield use the term The Resistance to describe the force that blocks creative expression. In his tidy little book, The War of Art, he notes that many would-be creatives torment themselves with negative self-talk. After grandiosely imagining writing the Great American Novel (or other art form), they procrastinate, make excuses, drink and/or do drugs, find escape in shallow relationships, and otherwise piss away their creative juices.
Fear is not all bad. “Are you paralyzed with fear?” Pressfield says. “That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
Nothing is worthwhile without a struggle. Creation is a process of struggle. If we have nothing to push against us–internally or externally–we will glide along the same old path and discover nothing along the way.
Pressfield’s answer is to man up–or, as he puts it in another tidy little book, commit to “turning pro.” He contrasts the amateur and the pro like this:
“When we’re living as amateurs, we’re running away from our calling — meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves. Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. We enact the addiction instead of embracing the calling. Why? Because to follow a calling requires work. It’s hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure.”
Writer’s block, then, is simply a refusal to face the daunting challenge of hard work. Pressfield spent years wasting his talent on bad jobs, bad relationships, and incomplete drafts. Like the alluring but degenerate artist in an alluring but degenerate subculture like New Orleans–a place where characters and misfits are celebrated– he refused to surrender his vices in order to realize his creativity. Until, one day, he rented a tiny house in northern California and lived a life of isolation.
Every day he got up, read, wrote, ate, read, wrote some more, and slept. He avoided newspapers and TV, relationships, and the life of the glib raconteur. The day he typed the words “THE END,” he knew that he had turned pro.
It did not matter that the novel was an inferior work or that he failed to sell it. What mattered was that he devoted himself, finally, to the work. He made that his priority and refused to let outside distractions and excuses rule his life. Like an alcoholic who no longer has any desire for a drink, Pressfield was now a different man. He didn’t need a spare and isolated houaw any more. From then on, he showed up to do the work. He was a pro.
“Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.”
Writer’s Block 2: Not Enough to Say
Not all writer’s block is as exquisitely psychological as The Resistance. For those seeking less than the Life of the Artist–people who just want to produce something worthwhile–writer’s block “presents itself” (to use the psychologist’s term) as a feeling of dumbness.
We have written before, maybe even well. We get an assignment–a paper, report, article, chapter, or even a book. We know the subject well–or at least better than 99.99 percent of the people that we pass on the street. We have piles of notes. We have talked about the subject with others. We have demonstrated our superior knowledge and even cleverness.
Then we sit down at the keyboard and nothing comes out. Or even worse, what comes out is garbage. The sentences are passive and clumsy, over-reliant on meaningless words (hedges like “almost,” “probably,” “almost,” etc., and emphatics like “very,” “strong,” “smart,” “best,” etc.) Sometimes we can’t even write a sentence, so we resort to awkward phrases. Our drafts (if you can call them that) are filled with “TK” (the journalist’s note to herself meaning “to come”).
A friend or fellow writer, seeing the frustration, comes along to offer support: “Just tell me what you want to say.” It doesn’t help. Why would it? They haven’t been researching your topic. What can they offer besides a pat on the back.
This is the most common variety of writer’s block. The only way out is to stop writing and do more rounds of research. Whether you’re writing a journalistic profile or a work of fiction, your job is to gather enough information to create a reading experience. Often, we think we have mastered the subject but have not. Nothing reveals our basic ignorance more than clunky writing about the subject.
So conduct more interviews. Dive into the archives. Explore more cases in point. Gather data. Go to the scene of the story and take notes. If possible, take a video so you have something to describe, moment by moment.
How do you tell when you don’t have enough information? When you tell more than you show.
General summaries offer a dead giveaway of thin understanding of a topic. The lifeblood of good writing is details–details that the reader can see, hear, feel, taste. Even when exploring an abstract topic, the reader needs enough details to get a tangible sense of the topic. The more general your discussion, the less you probably know–and the less the reader will care what you have to say.
Here’s an example from my own book project about Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 campaign for the League of Nations. In the course of discussing Wilson’s speeches in the Upper Midwest–Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana–I learned about one of the most exciting reform movements in modern American history. The Nonpartisan League championed reforms for farmers: railroad rates reform, silos for storing grain, a banking system with fair rates. But such a summary does no justice to the movement. I had to learn about who organized it, how it pressured both parties, the backstory of failed previous reform efforts, and the backlash from big business and political elites.
Even more, I had to create some scenes to show how the NPL operated–how recruiters traveled from town to town, buttonholing farmers, rallying local leaders, endorsing candidates. I had to read the NPL’s weekly newspaper and track down arguments in court cases. I had to show how mercenary gangs threatened and beat NPL recruiters. Even if I did not use all these details, I needed a bounty of details so that I could select the right ones.
I had to follow Hemingway’s classic advice to seek out “the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places, and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
Details make writing come to life. When you don’t have enough details–when you fall back on generalization–you are probably failing.
Writer’s Block 3: Thinking Too Hard
What if we have committed to acting like a pro and done all the research imaginable. But we’re still stuck?
What do you do when you’re truly, deeply committed to doing the work and have done your job as a researcher. You know all you need to know but can’t get the words down?
Sometimes, we’re so bent on perfection that we can never accept anything less. Rather than gifting the world with something worthwhile, we immobilize ourselves because we are too committed and too diligent. Rather then doing our best and then moving on, we are obsessed with producing Big-A Art.
This is the situation that Tom Wolfe faced when he was assigned profile of young hot-rod race-car drivers in Los Angeles for Esquire. No one was more committed or hard-working than Tom Wolfe, who was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He did everything that a committed writer could do but sputtered into a state of incoherence.
With the magazine all laid out–including a set of enticing photos–Esquire editor Bryon Dobell told Wolfe not to worry about writing a draft. Just type up your notes, he said. We’ll find someone to turn those notes into a story. And so Wolfe went on a writing bender. he wrote 50 pages of notes, in the form of a letter, and sent them to Dobell.
As you might expect in a letter, Wolfe begins simply: “The first good look I had at customized cars was at an event called a ‘Teen Fair,’ held in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles beyond Hollywood.” He simply shares his thoughts and observations: “Inside, two things hit you…” He makes simple transitions: “As I said…” With no pretension, he introduces characters: “All this time, Tex Smith, from Hot Rod Magazine, who brought me over to the place, is trying to lead me to the customized-car exhibit…” He ventures some broad observations: “Things have been going on in the development of the kids’ formal attitude toward cars since 1945…”
Once he brings us into this world, his diligent research, mastery of details, and love of oddballs have a chance to shine. He’s a pro and he did the work and it shows. He just needed to get of his own way–to forget about what he was trying to do and just do it.
The first time I published an article in my college paper, I asked a senior editor to give me a critique. I was expecting a pat on the back for a job well done. But I got a tear sheet* filled with red ink.
If you give a piece of writing to a friend or colleague, you will be lucky if you get the same treatment. You should always be open to critiques, of everything: the focus of the piece, the organization, the style, the evidence, and more.
But we writers are a sensitive lot. When we write, we put down not only what we know at the start, but also ideas sparked by the writing process. So writing takes on a life of its own. We often labor in isolation and get lost in our own world. Because we get lost, creatively, we lose perspective.
But don’t count on friends and colleagues to offer good critiques and feedback.
Most people, when asked to read a friend’s work, want to be nice. Even if the writing bores them or confuses them, they will not say it. They will look for something nice to say.
“Great topic.”
“You know, I didn’t know that…”
“It was interesting the way you tied together those two events…”
Even your most critical readers will still avoid a real critique. Not just because they are sensitive to your feelings but because critical reading is a hard and laborious task. So if you press them, they’ll find a couple of nits to pick but avoid the big issues.
I have worked with writers in a wide range of settings: newspapers and magazines, government, websites, think tanks, and book publishing. Many of the people in these settings are open to critiques. They are grateful for any ideas you might offer about making copy more clear and energetic. But some resist.
“But that’s my style…”
“No one ever said that was a problem…”
“We always do it that way…”
Some sensitive types protest vehemently. They are (to use the word in vogue) triggered by any and all criticism.
This kind of resistance increases the chance that, next time, the critique will be softer. Rather than battle a sensitive writer, even determined editors give way. Why hassle?
Even if you want a real critique, then, you often get the most general praise or meaningless nit-picking.
How do you get past the politesse and avoidance of friends and colleagues? If you want to get better, find someone who will read your work thoroughly and respond honestly and specifically. Ask them to critique:
How clearly you state a controlling idea and build the piece around that controlling idea. (See my discussion of “The One Idea” here.)
How clearly you write every sentence and paragraph. Every sentence should state the idea right away, with specific subjects and active verbs. Every paragraph should state and develop a single idea.
How well you stay on the right track–and how well you get back non track after a necessary diversion.
How well you highlight different sections of the piece with subheads.
How convincingly do you make your points, with specific data and other evidence that speaks directly to your points.
Where you make spelling and grammar mistakes.
Ask them to mark the sections clearly. Get them to underline or put brackets around specific passages. Specificity is the key. You need to know exactly when and where you go wrong.
Find the people who will be honest and show them your appreciation, however you can.
As for your friends and family? Appreciate their support but don’t count on them for any meaningful critiques.
•
*The term tear sheet comes from advertising. It refers to a page torn from a periodical to show proof that the ad had been published.
As the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles in a game against the New Orleans Saints in 2012, Reid had one of his players, Riley Cooper, lie down in the end zone for a kickoff.
Lie. Down.
The Saints thought they the Eagles had just 10 players on the field. They did not notice Cooper. When Brandon Boykin caught the ball, Cooper jumped up. Boykin threw a lateral pass to Cooper, who ran 93 yards for a touchdown.
Alas, the referee called back the play. Boykin’s pass went forward, so the ball got brought back to the 3 yard line.
But talk about a clever pay, which caught the opposition off guard and had the potential to change the game.
Andy Reid is one of the most successful coaches in football history. He is the only coach to win 100 games with two separate teams. His Kansas City Chiefs have won the AFC West for eight straight years. In that span, the Chiefs have also won two Super Bowl championships.
His secret is creativity, as Rodger Sherman explains in The Ringer:
Reid will invent strange new football ideas unlike anything that has been seen before—or at least not in the past few decades—and run them in the biggest moments of a season. And while his trick plays may appear like cockamamie inventions of a football mad scientist, they often take advantage of the unique strengths and talents of his superstar players. They are gimmicks and yet functional. “If you practice them long enough, they aren’t trick plays,” Reid said when I asked about his trick plays on Monday night, “they’re just plays.”
How does he come up with these plays? Like most coaches these days, Reid thinks about football all day and all night. At the highest levels of pro and college ball, coaches much give their lives over to the game. They arrive at the stadium early and stay late, every day. Some of them sleep at the stadium. With their team of associate coaches, they work on every facet of the game with their players during the week.
Wherever he goes — driving, eating at a restaurant, even sleeping — Reid carries a stack of index cards. As he turns over plays in his restless, football-obsessed mind, he frequently has eureka moments: “What if we…?” And when these ideas come to him, he writes them down.
The index cards he always keeps with him spent the nights within easy reach because he never knows when he’ll think of a new play and want to draw it up. I wondered if plays ever come to him in his dreams. “I don’t sleep enough to dream,” he said.
Over the years Reid has gathered a massive collection of plays, many tried-and-true but others different and even bizarre. This collection is, in essence, a blueprint for the whole organization, as Sokolove notes:
What the best N.F.L. coaches have in common, Banner told me, is that they’re “so detail-oriented they even annoy everyone around them.” Reid aced the interview the moment he showed up with a thick notebook he had been keeping for years. It was filled with his meticulously logged plans for all the things he would do if he ever became an N.F.L. head coach.
Think about this. Creativity does not come in magical bursts of eureka moments. It is the deliberate, careful, disciplined gathering of half-developed ideas–and then the deliberate, careful, disciplined processing of those ideas.
Sustained effort, not magic.
Reid’s obsessive genius offers two lesson for writers:
Always take a notebook, wherever you go. Your mind is restless and more powerful than you might know. Your subconscious is busy around the clock–and far more creative than your conscious mind. Your subconscious makes connections our conscious mind could never make. Your job is to be ready to capture all the ideas that come to you. You will almost never remember great ideas unless you write them down.
Process the scribblings from your notebook. Other coaches and players say that, when they come to the stadium, Reid is already there. He’s transferring his scribblings from his notebooks to whiteboards. Later that day, he’ll review his clever ideas with his coaching staff. It’s not enough to capture stray thoughts, 24/7. You also need to process them, so that you can turn them into something useful.
You need to follow this process. Wherever you co, carry notecards. Whenever you have an idea — a fragment of dialogue, an idea for a character or conflict, a way of describing an idea, whatever — you need to capture it. Then you need to process and store your ideas so that they will be available when you need them.
Two Online Courses for Writing Mastery
Master of Storytelling: All the skills and hack you need to tell a great story. If you’re writing emails, memos, reports, presentations, these skills will transform your writing, right away. It’s all here: character development, the structures of story, action and scenes, details, and more. You get 101 mini-lessons, with step-by-step explainers, case studies, videos, and downloads. (LEARN MORE)
Writing With Power: “Keep it simple,” every writing teacher says. But they don’t say how. In this engaging online course, you will learn how to deploy simple hacks at every level — sentences, paragraphs, and whole pieces — to comment with your audiences. You get 76 mini-lessons, with step-by-step explainers, case studies, videos, and downloads. (LEARN MORE)
As the script doctor steps off the stage, a look at his impact and storytelling lessons
Years ago, when I was transitioning from academic life to nonfiction narrative writing, I attended Robert McKee’s immersive Story Seminar. For three days, I sat in a New York theater for a complete course from one of Hollywood’s leading experts on narrative for the page, stage, and screen.
I felt like I was in that famous scene in Adaptation:
Brian Cox, the brilliant British theater actor who was the malevolent Logan Roy on Succession, played the McKee role to perfection. Stalking on stage, Cox/McKee barked out commandments for storytelling and dismissed the lily-livered comments of pretenders who do not want to work hard to construct a good story. His massive brows furrowing or rising to signal anger or glee, he teased, charmed, and berated the audience. He prompted the audience to agree with his takes on movies and literature. “Who thinks, as I do, that…” he would say. A forest of hands would rise.
Some view McKee’s performance as an ego trip, and it’s obvious McKee has a strong ego–at least in the sense of knowing who he is and what his mission and standards are. He knew what he wanted to teach and did not want to be distracted or deterred. He did not want to pal around with seminar participants. Many attempted to follow him at lunch and accidentally-on-purpose bump into him and ask a question. He would have nothing to do with it.
His standoffishness was one part self-preservation and one part lesson: I can show you what to do, but you have to put your goddamned ass on the chair and do the goddamned work yourself.
McKee started teaching storytelling after the release of his TV miniseries Abraham (1993). He realized, he said, that he could never be a great screenwriter–but he could become a great storytelling teacher.
Last year, Robert McKee performed the last of 400-plus of these marathon seminars. At 82, he has decided retire from his role as the Socrates of the Screen. But “retire” is not a word anyone uses to describe McKee, and he will stay plenty busy. For years, Story (1997) was the only way most people could learn McKee’s approach to create narrative. But in recent years he has produced four followup works: Dialogue (2016), Character (2021), Action (2022), and Storynomics (2018). He is now writing a new version of Story, which he calls Story II. (May it be a worthy sequel, more like The Godfather Part II than Return to the Blue Lagoon). McKee is determined to share all the tricks and wisdom he gained in a lifetime of writing and teaching. Obviously, his seminars and books overlap. But he has also expanded and deepened his core insights.
A few imperatives of storytelling
So what must the storyteller do? So what does McKee want us to know about storytelling? Here are some of the pieces of his wisdom that I have found most useful over the years:
• Forge character in the furnace of desire, conflict, and obsession: Nothing happens without a character’s passionate desire. That desire leads to action, with causes conflict, which tests everyone. Whoever emerges from the conflict more whole can be called heroic, even if they lose. Therefore, force the character to make hard choices–and make the choices harder as the story proceeds. Don’t give a character the choice between good and bad; make it good against a competing good or a competing bad. Make every choice involve loss.
• Create two great desires, one external and the other internal: People begin their quest with an simple, obvious, superficial desire: “I want to protect my family” (The Godfather) or “I want to rescue my son” (Missing) or “I want to get out of here” (Groundhog Day). As they encounter more obstacles, they deepen their understanding of what they want: “I want total control” or “I want to expose the truth about the Chilean coup” or “I want to be worthy of love.” By the end, they discover that their internal desire is the real point of it all.
• The point of action: Action is essential but only matters if it makes a difference in the story. If you have a great “action” scene but it changes nothing, it’s not worth keeping. Even the most exciting fight or car chase will drag down a story if it does not propel the story forward. By the same token, even the most mundane moments provide action if they make a difference and raise the stakes.
On the last day of the Story Seminar I took, McKee played and analyzed Casablanca, scene by scene. The highlight was his breakdown of the bazaar scene with Rick and Ilsa. Every line of dialogue is action: Every line changes the trajectory of the story and our understanding of these iconic characters.
• Alternate positive and negative beats: Audiences want change–or the possibility of change–at every level and at every step of the way. Make even the small actions (like a nod, an averted glance, or a soft-spoken word) matter. That’s what McKee calls a beat. Then alternate positive and negative beats. If a positive moment occurs, counter with something negative, then positive, then negative, and so on.
In a sense, action is a form of dialogue. Each act says something and forces others to respond.
• Make dialogue sound human (but better): Capture character with the way people talk: brave or cowardly, certain or confused, risk-taking or cautious, quick witted or slow, jocular or stiff, and so on. But remember that most people speak like fractured, conflicted, uncertain, and inarticulate beings. Find the sweet spot between realism and art. The goal is not mimicking reality but (to use McKee’s term) “enhanced expressivity.”
Also, remember that speech is a form of action. “Life is dialogue, action/reaction,” McKee says. But don’t use dialogue when you can tell the story in other ways. “When the screenplay has been written and the dialogue has been added, we’re ready to shoot,” Alfred Hitchcock said. First create the scenes, then the action, and finally the words.
Whatever you do, don’t “write on the nose,” using dialogue to provide backstory, which murders subtext and irony and treats the audience like a bunch of dummies who can’t add 2 plus 2. Avoid this kind of fake dialogue/exposition: “Yeah! I remember you! You sat in the last row of Mr. Leonard’s class! He was such a demanding teacher! And we just wanted to goof off!”
• Hit ’em again–harder: However much your hero suffers, make him suffer even more. Escalate the abuse, even if it’s just kidding/not-kidding taunts from friends. Giving your characters a hard time tests them, reveals them, and gives them an opportunity to respond and grow. “Pressure is essential,” McKee says. “Choices made when nothing is at risk mean little.”
“The more powerful and complex the forces of antagonism opposing the character, the more completely realized character and story must become.”
• Don’t say anything at face value: Everyone lies–like, all the time. No story should gather a group of good-spirited, accommodating truth-tellers. It’s fake and boring. Even honest people speak honestly in an oblique way. Even blunt statements of truth are oftentimes covers for something else. So make sure that dialogue contains two levels of truth: first the surface-level meaning of the statements, then the hidden misunderstandings and agendas of the speakers.
This, dear English majors, is where we find the all-important element of irony: The man-of-the-people radio star (A Face in the Crowd), the shy and skinny kid who knocks the block off the bully (Back to the Future), the legal secretary who learns tenacity she needs to fight polluters by managing life as a single mom (Erin Brockovich).
• Don’t mess with genre: Readers need to know what the story offers. Genre offers a wide but limited range of eternal tales, each one tapping something fundamental about the human condition. A genre, like a brand, is a promise: Read/watch this story and you’ll get the elements you’re expecting.
Genres also help us to get the story sizzling right away: “We don’t want people coming to our work cold and vague, not knowing what to expect, forcing us to spend the first 20 minutes of screentime clueing them toward the necessary story attitude.”
McKee lists 25 genres; that’s too many, I think. Mockumentary, for example, is not a genre but a way of presenting a story; a mockumentary can be a tragedy or comedy or Bildungsroman or any number of other distinct genres. Still, McKee’s list is useful for devising the right style of story.
• Pursue unity and truth: Ever the Aristotelian, McKee insists that all stories must reach closure by the end. As Aristotle says in The Poetics, the story should be “complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude.” The story and the fates of the characters should wrap up, even if they lose their quest. The ending should feel like a surprise, but it should also feel inevitable.
Of course Michael was destined to be a ruthless mob boss. Of course Rick would embrace patriotism and love over possession of Ilsa. Of course Macbeth would lose his kingdom. Of course Ed discovers the corruption and complicity that led to his son’s death during Chile’s coup.
To some, these rules of storytelling feel contrived, almost like a paint-by-numbers approach. But as in any other creative, skilled work–carpentry, sculpture, dance, architecture–the rules provide the grounding needed to work creatively. The rules prompt the writer to struggle through a raw, deep, agonizing, contradictory, and hard journey.
The Ultimate Hack: Do the Hard Work
The reason storytelling will never die, even with AI, is that it requires real imagination and struggle. The human experience is not an algorithm.
We have to do the work ourselves. Lots of people write “content” for “media outlets” and “clients.” Lots of people write “books” to promote their “brand.” But how many of them are willing to dig deep and work hard enough to produce a worthy story?
In a sense, McKee’s core message was that writing a story is a lot like being a hero in a story. It’s about having a goal and a determination to meet that goal. It’s about delusion, failure, denial, blindness, and laziness–and working hard to overcome these universal flaws to create something worthwhile.
The greatest challenge, then, is to find something worth saying. In a valedictory profile in The New Yorker, McKee tells Dana Goodyear: “The problem with Hollywood is, they’ve all read the book, they’ve all been to these lectures. They know how to tell a story, but they don’t have anything to say.”
In Adaptation, McKee tells Charlie Kaufman, played by Nick Cage: “Your characters must change. The change must come from them.” He’s telling Charlie that the writer has to do as much hard work as the characters. No formula or shortcuts for anyone.
What if (spoiler alert) all the wisdom of writing, storytelling, problem-solving, adventure, crisis management, and deep learning could be summed up in a two-word phrase?
Thanks to Angus Fletcher, a leading authority on storytelling and the brain, we know that two-word phrase: “What if?”
Fletcher is the professor of story science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative. He not only teaches and writes books, but also consults with the Army and Hollywood. He teaches them how to do what comes naturally, until we’re denatured by modern life: How to soak up the world with a sense of wonder and then to create a strikingly original approach to living the best life.
OK, back up.
Fletcher’s basic insight is that human’s don’t just create and enjoy stories. Stories are not somehow some thing “out there.” Stories organize all our experiences. No, that’s not quite right; it still suggests that stories are outside of us. We are stories. Stories as as much a part of our experience as blood and organs and skin and bones and sinews. Just as we must understand all those elements of life to understand health, we need to understand the elements of storytelling to understand experience.
“Storythinking hails from a time prior to authors, prior to humans, prior to language,” Fletcher writes in Storythinking. “It dates back hundreds of millions of years to the first creaky machinery of the animal brain.”
Cogito, ergo sum? Actually, Diigoúmai, ergo sum—or, I tell stories, therefore I am. “The human brain empowered our Stone Age ancestors to respond to unpredicted challenges and opportunities by linking creative actions into new plans—which is to say, new plots. That hatching of plots was narrative cognition.”
Humans think and operate in two ways: logic and narrative. “Analytically, story and logic employ different epistemological methods,” Fletcher notes. “Logic’s method is equation, or more technically, correlational reasoning, which inhabits the eternal present tense of this equals that. … Story’s method is experiment, or more technically, causal speculation, which requires the past/present/future of this causes that.” Or: What if?
Think about that a minute. The more maniacally we embrace facts ripped from context, standardized testing, getting the “right answer,” an so on, the less capable we are of storythinking. And storythinking is essential to the human experience.
Fletcher suggests three major skills to improve storythinking:
Prioritizing the exceptional: Finding what’s unpredictable, surprising, weird, deviant, extreme, shocking, even gross or repellant. That’ll get attention, right?
Perspective shifting: Imagining being someone completely different—not just with a nice, cozy empathy, but with a kind of embodiment of another. Getting out of your own skin, as extremely or totally (see 1, above) as possible.
Stoking narrative conflict: Testing ideas and scenarios as a kind of epic battle that takes you “boldly … where no man has gone before” (catchy phrase, no?). Submit characters and situations to stress tests that take the storythinker’s mind far beyond where it was before.
Fletcher’s story has more than its share of plot twists. After four years in the neurophysiology lab at the University of Michigan Med School, he decided to focus on storytelling. He learned from the best, studying Shakespeare for his Ph.D. in literature at Yale. Then, at Stanford, he connected with Pixar storytellers and became a script writer for TV and movies. He has also worked with the Army Special Corps.
I recently spent an hour exploring these issues with Fletcher on the phone. But the recorder wasn’t working. (This was my “all is lost” moment.) So rather than giving you his word-by-word account, I offer a paraphrased summary. Fletcher okayed my summary of our conversation.
On the brain, evolution, and storytelling …
The brain is not a computer. It’s a way of experiencing the world. It’s not like we just gather data and then assemble those data. To be sure, we often develop stories out of information that we have stored in our brains, at different levels including the subconscious. But even more important, we create stories to produce something, not just organize information. We can actually produce stories out of nothing. We can actually create whole new worlds.
That’s what scientists do. They are always telling stories, trying to figure what will happen in this situation and that situation.
Over the course of human evolution, humans have not only mastered the art of storytelling—and, in turn, been shaped by stories. The human experience is itself inseparable from storytelling. Humans could never step out of storytelling even if they tried.
On the clutter of the modern mind …
We once had the ability to imagine something out of nothing. Before modern technology, we had to entertain ourselves when we were bored. We had to observe and imagine. But now every time we get bored, we turn to our iPhone. The best thing we could do to reignite our imagination is to smash our phones.
When we come into a room, we don’t notice anything unless something is out of place. Babies and toddlers, when they come into a room, they see something new every time. Even if that room is familiar, they look at the details in a room with fresh eyes every time. They don’t assume that anything is going to be the same way. In a way we have to recover our ability to look and observe like two-year-olds.
On the need to slow down and notice things, detail by detail and moment by moment …
People automatically make causal arguments and take all the interesting details out of the equation. They say X causes Y. But in fact, there are lots of other factors involved besides X and Y. The blandest ideas come from sanding over the details.
We are a storytelling species, to be sure, but we’re also a summarizing and simplifying species.
When we think that X causes Y, we have to push ourselves to see how X causes x1, x2, x3, and so on—actually more than that, like y1, y2, y3, et cetera—before getting anywhere close to Y.
Of course, as a writer and a storyteller, you don’t want to overwhelm people in details. You want stories to offer some coherent view of how the world works. You want stories to explore a coherent “What if?”
On ever-evolving genres …
Genres are not eternal. Working within genres, we need to twist and combine genres. Genres are always being invented and reinvented to put storytelling on new paths. (On the topic of genres, see the interview with John Truby.)
A number of important genres, like the Western or Detective story, are reflections of modern life. They could not have been imagined before the settling or urbanization of America. Science fiction is another new genre. In ten years, someone might discover or invent a completely new genre, like Poe did with the Detective genre.
On the power of unusual, surprising, shocking, and even perverse experiences …
The best skill writers could develop is to notice things better. Look for what’s out of the ordinary. Notice what you don’t see right away. Stretch your mind and imagination to include what you don’t see right away … and what you don’t see at all.
Every great advance in storytelling comes from doing something deviant and disruptive. Some examples include Hamlet, The Decameron, and Don Quixote.
What makes those stories so fascinating is that they do something completely different. In Hamlet, an action story, you have this thoughtful character who is thinking like a philosopher. In Don Quixote, the characters themselves are reading Don Quixote! Who would think of that? Only a “What if?” creator.
Take a modern example. Better Call Saul is immediately exciting and engaging because, in the very first episode, it does two things. First, it introduces a complete set of divergent characters. Second, it creates some very strange worlds that the audience probably has never imagined before. A case in point is the home of Chuck, Jimmy’s brother. Chuck is living in a house wrapped in aluminum foil and devoid of all electronics because of his belief that microwaves are messing with his body and mind. That’s a strange character and a strange world. And we want to know more.
Better Call Saul is an elaborate “What if?” story. The characters are believable in their own ways but also stretched beyond their own experiences. What if there was a lovable con-man lawyer whose life is dominated by his domineering and troubled brother? What if that lawyer got involved in a wild range of experiences that take him to skateboarding stoner conmen to drug dealers to a sweet, wry fellow lawyer to an Asian hair salon, et cetera?
On the structure of experience and stories …
In a sense, all kinds of experiences seem to take Aristotle’s format: beginning, middle, and end. Something prompts you to pay attention, then you process the idea, and then you resolve it.
Actually it doesn’t work quite that way. When you hear a dog bark, you’re actually in the middle of the story, not the beginning. That bark prompts you to work backwards to figure out what made the dog bark. And then you look into the future to see what’s going to happen next. It’s the familiar storyteller’s approach: in media res. You start in the middle of the action.
In all our everyday experience, we’re constantly looking backward and forward at the same time. Storytellers, take heed: Just saying who does when and when and how is not really a story. Story requires a structure that engages the reader in saying (you guessed it), “What if?”
On deliberate training to see, notice, and tell fresh stories …
Working with the Army Special Corps, one of their most important skills is to react constructively to strange and unexpected circumstances. They can’t just respond with the three automatic actions: fight, flight, or freeze. They have to respond more imaginatively. In those circumstances, where absolutely nothing is familiar, they have to learn how to construct a brand new story, not just fall back on familiar stories. That takes discipline and skill. They need to be able to imagine a diversity of possibilities—not only a whole batch of factors that led to the moment, but also a bunch of possibilities that might happen in the future. This takes discipline. That takes an extra brain muscle that they have to develop.
Until about 20 years ago, the military lived and worked in a world of “hurry up an wait.” They experienced a lot of dead time. Now soldiers are allowed to have cellphones with them so they fill that dead time. They would be better off observing and thinking. That’s the most important thing that artists do. They wander around, thinking and observing and speculating. To outsiders, it looks like they’re doing nothing. But really, they’re doing the most important thing—noting what other people don’t notice and thinking about the world in fresh, different ways.
On the power of fresh details …
Storytellers who think that everything comes from Aristotle or the Hero’s Journey don’t understand that a story’s energy and intrigue comes from the surprises. When a story fits a simple format (like the Hero’s Journey), it won’t be able to hold the attention of the viewer. It will be too familiar. After a while, the audience will turn away.
On the importance of asking “What if?”
“What if?”is the ultimate question for the brain and the storyteller and the audience. We need to imagine what might happen, outside of ordinary circumstances. We need to be able to construct whole new worlds.
Inventive and expectation-busting stories make the audience ask “What if?” They get us out of out of own world and into a wholly new place where we can imagine things in completely different ways.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Kate Daloz is the prototypical child of hippies—even if her parents abjure the term.
She grew up in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom when her family participated in the “back to the land” movement. As other Americans embraced the creature comforts and congestion of the suburbs, the Daloz family left to live independently among other naturalists, rebels, activists, and free lovers.
In her book, Daloz describes how her parents, Peace Corps veterans, joined their neighbors as they struggled with the realities of living on the land—from the long, hard winters and lack of indoor plumbing to the rivalries and resentments that result from the idea of free love. For some, the alternative lifestyle was inspiring and even life-saving; for others it was a long, hard grind bereft of the support they needed to live well.
Daloz received her MFA from Columbia University, where she also taught undergraduate writing. She was a researcher for biographers Ron Chernow (Washington: A Life), Stacy Schiff (Cleopatra: A Life), and Brenda Wineapple (White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson). She has written for The American Scholar, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.
Daloz visited my class “Writing the City” at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation to talk about the joys and frustrations of writing and her unusual childhood. Our class conversation went like this:
What do you write and why do you write it?
The common advice is to write what you know. But more important is: What are the deep questions that you don’t have answers for?
When I started writing my book about communes, I started thinking about the context where I grew up. My family was not interesting enough for an entire book, but the time period was. I was talking to my parents and they said, “Oh, you know, we weren’t hippies, but the people who lived on the commune next door, they were hippies.” Three groups of back-to-the-land newcomers lived nearby. They all showed up in northern Vermont within two years of each other in the early 1970s for the same type of experiment. I realized that this was clearly a historical moment that I hadn’t seen described anywhere.
This was a fleeting moment of experimentation. A lot of families like ours had gone back to the land. My family was pretty square but sex, drugs, and rock and roll–all of that happened at the commune.
I expanded the view outward from my parent’s little hill to three communes that were near each other. My parents belonged to a small community of couples living singly. A mile away there was a mini-commune with two couples living together and trying to farm with horses–in the 1970s, they had gone back to 19th century technology. And then a little further off there was the anarchic, free-love commune where they were really trying to live with no amenities at all. It was a very radical experiment with mixed results.
Once I looked at all three of these groups together, I could start to see the shape of the time period.
Your research eventually found a really specific focus—privilege among the utopians.
At the beginning, I thought, there’s the history of this period that has never been written. Later, I realized I was basically writing another book about middle-class white baby boomers celebrating themselves, which was not exciting to me.
Then, after reading an essay in The New York Times Magazine about privilege, I suddenly started understanding causal relationships that I hadn’t been seen before. The people that I’m writing about were incredibly privileged and they brought that privilege into these experiments in “poverty,” as they put it to themselves at the time. Their experiment was complicated by their own privilege and they didn’t understand that at all. That became by far the most interesting thing to me. Suddenly I had something new to say about this period.
They came from tremendous economic, racial, and educational privilege but were frustrated by what they saw as the limitations of Eisenhower-era American culture. They thought they could just wipe it all away and start a new society. The idea was, “We’re starting from scratch and everything is possible.” To some extent they were right. They threw out everything and in some ways never went back. One example: They decided they were against canned food and so they started to eat organic. If anybody had organic food for lunch today, it’s partly because of these guys. All kinds of stuff that came into the mainstream through the 1970s counterculture.
But sometimes in rejecting everything, they threw out too much. In the commune, theybuilt a house with an open sleeping loft. The concept was, why do we need doors? They were also practicing free love and partner swapping. But not everybody was on board with that. People were telling me stories about having to be downstairs while their partner was upstairs with somebody else. And you could hear everything. There was no privacy. They kind of didn’t take their own emotions into account.
Over the course of research and writing a major project, your ideas are constantly changing, right? How do you focus so you can figure out what’s going to be the big idea?
I have learned to ask myself: What do you want your reader to take away from this? What do you want your reader to understand? What is it that you want for them? And then can you articulate that? Because if you can, then you’re in control of your material. I couldn’t answer these questions at the beginning of writing the book, but by the end I had a razor-sharp answer.
In my daily process, I often sit down in the morning and answer by hand for the section I’m planning to work on, “What do I want my reader to understand?” Even if I did the same thing for the same section the day before, it’s interesting to notice how sometimes the wording changes just slightly. It’s okay that it’s repeating, it’s okay that it’s recursive, because the important part is the process. By the end I’m going to have a really good answer.
The next question are: What are the details that the reader would need in order to understand this? What do I need to tell them about? It helps me make all those decisions that we have to make as writers. Do I tell them this? Do I go into this background? It helps me sort through all the things I learned doing research: Does this detail belong in the piece? Does my reader need this in order to understand? If they do, then you put it in. If they don’t, then it doesn’t go in.
Brainstorming and organizing ideas—figuring out all the pieces, how they fit, and what they mean—can be a crazy process. You can never predict how it might go.
Exactly. I’ve noticed that there’s a moment in my writing process when I can hardly sit in the chair, usually when I’m thinking about structure. So when I feel this happening, it’s more productive to allow myself to get up and walk and talk to myself. One time I was struggling with a structure problem when I coincidentally had to leave the house on an errand–I pretended to be on the phone and walked down the street talking to myself. It worked! I got there, and was like, okay, I solved that problem with the chapter. I wrote it down in my notebook so I wouldn’t forget, and then, you know, picked up my kid or whatever I was doing.
When I feel that restless writing stage coming on, I’ve learned to deal with it by treating myself like a bright but not very focused 12-year-old. I’m like, “OK, it seems like you have a lot on your mind. Let’s talk about that.” (This is me talking to myself.) I try to gently set boundaries on my own digressions rather than becoming severe with myself, since I find that entirely counterproductive to my productivity.
I’ve also noticed that understanding periods of restlessness and digression as part of my creative process can be really fruitful, so now I try to leave a certain amount of space for it.
At one point, I sat down to work on the book’s introduction and I could not focus. My brain was insisting on thinking about a different issue that had absolutely nothing to do with hippie communes–but did have to do with privilege. I finally gave in and hand-wrote an eight-page essay that never saw the light of day. It was strictly for myself. A week later it was like, Bloop! I realized, “Oh, this book is about privilege.” By not fighting myself [and telling myself], “Be on the same team as your own brain,” I let myself come to an interesting insight.
When you’re interviewing someone, do you direct them or just let them go off?
Within reason, let people digress. When you let people just talk, you start to hear what’s their agenda. If you give them some time, you learn a lot about what they want to talk about. And then you can take that lens and apply it back to what they told you and see if it changes your understanding of their narrative to some extent.
Tell me about your writing process? When do you write—and what’s your process?
The key part is just carving out time and just doing it. Someone once told me that keeping a journal doesn’t count as real writing because it’s not reader-facing. I find that to be a helpful distinction–to ask for a reader’s time and attention, you need to offer them something beyond what you’d write for yourself.
Before I was a writer, I was teaching adult basic education at LaGuardia Community College in Queens—really long days, but I loved it and didn’t have to work on Fridays. I always wanted to be a writer so I would use that Friday and sit down and make myself write. It was absolutely awful stuff. Then I started a writing group. On the strength of something I wrote there, I got into Columbia’s writing program. That program forced me to have deadlines and that taught me to make sure to block off writing time every day.
As far as my actual practice, I do a lot of work away from the computer. Especially in early stages, where I’m trying to articulate a big, new idea, I now spend weeks not typing at all. I sometimes write with a pencil on yellow legal pads. Very often the first draft happens there, then I type it and then it gets better. I did it this morning, actually. I often write in fragments, I do it in pieces. Over time, I start to see, OK, here’s how I would tell someone else about this. I spend a long time writing super informally.
Sometimes people think working by hand sounds inefficient, but for me it’s actually extremely efficient. When I’m writing by hand, I’m not sitting there in front of a blank screen, pulling my hair out, suffering. I’ve realized that sitting and suffering is the ultimate waste of time and that literally any other mode of working would be more effective. Now, whenever I write something on the computer and think, “Oh, this is awful, I hate it,” I just immediately close the screen and start writing by hand. Almost always, I move forward. I can’t tell you the number of times that’s happened. I just stop typing and start writing by hand and I’m free. I let myself make more mistakes and then I write 500 words that way. And then I come back the next day and type it up.
How do you sort your material so you can always find what you need?
I worked for two biographers, Stacy Schiff and Ron Chernow. They showed me how they organized research materials so carefully that their notes would still be absolutely comprehensible if they didn’t get back to them for a year or two, when it was time to start writing.
In my own, informal notebook, where I’m thinking through my central arguments, when something really good happens, I highlight it. So if I come back looking for that phrase or insight, I can find it. I make a list of notes that’s not linear, and not at all ready for a reader. Nobody should ever see it. It doesn’t look like final writing. It just is like fragments of phrases.
It just happened today. I’ve been trying to write a book proposal where I have to say, “Here’s my big idea and how to do it.” It’s hard to take something huge and express it in three sentences. So I have all these fragments of phrases and I printed them all out. And I look at them and I mark them up with a pencil—a pencil because that lowers the stakes, makes me feel like I can erase it and not lose anything–and gradually move them into a shape that will make sense to someone else.
Do you use any writing tools?
I use Scrivener, which lets you build folders. I like that you can compose in fragments, very moveable fragments. You’re not stuck thinking that you have to develop the whole piece from top to bottom. And for me, that’s really freeing.
On the research side, it offers nested compartments. I had one called “Myrtle Hill,” (the commune) and then a sub-folder called “physical layout.” Any time someone said something like, “you could walk from Lorraine’s tent to the cook tent” or, “you could see the outhouse from the road”—I copied and pasted those details into the “physical layout” folder so I would have them ready when I worked on that description.
How to you hunt for details—the kinds of “for instances” that surprise and enlighten the reader?
I used to do this exercise with creative writing students: Find a picture of a generic room, like from a magazine, and then decide something that might have happened there—somebody died or there was a birthday party, or whatever. Describe the room based on what you wanted the reader to think about that event. How do you describe the curtains if you want the reader to think about a party versus a death? This particular exercise leads to over-the-top descriptions, but the idea is how to get the reader to think about what you want them to think about even when you’re not describing action directly.
To write well you need to “start strong, finish strong” at every level—sentence, paragraph, section, and whole piece. How do you think about that?
The function of the beginning of a piece is to say, “Hey, reader, you were thinking about Spiderman a minute ago. Now I want you to think about this. Here’s all the things I want you to think about as you go into the meat of my piece.”
For me, I can’t get the opening right until later in the process. Once I know where I’m going, I can give somebody directions to where I am going. But I can’t give someone directions till I’ve gone there myself.
Clarity does not come in the beginning. I revise my way into clarity. I always ask myself, ‘What do you offer the reader? What do I want them to think about? Where am I turning the camera?’ Writing a strong beginning and end is one of my favorite things to do in revision.
When you’re describing something, you’re either slowing down something that’s really fast or speeding up something that’s really slow.
Sometimes you get to describe something in real time. Darcy Frey wrote a book about basketball called The Last Shot. The prolog shows his main character dribbling the ball. Frey just watches this kid at dusk dribble and then take a foul shot. The amount of time it takes to read the paragraph, that’s the amount of time covered in the scene.
I did something like that on an essay I wrote about the closure of the last roller disco in Brooklyn. I went to the rink and took my camera and filmed people. I knew I wanted to do something like Frey’s opening, so I found somebody in a red shirt and filmed them going around the rink once. Then when I was writing, I used that footage to help me build a one-sentence description of the rink that took that same amount of time to read. It was a long sentence, but it was a really fun exercise.
How do you speculate about something, when you only have scraps of information—but you want the reader to imagine a scenario?
I wrote an essay in The New Yorker about my mother’s mother, Win, who died of self-induced abortion in 1944. We have a ton of letters that she wrote, but none from the day before she died. I wanted to speculate about what was going on in her mind as she made an extremely momentous decision. So I say: “Win left no record of what she was thinking or feeling that weekend as the others tilled the garden while the children napped in a hammock. But when I imagine her, these are the things I think about: of how provisional and precarious early pregnancy feels…”
Also, when I wrote about her early pregnancy, I could say something because I knew what that feels like myself. The reader knows it’s me, it’s not her, in that sentence, and yet I want the reader to imagine what she was thinking.
What situations fascinate you, when you’re describing them moment by moment?
I like situations in which two things shouldn’t be true at the same time, but they are. One idea: Wouldn’t it be cool if you could find a situation where two people are doing the same thing, but one of them is doing it well and one of them isn’t? Like, you’re at the gym and there’s like a novice and an expert. Or two people fishing—one experienced, one doesn’t know much about what he’s doing.
Sometimes you need to use pictures—or even draw pictures—to understand them. You can’t just describe them, detail by detail.
When I was describing the commune, I had this map that someone else had drawn and then I walked around with her and took all these notes. Later, I drew my own crazy map that actually shows three time periods. Once I could do that, I was in control of the material. Once I could draw the map, I sort of kept looking at it to write. I eventually internalized it enough that I could just move around in that space comfortably, without looking at notes.
What’s the biggest difference between experienced and inexperienced writers?
Studies show that inexperienced and experienced writers work in different ways. Experienced writers did their work far from the deadline and under low-stakes circumstances. They use a notebook to develop big ideas, or talk a new idea through with somebody, or scribble notes on a napkin–their most important intellectual work starts far away from the version that a reader is going to see. By contrast, inexperienced writers tended to try to do everything at once in the final draft. They didn’t separate out stages of their process.
I never start the day typing, ever. I warm up with my notebook, because sometimes I just need to sit down and be like, “What am I doing?” or “Oh my God, this sucks, I’m so distracted.” That takes, I don’t know, like five minutes, before I’m ready to work more formally, sometimes more. Even if the warm-up takes a half hour, I get so much farther that day than I would if I sat in front of a blank screen for four hours.
How do you handle descriptions of long-ago events—when you can’t necessarily rely on the memories of the people you interview?
In a lot of cases, I was talking to people whose marriage had broken up, you know, or like two people who hadn’t spoken to each other in 40 years and they’re trying to remember the same thing. I tried to listen really hard for commonality. I also look for a contrast between their narratives. I also try to find the version that offers the details that are the most historically interesting. Then I see if I can corroborate those details.
How important is the title? And how do you come up with it?
I was with my editor and he told me, “OK, you need a title by Friday.” And I was like, “Cool, it’s Wednesday.” By coincidence, that afternoon I was looking through two versions of the Whole Earth Catalog, and I noticed that the statement of purpose in 1968 was, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” but by 1974 it had changed to include the line, “This might include losing the pride that went before the fall we are in the process of taking.”
That summed up the whole period for me, and many of the themes I was interested in exploring. Plus it looked really cool over an image of a half-built geodesic dome.
People immerse themselves in stories for all kinds of reasons. They want escape or adventure. They care about the characters. They love the world of the story. They love the familiarity of a genre. Many appreciate the “moral of the story,” whether it’s subtly developed or explicitly stated.
Readers sometimes get annoyed when they hear conversations about the story’s allegories or deeper message or hidden structure. Why can’t a story just be a story? Why do academics and gurus have to spoil the immersive experience of a story by breaking it down into patterns and pieces?
Here’s a typical grouse against the analytic breakdown of stories (taken from an online discussion board):
I think some of the analysis that can go on in a classroom for literature can kill the enjoyment of a book. I mean, why does a dude traveling down the road have to be some grand allegory for man’s journey through life? Maybe dude just wanted to go to the store or something.
You could say the same for a piece of music, a painting or sculpture, dance, performance art, or comedy. As E.B. White cracked: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”
Here’s the problem with that way of thinking–and why storytellers must always strive to understand the detailed structure of writing:
If you can’t understand what makes a story work, from the scene-setting to the action to the dialogue to the conflicts to the overall arc of the piece–you’ll never be able to write or perform a great story. You’ll never understand why a reader or viewer likes The Sopranos or Succession or Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes or Frankenstein, to name just a handful of popular stories.
Miranda makes this point in response to Andy’s smirk in the sweater scene in The Devil Wears Prada:
Andy, the whip-smart intern for Runway magazine, is bemused by the endless conversation and debate about fashion. An aspiring investigative reporter, she has taken the job at the fashion magazine as a way to get started in journalism. But she smirks when she watches her boss and coworkers debate the pros and cons of various fashion choices. What’s the big deal?
She doesn’t understand anything about what makes a piece of fashion succeed or fail. When she buys a sweater, she just thinks she “likes” it, the way an uncritical reader or viewer “likes” a story. She doesn’t understand that her sweater was the result of countless discussions, analyses, creative exploration, A/B testing, fashion shows, and more.
So with any creative enterprise. To produce something at a high level, you must understand the deep structure of that thing. What are the necessary elements of a creation? What goes where, when, and how?
For two millennia, storytellers have started with Aristotle’s narrative arc. From there, they have followed the teachings of Shakespeare on tragedy, Jung on character archetypes, Poe on mystery, and Shelley on horror. Modern storytellers turn to Joseph Campbell on the Hero’s Journey, Robert McKee and Blake Snyder on story beats. More recently, we have benefited from John Truby’s work on genres.
Every time we write, we have to learn these architectural elements anew. Storytelling is not a paint-by-numbers operation. But over the millennia, we have learned a lot about what makes storytelling work. We have learned how to structure a story, how to rceate scenes, how to explore complex issues. Certain storytelling basics, which have evolved over time, are eternal. Follow them or doom yourself with an eminently put-downable story.
As John Truby says in The Anatomy of Genres, a genre is not just a familiar way of living in the world of stories. It is a system. Any system–from the biological system of the body or the internal combustion engine of a car–succeeds only when each of its component parts performs its job and contributes to the larger process in a reliable way.
(For an interview with Truby, go here. To purchase The Anatomy of Genres, go to anatomyofgenres.com. For story courses and story software, go to truby.com.)
Truby discusses 14 genres, in the following order: Horror, Action, Myth, Memoir, Coming of Age, Science Fiction, Crime, Comedy, Western, Gangster, Fantasy, Thriller, Detective, and Love Story. They move from the most primal issue (death) to the most transcendent (connection).
To develop your story, follow the complete system for your genres. Make sure to include the specific “beats” essential to that genre.
Horror
Action
Myth
1. Ghost: sins of the past
2. Story world: haunted house and close society
3. Monster attacks
4. Hero as victim
5. Weakness Need 1: slavery of mind and the monster within
6. Weakness Need 2: shame and guilt
7. Desire: defeat the monster, defeat death
8. Opponent: the monster, the other in the extreme
9. Ally: the rational skeptic
10. Crossing the barrier to the forbidden
11. Plan: reactive
12. Drive: the monster attacks escalate
13. Battle: safe haven
14. No self-revelation
15. The double ending: eternal recurrence
1. Hero’s defining crisis
2. Story world: enslavement from physical attack
3. The warrior’s moral code: courage in the world to greatness
4. Weakness need: shame culture in the world to violence
5. Desire: success, glory, and personal freedom
6. Collecting the allies
7. Opposition: external bondage
8. Game plan
9. Revelation leads to decisions
10. Drive: cat and mouse
11. Moral argument: the great versus the good
12. Vortex point and violent final battle
13. Self-revelation
14. Farewell or communion
1. Story world: natural world in two cultures
2. Ghost: difficult birth and losing the father
3. Character web: the great chain of being
4. Character web: archetypes
5. Myth hero: searcher
6. Weakness-need
7. Inciting event: talisman
8. Desire: journey and destiny
9. Allies
10. Opponent: successive strangers
11. Drive: symbolic objects
12. Revelation: opponents attack
13. Gate, gauntlet, visit to the underworld…
14. Violent battle
15. Self-revelation: public/cosmic revelation
16. New equilibrium: outgrow the code
Memoir/Coming of Age
Science Fiction
Crime
1. Story world: system of slavery
2. Hero’s role: detective of oneself
3. Story frame
4. Point of view
5. Ghost: family abuse
6. Weakness need: deepest wounds and shame and guilt
7. Double desire
8. Opponent: family or group members
9. Plan
10. Reveals and decisions
11. Drive: moral argument
12. Battle: family opponent
13. Double self-revelation
14. Moral decision: forgiveness/farewell
15. New equilibrium: moral effect
1. Story world…Weakness need: unevolved
2. Minor characters: creating society and system
3. Desire
4. Opponent: authorities
5. Plan
6. Plot: sub worlds
7. Reveal
8. Battle
9. Self-revelation: public/cosmic
1. Story world: slavery of superficial society
2. Inciting event: crime
3. Cop hero strengths and weakness need
4. Values and moral code
5. Desire: catch a criminal
6. Opponent/mystery: super criminal
7. *Drive: cat and mouse
8. Reveal: criminal uncover
9. Drive: moral argument
10. Apparent defeat: the criminal escapes
11. Gate-gauntlet-visit to death, chase
12. Silent battle or big revelation
13. Self revelation, society reaffirmed
14. Moral argument conclusion, poetic justice
Comedy
Western
Gangster
1. Weakness need: comic gap
2. Character web: comic character types
3. Inciting event: leapfrog
4. Desire: clothesline
5. Opposition: four points
6. Plan: scam
7. *Drive: the overall danger
8. Battle: ultimate worst nightmare
9. Self revelation
10. New equilibrium: marriage of new community
1. Story world the New World
2. Hero’s role: the cowboy as fighter
3. The cowboy’s values: the code of the West
4. Weakness-need: the loner and the man of shame
5. Desire: save the builders of civilization
6. Opponent: Indians and bad cowboys
7. Opponent’s plan: destruction
8. Plan: direct confrontation
9. Battle: showdown
10. Moral argument: the moral showdown
11. Self-revelation: eternal wanderer
12. New equilibrium: doomed man
1. Story world: the corrupt city hero: gangster as killer
2. Weakness-need: contradictory character
3. Inciting event: petty crime
4. Desire: money and empire
5. Allies: gang members
6. Opponent: gang boss, rivals, gangs, and cops
7. Plan: deception and violence
8. Fake ally: gang members
9. Reveal: betrayal
10. Battle: mass murder or massive destruction
11. No self-revelation
12. New equilibrium: death or death of the soul
Fantasy
Thriller/Detective
Love
1. Story world
2. Hero: Explorer
3. Desire: explore an imaginary world
4. Character web: fantastic characters
5. Opponent: authorities
6. Plan
7. Passageways between worlds
8. Drive: Journey through subworlds…
9. The super magical moment
10. Battle: the final test
11. Self-revelation: free and fun
1. Opponent’s plan to commit murder
2. Story world: enslaving society
3. Hero role: search for the truth
4. Detective ghost
5. Detective strengths and weaknesses
6. Detective weaknesses
7. Values: code
8. Detective desire: solve mystery & find truth
9. Opposition: killer, suspects, and mystery
10. Plan #1: investigation
11. Opposition’s plan: red herrings, false meaning, and lies
12. Plan/investigation #2: questioning
13. Plan/investigation #3: intuition and deductive logic
14. Plan/investigation #4: flashback, changed POV
15. Plan/investigation #5: recreate a new reality/story
16. Reveal the killer’s fatal mistake
17. Battle: trial of the killer and the battle of stories
18. Battle: opponent’s final attack
19. Self-revelation: the detective sees her own crime
20. Moral argument: poetic justice
1. Story world/canvas & field of play: Mind-body & exotic subworld
2. Technology: words of love
3. Ghost: cycle of fear
4. Hero’s role: lover
5. Weakness-need: Inability to love
6. Desire: gaze, meeting, longing
7. Allies: love advisers
8. Character web
9. Main opponent: lover
10. Opposition step 1: the joust
11. Opposition step 2: Additional suitors
12. Plan: the scam
13. Drive 1: Initiating
14. Drive 2: Flirting
15. Drive 3: seduction (verbal first dance)
16. Revelation: the first dance
17. Revelation: the first kiss
18. Apparent victory: Perfect love moment
19. Apparent defeat: breakup
20. Moral decline
21. Battle of words
22. Self-revelation: double reversal
23. New equilibrium: Communion or farewell
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
If you have been in one of America’s 50 states lately, you might have seen Ellen Jovin.
In 2018, Jovin had a burst of inspiration. A lifelong grammar nerd, she decided to set up a table in Manhattan and answer questions about grammar.
Really.
Why didn’t I think of that?
Sitting at the 72nd Street subway station on the Upper West Side or near Central Park, she hung out a sign inviting passers-by to ask questions about periods and prepositions, colons and semicolons, run-on sentences and Oxford commas, and a whole lot more. Most people, of course, just walk on. New Yorkers are in a hurry, you know. But many stopped by—first out of curiosity, then with real problems to solve and arguments to press.
When she became a regular presence, Jovin got some media attention. Then she got a book contract. Then she took a 50-state tour to expose America to her passions.
She earned a B.A. from Harvard College in German studies and an M.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles in comparative literature. For grins, she has studied 25 languages. She lives with her husband, Brandt Johnson, not far from the World Headquarters of the Grammar Table in New York.
I first saw you outside the 72nd Street subway station in New York. Your popup table reminded me of Lucy’s setup on “Peanuts.” What made you think of turning writing and grammar into a public event? Is it even more than that— performance art, for example?
I never had any inclination to be a performer, so I’d say no to the performance art idea. I happen to love talking to strangers, and I love talking about grammar and language, and I was sick of being online so many hours a day. I wanted to be outside, in light and air and with people. Those were my main reasons.
What is fascinating to you about the mechanics of writing? Do you see writing as a kind of system or machine? Or is it about relationships?
I am drawn to excellent writing for its art and beauty, and I am also drawn to—and delighted by—the technical details. On complicated projects, I tend to write a whole bunch of stuff quickly, creating a big, chaotic mess many times longer than I need, and then I clean it up by going through that chaotic mess hundreds of times. When I edit my work, I suppose I am often thinking about the pieces of a sentence in a technical way, but it is so automatic that it doesn’t feel separate to me from the aesthetic qualities.
Someone recently asked me about a subject-verb agreement problem in a sentence, and I responded that it was technically correct but hard to read because the subject plus modifiers contained eighteen words—three prepositional phrases and one relative clause with a total of six different nouns and pronouns that shifted back and forth from singular to plural—so even though the verb was technically right, it was a failure stylistically. My impression is that I experience style more technically than most writers do.
Who are your favorite writers and why? How do these authors speak to you? How much is intellectual and how much is emotional?
I don’t have favorite writers, at least not now. I love so many. One of my most joyful experiences as a reader was when I was in my mid-twenties. I had just left graduate school in Los Angeles and moved to New York, and I could suddenly read whatever I wanted without having to take exams and write papers with deadlines, and I was constantly excited about it. Those first couple of years I regularly bought books on the street at St. Mark’s Place.
I read dozens of novels, many of them English-language novels that English majors might have read in college but that I hadn’t, because I wasn’t an English major. Instead I had studied German and then comparative literature. I had already done a lot of reading in various other literatures, and in English I had intentionally read a lot of works outside of the traditional canon, and I loved all of it, but there were so many books left for me to read by some of the standard big names in English literature.
It was like living in a magic land to be able to plow through book after book by Edith Wharton, all the Brontës, Dreiser, Thackeray. Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Dickens, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and a whole lot of others. For a small amount of money, way smaller than the cost of a television, I could buy compactly packaged worlds of words off the street.
OK, now I am wondering if frequenting book stalls in the early 1990s made me more likely to have a Grammar Table. Never thought of that before. Hmmm.
Oh, and the feeling is both intellectual and emotional. It’s a soaring feeling of joy like the one I get when I climb a steep trail and then get to look down at spectacular scenery below.
I’ve always thought that grammar is easy—or easy enough to write well—once you care. So the challenge, in mastering writing, is to care. Just like kids easily memorize sports statistics and teenagers remember arcane song lyrics, we master what we pay real attention to. Angela Lunsford at Stanford argues that people are better writers today because they have more opportunities to find an audience. What do you think of these musings?
How delightful to hear that! I say that all the time, though I think the benefits are not distributed evenly across personality type. I personally think social media transformed my writing life. It gave me free daily outlets for creativity and a way to geek out about grammar and language with people around the world. It’s because of Facebook that I ended up in tons of online language groups, and that’s how I got sucked into too much computer time, and that in turn has a lot to do with how I ended up outside at the Grammar Table.
Even now I still love discussing language topics on social media, and Twitter and Mastodon are fantastic for language polls about usage and punctuation and grammar. One thing about the online audience: To benefit fully, you have to have empathy and enough training or innate writing sophistication that you can actually pick up on the details of reader responses and the reasons for them. It is also far from automatic that well-intentioned, thoughtful people know how not to feel devastated when other people are mean.
Regarding what you said about caring: Yes, caring is key. How you make young people (or anyone) care about certain useful topics they tend not to care about automatically is an endless instructional and motivational challenge. I always loved grammar, even when I was in grade school. It tickled my brain. I was fortunate enough to have great instruction from first grade through the end of my education, but on top of that, grammar was like the idea equivalent of ice cream for me. I just wanted it. I didn’t want to perform in school plays—I wanted to do more sentence diagramming.
What surprises you about the questions people ask and how they get invested in the writing process? Can you think of two or three strange (or just memorable) characters you have met on your travels?
I am not surprised all that often, at least not in this realm. I’ve been around a while, you know! But because I have not spent a lot of time in the South, those Grammar Table stops were among my favorite—and for me the most educational.
A man in New Orleans didn’t like that object pronouns were called object pronouns. He thought that was dehumanizing and suggested that I, as a language professional, might be in a position to do something about picking less objectifying grammatical terms. I enjoyed that.
And then there was the construction worker I met in Decatur, Alabama, who was obsessed with punctuation and apostrophes, who loved calligraphy, and who was thoroughly annoyed by people who wrote “ya’ll” rather than “y’all.” He surprised me.
So you have now been in all 50 states with your amazing road show. What do regional differences tell you about writing—about what varies and why, and also about what is the same everywhere?
People move around a lot in this country, so everywhere I went, I met people from somewhere else. Mostly people had similar questions across state borders. In Ohio I was asked about the status of “ain’t” twice—more than in any other state—and I was also asked what I meant by “grammar” more in the South than elsewhere, but I don’t make much of the former (it’s not statistically significant) or much of the latter either.
I don’t think people understood less about grammar in the South, but it would make sense if a word associated with judgmental editorial orthodoxy were approached more tentatively in a region whose dialects are often picked on by the rest of the US.
How can mastery of grammar and mechanics help people to find their own distinctive style? Do you see this with your favorite writers?
When I look at a piece of writing, I really cannot tell how the writers got there. Was that cool sentence with a record-challenging string of opening dependent clauses leading up to a single punchy, zingy independent clause thought through grammatically by the writer and intentionally structured that way? Could the writer name the grammatical elements? And how much did an editor rewrite the person’s work? No idea.
I am confident that most skilled writers feel their way through sentences rather than engage in clause-counting. That’s true for me too, most of the time, and I think it’s the way it should be. Our grammatical explanations followed language; they didn’t predate it. I just happen to like supplementing my instincts with super-geeky technical analyses. Everyone has their hobbies.
Being closer to language and more aware of language, however you choose to acquire that awareness, helps people become more themselves in writing. Getting older helps a lot too. On average, people become more likely to say what they want to say as they age. Therefore, I recommend aging.
OK, seriously: How in the world can anyone ever not use the Oxford comma? It’s bad enough that some editors disdain it. You could write that off as a personal quirk. But for style guides to ban the O-comma is unthinkable and even unconscionable. What does that tell you about human nature?
Nice try, Charlie, but you are not going to get me to stop sticking up for the people who omit it. Despite the memes and public disputes and even litigation, I remain attached to my agnosticism on this point. “I ate carrots, celery and cucumbers” means exactly the same thing as “I ate carrots, celery, and cucumbers.” I currently use the Oxford comma, and I usually like it, and I sometimes even insist on it, but this is not an issue that rouses my passion.
Is the phone ruining people’s reading experience by making it so easy to get off to read a text, search a topic, or check social media?
Ugh, this question distresses me. I am struggling with this issue. I don’t want to discuss it publicly right now. I will come back when I am emotionally prepared to look at the damage caused to my attention span.
*Sorry, Ellen, the Oxford Comma is not optional.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
The idea of genre can be a touchy topic among writers.
“Don’t classify me, read me,” Carlos Fuentes groused. “I’m a writer, not a genre.”
Genre refers to a type of story–the kinds of characters, problems, places, and conflict you can expect to encounter. People look for different things in stories–and when they don’t find it, they get angry. In that sense (like a brand in business), a genre is a promise. When you buy a detective story, you expect to see a smart loner systematically figure out who had the motive, means, and opportunity to commit a crime–confronted by a cunning opponent who matches him at every turn, until the very end.
But as John Truby says in his brilliant new book, The Anatomy of Genres, a genre is not just a familiar way of living in the world of stories. It is a system. Any system–from the biological system of the body or the internal combustion engine of a car–succeeds only when each of its component parts performs its job and contributes to the larger process in a reliable way.
(To purchase The Anatomy of Genres, go to anatomyofgenres.com. For story courses and story software, go to truby.com.)
Truby lists 14 genres, in the following order: Horror, Action, Myth, Memoir, Coming of Age, Science Fiction, Crime, Comedy, Western, Gangster, Fantasy, Thriller, Detective, and Love Story. They move from the most primal issue (death) to the most transcendent (connection).
Truby offers two essential rules for genre writing:
Each story must use 15 to 20 specific beats, or plot events, that fit its genre. When they’re missing, the reader senses a kind of void. Storytellers who think they can reinvent narrative–who resist the conventions of genre–are in for a rude awakening. You need to deliver what people expect when they pick a story. (For an overview of the beats in all genres, go here.)
Every story needs to transcend its genre by offering something unpredictable and by using two or three other genres in supporting roles. A Sci Fi story can have elements of the Myth and Love Story genres, for example. Why the need for multiple genres? Modern people are surrounded by stories and get bored with overly familiar genre techniques. They need something extra to spritz the experience.
Truby’s work is primarily a guide for storytellers. But it is also a rumination of the role of stories in human life. Stories are not just accounts of people (or other creatures) doing things in an entertaining and meaningful way. Stories don’t just help us to “make sense” of life; they are not, as Joan Didion once said, “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images” we experience in life. Stories are not just about life; they are life. We could no more “separate” ourselves from the stories we tell and consume than we could separate the heart or the lungs from the body.
Why does that matter? Because the truest stories don’t just follow genre conventions. They tap something ineffable about human experience. That, ironically, is why the conventions matter so much. When we get them right, we are now free to discover the truths that lie deep in our minds and hearts and to somehow get them onto paper. Rules don’t restrict creativity but enable it.
To explore these issues, I talked with John Truby about his new book. An edited transcript of our talk follows.
How did The Anatomy of Genres come about?
I have taught writers for over 30 years. At times, when I talk with writers about what I do, they say, “I know all about story because I use the three-act structure or The Hero’s Journey or Save the Cat and they think that’s all they need. These approaches are fine for beginners, but they have very few practical story techniques—and almost nothing that can tell you how to write at the professional level. We’re talking about being in the top 1 percent of writers.
For me, genres are the highest form of knowledge because they tell us how the human mind works.
When I wrote my first book, The Anatomy of Story, my goal was to include all the professional story techniques a writer would need to write a bestselling novel or a hit screenplay. But the one subject it does not cover, which is the key to writing a hit film or novel, is how to write the different genres that make up 99 percent of popular storytelling today.
What about genres that makes them so important?
The answer is expressed in the subtitle: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works. We typically say that humans tell stories, but I believe it’s much deeper than that. Humans are stories. From birth, our mind creates our first story, and it’s the story of me. And from then on, everything I see and understand is a form of story.
Genres are different types of stories. Therefore, each genre gives us a different portal into how the world works and a different recipe for how to live successfully. For example, Horror says we live our best life when we confront our death and make amends for our sins. Fantasy says we succeed by making life itself a work of art. Each of the 14 major genres has a different approach to how to live.
If you want to be a successful storyteller, you have to express the deeper life philosophy through the plot of that genre. And frankly, most writers don’t do that.
Is it safe to say that the fundamental human problem is that we’re all going to die? Do the genres simply have a different answer to that question?
Absolutely. Horror is the first genre I explore because it deals with that question directly. It’s about how do you face your own inevitable demise. That’s something that nobody wants to face. In fact, nobody really believes it’s going to happen to them. All genres are about how to live a good life in this limited time that we have. Each genre gives a different recipe for how to do that: You will live a fulfilling life if you do X.
The genres each look at different aspects of life. Together, they add up to a comprehensive approach to understanding life.
All 14 genres not only have a very powerful and valid life philosophy; all of them are necessary for a fully rich life.
If you sequence the genres in a certain way, you get a kind of ladder of enlightenment. That’s why I start with Horror and Action at the base level and then move all the way up to the highest levels, which are Fantasy, Detective, and Love.
You could make a parallel with genres and archetypes. Archetypes show the different kinds of people in the world—and they reflect the tendencies that we all have within our own selves.
That’s absolutely right. But genres are much bigger than archetypes in terms of what they pull together into one system. The power of genres comes from the fact that they are based on the major activities of life. For example, Crime is about morality. The Gangster story is about business and politics. Memoir is about creating the self. Fantasy is about the art of living. Love is about how to live a happy life. The question is, how will we do that?
Tolstoy asked: “How, then, shall we live?” Each genre answers that question in a different way.
Exactly. And, you know, it is part of how I wrote each genre chapter. At the beginning of each chapter, I talk about each genre’s mind/action view. By that I mean, each genre expresses a unique way of thinking about the world, and each one shows how to have success, and that is the genre’s theme. Each genre combines the action side and the mind side. That makes it all-encompassing in terms of how to live.
So what are these genres about more specifically?
Horror is really about religion. Action is about success. Myth covers the life process. Memoir and Coming of Age are about creating the self. Science Fiction is about science, society, and culture—that’s why it has the biggest scope of all the genres. Crime is about morality and justice. Comedy is about manners and morals. The Western is about the rise and fall of civilization. Gangster is about the corruption of business and politics. Fantasy is the art of living. Detective and Thriller are about the mind and truth. And Love is about the art of happiness.
You don’t get any deeper or more expansive than that. And when you put all those together, you cover everything human beings do.
The sequence of genres could be arranged along Aristotle’s narrative arc, from the early basic challenge of survival to the ultimate development of the heart.
In my mind Aristotle is probably the greatest philosopher in history. Yeah, he was wrong about certain scientific things. But no philosopher contributed more important work in every major category of philosophy. He begins with metaphysics, with the process of becoming. And that’s what a story is.
My gripe with Aristotle’s Poetics is that it doesn’t give enough practical steps about how to tell a story. That’s one of the reasons I wrote The Anatomy of Story. And that’s why I wrote The Anatomy of Genres—to give writers the detailed, specific techniques they need to write a professional-level story.
We are not only a storytelling species, but also a summarizing, synthesizing, simplifying species. So one of the challenges of being a good storyteller is avoiding too many summary statements and describing specific people, places, and events in detail.
Yeah, it is. In my writing workshops, students often say, “Well, generally, this is going to happen.” But that’s not going to cut it. You need very specific actions. If you’re writing a Detective story, you’ve got to have a very specific clue that gives you a very specific reveal and then you’ve got to build on that. A great story is a series of causal links. You’ve got to be specific about what each person is doing at each moment.
Imagine how bad The Godfather would be if Mario Puzo said, “There was a big wedding in the family and a good time was had by all as Don Corleone did some business on the side.”
Exactly. And that’s the way most writers would do it. And that’s why you’ve got to be so precise in the sequence of actions you put in the story.
In any genre, there are 15 to 20 major plot beats unique to that form. They must be in that story or you’re not doing your job and the reader will be very unhappy with you. Plot is the most challenging thing for writers because they think in terms of individual moments in the story. No, it’s all about stringing together a sequence of events—which are driven by the opponent.
How do you do that?
Start with the opponent’s plan to defeat the hero. That might be the most important technique for creating a plot.
Take the Love genre. Realistically, a love story should take about 10 minutes. You’ve got two people who are attracted to each other. The rest is negotiation. But for a movie, it’s got to last at least 90 minutes. So how do you do that? Start with the opponent—and in a love story, the main opponent is the object of desire.
Back to the importance of action—lots and lots of beats. How do all these beats hang together?
Each individual beat means nothing without being part of 15 to 20 other beats. The beats in all the genres have been worked out in great detail over decades, sometimes centuries or even thousands of years. So you need to know the sequence of 15 to 20 beats for the genre you’re writing in.
But the real key is how you transcend the genres. Otherwise, you’re telling the same story that everybody else in that genre is telling. You’ve got to tell your story in a unique way.
How do you do that?
It means executing the individual beats in a way that we haven’t seen before. More importantly, it means expressing the life philosophy through the plot beats. And that’s the area where writers go wrong. The most underestimated element of storytelling is theme. Writers are terrified of theme. They’ve heard the old rule that if you want to send a message send it Western Union. So, to avoid hitting the theme on the nose they avoid theme entirely. It’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make. You need to express theme under the surface, through the structure, through the plot beats. If you’re not expressing the life philosophy of that genre, you’re getting one-tenth of the power of your story.
Genre is often described as a promise to the reader. When you pick up a Western, you can rest assured that you will get all the elements that have always made you enjoy a Western. Likewise, the character’s expression of a life philosophy is another kind of promise.
That’s the promise that most writers don’t know. They know that genre is a plot system. What they don’t know is that it’s also a theme system. The challenge is to express the theme through a complex plot.
Are there some tricks to express the theme with action? Let’s try an example. Imagine a couple of friends playing pickup basketball and one of them is overly aggressive and the other one is focused on style. And the aggressive guy beats the style guy and says, “See, that’s your problem, you were too concerned about strutting around, so you lost.” So in this case, you could build the theme into the action and dialogue.
Yeah, but the dialogue should be minimal. The theme should be expressed through the action and structure. And that brings us to another point, which is that one of the ways you transcend the genre is to mix genres. You need to combine two, three, even four genres. Each genre has 15 to 25 plot beats. When you combine that with two or three genres, you separate yourself from the rest of the crowd.
If you just mashed together three genres, that could be a mess—and disorienting. Somehow, you need to control your use of the different genre beats.
If you don’t know how to mix genres, you get story chaos. That’s why you have to choose one genre to be the primary form. That provides your structure—your hero, your main opponent, the key desire line, and so on.
Then you grab the beats from the other genres and mix them in—but only when they work with the main genre. If the minor genres come into conflict with the main genre—and many do, since they’re different approaches to handling the same problem—you stick with the plot beat of the major genre.
So your main genre is your North Star. You use the other genre beats when they strengthen the thrust of the main genre.
Exactly. And there are a lot of things that determine the main thrust of your story. But the most important one is the hero’s goal. And so whatever you can attach to that spine, to that goal, you want to use that.
Can you give an example of a great story that uses a major genre but is also supported by other genres?
In The Godfather, Mario Puzo combined Gangster with Fairy Tale and Myth. It’s actually three story forms blended together, with the structure revolving around the father and his three sons. That’s a Fairy Tale technique: the three sons. Each son has a different set of traits and characteristics. You see how each one responds and only the third one has the right combination of traits to be a successful godfather. If you were writing a typical gangster story, you’re not going to come up with The Godfather. It’s unique to Mario Puzo.
Francis Ford Coppola could not have created a movie like The Godfather without the massive level of detail in the novel. The worst writing mistakes get made—the worst cliches happen, the worst stretches of boredom happen—when you don’t have enough raw materials. You need a pile of details and moments and possibilities to create a great story.
That’s why Hollywood prefers to start with a novel, because it’s a lot easier to condense a novel and get a really dense plot in a film. When we think of The Godfather book, people think of it as just pulp fiction. No, this is a great book. This thing is brilliant. And I have learned so many lessons of storytelling from reading that book and watching that film.
You’ve got to have specific details at every level of the story. Only when you have those kind of details can you then sequence them together into an overall story, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Many writers simply do not understand the connection between the detail level and the master scheme level.
Do you have any favorite genres?
I love all these genres. In writing this book, I gained tremendous love and respect for the genres that I didn’t really care about. Each genre gives you this portal to different activities of life. But even though I love all the genres, the ones that I love the most are the Western and the gangster.
The Western is about the rise of the American Dream and Gangster is about the corruption of the American Dream. The Western is completely inaccurate historically, but it’s not about real history. It’s the American Creation Myth. The Gangster is the best expression of how the real world works now because it focuses on the corruption of business and politics.
The Gangster form is the closest genre to the Great American Novel, which explores how America has failed to meet the ideals expressed in its creation documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Great Gatsby is a transcendent Gangster story. Mad Men is basically a modern-day Great Gatsby. Both main characters create a new identity from a lie. They both express the basic American ethic that you can be whoever you want to be.
Mad Men, by the way, is one of the five best TV dramas ever made—just a massive work of art, one of the great American epics ever written.
Mad Men’s first episode tells you everything you’re going to experience in the show. Matthew Weiner knew where he was going to go. He knew the final scene of the series the whole time.
That’s one of the keys to writing a transcendent work in TV—having a sense of the overall track of the main character’s development from the very beginning. Breaking Bad was the same way.
So your two favorite genres are the Western and Gangster. They both explore the American Dream. If you were French, would they still be your favorite genres?
I grew up with the Western, which expressed that whole conception of the American ethic, which is incredibly positive and empowering. When I was a teenager, I encountered the four great anti-Westerns: The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Once Upon a Time in the West. They are the Gangster versions of the Western. They are about the fall of the American Dream.
Seeing these films was a major turning point in terms of my understanding of the potential, the philosophical power, you could have from a Hollywood feature film.
Movies do something that no other art form can do, which is they get us out of the utter wordiness of life. We have the tendency anyway to overly simplify things. Images get us to be in the moment.
Images are obviously central to modern storytelling. But one of my bugaboos is the idea that that film is a visual medium. Yeah, it is. We see a screen with images. But that’s not what people respond to. Film is a story medium. This is why I find the idea of the auteur theory one of the dumbest things ever. No, film is created by the writer. It’s the writer creating the character, the plot, the structure, the theme, the symbols, the dialogue, all the stuff that the audience is responding to.
If film was just a visual medium, we should say that silent film is the greatest film we’ve ever seen. But there’s a real advantage to talk. That’s why talkies got to be so popular so fast. People also say, well, you got to express ideas visually. Yeah, well, that’s true of any story: “show don’t tell.”
Look at Casablanca. If we were judging it based on the visuals, we would say that thing’s terrible. But it has probably the greatest dialogue in the history of film. When people say a picture is worth a thousand words, I always say a word is worth a thousand pictures. Words are what give you texture. Words are how we know that that person is a unique from everyone else.
Truman Capote once said that “all literature is gossip.” People are whispering about somebody else, often in a very judgmental and a prurient way, in secret. In that sense, the best stories feel like eavesdropping. You weren’t supposed to see Don Corleone in that room—that’s a private thing and you weren’t invited. You often say that stories are portals into different worlds, where you have no business being.
Right, the portal gets us past the public facade. Stories are about the private, where people have the most painful moments and experiences with each other. This is something we don’t talk about in public because it’s often painful and embarrassing. But that’s what stories allow us to do.
We all have secrets. Because they’re secrets, we don’t want anybody else to know what they are. But stories can get at them. If stories were only about what people do in public, they would really be boring. So in a way, the best way to think of stories is they capture the things that nobody else wants to let you see.
So, shifting focus, I was wondering if you ever feel “storied out.”
It’s just the opposite. When I watch a movie, I am absolutely entranced—unless the writer screws up. That’s what breaks my suspension of disbelief. And then you’re out of the story. But when I see great storytelling, it’s a totally enriching experience. I’m fascinated by the techniques the writer used to get those effects and how they applied the technique to their particular story problem. And then how that illuminates the way life works and how the human mind tries to make its way within it.
I sometimes liken it to sports. Let’s say you watch football. If you don’t know much about football, it just looks like a mass of bodies jammed together, and they just do that up and down the field. That’s boring. But if you know what’s happening, you are literally able to see the details as they happen. You can see, oh, that right guard is pulling, the defensive end did a trick maneuver to get to the quarterback, et cetera. You get into what’s happening structurally, under the surface.
This is why my approach to story has always been about structure. What’s most fascinating is there’s the surface of what’s happening and there’s the deep structure of what’s really happening and why. It’s getting to the deep causes that I find absolutely fascinating. And the reasons for it happening are often very different than we really think.
Can I ask about our current political situation? We have all these performance artists running around, lying, avoiding issues, breaking the law. It’s really the Gangster stage of our development. And a lot of what these gangsters and liars are doing is creating fake stories. So the key thing about being able to put on your story analysis hat is that you’re able to see through that.
With the rise of information technology, the ability to divide image from reality has never been greater—which means the ability to lie has never been greater.
So how do you deal with it? What genre can help us to separate truth from lies?
To me it’s the Detective story. It’s about asking questions, looking at evidence and using methodology. We can never get the whole truth. But you can get to some degree of truth that is not a complete fabrication. And that’s why the detective form is so valuable. I consider it the most important modern genre. Few of us are action heroes. But we can all learn how to look for the truth. The detective story tells us how. Science itself is a detective story.
Robert Caro, the great biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, once said something to the effect of, “I don’t know what truth is but I do know what facts are. And facts can add up to some amazing insights.”
And it is something that everybody is responsible for. I don’t think people take nearly as much responsibility for it as they should. If we don’t do it, the larger system is going to collapse.
If we don’t take control of the detective narrative, if we don’t play our parts, so to speak, then you’re going to let the bad guys write their own horror stories, gangster stories, action stories and myths.
With the possible exception of the Love story, there’s no story form more important to our success, not to mention survival, than the Detective story.
Given the importance of the detective story, is there an ideal detective?
The model for the detective, and the most brilliant of all detectives, is of course Sherlock Holmes. He is one of the most influential, if not the most influential, character in modern storytelling.
But there’s no way I’m going to be able to meet somebody for the first time and know that he was in Afghanistan and that he’s a doctor, et cetera. So in terms of the detective’s fact-finding mission, is there another one? I was I was going to say Woodward and Bernstein …
Sherlock Holmes works from the ground up. It’s not just that he’s a genius. It’s his observations that help to solve the case.
Observations about the dog that didn’t bark in the night.
Right. Sherlock Holmes is the master of starting with the facts, starting with the clues, with the specific physical evidence, and then slowly but surely generating a larger theory, a larger story of what truly happened. And that is the methodology. We need to use methodology to get away from these divisive ideologies. Too many are so trapped by their own ideology, they can’t see basic facts.
And looking is a very hard thing to do. Most of what I see, I’m actually constructing in my brain, based on my experiences and my predictions.
Absolutely right. One of the things that was so fun about writing the detective chapter was to look at all the things that prevent us from being able to see ourselves because of the ideology that we’ve created since childhood. Our stories allow us to see only certain things. Humans are pattern-making animals. But it amazes me how often the pattern people put together is complete nonsense.
We all have stories of our own lives and those stories are usually wrong. So the key, whether you’re a storyteller or reader or just a person trying to lead a decent life, is developing the ability to reject the stories that don’t actually pan out.
That’s what the Memoir genre does. In a memoir, you look back and see the story you created for yourself to help you survive. But those stories were full of errors. You created them when you were young. Or you were given them and you bought into it because it came from dad. So the great question of memoir is: How do you create a new story that allows you to have a better life in the future?
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Writing is writing. The kinds of skills you need to master writing in journalism, fiction, or academia are the same skills you need in business.
Except . . .
Business professionals face unique challenges as writers. They usually write to produce results, not just to inform audiences or express ideas. They often use specialized language, with technical meaning, but must also connect with general audiences. Finally, professionals also operate in a pressurized environment where the priority is to produce on other, non-writing tasks.
Therefore, any good program for business writing must do two things: (1) Master the core skills and techniques of writing, which apply in all fields. (2) Adapt those skills to the unique context of professional life.
That is exactly what this seminar does. With clear, step by step guides and examples relevant to your everyday life, we explore the dimensions of writing in business, government, and nonprofit organizations.
We pay special attention to the specific kinds of documents you need to produce. Before meeting, we get an inventory of the major documents in your organization and identify its special form and style. We also provide specific techniques to apply what we learn to your work—right away, as soon as you return to your desk.
The result is a program that will improve your efficiency and creativity not just as a writer, but in all you do.
This seminar will:
Show you the core skills of great writing in all fields—and adapt those skills toi your challenges as a professional.
Use your actual documents—in draft or final form—to show how to use the elements of writing for all challenges.
Provide a checklist of all t=of the considerations for all professional writing challenges.
Offer a strategy to deploy your new skills and understanding … as soon as you return to your desk.
Course Overview
The T Bar—Why Writing Power is Business Power
Most companies—especially in technical, specialized fields or with large corporate structures—focus on their “verticals.” But whatever your mastery of the verticals, you also need to connect across the silos. McKinsey Consulting uses the T-shaped organizational structure to describe how. The horizontal bar of the T represents the connections between the divisions. When a business can provide the depth of expertise of the I’s—and then connect those I’ s with good, smart communication—the company has a chance to do extraordinary things.
One Simple Technique to Transform Your Writing—Right Now
The Golden Rule of Writing provides a simple and intuitive hack for all levels of writing: the sentence, paragraph, section, and whole piece. Using the Golden Rule—with the help of the Landscape View—provides a process for you to gain control of your writing and to “burn” good writing habits into your brain.
‘One True Sentence’—How to Get it Right, Line by Line
The sentence is the single most important unit of writing. If we can write great sentences, every time, we have a chance to write great paragraphs and whole pieces. The sentence begins with a simple core. But to gain real power, you need to master the “hinge sentence.” Also: In professional settings, writers need to be on the lookout for wordiness and jargon.
Writing Stellar Paragraphs with Buckets and Tabloid Headlines
The paragraph is the most neglected element of writing—and it shows. Too many paragraphs ramble without purpose or focus. In this unit, we will use the concept of the “idea bucket” to stay focused. Using the Tabloid Headline and Landscape View, we’ll gain mastery of the second most important unit of writing.
Finding the Right Shape: Blueprints for All Pieces
Writing a great piece requires finding the right shape. The eternal structure of all communications is the story. But how does that work? And what are the variations on this theme? What are the different “shapes” of pieces? How can we adapt this core structure to different kinds of writing? Can we use simple blueprints to structure our work?
Editing With Focus, from Big to Small
“Write with your heart,” Hemingway once said, “but edit with your head.” Most writers struggle with editing because they try to do too much at the same time. In this unit, we explore how to break editing into stages to focus on one challenge at a time. With techniques like the Landscape View, Tabloid Headlines, and Clutter Cutter, we can create the focus we need to do it well.
Getting the Right Style—What You Have in Common With George Clooney, the Williams Sisters, and Stephen Curry?
Style is the unique expression of an idea, often with surprising and delightful flourishes. But in all fields—art, music, architecture, and even science and business—style requires mastery of the basics. Using a process we call “stacking” —and building on the skills from our unit on sentences—we will explore how to transform the simplest elements of writing into your own distinctive style or brand.
Following Up
Learning is never enough. What really matters is how you apply what you learn. This seminar is designed to give you a clear plan of attack—whatever you want to do as an organization or department.
Seminars for Storytelling in Business provide the core skills for connecting with people inside and outside the organization.
Research shows that people evolved as a narrative species. We pay the most attention–and learn and engage more powerfully–when we hear and tell stories.
Amazingly, you can “storify” writing in all fields (business, government, nonprofits, education), in all documents (emails, web copy, reports, proposals, and more), and at all levels (sentences, paragraphs, sections, whole pieces).
This seminar will:
Explore how storytelling could enhance the communications of your organization with your own people, clients, vendors, customers, and others.
Show how to develop characters to create empathy with audiences of all kinds—even for documents that do not have any obvious characters.
Demonstrate the essential elements of storytelling, building on Aristotle’s three-part model of drama and modern research on the brain and classic stories.
Apply those skills to business writing and communications, from emails and web copy to reports and other major pieces.
Engage students in storytelling exercises, as a group, to start to “burn” storytelling skills into the brain.
Provide useful templates/blueprints for using stories in different documents.
Course Overview
A great story can engage employees, build loyalty among customers, and strengthen the culture of an organization. No matter the goal, strong leaders know how to harness the power of stories to their advantage.
This course explores the value of stories, reasons to use them, methods for collecting tales, narrative patterns, character construction, and delivery skills. During this session, participants will also learn how to plan a story inventory and begin building a library of narratives.
The group will also learn the art of story spawning and the importance of story hearkening. By the conclusion of the workshop, those who attend should understand how to leverage their stories and others’ stories for a variety of purposes.
Workshop Outline
How Stories Engage Everyone, From the Biggest Clients to the Newest Hire
It’s a truism that humans evolved as a storytelling species—that a great narrative can engage audiences emotionally. But it’s deeper than that. The narrative is the most basic form of thinking. Every day, we have 50,000 or more thoughts—and they take the form of mini-narratives. If we understand a basic 1-2-3 structure, we can master the art of great sentences, paragraphs, sections, and whole pieces.
Group activity: Explore the three-part structure of all perception and thinking, writing and storytelling. In a “one-minute presentation,” you will learn to tell your three-part story on the spot.
Before and After—Reverse-Engineering Bland and Narrative Passages
Stories are not just “one damn thing after another,” as an eminent historian once commented. It’s not enough to record a series of actions or events. Stories are sequences with change and meaning.
Group activity: Compare a set of passages—some simple and bland accounts of events, others full-fledged stories—and identify and dissect the specific maneuvers that make stories stories.
Finding the One Idea—Discovering What Story You Might Want to Tell
Stories are usually about lots of people and events. But they need to converge on a single idea, or else you will alienate the audience. Hollywood uses the “logline”—a short and simple statement about a story’s setup and delivery—to capture the essence of a movie. Sometimes we can’t know the “One Idea” of a story till after we have written it and struggled to find its meaning.
Group activity: Explore a process for moving from a jumble of ideas to a coherent, clear, compelling idea that will drive the story from the first word to the last.
‘Everything Begins With a Character’—Why People Love Characters More Than Anything Else and How You Can Give Them What they Want
All good storytelling begins with character. A good character evokes the empathy and concern of the reader, making the reader a hidden part of the story. Rendered well, characters not only lead a story but also dramatize and explain key ideas.
Group activity: Develop a compelling character out of thin air. Moving around the room, we will create a “dossier” for a character. By creating a character, we will take a major step toward building a whole story.
Creating a Dynamic Narrative Arc—In Everything You Write
Two and a half millennia ago, Aristotle identified the key elements of a story. In our time, neuroscientists and business mavens show how these elements affect the reader as she goes about her day—working, learning, caring for family, shopping, playing, and more.
Group activity: Dissect a mini-narrative from film. We will block out the beginning, middle, and end. Building on the basic story structure, we will boost the story’s power with specific moments that define characters and struggles and move the story forward to its inevitable conclusion. We will use blueprints for specific business pieces that use these story moments.
Story Moments—Structuring a Great Explainer, Post, Proposal, Pitch, and More
Big Data on stories—concerning takes from Sophocles to Succession—show that stories succeed best when they use about a dozen key “moments.” These moments can be found in the best ads, blogs, sales copy, pitches, and more. The challenge is not just to use these moments, but blend them seamlessly into the piece.
Group activity: Consider a series of ”fact sheets” on issues of importance to the organization. From these, we will create powerful and dynamic stories that reveal the essence of the issues at hand.
Thinkfast—Make a Story Out of Mush, Instantly
The world, as William James once commented, often seems like “a blooming and buzzing confusion.” As noted at the beginning of this seminar, the brain automatically organizes this confusion into a coherent narrative. To succeed, we need to take control of the narratives of our work and lives.
Group activity: Work with a series of “fact sheets” on issues of importance to the organization. From these, we will create powerful and dynamic stories that reveal the essence of the issues at hand.
By the end of this course, those who attend should have a solid grasp of the power of storytelling in business and how as leaders they can develop and deliver narratives to achieve wide-ranging goals.
Following Up
In this seminar, you will learn a full suite of skills and techniques to “storify” all of your writing in your organizations—from emails and web copy to reports and proposals and RFPs … even speeches and presentations.
Every time we commemorate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, we talk about the co-called “I Have a Dream” oration at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
The speech is certainly worthy of the praise, as I explore in my book Nobody Turn Me Around. Some other King speeches were probably better. To me, the most profound was his Riverside Church speech against the Vietnam War in 1967.
But a myth has grown that King’s dream passage was a riff. The myth goes like this: Toward the end of the speech, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” King did not prepare to talk about a dream. But, prompted by Mahalia, King gave one of the greatest prose poems in the history of American rhetoric.
The only problem with that story is that it’s not true. In fact, King worked on the dream passage the night before the March on Washington. He debated whether to use the passage the night before with Andrew Young and Wyatt Tee Walker. When Young and Walker left for the night, King practiced the passage in his hotel room.
For my book Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington, I interviewed three people who were with King the night before, as well as a man who stayed in the room next to King’s. In this excerpt from my book, I explain how the “dream” passage actually happened.
Origins of the ‘Dream’
A passage from Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington, by Charles Euchner, published in 2010 by Beacon Press:
King had spoken about a dream for months. At a mass meeting in Birmingham, he sketched out a vision of an integrated society, concluding, “I have a dream tonight.”
The Bible talks of dreamers. The book of Joel teaches that “your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” In Genesis, Joseph dreams of what will happen in the future, and his father, Jacob, rewards him with a coat of many colors. In Egypt, Joseph lands in jail, where other inmates tell their dreams. When the Pharaoh learns that Joseph has interpreted those dreams, he asks Joseph’s advice.
The “American Dream”—that dizzying collection of images about family and community, flag and sacrifice, immigrants and ancestors, prosperity and ever-expanding inclusion—was a standard trope. King referred to it often.
SNCC and CORE organizers also talked about a dream as they worked in the Deep South. When King visited the site of a church burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan in 1962, in Terrell County, Georgia, a student named Prathia Hall started saying, “I have a dream,” trancelike.
King sometimes hesitated to talk about dreams because he feared those dreams turning into nightmares. He read Langston Hughes’s 1951 poem “Harlem,” which asks what happens to a dream deferred. “Dreams are great, dreams are meaningful,” King said. “And in a sense all of life moves on the wave of a dream. Somebody dreams something and sets out to bring that dream into reality, and it often comes in a scientific invention, it often comes in great literature, it often comes in great music. But it is tragic to dream a dream that cannot come true.” King understood the dangers of dreams.
Always, King remembered the dreamlike state that strengthened his own commitment to God, back during the Montgomery bus boycott. Late one night, King answered the phone and heard a profanity-filled diatribe: “Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. . . . If you aren’t out of this town in three days, we are going to blow your brains out, and blow up your house.” Unable to sleep, King sipped coffee. Where does that hatred come from? Why is it so powerful? How can it change?
“And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me and I had to know God for myself,” King remembered later. “And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I will never forget it. And . . . I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, ‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause we represent is right. But, Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this . . . because if they see me weak and los- ing my courage, they will begin to get weak.’”
At that moment, King heard some inner voice: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.”
That was King’s dream.
Two months before the March on Washington, King led the Great March for Freedom in Detroit. The United Auto Workers organized the demonstration as a trial run for the March on Washington. That march brought out a hundred thousand people—two hundred thousand, some insisted—who walked down Woodward Avenue.
King told the crowd at Cobo Hall: “I have a dream this afternoon.” He de- scribed the dream . . . that one day the sons of former slaves and slave owners could “live together as brothers” . . . that white and black children “can join hands as brothers and sisters” . . . that “men will no longer burn down houses and the church of God simply because people want to be free” . . . that “we will no longer face the atrocities that Emmett Till had to face or Medgar Evers had to face” . . . that his four children will be “judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin” . . . that “right here in Detroit, Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house anywhere that their money will carry them and they will be able to get a job” . . .
That day in Detroit, people cheered wildly. The theme resonated, more with each refrain. “Yeah!” the crowd shouted. “That’s right!” “I have a dream!”
But the Detroit speech had a clunky feel. And the dream passage consumed four minutes. The speech in Washington was supposed to last only seven minutes. Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, threatened to turn off the microphone if King spoke for more than ten minutes. If King talked about the dream, he wouldn’t have time for much else.
King asked Wyatt Walker and Andrew Young what they thought.
“Don’t use the lines about ‘I have a dream,’” Walker told King. “It’s trite, it’s cliché. You’ve used it too many times already.”
Young agreed. King looked up but said nothing.
Years before, King came up with the refrain “Give us the ballot” for hi speech for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. He showed it to Bayard Rustin. “Martin, the mentality of blacks today is not that they want to be given anything,” Rustin said. “They want to demand.” King agreed, but decided to keep the line. “It just rolls better for me,” he said.
In the room next to King’s at the Willard Hotel, Harry Boyte lay down in a sleeping bag on the floor. His father had recently begun work as the office manager of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Harry joined his father in Washington before starting college at Duke that fall.
As he drifted to sleep, Harry heard a booming baritone from the next room. Over and over he heard the same words: “I have a dream . . . I have a dream . . . I have a dream . . .”
“He must be practicing his speech,” young Harry Boyte thought.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Tapper: If you end up losing your job in Congress because of your work on this committee, it will have been worth it to you? Cheney: There’s no question pic.twitter.com/JczCTUV92S
Liz Cheney has risked all to uncover the truth of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. A month before her Republican primary in Wyoming, she is 20 point behind her Trumpist opponent. Once a darling of the Right, she is now its most bitter foe. She faces the ugliest attacks, including death threats, because of her mission to expose You-Know-Who’s role in the attempted coup.
In her statements and questions as the vice chair of the January 6 committee, she is clear and direct. She also knows how to create a cliffhanger and throw shade.
But she talks like this when interviewed:
Jake Tapper of CNN: If you end up losing your job in Congress because of your work on this committee, it will have been worth it to you?
Liz Cheney: There’s no question I believe that my work on this committee is the single most important thing I’ve ever done professionally. It is an unbelievable honor to represent the people of Wyoming in Congress. And I know that all of us who are elected officials take an oath that we swear to God to the Constitution and that oath has to mean something. And that oath means that we cannot embrace and enable a president as dangerous as Donald Trump is. And my obligations and my responsibilities on this committee are to ensure that we understand exactly what happened so that we can establish legislation and recommendations to help ensure it never happens again.
Cheney answers the question. She says what she means. She does not equivocate. But she takes 114 words to do it. That’s almost half of a double-spaced page of type. If you break it into four sentences, that’s 28 words per sentence. Research shows that people understand best when sentences average below 20 words in length.
Worse, the response is as lively as lead. There are no sensory words — no words that evoke sights or sounds or texture.
Why do politicians do this? Who do bureaucrats and corporate people do this? Why do intellectuals do this?
I can see six possible explanations, not mutually exclusive:
Orwellian obfuscation: This is the most obvious explanation in official-speak but does not apply here. In 1984 and “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell warned about the tendency of people holding or seeking to cover up the truth with circumlocutions as well as outright lies. Any time someone faces some uncomfortable situation, they try to talk their way around it. Most famously, Bill Clinton claimed he “didn’t inhale” when he was a college student trying pot. In a sense, Clinton didn’t have any choice but to dance around the topic. Self-righteous pundits, politicians, ministers, and moralizers treated smoking pot as a disqualifying action. Douglas Ginsberg, remember, lost a seat on the Supreme Court solely because he smoked pot while a member of a university faculty. So it’s understandable when public figures dance around inconvenient truths. But when it becomes a habit–when every public utterance is processed by the Truth Obfuscation Machine–it’s a dire problem.
Thinking while talking: Politicians talk all day, under the glare of TV lights and with opponents waiting in prey nearby. They are expected to produce an answer to every question, without thinking through the words they will use. Oh sure, they can fall back on previous utterances and talking points–and they do. Still, it can be overwhelming to speak continuously. They have to start their answer before they think through how to answer. They can’t pause for five or ten seconds or the interviewer will begin to press them. Five seconds is an eternity on TV.
Hedging while being emphatic: Public figures want to be stalwart and provocative in their pronouncements. They want to appear not only knowledgable but also strong. They want to stake out strong claims. There’s no room on TV for the mealy-mouthed. So so they proclaim and declare and challenge and pronounce–emphatically. The desire to be bold runs into the wall of wanting to be safe. So she talks about the “single most important” and “unbelievable honor” and “swear to God,” but buries these emphatics in a mush of bureaucratese.
Holding the floor: On TV–and in the other forums where politics, media, and egos converge–you always risk losing the floor. So Liz Cheney uses the technique that her droning father Dick used: Just speak without interruption till you’ve made the points you want to make. The point of Sunday talk shows is not to deliberate or debate or reconsider anything; it’s to leave with soound bites that get coverage in the media. Who cares if it’s lost in a bog; it’s still there, fodder for friends and foes alike to use in the next round of argument and posturing. Therefore: speak till you drop your talking points.
Living in abstraction: Politicians, technocrats, academics, and (shame on them) journalists live in a world of abstractions. They talk about “the American people” and “public opinion” and “the narrative” without any real care for the flesh-and-blood people and issues that make up those categories. If you live in a world dominated by fundraising, polling, gerrymandering, and talking points, the human element gets buried. Pols try to fight this with their anecdotes: “Just last week in Dubuque, I met a farmer named Ned struggling to pay for seed…” But it’s still lifeless and bloodless.
The long game: The best-case scenario is that Liz Cheney is channeling Ike. President Dwight Eisenhower was famous for his bland and meandering speech in press conferences and other public appearances. But behind the scenes, as Fred Greenstein shows in The Hidden-Hand Presidency, he was sharp and concise. He used bland Ikespeak to lull the public (and his opponents) to sleep. Ike cared more about his agenda than winning praise for cleverness. Maybe that’s Liz Cheney’s game, too.
So how might Liz Cheney have done a better job answering Jake Tapper? Try this:
Jake Tapper of CNN: If you end up losing your job in Congress because of your work on this committee, it will have been worth it to you?
Liz Cheney: Oh, God yes. No job is worth endangering the Constitution. Donald Trump is a walking, talking threat to everything I care about. Look, I love representing Wyoming in Congress. It’s an amazing honor. But Donald Trump is the greatest danger to American democracy since the Civil War. The January 6 Committee must make sure he never gets close to the White House ever again. That matters more than my job.
This response is 70 words in eight sentences–an average of 8.75 words. Each sentence is punchy and direct. She does not lose the audience in a long drone of bland and abstract language.
Whatever the reasons for Liz Cheney’s manner of speaking, she and other public figures would do better to speak with greater clarity and verve–not just for their own cause, but for the larger cause of truth and honesty. If you lose a little wiggle room or deniability along the way, so be it. In the long run, direct language will produce a better payoff for your cause and for your own state of mind.
–
*Not just politicians. Other public figures, too, as well as academics and professionals in all fields — anyone, in fact, with something to gain and lose with their speech. More than we would like to admit, the rest of us follow these models of speech. *sigh*
Paco Underhill, the son of a diplomat, turned his liabilities as a boy into his greatest assets.
Underhill grew up on the move as his father took new postings with the State Department. Living in Poland and Malaysia, he did not experience the retail riches of Western life. Partly because of his itinerant life and partly because of a childhood stutter, he learned to observe his surroundings carefully.
He developed those powers of observation even more acutely as a city planner, working for the Project for Public Spaces under the direction of the legendary William (“Holly”) Whyte. Underhill then created a consulting firm called Envirosell that analyzes how people use stores, museums, and other public and private places. Using direct observation, time-lapse photography, interviews, and data, Underhill and his team identify ways to make the shopping experience more engaging to users and more lucrative to retailers.
Since its founding in 1986, Envirosell has worked in 50 countries and with more than one-third of all Fortune 100 companies. He has worked in all sectors, in virtual as well as brick-and-mortar environments.
Underhill’s new book How We Eat offers a friendly guide not just to the shopping experience, but also to the larger issues of food, e.g., organic versus mass farming, small versus supermarket buying, home cooking versus prepared foods, and varieties of diets and eating traditions. Like his previous books—Why We Buy, Call of the Mall, and What Women Want—How We Eat offers insights into the everyday design decisions that shape human behavior.
Winston Churchill once remarked: “First we make the buildings, then the buildings make us.” Underhill offers a methodology for remaking the spaces of our lives. The $1 trillion food industry makes us, for sure; but with the right insights, we can also redesign the systems that produce and sell food
Underhill, a graduate of Vassar College, lives in New York City and Madison, Connecticut.
You started your career as a city planner and analyst—using time-lapse photography to track how people behave in public spaces. How did that come about?
I went to Columbia for a summer and in one of my classes heard a lecture by Holly Whyte. As I walked out, I thought, “Man, this is so cool.” It was a way to observe people and understand how the built environment worked. It made complete sense.
After I heard him lecture for 45 minutes, I knew what I wanted to do. And then I ran my own study. I looked at a pedestrian mall in Poughkeepsie and how the street furniture and signs worked. Then I knocked on his door: “Hello, you don’t know me, but I just did this…” That’s how I got my first job. That’s when the Project for Public Spaces was just launching. I became the first staff member. One of my first jobs was working at Rockefeller Center.
Holly Whyte was a magical guy. He had a gift of gab. I saw him entrance people at least 100 times after that first lecture. I learned about how he wrote and presented himself.
How did you make the transition from city planning to retail analysis?
I was a junior member of a crew that would go to different cities and look at traffic patterns and rewrite zoning ordinances. I was on the roof of the Seafirst Bank building in Seattle, 60 stories up, and there was a stiff wind blowing. My job was to install cameras and I could feel the building rocking. I did what I had to do, but I would rather have a job where I don’t have to go into the roofs of buildings.
A week later I was in a bank and getting madder by the moment and realized that the same tools I used to explore cities, I could use to understand a bank or a store or an airport or a museum or a hospital and deconstruct how they worked. I had never worked in banking or retail or even took a business course. But I knew something about how to measure how people move. It also helped that I came to it with a certain degree of freshness.
A lot of observations seem obvious after the fact—but they are fresh insights at first.
One of my jobs was analyzing a Burger King and its new salad bar. It was in the early 1980s in Miami. Yes, my job was to look at the salad bar, I was going to look at the entire pad. There were so many things that were painfully obvious, but to the marketing research team, were just completely new and different. When a man walks into a Burger King, the way he chooses a table is different than the way a woman does it. We tracked who parks in the lot and who goes through the drive-through. If you drove a Cadillac, you would use the drive-through. That’s obvious but no one had noted it before.
There are implications in terms of design and management. I started with restaurants, then worked on hardware stores, music stores, fashion, then food. I was able to come up with [store design changes] that someone could do in a week or two or even overnight. Business in those days was focused on strategy—McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group. I was able to say, “Here are five things you can adjust and make a difference.”
Some of it was comic. The first hardware store, I said the brochures are in the wrong place. They let me move them but at the end of the first day the manager yelled at me: “You’ve gotten rid of a week’s work of circulars in one day!” One of the first drugstores, I asked, “Why are the baskets only at the front door?” I showed them video clips with customers walking to the register with their arms full. What if we trained staff so that when they see someone with four things in their hands, the customer would get a basket? We did it and the average purchase went up 18 percent.
How did you learn how to observe carefully?
Growing up I had a terrible stutter. As we moved every 18 months or two years, I was more confident looking and trying to understand how things worked than asking questions. So I took a coping mechanism and turned it into a profession.
I also remember looking at Sears and Roebuck catalogues—toys and furniture and all these things. Nothing in Warsaw duplicated that catalogue. Going into Germany during a family trip, getting into the first PX, it was a world I had never seen before. I am not a material kind of guy, but I do have a passion about understanding how things work.
How can we train ourselves to make careful observations?
When I taught field work at City University, we were right across from Bryant Park. I would pick one person from the class and say, “I want you to go and walk around Bryant Park for 15 minutes and come back and tell us what you did. After he left I would pick out someone else and say, “I want you to go follow him and record what he did.” Then they would come back and we would contrast what the two reported. There were obvious differences. People didn’t lie but what they said and did was often completely different.
What kinds of habits—and what kinds of people—make for good observation?
Over the last 34 years I sent out crews of trackers all over the world. When I’m in an environment observing, I have to be very careful after doing it for an hour—I haven’t seen what I need to see. It’s often the second or third day when you really see and understand. So a lot of it is a Zen-like state of patience.
One man did 500 missions for me. He had a short career as a guitar player in a prominent early 90s band called Codeine. It had its own distinct beat. He became a kindergarten teacher. I found him doing substitute teaching and he was so patient and so observant and so rhythmic, with a slow steady beat, and he was so empathetic.
I also had an Endicott Prize-winning illustrator of children’s books. He would work for me for nine months and then he would come in and say, “Disney just optioned one of my books, I need to take some time off.” So he would go and then come back when he was ready. I would rather have someone great for 60 percent of the time than someone not as good 100 percent of the time.
How did you develop as a writer? How did you develop your informal, avuncular style?
In my early college years, I had a wall in my dorm filled with rejection letters. I wrote stories and even poems. I wrote fiction into my 20s. I took the skill set I learned writing fiction and used it in my nonfiction writing.
There are nonfiction writers who are trying to show how smart they are. I firmly believe in edutainment. If I can entertain you, I can educate you. I want to change readers’ prescriptions [lenses] in how they see the world.
How do you break down and manage major writing projects?
I have always been a writer of columns. The form I feel most comfortable is a 2,000- to 3000-word piece. People’s attention spans aren’t the same that they were when Charles Dickens wrote his books. Therefore, when I think of a book, it isn’t 12 chapters, it’s actually 50. I’ve broken it down so it’s easy for someone to pick up the book, read for a while and put it down and not feel as if they’re missing anything.
To write How We Eat, I had 40 columns, 50,000 words already written. It was a matter of piecing them all together. I learned from writing reports, it’s important to create a framework to start out. It isn’t as if you start at the beginning and go to the end. Get a frame and put pieces into that frame.
The modern book isn’t measured in pages; it’s measured in words. I was informed early in my career that to get read, a book needs to be 70,000 words.
Also, I also recognize that I need to keep vocabulary simple. As a column writer, I’ve been very careful about use of adjectives and adverbs. I should say careful, not very careful.
I have always been a storyteller. Being able to take business or nonfiction knowledge and do it as a story is very reader-friendly. There are a couple of sections where it goes from being a monologue to a dialogue. That’s part of what pleased me—the transition between one and the other. It makes it m more informal. It’s storytelling.
What writers have you admired and emulated?
I always loved the fiction writer James Lee Burk. He could describe smell better than anybody I knew. His books are formulaic, but he can go on for 1,000 words describing a smell.
Then there’s the foreign service man, Edward Hall, who write The Hidden Dimension and The Silent Language. Growing up in a third world country, even as a teenager I didn’t have TV. I consumed a prodigious amount of books—60 to 80 a year.
How did How We Eat develop?
When COVID hit, I had been working on the manuscript for over a year and had to take 60 percent and throw it out. A year ago, after having been battered by COVID, I gave Envirosell to my young employees and shifted to being a strategic advisor. That means my platform is a lot freer because I don’t have to worry about stepping on toes.
This book feels lighter—the style and flow and personality—than Why We Buy. Am I right about that?
That’s a very conscious effort. The purpose is to get to a healthier version of ourselves and our planet. I’m not going to tell you what to do but I can change the prescription [lens] by which you see the world. In changing that, you able to make better decisions. I was also aware I wanted to write for a popular audience. Everybody eats and drinks and buys food and beverages. Why We Buy targeted a certain audience and What Women Want targeted a specific audience. This one was targeting everyone.
Hollywood uses the “logline” to describe the essence of a film—a simple one-sentence line about the major character or mission. What’s your logline?
Mine would be: I want to change your prescription to get to a healthier version of yourself and create a healthier planet.
When COVID hit, we recognized that the world was going through a fundamental change. It wasn’t World War II breaking out, but it was global and there was a great deal of hurt. And it affected the structure of our own lives. I realized I don’t want to write a negative book. I don’t want to say, “Oh, man, are we screwed!” I wanted to write a positive and enlightening and challenging book.
The word I kept using is “post-pan.” I want to focus on the post-pandemic period. It will be over at some point. There are going to be some big changes and we need to be ready for them.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Cleveland’s major league baseball team, known for decades as the Indians, struck out by taking the name the Guardians.
It’s hard to think of a blander moniker, especially for a gritty city like Cleveland with such a great baseball tradition. Seriously, the name was inspired by a statue on a bridge that no one cares about beyond, say, the Scranton Flats.
Zzzzz.
Paul Dolan, the team’s owner, explained the new name thus: “Cleveland has and always will be the most important part of our identity. Therefore, we wanted a name that strongly represents the pride, resiliency, and loyalty of Clevelanders. ‘Guardians’ reflects those attributes that define us while drawing on the iconic Guardians of Traffic just outside the ballpark on the Hope Memorial Bridge.”
Zzzzz.
But Clevelanders might have a chance for a do-over. A local roller derby team with the same name has sued the Not-the-Indians-Much-Longer-But-Maybe-Not-the-Guardians-Either in federal court for a violation of its trademark.
“Major League Baseball would never let someone name their lacrosse team the ‘Chicago Cubs’ if the team was in Chicago, or their soccer team the ‘New York Yankees’ if that team was in New York – nor should they,” said Christopher Pardo, the lead attorney for the real Cleveland Guardians. “The same laws that protect Major League Baseball from the brand confusion that would occur in those examples also operate in reverse to prevent what the Indians are trying to do here.”
I doubt anyone will confuse the rollers and the ballers, but the suit gives the former Indians team a chance to get the name right.
Every writer knows the important of giving characters the most fitting names. Consider a few examples:
The Dickens character Ebenezer Scrooge, from A Christmas Carol, sounds a lot like miser and screw, which is what he does to people before his Christmas Eve epiphany.
Gradgrinds, from Dickens’s Great Expectations, is a school superintendent who cares nothing about the souls of his students–only in disciplining them for their soulless lives ahead.
Holly Golightly, from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, sounds as airy as her character.
Big Brother, from Orwell’s 1984, conveys the message brutally and clearly, with just enough irony to make the concept chilling.
Lolita, from Vladimir Nabakov’s novel of that name, is best explained by the author himself: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
Hannibal Lecter, from Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs, sounds a lot like cannibal, which he is. It also evokes the Carthaginian general Hannibal known for his exploitive and uncaring attitude toward his own troops.
Naming can provide a memorable handle for characters. The same goes for place names. Can you imagine Los Angeles being called Buffalo or vice versa? No. Those names belong with those places. A good name rolls off the tongue and sounds like the character or place. Every time you hear the name, you are reminded of their qualities and lit’ry appeal.
So what should the Cleveland team be called? That’s easy: The Cleveland Fellers. By far, the team’s greatest player was Bob Feller, the Hall of Fame pitcher who won 266 games from 1936 to 1956, an 18-year career interrupted by two years of service in World War II.
First, I was rooting for the team to be called the Rockers, which would create countless cross-marketing opportunities with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Can you imagine a Rockies-Rockers World Series? Neither can I, but still …
Rapid Robert Feller deserves the honor. No one ever performed better for the Cleveland Nine and no one better embodied the values of the Clevelanders or the game of baseball.
“I would rather beat the Yankees regularly than pitch a no hit game,” said the twirler of three no-hitters.
“I’m no hero,” he said of his service in the war. “Heroes don’t come back. Survivors return home. Heroes never come home. If anyone thinks I’m a hero, I’m not.”
“My father kept me busy from dawn to dusk when I was a kid. When I wasn’t pitching hay, hauling corn or running a tractor, I was heaving a baseball into his mitt behind the barn… If all the parents in the country followed his rule, juvenile delinquency would be cut in half in a year’s time.”
Talk about good Midwestern values. Corny as heck, but worthwhile.
And imagine the wordplay: “I know my Fellers will bounce back from this tough loss,” manager Terry Francona said. Or how about getting a player named Rocco: A Rocky Feller. The zany players would be called the Odd Fellers, natch, after the old fraternal organization. Rhymes will be fun too: the Stellar Fellers, the Killer Fellers, and the Cellar-Dweller Fellers. Cheer leaders could be called Feller Yellers. At the trade deadline, they’d be the Seller Fellers. The PR staff and broadcasters would be the Feller Tellers.
Once upon a time, teams regularly named themselves after people. The Cleveland Browns were named for the Brown family that owned the team. The Indians themselves were named, some believe, to honor a onetime Native American player. The practice is rich in international football (soccer to rubes). Argentina’s Club Atlético Aldosivi comes from the first two letters of the last names of the team’s founders: Allard, Dollfus, Sillard and Wiriott (typewriters then had no W, so the team used a V instead).
When you have a person whose name embodies everything that is great about a team, city, and tradition, do it.
While we’re at it, let’s name the Washington Football Team the Georges. America’s first president deserves the honor. The helmet practically designs itself. Let’s fill the stadium with powder-wigged fans.
But back to the city on the south edge of Lake Erie. (Note to self: Don’t call Cleveland the “Mistake by the Lake” and don’t talk about the lake catching on fire. They hate that.)
Dear Paul Dolan: Not many people get a chance to recover from such a lame decision like the Guardians name. Take advantage of the moment. Be a clever Feller.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Will Storr is England’s Malcolm Gladwell–a polymath who uses stories to explore complex and compelling ideas. His books include The Heretics, Selfie, Will Storr vs. The Supernatural, and the Science of Storytelling. His latest, The Status Game, will be released in September. His is also author of a novel called The Hunger and The Howling of Killian Lone.
Everything Storr does informs his other work. The Heretics have him the idea for The Science of Storytelling, which in turn informed his research for The Status Game.
When not working on his own work, Storr teaches writing seminars to audiences ranging from journalists to members of the European parliament.
Charlie Euchner: How can we take the insights from brain science and behavioral science and apply it to the process of writing stories?
Will Storr: About 10 years ago, I was working on a book called the Unpersuadables about why clever people believe crazy things. And the answer, in a nutshell, is that the brain is not a logic processor—it’s a story processor. The brain makes us this hero at the center of the world and we’re overcoming.
I was also working on my first novel. I realized that what the experts were saying about stories were the same things the scientists were telling me about how the brain works. It was the big lightbulb moment. Then I started thinking, well, maybe I can use it to make my own storytelling better.
The basic idea is that the brain is a storyteller and the way it processes reality itself has a story. We are a hero overcoming obstacles. We experience life in three acts, with a crisis, a struggle, and resolution. And that’s why we tell stories. So if that’s true, then these great story theorists have got to have some basis in science.
CE: Aristotle’s Poetics—from 2,500 years ago—still offers a brilliant overview of this. He got it right.
WS: I’m currently writing a book about status and [Aristotle] crops up in there as well. This man was just unbelievably smart. The things that he was coming up a couple thousand years ago! In all these different areas, he’s now being proven right–and wrong in some too. He was quite extraordinary.
CE: When you started to look into the techniques of storytelling, before you got into the brain research, who were you reading?
WS: The big three were Robert McKee, Christopher Booker, and John Yorke. Christopher Booker was the main one. For all of them, [the message] is to the focus on structure, structure, structure. If you compare all the stories that are successful, what they’ve got in common is structure. There are all kind of recipe books. …
But there’s another way. If you take a character-first approach, the plot is designed for the character, rather than starting with the plot and then thinking of a character to plug into it.
CE: The character is where the energy comes from. You can have a perfectly plotted piece, but if you don’t care about the characters and if they have no energy and if you can predict everything they say, the plot is just one damn thing after another—and not a process of exciting exploration and danger and risk-taking.
WS: If you can imagine Breaking Bad with a [poorly drawn] character, it would have completely flopped. For me Walter White was the perfect character—a low-status, embittered, scared character. Breaking Bad was great because of Walter White.
CE: So plot can actually get in the way of a story, without a great character.
WS: For me it’s that marriage of plot and character. When I’m teaching students, they have this great idea. They say, ‘This happens and then this happens, then this happens.’ I say, ‘Well, who does it happen to?’ And they’re not sure. They’re vague or it’s a version of them. They’ve got carried away with plot, plot, plot. They’re convinced they’ve got this bestseller but they haven’t got the character. What matters is our goals in life—the things that we want more than anything, which come out of our character.
We are all flawed characters and we always butt up against our flaws. The plot has to be specifically designed to connect with the characters’ flaws and then test it. Or if it’s a tragedy, make them double down on it. Define your character’s flawed idea about the world in one line, preferably.
At the end of the first season of Fleabag, the [lead character] has this great cathartic moment where she realizes what her problem is—and that is that she only sees herself as a sexual creature, that’s her only value. That problem has created all of the drama. She had sex with her best friend’s boyfriend and her best friend killed herself and that’s destroyed everything. So you begin with that very specific character and that specific flaw.
Another example is The Godfather. Michael’s flaw is his belief that he’s not a gangster. And then his father is assassinated and that tests him. Or in Jaws, the shark comes and starts eating everybody. The protagonist Brody, who is terrified of water, can’t go near it. So that shark, coming into his patch, connects specifically with his flaw and tests it and forces him wrestle with his deepest fears.
So the hero has a flaw and something happens to test it. Once people have done that, the plot thing becomes so much clearer.
CE: When you say flaw, it’s the false story you tell about yourself. It’s like the myth that you believe and live by, which causes you to do all these flawed things. Is that, is that fair to say?
WS: That’s definitely, that’s brilliant. But yeah, the flawed belief about the world.
CE: Your discussion of Lawrence of Arabia was especially powerful. His myth about himself was true in lots of ways. That’s why the myth is so tenacious and why it’s such a worthy adversary—because it actually works, until it doesn’t. Is that what you’re getting at?
WS: Yeah. I ghostwrote a book a couple of years ago for Ant Middleton, who’s a celebrity over here. He used to be in the special forces. I asked why he wanted to do it. “Well,” he said, “I want to be the best.” But why? “Why wouldn’t I want to be the best?” he said. So I asked again. “Because I wanted to be tested.” OK, so why do you want to be tested? Was there somebody in your childhood that made you feel that you had to be the best? And then he tells this amazing story. His father died when he was five. Then the evil stepdad comes along; it’s like a fairy story. He insisted that his kids become the best on pain of physical punishment. And I said to him, you know, would it be fair to say that when you were growing up, you were taught that we’re only safe if you are the best under all circumstances?
And he sort of leaped and said, “Yes, that is exactly it!” And that’s how it works. The idea that “I have to be the best, I am the best,” saved his life. It drove him to incredible heights. Being in the FAS, it’s incredibly difficult. He was in Afghanistan and he was the point man. He was responsible for landing in Afghanistan, 2 in the morning, walking to a Taliban compound and killing somebody and then going home again. You know, he was a tough bastard and they’d be shooting with an AK-47. But he had absolute confidence in his ability. That absolute confidence, he said, saved his life. He sincerely believed that he was invincible. He could dodge bullets—that’s what he said, “I can dodge bullets so that I am the best.” But then once he’s out of the army, he becomes his own worst enemy because he’s not the best anymore. He’s just a guy. And he gets into an argument with a police officer who’s treats him with a certain amount of contempt and he picks him up and he throws him on the floor and he knocks him out and ends up in prison for 18 months.
So that’s how the sacred flaw works. It’s the character’s best friend—but then, usually at a break point, it suddenly it becomes an enemy. And that’s why it’s drama. It’s, “Oh my God, I can’t live this way anymore.”
This myth, as you put it, by which I’ve been living my life and has given me everything that I value, becomes untenable. That’s what happens in great storytelling
CE: Speaking of flaws … Is there a flaw that’s common for writers starting out?
WS: Two of them. The first one is defining your character without specificity, without the understanding that they’ve got to go on a journey of change and they’ve got to be flawed.
CE: The other writer’s flaw?
WS: The second one is related—that you don’t need to know about plot, about structure and process.
I was on a panel at a literary festival and people asked, “What’s your process?” And every single panelist, apart from me, said, ‘Oh, I just imagine a character and see where the character takes me,” and I just don’t believe it. I’m sure some people can write like that and end up with a publishable story. But there’s a lot of bullshit published. And there’s a lot of mythmaking. When [writers say] you’ve just got to close your eyes and let the magic emerge, I think it’s almost cruel, you know?
CE: In your work, you use a process that I call yo-yoing—moving back and forth from scene to summary, back and forth. In The Science of Storytelling, you’ll have several pages where you dig into the brain science and your thinking about technique, which is abstract and not so emotional, right? Then you break away and talk about Lawrence of Arabia or Remains of the Day or other works. You are an explainer on one side, but you are also a storyteller.
WS: The brain wants change. So if you’re going on for three paragraphs about one thing, you need to switch.
In The Science of Storytelling, I had to explain some abstract, complicated ideas. Having the novels and the films is such useful way of describing this complicated brain stuff. It was a real gift to be able to describe confabulation by using Citizen Kane. Storytellers are great because before the scientists got, they understood how this.
CE: Scientists—Darwin, Einstein, Stephen Hawking—have a knack for storytelling. To understand time, Einstein talked about standing on a platform and imagining when lightning struck the top of the train. He was seeing in pictures. He wasn’t seeing equations. Only later did he translate the pictures into equations. So there was a dialogue between the abstract and the concrete.
WS: Jonathan Haight’s a great communicator as well because he really understands the power of simplicity. The way he communicates complex ideas is just absolutely fantastic. So does Richard Dawkins.
CE: Let’s talk about detail and precision. I’m not sure how well people understand the need to amass enormous volumes of information.
When the average person walks into a room, what they see is not enough to describe anything interesting. They just see what they expect to see. As a writer, you have to stay there and just keep observing. You have to collect the most specific details about the character, about the background, about the room, about the conflict, about the other characters, about the situation, about the fears—the more details you get, you get all the building materials you need to build your house.
A lot of writers have an idea of what they want to say. But if they don’t have enough details, it’s like not having enough bricks to build the house and doesn’t stand up. It seems to me that a lot of what you’re talking about in your book is the power of precision—and that requires a lot of work.
WS: There’s precision on two levels. First, the more specific you are about a character at the beginning of a book, the more that character is going to explode out of that story.
In Lawrence of Arabia, he’s a very specific character. He’s an arrogant guy who thinks he’s extraordinary and that’s it. That’s Lawrence of Arabia. But when you put him through all that drama of the war, in all of these different scenarios, he becomes an incredibly complex, realistic character.
So there’s a paradox. I get pushback when I’m trying to define the character in a line or two. People say it’s simplistic. But it really isn’t—there’s something magical about it. You need to be precise about who the character is because you haven’t got the space to write someone’s whole life. You have to write about a precise character.
Also, when you are writing about a precise character, your book becomes about a precise idea. It becomes a deep investigation about how life should be lived. Ira Glass of This American Life once had a mentor who said that all story is an answer to the question: How should I live my life?
I think that’s really true. That’s what that precision in a character gives you. Your character represents a way of living life. And the story is a test of that idea of that—how should I live my life? How is this person living their life? And how is it working out for them? What does it mean? What are the ramifications?
Take Remains of the Day. In a really specific way, it’s about the whole English, stiff-upper-lip, cold, emotionless life. Stevens is very precise. He believes in emotional restraint—those two words, that’s him. That whole book brings out those two words, but it’s incredibly complex and nuanced—and believable. So that’s the first thing about precision.
CE: And the other way to think about precision?
WS: We read books and watch movies and the information comes into our brains in the form of words. The brain reconstructs the world that you’re describing. It’s much more automatic if you give specific details. If you say a monster, your brain doesn’t know what model to use. That’s why we “show, don’t tell.” If you’re just using abstract words, the brain can’t model it accurately.
CE: Then your brain compares the details to its vast database of other monsters. Then the story becomes a process of co-creation. You the author give that detailed portrait of the monster—it could be a dragon or it could be a sadist in a cabin in the woods. But you need to reader to relate it to something that they know. Even if they’ve never had to deal with a dragon or deal with a creep guy in a cabin in the woods, it becomes real to them because they connect something they know with something they don’t notice.
WS: Absolutely. That’s that beautiful thing. As you say, great art is an act of co-creation.
CE: Now let’s talk about the Two Plus Two Rule. If I say two plus two and immediately tell you it equals four, that’s an insult to you. But if I say two plus two and let you conclude, oh yes, that’s four, then the story is a lot more powerful. If I give you three details about that monster in the in the cabin in the woods, you can conclude yourself something about that character. But if I tell you what it means, it takes away the joy.
WS: You can’t spell everything out because then the reader has got nothing to do. The brain is a prediction engine. If the prediction’s unsure, that’s really fun. If there’s nothing to predict, there’s no participation from the reading brain. The more literary you get, the more writing is about hints and clues—the more gaps there are to fill. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, has very little actual story in it: A couple has bad sex and then breaks up. All the rest of it is like a smorgasbord of clues about what is it that triggered this terrible eventuality and why it’s there.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
The first time I met Bob Moses, I was sitting in a lecture hall with a group of more than 100 puzzled students at Holy Cross College.
The college invited Moses to speak to the First-Year Program. In that program, students in a wide range of classes–philosophy, history, theater, math, physics, the languages–grappled with a common question. The question that year was: “In a world bound by convention, how then shall we live?”
Robert Parris Moses, who died on July 25 at the age of 86, grappled with both sides of that question his whole life.
The convention ruling black lives then was not just oppressive and violent, but intellectually and emotionally crippling as well: Either accept the idea of white superiority, living submissively with your own kind in a segregated and unequal world, or face vicious retribution.
Moses was awakened in 1960. Teaching at a prep school in the Bronx, the 25-year-old Moses followed the exploits of the student sit-in movement with awe.
“Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing,” he later said. “This time they were taking the initiative. They were kids my age, and I knew this had something to do with my own life.”
Bob Moses went to Mississippi, the most violent of all the old Confederate states, and took up the challenge. Joining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he worked to register voters in the isolated towns where blacks had never been encouraged to speak or act for themselves. White mobs attacked him and cops arrested him. In Greenwood, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, bullets missed him but hit the driver and he had to steer the car to safety. In Liberty, someone attacked him with a knife as he was leading a small group to register at a courthouse. Bloodied, he was arrested; when he pressed charges, his assailant was acquitted by an all-white jury on the grounds that he had provoked the attack by assuming a threatening stance.
In 1964 Moses was the leader of Mississippi Freedom Summer, perhaps the most audacious moment of the civil rights movement. Hundreds of white students came into the state to register voters and lead freedom schools. The campaign led to countless attacks, including the murders of James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, which put a glaring spotlight on violence in the system of segregation. Later, Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Moses also helped to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a democratically elected slate of delegates that demanded to be seated at the party’s 1964 national convention in Atlantic City. They lost that battle–the convention seated the traditional slate of segregationists–but that challenge transformed the Democratic Party. Before, it accepted segregation; after, it rejected segregation.
Back to that moment at Holy Cross.
Moses stood in front of the lecture hall and described a lynching in which (not uncommonly) crowds gathered to watch and celebrate, even photographing themselves near the hanged, charred corpse. He read a letter by a witness, who described the moment in detail, without a trace of understanding or care.
Moses asked students for a response and then fell silent.
Confused, students shifted in their seats. Their eyes darted to each other and to their professors. They expected (as did we all) an inspiring account of heroic exploits. Moses was defying this convention. Finally, the long, awkward silence broke and students began to talk. Moses stood and watched and listened. Some students later felt disappointed that they did not get their expected burst of inspiration; others walked out transformed. Moses had given them the ultimate lesson: You are responsible. You can’t wait on others. You need to find your own voice. In your own way, you need to face the brutality of this world.
That’s how he operated in the movement. He was the quietest of all movement leaders. Taylor Branch, Martin Luther King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said: “Moses pioneered an alternative style of leadership from the princely church leader that King epitomized. … He is really the father of grass-roots organizing — not the Moses summoning his people on the mountaintop as King did but, ironically, the anti-Moses, going door to door, listening to people, letting them lead.”
Moses understood, as activists often forget, that the greatest resource in any struggle is the people themselves. They have the intelligence and strength to resist; the organizer’s job is to help them understand, develop, and exercise their own power. The greatest leaders are themselves servants who help others to become leaders.
In Mississippi, Moses found activists in isolated hamlets by bouncing a ball. He knew that blacks had been terrorized for generations and faced abuse if they stood up for their rights. If he approached them cold—knocking on doors, talking with them in stores or fields or churches—they might be too scared to talk. So he stood on street corners and bounced a ball. That attracted a crowd of kids. Then, inevitably, the ball got away. “Before long,” Moses explained, “it runs under someone’s porch and then you meet the adults.’’
If King was the Moses of the movement, as Taylor Branch said, Moses was the King of the movement in Mississippi. He was revered because he knew how to listen and guide people to become their best selves. In fact, hearing him often took great effort. He spoke so softly that you had to lean in and really focus on what he was saying. Since he was not nearly as voluble as others, what he said really mattered.
I met Moses again as I was researching my book Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington. We met in Cambridge, where he was leading the Algebra Project, an effort to bring math literacy to blacks and poor people everywhere. He talked so softly that when I got home, I had to play the tape on a speaker, crank up the volume, and listen intently.
That conversation covered all the familiar topics. But to me, the most telling moment came when I minimized the importance of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The law established the civil rights division in the Justice Department and empowered federal officials to prosecute people who conspired to deny others’ right to vote. But the law did nothing to open schools or public accommodations or voting booths to black Americans.
Moses corrected me. That law made a bolder civil rights movement possible, he said, by giving activists a “crawl space” in the government. If a later president was sympathetic to civil rights, the activists could develop relations with the civil rights people in the DOJ. And so when John Kennedy became president, he sent John Doar and John Siegenthaler to DOJ. They offered critical help to the movement. They coordinated activities, shared intelligence, and developed a trust that made better things possible.
The civil rights movement required a wide range of heroes. The movement needed the audacity and grit of A. Philip Randolph, the nonviolent cunning of Bayard Rustin, the soul of Martin King, the egalitarian ways of Ella Baker, the intellectual rigor of James Lawson, the impatience of Stokely Carmichael, the love of Daisy Bates, the stubbornness of Fannie Lou Hamer, and the quiet servant leadership of Bob Moses–and so much more. In the story of civil rights, the idea of “a hero” is nonsensical. Countless heroes, most of them quietly working in the “crawl spaces” of the society that oppressed them, were necessary for success.
They were then, they are now.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
On June 2, 1925, a 21-year-old rookie named Lou Gehrig played first base for the New York Yankees against the Washington Senators. He replaced Wally Pipp, a star player who was struggling with a .244 batting average. Gehrig was hitting only .167 in limited duty, but the Yankees were just a game out of last place and something had to change. That day, in an 8-5 Yankees victory, Gehrig got three hits in five at-bats.
You know the rest of the story. Poor Wally Pipp never returned to his position and ended up getting traded to the Cincinnati Reds. Gehrig, the “Iron Horse,” played in 2,130 consecutive games until he took himself out of the lineup on May 2, 1939. His consecutive-games record stood for 56 years. Cal Ripken broke the record on September 2, 1995 and then extended it to 2,632 games.
Why Gehrig benched himself is the stuff of tragedy. After just eight games in 1939, he realized he had no energy or power. He could not control his athlete’s body any more. His teammates had noticed his physical decline for a year but he tried to ignore the signs. On June 19, his 36th birthday, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, later known as Lou Gehrig Disease. He never played again. He died on June 2, 1941, the 16th anniversary of the streak’s first full game (he pinch-hit the day before), at the age of 37.
What most people remember about Gehrig, thanks to Gary Cooper’s portrayal in “The Pride of the Yankees,” is his simple, decent, sweet, uncomplaining, stoic response to this awful disease, which ravaged a once virile man until he could not walk or speak or swallow. In possibly the most iconic moment in baseball history, Gehrig summoned his strength to thank 61,808 fans who gathered at Yankee Stadium for Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day on the Fourth of July in 1939.
“For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break,” he told the crowd. “Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” He thanked the team’s owner, general manager, recent managers, teammates, parents, wife, in-laws, groundskeepers, and fans. Then he concluded: “So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.”
If that scene doesn’t move you, you can’t be moved.
But as baseball honors this man on June 2, a greater tragedy has never been appreciated. By not exploring this greater tragedy, baseball misses the opportunity to honor Lou Gehrig in the most meaningful way.
The Cost of Trauma
The following question cannot be answered with certainty: Did the traumas throughout Lou Gehrig’s life — and his heroic stoic response to those traumas — kill him?
Dr. Gabor Maté, a leading authority on trauma and addiction, argues that 90 percent of all disease originates in trauma. Emotional stress, Maté says, causes terrible strains on the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the nervous system, and the immune system.
Trauma, Maté says, is a “disconnection from ourselves.” Trauma often begins with outside events, like a car crash, the death of a loved one, a debilitating accident, physical or emotional abuse, or a sense of abandonment. When a person experiences an awful event but does not get enough care or love, she represses her feelings. She does so to survive, to get through another day. It’s an emergency response.
Emotional stress overwhelms the physical system. Maté, the author of When the Body Says No, often quotes a 2012 article in the journal Pediatrics. Jack P. Shonkoff of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University and his colleagues argue that the repression of trauma creates a series of compensations, making the body susceptible to longterm damage.
Under conditions of extreme disadvantage, short term physiologic and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival may come at significant cost to lifelong health and development. Indeed, there is extensive evidence that the longterm consequences of deprivation, neglect, or social disruption can create shocks and ripples that affect generations, not only individuals, and have significant impacts that extend beyond national boundaries.
Emotionally, repression can lead people to avoid acknowledging pain, to pretend it’s not there or doesn’t matter. It can cause them to be stoic and uncomplaining — turning the early trauma into ongoing trauma.
Although manageable levels of stress or normative and growth promoting toxic stress in the early years (i.e., the physiologic disruptions precipitated by significant adversity in the absence of adult protection) can damage the developing brain and other organ systems and lead to lifelong problems in learning and social relationships as well as increased susceptibility to illness.
Since Decartes, scientists and medical experts have separated mind and body. The isolation of distinct systems can lead to greater understanding of those parts, as well as treatments for maladies. But the brain is actually inseparable from the body; the brain is as much a part of the body as the digestive tract or the pulmonary system. Damaged brains lead to damaged whole body systems.
A variety of stressors in early life … can cause enduring abnormalities in brain organization and structure as well as endocrine regulatory processes that lead to reduce immune competence and higher or less regulated cortisol levels, among other consequences.
The evidence is jarring. Consider a few examples. A Canadian study found a 50 percent higher cancer rate for people experiencing childhood trauma. An Australian study found a ninefold increase in the risk of developing breast carcinoma among those who suffer trauma. A West Point study found increased likelihood of Epstein-Barr virus for cadets struggling to meet a father’s high expectations. In another study, women struggling with marital problems were found to have diminished immune functioning.
Does this argument put blame on caregivers who might not be able to give adequate care? Gabor Maté says no. He recounts his own experience to make the point. Maté was born in Budapest in 1944 as the Nazis were taking over Hungary. His mother, frightened that they might be killed, gave baby Gabor to a stranger on the street. She hoped to reunite but was determined to save him no matter what happened. Mother and child did reunite but her anxiety, before and after, was intense. As the family learned the full extent of their tragedy — two were killed in camps, others were missing — young Gabor’s whole world was full of anxiety and fear. That created anxiety for the baby. Was it the mother’s “fault” if she could not provide a warm, healing, safe environment under such extreme stress? The very idea is obscene. The point is that we need to make sure everyone, parents and children and their extended circles, gets the support and help they need to deal with this toxic and debilitating stress.
Failing to do this, Maté and other researchers say, has dire consequences. Diseases resulting from trauma include atheroschlerosis, diabetes, Cushing’s disease, Parkinson’s, muscular dystrophy, coronary artery disease, hypertension, stroke, and major depression. Also: ALS.
The Lou Gehrig Story, Take 2
Lou Gehrig suffered trauma from a young age and spent a lifetime quietly compensating for that trauma.
Gehrig was legendary not just for his excellence on the field, but also his willingness to sacrifice for others. He was, by all accounts, a selfless teammate who led by example rather than claiming credit. He played injured for the sake of the team. He guided younger players, protecting them from playing hurt. He gave other stars the spotlight.
Gehrig was the son of German immigrants, an alcoholic father and an overburdened mother. His father Heinrich came to America in 1888 from Adelheim, Germany. He found work sporadically as an ornamental ironworker and sheet metal worker. But he was unreliable, owing to his alcoholism. He spent countless hours at a local tavern. After suffering a debilitating illness, during the time of Lou’s adolescence, Heinrich spent the rest of his life as an invalid. His mother Christina, came to the U.S. in 1899 from Wiltser, Germany. She worked as a maid and a cook to earn most of the family’s annual income of $300 to $400. She was tough but also brittle, unable to address the trauma in her own life.
The Gehrig family lost Lou’s two sisters and brother in childhood. His older sister Anna died at the age of three months. His younger sister Sophie died from a combination of measles, diphtheria, and bronchopneumonia before her second birthday. Lou’s brother died soon after birth and was never named. Lou never spoke about the deaths.
Growing up in poverty, Lou managed as well as he could. Chunky and uncoordinated, he was picked last in pickup games. As he grew into a muscular teen, he was hobbled by a painful shyness, made worse by wearing old clothes and shoes. When he went to school without a coat in winter, he was embarrassed. Like lots of immigrant kids who shared the same fate, he did not complain. He played soccer for three years before he started playing baseball at age 14. He could hit the ball far, which compensated for his shortcomings on the diamond. Eventually, he was good enough to play baseball and football at Columbia University.
Gehrig took a $1,500 bonus to leave Columbia to play for the Yankees to tide the family over until his mother could recover from illness and get back to work. “There’s no getting away from it, a fellow has to eat,” he later told The New York Times. “At the end of my sophomore year my father was taken ill and we had to have money. … There was nothing for me to do but sign up.”
After playing 13 games in 1923 and 10 in 1924, Gehrig got his break with Pipp’s slump in 1925.
He became the steady force on the greatest dynasty in baseball history. Over 14 full seasons, Gehrig batted .340 with 493 home runs. For 13 straight seasons, he scored and batted in at least 100 runs. He led the league in runs four times, home runs three times, RBIs five times, on-base percentage five times, and batting average once. And, of course, he played in 2,130 consecutive games.
The Ongoing Tragedy
Baseball’s greatest tandem was Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The Dionysian Ruth was as different as could be from the Apollonian Gehrig. But the two happily supported each other in their roles and even socialized together. Ruth was a favorite of Lou’s mother Christina, who fed him her German food and idolized him. But the two stars grew to resent each other. Their fallout began when Christina made a clumsy criticism of Ruth’s wife. Ruth cut off Gehrig. Then in 1937, two years after his retirement, Ruth questioned Gehrig’s commitment to the streak:
I think Lou’s making one of the worst mistakes a ballplayer can make by trying to keep up that “iron man” stuff… He’s already cut three years off his baseball life with it… He oughta learn to sit on the bench and rest… They’re not going to pay off on how many games he’s played in a row… The next two years will tell Gehrig’s fate. When his legs go, they’ll go in a hurry. The average ball fan doesn’t realize the effect a single charley horse can have on your legs. If Lou stays out here every day and never rests his legs, one bad charley horse may start him downhill.
Ruth was right. But for Gehrig to stop, he would have had to abandon a moral code forged in trauma.
Gehrig’s streak subjected his body to constant punishment. While he protected young teammates from playing with injuries, Gehrig insisted on playing with dozens of injuries (including traumatic injuries) his whole career.
As researchers have struggled to understand the specific causes of ALS, they have focused in recent years on traumatic head injuries. God knows how many blows to the head Gehrig suffered playing college football and batting in the era before helmets. Consider this moment: On June 29, 1934, in an exhibition game in Norfolk, Va., he was beaned on his right temple and lay unconscious for five minutes before the team trainer revived him and sent him to a hospital. Gehrig was quoted in the next day’s New York Times: “I have a slight headache and there is a slight swelling on my head where the ball hit but I feel all right otherwise and will be in there tomorrow.” Sure enough, he hit three triples the next day against the Senators before the game was called for rain.
Other injuries were debilitating too: broken bones and backaches and pulled hamstrings, headaches and colds and viruses and the flu. Later X-Rays showed at least eight broken bones on his hands.
Around the time when Cal Ripken broke his record, Gehrig’s former teammate Bill Werber remembered a few of those incidents. After breaking the middle finger of his glove hand, he barely waved his bat. “He’d hit with part of his hand literally off the bat,” Werber said. “Don’t ask me how.” When Gehrig’s foot was spiked in a play at first base, Werber said, “he hurt terribly.” But he kept playing. By playing, he probably contributed to his untimely demise.
Baseball fans celebrate the Iron Horse for his selfless sacrifice. The Los Angeles Times rhapsodized that “there was an essence of nobility, courage and resolve to it. For a country that was enduring a crushing Depression, Gehrig’s record seemed a uniquely American achievement.”
But what if the streak sends exactly the wrong message? What if this individualist model of suffering in silence not only claimed Gehrig’s life but has also harmed generations of American children and families?
Gehrig’s stoic bearing is celebrated, in large part, because it exemplifies the ethos of American individualism. According to this ethos, we should all work hard, take our hits, stifle our hurts, not complain, and tough it out. Americans celebrate toughness and dismiss or even demean those who suffer. In dismissing victims, this ethos has contributed to countless cases (many millions, for sure) of people denying their own pain and not getting the help they needed.
This is, of course, not Gehrig’s fault. He was a victim of this stoicism too. But as we commemorate this man’s life, feats, and spirit, let’s think hard about creating a greater legacy for him and others who have struggled with trauma.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Long ago, when I was starting out in the world of journalism, I discovered the anonymous but irreplaceable character of the “slot man.”
On the various section desks of the daily newspaper, editors were seated in a horseshoe arrangement of desks. When reporters weren’t out on a story, they worked there too. The slot man, or “slot” for short, put the section together: gathering stories, deciding on placement, laying out the pages. The best slot was also an editorial maestro. Moving paragraphs around, demanding a quote or a fact to strengthen a point, adding a nut graf, sharpening definitions, and shifting emphasis, he could make a good story great.
Legendary slots went even further. They took locally reported material and blended it with information from wire services like AP, UPI, Reuters, The New York Times, and more. With a broad and deep knowledge of the news — and history and human nature and storytelling — they could fashion a compelling, fair-minded, and sprightly summary of the latest news developments. If the byline didn’t carry the local scribe’s name, it would simply read: “From Wire Services.”
A friend once told me about the slot man on The Tennessean, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who reworked the stories of a young reporter named David Halberstam. Starting out, Halberstam’s stories needed help: better reporting, better leads and transitions, better quotes, better background information. Later, Halberstam became a superstar reporter in Vietnam for The New York Times. He wrote a series of bestsellers, like The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, and (my favorite) The Breaks of the Game. But Halberstam needed that boost from the slot man in Nashville.
That gets us to the matter of Seth Abramson, the professor/author/podcaster/columnist/tweeter/lawyer/poet/gadfly who has attempted, in his own way, to provide a comprehensive overview of the many sprawling and tangled scandals of Donald Trump. This story, of course, reaches back to Russian beauty pageants, Saudi development deals, sketchy bank loans, crashed gambling dens, lawsuits, bag men, and enforcers.
To describe his work, Abramson uses the term “curatorial journalism.” With some exceptions, Abramson doesn’t pound the pavement and work sources for his information. He gathers news and legal documents from all over the world and tries to fit them into a larger whole.
Abramson’s great insight is that, too often, journalists forget about their stories almost as soon as they get posted. Reporters constantly chase the next new story and don’t have the time or inclination to weave old revelations into new stories. Abramson decided he would do just that, gather all of the great scoops and revelations from all the amazing reporters and bring them together into a single compelling narrative.
He is, in other words, a modern freelance slot man.
Abramson’s output has been overwhelming. He has written three dense books — Proof of Collusion, Proof of Conspiracy, and Proof of Corruption— that detail the crimes, high and low, of Trump businesses and political operations. He has a hit podcast and a feed on Substack. And he has almost a million followers on Twitter, where he spins out lengthy “threads” of tweets to make exhaustive arguments. He even did a Playboy interview.
Some people don’t understand what he does, but it’s really quite simple: He compiles info, wherever he can get it, and works it into stories. He checks his sources, as much as anyone can check sources about shady meetings in the Middle East to fix presidential elections for Russian assets. He’s serious about getting his facts right.
Abramson rankles some. The term “curatorial journalist” has a rarefied feel to it; curators, after all, acquire and arrange art in fancy, hushed museums. He also talks a lot about poetics and meta-journalism and metamodernism. If you care about literary and cultural theory, these ideas all offer some good chin-scratching opportunities. But for ordinary people, trying to make sense of this dangerous autocratic moment, such language can feel abstract and egotistical.
The old-time slot would not have talked like that. He would have said: “Look, I’m just tryna make sense of this mess. Who did what, when, and why? You know, follow the money. Connect the dots. That’s all.”
Hit Job?
Enter Lyz Lenz, an Iowa-based writer whose work has appeared in the Pacific Standard, Marie Claire, Jezebel, and The Washington Post. She is also the author of a new book on pregnancy called Belabored. Her writing has a certain snarky pizzazz.
Lenz wrote a long takedown of Abramson, titled “Thread Man,” in the Columbia Journalism Review. Her main contention is that Abramson splices together unverified rumors and hearsay, as well as real facts, in his work on Trump.
She claims, for example, that he embraced the Steele Dossier as if it were proven fact. “The reliability of the Steele dossier is, to put it mildly, in question; a report by Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, found that the dossier was dubious, unvetted, and shady as hell.” Actually, Abramson has carefully tracked what parts of the dossier have been verified independently and which parts have not. He says about 70 percent of the dossier has been confirmed. I’ve heard other experts say the same.
In the guise of demanding better accountability from Abramson, she absolves Trump: Oh, just forget about the Steele Dossier. That’s just gossip.
Abramson says he has spent about $75,000 to hire his own fact checkers. He did not want to get caught making an avoidable error in his books. Without doubt, his book will have some errors. Journalism is still just the first draft of history. As Abramson says, we now understand only the surface of the recent period in our history. It will take years of work, by legions of historians and journalists, to get to the bottom of it all.
Lenz has a hard time understanding Abramson’s logic. She complains that he uses others’ work. Well, that’s his point: to gather and synthesize an otherwise sea of confusion, like the slot man of yore. That’s his project. If she wants a different kind of book on Trump’s business and political activities, maybe she should write it. To undermine his deep dive, she says his extensive sourcing is actually, deep down, a trick.
Abramson is meticulous about sourcing, yet it feels a little disingenuous: he can say that his assertions have been verified by “major media reporting” and if he’s wrong, it’s not his fault; if he’s right, the facts were always there in front of us, and only he was smart enough to see the big picture. (How can he be a conspiracy theorist, he asked me, if “it’s all reporting from major media outlets”?) Slap a label of “proof” on the cover and call it meta-journalism—when really what you’ve done is news aggregation, selling three books based on other people’s work and claiming to offer proof of things that these very same journalists have said they cannot, did not, find.
Read that passage carefully. Abramson’s citations don’t count because “it feels a little disingenuous.” When he offers credit to the countless reporters who have reported on this topic, she holds that against him too. She says Abramson takes credit when the facts prove true and avoids responsibility if they fall short. That’s Lyn Lenz reading Seth Abramson, not reporting or even analysis.
Is Lenz doing performance art here? Take a look at how she impugns his character without evidence: “He denies doing it for the money, insisting that he is a public servant and educator. He just wants the truth to get out there, he told me. But his virality speaks to a different kind of validation, one that is less about monetary reward than cultural capital.” Work backwards to see her logic: His work is viral, therefore he must be in it for fame, if not money.
By the way, did Lenz actually meet Abramson? Yes, I realize we’re all locked down in the pandemic. But from her story and Abramson’s accounts, it doesn’t seem like there was a real effort to meet him on his own turf. Zoom’s fine, so’s the phone, even email. But if you’re doing to do a long-distance profile, make sure to connect in a meaningful way with the subject. Especially (LOL) if one of your complaints is that he doesn’t get out of the house for research.
Deep down, Lyz Lenz seems to resent Abramson for his Twitter fame. He has 928,000 followers but she has only 63,000. Reason for jealousy, right? You can practically feel her snarky anger bubbling up …
Ha! Gotcha! Actually, I have no idea about her motive. But Lyz Lenz makes these kinds of rhetorical moves often in her CJR takedown.
Abramson is hopping mad. He is threatening to take her to court. He is sending a detailed recitation of Lenz’s alleged errors and misstatements to the general counsel at Columbia University. He points out numerous instances where he tried to explain himself, both to Lenz and a fact-checker for CJR, to no effect. He lists a number of cases where she flat-out misstates the record. And, he says, he has the receipts. Working on his books about Trumpism, he had no choice but to carefully track every source, every fact. So he’s armed for bear.
Back to Basics
Seth Abramson, a man of unusual energy and stamina, took a risk and tried to do something no one else wanted to do — that is, to lay out a complete record of the Russiagate, using every scrap of information he could find. Most journalists don’t do that. Too often, journalists slight the scoop they did not get. Abramson did not have the opportunity or the inclination to get out and act like Bob Woodward, so he decided to do something different. He decided to be the slot man for the Trump era.
But something about Abramson rankles people. He sometimes acts like a know-it-all on Twitter. He waves his credentials around. He uses abstruse academic jargon (surprise, surprise). Lenz joins the Daily Beast in accusing him of exaggerating his place in various artistic events, like he’s Zelig. That bothers me, but others do it too (hello, Papa Hemingway; step right up, Truman Capote) — not an excuse, but also not the main point when assessing his actual work.
In a brief email exchange last summer, I told Abramson that I wish he had given his story a leaner arc, alternating tight narratives with essential definitions and background information. That’s the ultimate formula for complicated stories: Trees, forest, trees, forest, trees …
To his credit, Abramson wanted to avoid contriving scenes: “When Bob Woodward wrote Fear, he was stuck taking Steve Bannon’s word for how Bannon’s conversations with federal agents unfolded, with the predictable result that in those conversations Bannon sounds like Aristotle and Mueller and his assistants—some of the best legal minds in America—uniformly sound like Deputy Dog.” I mostly disagree but I get his point. So ixnay on the Woodward-style scenes. As Lyz Lenz notes and he acknowledges, that can make his writing dense and hard to read.
But you know what? Seth Abramson did a good job putting pieces together, as a first draft of history. Now it’s time for a break. Let’s get everyone to go to their corners. Let the pieces hang for a while. Then, as Trump and his gang get hauled into court and investigators, reporters, and historians do their thing, let’s see how the pieces come together. My bet is that Abramson’s work will offer a worthwhile roadmap.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
If you want a fun ride through the bizarro world of Florida, the modern spirit of destruction, and how ordinary people get pulled into wild tales of adventure, you can’t do better than Carl Hiaasen.
Hiaasen is a columnist for the Miami Herald and a bestselling author. Everything he writes offers a clinic on how to draw the reader into a story. Take a look at the opening paragraphs of Skinny Dip:
At the stroke of eleven on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perrone went overboard from a luxury deck of the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess. Plunging toward the dark Atlantic, Joey was too dumbfounded to panic.
I married an asshole, she thought, knife headfirst into the waves.
The impact tore off her silk skirt, blouse, panties, wristwatch, and sandals. But Joey remained conscious and alert. Of course she did. She had been co-captain of her college swim team, a biographical nugget that her husband obviously had forgotten.
Bobbing in its fizzy wake, Joey watched the gaily lit Sun Duchess continue steaming away at twenty nautical miles per hour. Evidently only one of the other 2,049 passengers was aware of what had happened, and he wasn’t telling anybody.
Bastard, Joey thought.
She noticed that her bra was down around her waist, and she wiggled free of it. To the west, under a canopy of soft amber light, the coast of Florida was visible. Joey began to swim.
What does Hiaasen do in this 169-word passage? Hiaasen follows eight simple rules of attraction, providing:
An immediate glimpse into the story: In the first sentence, we see Joey plunge off the side of a luxury liner. It’s almost as if we’re on the deck, watching as she f a l l s.
A low-cost threshold: Joey’s plunge is easy to see. We have questions, but the immediate moment is not at all complicated. She falls. We have good reason to suspect she was pushed. Now what?
A view of the goal: We immediately see that survival and revenge are Joey’s twin goals. “Bastard!” says the former collegiate swimmer as she begins to dig her arms into rough sea, hoping to survive and swim to safety.
A hint at the paths needed to get there: The path is simple: Bobbing in the choppy waters of the hostile sea, she needs to find her way to land. She’s got the athletic ability. But how far is land? Is there some island nearby? Or maybe someone sailing nearby? Or is there any way for someone to see her or notice her missing?
Sensory involvement: We see a sexy, fit, feisty woman plunging into the dark waters below: the ripped clothes and undergarments, the fizzy water, the light. It’s just enough sensory stuff–sights, sounds, and feeling–to get a sense of the moment. Not to mention the sex appeal of this feisty heroine.
A sense of what it means: We have good reason to know that the Joey’s husband, who forgot that his wife was a swimmer in college, tossed her overboard. That makes him the villain. More to come …
The right balance of adventure and safety: No reader wants to fly overboard into ice-cold choppy waters. But as Hitchcock noted, we’re delighted to watch from the comfort of our armchair. So settle in for a rollicking tale of survival and revenge. Don’t worry. You’re safe.
An early win: Joey’s surviving and keeping her wits is a major victory. She’s supposed to be dead, after all. That early win whets our appetite for the drama ahead.
We could do worse than to follow these eight basic rules for drawing the reader into the story.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Thanksgiving remains the essential American holiday. It brings together kith and kin. Food and drink are plentiful. Don’t forget the Macy’s parade and the annual Detroit Lions game. And it’s (mostly) free of commercial exploitation.
After hearing an interview with Canadian author Margaret Visser, I offer one other reason to appreciate this moment of pause before the Christmas rush. To wit: It’s the only holiday dedicated to the power of language.
The purpose of the holiday is to give thanks. You say what you’re grateful for—your health, job, family, friends, church, neighbors, customers. You pause a moment, collect your thoughts, and then speak.
Other holidays mark religious moments, birth dates of leaders, and anniversaries of historic moments. But Thanksgiving, alone, encourages us to speak, to put our fullest feelings into words. Thanksgiving asks us to acknowledge how lucky we are to be alive, in a great country, among family and friends, with all kinds of possibilities for making more of ourselves and giving back to our community.
Linguists refer to this kind of statement as a “speech act.” We normally distinguish the concepts of speaking and acting. But philosophers like John Searle say that to speak is, in fact, to act. To act is to change the world. When you speak—whether you’re yelling at someone in traffic, cooing to an amour, delivering a speech, or arguing in court—you act. Giving thanks, as we do today, is a special kind of speech act. It’s both voluntary and expected, generous and reciprocal, moral and emotional.
Visser, the author of The Gift of Thanks (excerpt), yesterday took the listeners of NPR’s “On Point” on an etymological romp about the idea of thanks. Consider these roots and variations of our modern vocabulary of gratitude:
The Greek word for gratitude, translated into Latin, is gratia—not just praise but also delight and joy.
The Germans added the word to think, denken. To say thank you is to pause and reflect for a moment, rather than taking something and leaving right away.
The French use the term reconaissance (with the root word cognition), which recognizes the other.
The Japanese say “I’m sorry” as a way of expressing gratitude, acknowledging the sacrifice involved in any gift or good gesture: “I’m sorry to have intruded on your life.”
As Visser explains, gratitude and thanks provide essential glue to a society depleted of traditions and dedicated to individual pursuits. In an age when anything goes, saying thank you (and other social etiquette) provides the mortar for the big gaps between the bricks.
Giving thanks is, in some respects, a duty. As children we are taught to say please and thank you and we get chided when we forget. For a while, these manners are perfunctory. But then they become genuine. Saying thanks takes on an emotional meaning. After saying thanks enough times, we really mean it.
That is the essence of democratic practice. Democracy does not demand that we all like each other, think each other smart, or compromise our own interests. As opponents to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s noted, no law can make us love each other. But we need to respect each other even when we don’t want to, in order to get along. So we say please and thank you, even to people we can’t stand. We accept calls, answer requests, acknowledge others’ ideas, work together on committees, even exchange favors – even when, given a choice, we might not prefer to do so.
In the process of doing the right thing, we start to feel something. We take to heart the meaning of those practices. Partly that’s because of reciprocity. But also it’s because we internalize the meanings of our actions.
As a speech act, giving thanks affects not only how other people think and feel, but how we see ourselves. Thanksgiving shows, as much as anything, the power of words to enlarge us.
Lots of reasons, then, to like Thanksgiving, the holiday dedicated to speech acts.
Growing up in Detroit and northern California, Jennifer Mercieca used to watch the TV news with her father. Her dad, an autoworker, was an immigrant from Malta, about 60 miles from Sicily, which, she notes, is “the birthplace of rhetoric.” Over time, as she explored journalism and public affairs, she developed an interest in rhetoric. But it wasn’t until college that she started to explore the topic in depth.
“I liked Reagan as a kid and thought of myself as a Republican, but I didn’t memorize his speeches or anything like that,” she said.
In her first rhetorical analysis as a student at the University of the Pacific, she dissected the eulogies for Richard Nixon in 1994. Robert Dole pronounced the post-World War II era “the Age of Nixon.” Bill Clinton asked that “may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.” But Mercieca was not impressed. “I didn’t find those speeches inspiring,” she said.
Since earning a Ph.D. in speech communication at the University of Illinois in 2003, she has taught at Texas A&M University. Her new book, Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump (Texas A&M University Press), identifies six key rhetorical maneuvers of the president. Three of them draw him close to his audience; the other three create a division between him and his supporters and the rest of the world.
Her favorite rhetoricians? “I love to read Thomas Jefferson, I love Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, I’m amazed by how presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama took advantage of then-new media to connect with Americans—expanding the role of the presidency by expanding its reach.”
Mercieca has always been fascinated with the heroic figure in politics. Her first book, Founding Fictions, examines the way the nation’s revolutionary generation defined the new republic’s citizens as romantic heroes, tragic victims, or ironic partisans. Her second book, The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations (coauthored with Justin Vaughn), explains how Barack Obama rose to the White House with heroic rhetoric, only to struggle with the disappointment of followers who expected more from his presidency.
The surprising takeaway from Mercieca’s book on Trump: He is not the random and chaotic figure he appears to be. During the 2016 campaign he was calculated in his wild attacks and claims as he depicted himself as a historic, blunt-talking heroic businessman and denigrated his opponents as stupid, venal, and corrupt.
How do you define rhetoric? What makes it different from demagoguery?
I think of rhetoric as Aristotle did: as a method for decision making in a political community. Aristotle said that “rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic”—both were methods, but dialectic would lead to sophia (philosophical truth) and rhetoric would leader to phronesis (practical truth). Both were necessary, in Aristotle’s view, because some decisions would need to be made under circumstances that required phronesis rather than sophia.
Aristotle explained how ethos, pathos, and logos work to help persuade, but the fundamental purpose of rhetoric for him was political decision-making. He didn’t explicitly write about ethics and rhetoric, but if you understand his Politics, Rhetoric, and Nicomachean Ethics as a system, then his criteria for justice—giving your neighbor what is good for them and what is owed to them—works for an ethics of rhetoric as well.
So rhetoric is an ethical exercise, a way of bringing people together to solve problems.
When I teach courses on rhetoric, argument, political communication, and propaganda I explain that rhetoric is addressed to people who know themselves to be addressed; it is a meeting of minds in which one person asks another person to think like they do, to value the same values, to remember or forget history in the same way. It doesn’t force. It affirms human dignity by inviting. A person who seeks to persuade gives good reasons and formulates arguments in the best way they know how, always affirming that the recipient of the persuasive message has a mind, values, and experiences of their own and that they may not change their mind. Rhetoric uses persuasion as a tool of cooperation.
And demagoguery?
Demagoguery uses rhetoric as a tool of control. It is not “persuasion,” but compliance-gaining. The opposite of rhetoric isn’t “truth,” it’s force and violence. Compliance-gaining is not a meeting of minds; it does not invite; it does not value the thoughts, feelings, or experiences of the other person. Compliance-gaining does not affirm human dignity and it doesn’t make good arguments.
A person may force a change in someone’s mind with compliance-gaining strategies. But because minds are changed without consent, compliance-gaining is a short-sighted strategy that will ultimately undermine the relationship between those people.
How did you get interested in rhetoric? Was it politics or literature or what? Can you note one or two early influences and what wisdom you still carry from those early lessons?
I always loved words. I was a really early reader and I would read anything I could: cereal boxes, dictionaries, kid’s books, grown up books, you name it. I also watched the news all the time with my Dad. I was in journalism in high school and on the speech team in college, where I majored in communication and worked in radio and TV. I thought that I would be a journalist, but I ended up studying rhetoric because I wanted to understand the ways that democracy and citizenship and rhetoric work together.
The first book that really mattered to me as an undergrad was Plato’s Republic. I loved that it was an entire book about how to form a just political community and I loved the dialectic game. But something seemed off about Plato’s version of things too and I think part of my interest in political theory and rhetoric has been in trying to sort that all out.
When you look at the “genius” of Donald Trump’s rhetoric, how much do you think is conscious and deliberate? How much comes naturally, from his own superficiality, prejudice, and sadism?
I know that “genius” is an awkward word to use with Trump. Rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke described Hitler’s “demagogic effectiveness” in his 1941 book review of Mein Kampf, and that’s essentially what I mean. I used “genius” because Trump likes to call himself a genius and I thought that would make more sense to a general audience than “demagogic effectiveness.”
That being said, Trump is very strategic and consistent in how he uses language to distract, attack, and ingratiate himself with his followers.
I don’t know where he learned it. He hasn’t released his school transcripts, so we don’t know if he took a class in rhetoric. One of his ex-wives said that he had a copy of Hitler’s speeches, but we don’t know if he ever read them. A dangerous demagogue is an unaccountable leader and Trump’s rhetorical strategies are designed to prevent us from holding him accountable. I think that he’s probably developed these language strategies over a lifetime of refusing to be held accountable.
Aristotle famously said that all virtues can be turned into vices when used to extremes. Can an honest and well-intentioned person do the opposite and turn Trump’s techniques—ad populum, ad baculum, paralypsis, ad hominum, reification, and tribalism (my catch-all term for nationalism, American exceptionalism, etc.)—into positive and constructive appeals? If so, how?
Accountability is the difference between a “heroic demagogue” who leads the people justly and a “dangerous demagogue” who leads unjustly. A dangerous demagogue uses language in ways that prevent us from holding him or her accountable.
I argue in my book that Trump repeatedly used six strategies—three to bring him closer to his followers and three to separate himself and his followers from everyone else. For some of Trump’s strategies, the answer is yes—they could maybe be used for good ends; for others, the answer is no.
A heroic demagogue could use American exceptionalism, or paralipsis, or ad populum (perhaps) in ways that were accountable.
The rest of these strategies are fallacies that are designed to distract our attention from the central issue of the debate, to dehumanize, and to deny standing. These last strategies are poisonous to public argument. Of course, there are so many other rhetorical figures that a heroic demagogue could use, there’s no need to limit a heroic demagogue to the six things that Trump did.
In interviews and debates, Trump talks in a rush, speaks over other people, and interrupts, making it hard for the other person to respond thoughtfully. Trump probably produces more “elevator moments” than anyone. Are there techniques to confront this bulldozer effect?
I think of this as part of his ad baculum (threats of force or intimidation) strategy. It’s a kind of force to overwhelm the opposition so that they can’t enter into debate or discussion. It’s certainly a way to prevent your interlocuter from holding you accountable for your words or actions.
The only way to confront it is to break the “naturalness” of the “image event,” which is really awkward. What I mean by that is that interviews operate by specific rules: reporters ask questions and politicians respond—it isn’t “scripted,” but there’s a script of sorts. Interviews operate as a certain kind of game. Trump violates the script of those events and the only way to stop him is to intervene and call out the violation. But doing that only highlights the unnaturalness of the image event itself. It acknowledges that the news is itself a spectacle and a fraud.
The only way to confront Trump’s violation of the rules of the game is to admit that it’s a game in the first place. Acknowledging that plays into Trump’s hands, unfortunately. It’s an asymmetric game in Trump’s favor now and that’s why he has been winning.
One of Trump’s most powerful techniques is to overwhelm people—journalists, fans, opponents, other public figures, etc.—so they can’t respond thoughtfully. It also undermines the power of facts, since facts get caught up in a constant churn with lies, insinuations, and uncertainty.
Trump’s whole rhetorical strategy is to use language as a kind of force (he claims to be a “counterpuncher,” but he uses force by default). He uses rhetoric for compliance-gaining, which is anti-democratic. He uses language to overwhelm his opposition. I sometimes call it “weaponized” rhetoric or communication—the widespread use of ad baculum. It’s exhausting to try to track all of Trump’s plots and sub-plots, to keep up with his lies and distortions, to refute all of his fallacies. It probably can’t be done. What’s worse, is that in the process he has made you look foolish and he’s already moved on to other lies, distortions, and fallacies. His is a very effective strategy that allows him to get away with whatever he likes.
Trump also trucks in false equivalence, which disables people’s power of discernment—treating minor non-issues (like Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account for some public business, which many of Trump’s aides have done as well) with major outrages (violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, undermining masking and testing, using pardons for coverups, and much more).
He repeatedly uses tu quoque (appeals to hypocrisy) to attack the ethos of his opposition. He may accuse them of doing the same things he does, or bring up arbitrary issues as equivalences, or say that they’re self-interested, or hypocrites in some other way. It is a pernicious strategy because it erodes public trust. It’s a strategy designed to deny standing to his opposition so that they can’t legitimately criticize him or hold him accountable. Anyone who opposes Trump loses credibility themselves, which makes him that much harder to oppose.
What about Trump’s demagoguery—and others’ response to it—gives you despair? What gives you hope?
The despair comes when I think about how effective these strategies have been for him; the hope comes when I see so many people resist him; then the despair comes back when I see that his base has held firm.
I despair because our public sphere is broken and we’re unable to use language to solve political problems—we’re unable to use rhetoric as a method to decide practical truth (phronesis). Trump didn’t break our public sphere himself, but he took advantage of crisis levels of pre-existing distrust, polarization, and frustration and used dangerous demagoguery to attack America.
I still have hope that we can rebuild trust and bridge polarization and end Americans’ frustration with each other and their government, but it’s much harder after what Trump has put us through over the past five years.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Living in the Age of the Coronavirus, we lose touch with reality. We live in the “eternal present.” Isolated from normal activities and places—and restricted in our actions—we lose our outside reference points. We rely, more than ever, on the information and opinions of mainstream media, government officials, and (God forbid) social media.
That makes us vulnerable to gaslighting.
That term, which comes from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton called Gas Light, refers to a deliberate process of making someone doubt their sense of reality. In the play, a husband drives his wife mad by manipulating minor elements of her environment—and then denies anything has changed. The man turns off the house’s gaslight at odd times and then, when his wife asks, denies there has been any change at all. When she asks about noises in the night—she heard him rummaging in the attic for the jewels of a woman he killed—he denies hearing any such sounds. Slowly, the wife goes mad. That was his goal since he seeks to have her institutionalized for insanity.
Gaslighting is abuse. It’s a sadistic form of mind control. It aims not just to shape the way people think. It also aims to undermine people’s ability to trust their own perceptions and thinking.
“Gaslighters use your own words against you, plot against you, lie to your face, deny your needs, show excessive displays of power, try to convince you of ‘alternative facts,’ turn family and friends against you,” says Stephanie Sarkis, a psychotherapist and author. They revel in “watching you suffer, consolidating their power, and increasing your dependence on them.”
In a time of crisis and confusion, gaslighters fill the air with denials of simple reality (that the coronavirus is “just like” seasonal flu), false charges (that Democrats stoke fear of the virus to undermine the president), fake theories (like the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab), offer false assurances (the virus will disappear “magically” and “it’s something we have tremendous control of”), sell sketchy remedies (like prescribing hydroxychloroquine, injections of disinfectants, or the use of ultraviolet light in the body), prevent people from getting the basic tools they need for gathering accurate data (like testing and tracing systems), and then deny basic facts including their own statements (“I felt this was a pandemic long before it was a pandemic”).
When gaslighters persuade even a small group of the population to believe propaganda, they undermine the very possibility of public debates with reliable information.When autocrats shout “Fake News!” at reporters and purvey thousands of lies on social media, their aim is not to win an argument. Their aim is to prevent a true argument even happening. Might makes right.
But listen up: You have the power to screen out the lies and deceptions. It takes hard work to find true experts, people with sterling reputations who display respect for facts. You need to give up your own desire for easy and quick answers. You need to accept the complexity of the situation and accept that even the smartest people cannot make reliable predictions in a volatile situation.
When you hear people making wild claims, which run counter to those of the experts, ask some simple questions:
• Does this person have training and expertise in the field? Does he have experience with the scientific issues at issue? Has he done research or worked on the front lines?
• Does he consider and acknowledge all of the facts, even the inconvenient ones? Does he avoid cherry-picking facts and claims to bolster his claims? Does he welcome new troves of data and information, even when they contradict his working theory of the issue?
• Does he avoid generalizations on topics that remain matters of serious debate? Does he avoid taking slivers of possible truths and pretending they are final and authoritative?
• Does he adopt a scientist’s mindset? Does he look for evidence against his hypothesis? Does he look for weak links in his own argument?
• Does he acknowledge mistakes when they occur? Does he adjust his thinking and actions when new information comes to light?
• Does he treat people with respect when they question his and others’ statements and records? Is he hungry for different perspectives on issues?
When you can answer “yes” to these questions, you can trust the source. Otherwise, remain wary and vigilant. Don’t get sucked into debates that do not respect facts or values.
It’s understandable why so many people fall for propaganda and false narratives. Most people want to believe the authority figures that they like and trust. We all want to belong to a larger tribe. We are social creatures. We want to fit in.
We also crave answers to complex questions. Given our limited time and expertise, we want to find a shortcut to understanding. We want to know when the pandemic will end. We want to embrace a model for understanding this nightmare.
So it’s understandable why people submit to false prophets and easy answers.
But if you fall for the fakery of the gaslighters—whether it’s the president or a propagandist on cable TV or a snake-oil salesman on Facebook—you will lose your sense of reality. You will forfeit your greatest power, which is the ability to think for yourself.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
America is now in the midst of one of its periodic awakenings about race.
Every generation or so, something happens to force race into the consciousness of mainstream America. Sometimes these awakenings lead to reform; sometimes they don’t.
The current awakening arose from the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis and the growing realization (long understood by anyone paying attention) that police treat blacks differently than whites. Weeks of demonstrations have extended the race discussion beyond police brutality to a broader agenda. Inequality in education and jobs. Higher death rates during the COVID crisis. A culture that celebrates the treasonous legacy of the pro-slavery Confederacy.
But as Shelby Steele argued years ago, debates over race quickly degenerate into contests over innocence. In an essay entitled “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent?” Steele noted that
the human animal almost never pursues power without first convincing himself that he is entitled to it. And this feeling of entitlement has its own precondition: to be entitled one must first believe in one’s innocence, at least in the area where one wishes to be entitled. By innocence I mean a feeling of essential goodness in relation to others and, therefore, superiority to others. Our innocence always inflates us and deflates those we seek power over. Once inflated we are entitled; we are in fact licensed to go after the power our innocence tells us we deserve. In this sense, innocence is power.
The white claim to innocence arises any time blacks and their allies propose solutions to the enduring problem of race in America. In 2014, for example, the Roberts Court struck down provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required states with histories of racial exclusion to get approval from the Justice Department for changes in voting procedures. The appeal of Southern states went like this: How long do we need to get approval over our voting laws? We weren’t the ones who banned blacks from voting. We’re not the ones who are guilty. Give us control over our own elections. That was so long ago!
When the Roberts Court agreed, giving the old Confederacy power over its election rules, states across the South and beyond enacted rafts of new rules and procedures that made it harder for blacks to register and vote. Voter ID laws. Purges of voter rolls. Shorter voting hours. Not enough provisional ballots. Closing polling stations. Hacked voting machines.
The Roberts Court’s reasoning was the same reasoning of many whites who oppose addressing the issue of race: We’re not responsible. We didn’t create the problem. We didn’t own slaves. We didn’t benefit from Jim Crow. We didn’t redline black communities. We didn’t push blacks into toxic-waste zones. We don’t support the cops who abuse blacks. All of which is to say: We are innocent.
The concept of “white privilege” is intended to refute this claim of innocence. Even if they did not actively participate in racist policies and practices, whites still benefit from them. Generation after generation, whites get advantages in all areas because of this nation’s long history of direct and indirect racism. Inequality and unfairness and one moment begets inequality and racism at another moment … and another and another and another.
But that feels abstract, like a long game of telephone where everyone has forgotten the words spoken at the beginning of the line.
In her new book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson offers a much more useful metaphor for the enduring injuries of race in America: The broken-down house.
Wilkerson notes the discovery of a long-festering welt in a ceiling, which, unfixed, could undermine the integrity of the house’s structure. “Choose not to look … at your own peril,” she writes. “Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”America’s race problem, she says, is like an old house that has performed many basic roles well but has carried forth damaging imperfections. We have made some patches and additions to improve this structure. But many basic flaws have remained and festered.
We in this country are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even. Many people may rightly say: “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.
Unaddressed, the ruptures and diagonal cracks will not fix themselves. The toxins will not go away but rather will spread, leach and mutate, as they already have. When people live in an old house, they come to adjust to the idiosyncrasies and outright dangers skulking in an old structure. They put buckets under a wet ceiling, prop up groaning floors, learn to step over that rotting wood tread in the staircase. The awkward becomes acceptable, and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvenient. Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.
No, as a white, I was not present at the creation of racism in America. I didn’t own slaves. After the Civil War, I did not prosper from sharecropping or Jim Crow. I did not fight the right to vote or blacks’ access to education or housing or public accommodations. I have never used racist slurs. I embrace the equality of all. I support Black Lives Matter. I would like to sit at Martin Luther King’s table of brotherhood.
And yet …
Like all Americans, whatever their age, I have grown up in this house with enduring (sometimes growing) structural flaws. I didn’t build the house. I was not responsible for the flawed foundation or construction. But here I am, living in it.
I have, without doubt, benefited from the flawed house. Weeks after my birth in 1960, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I returned to the hospital with pneumonia. Looking through a family scrapbook years later, I discovered that I was treated in the “white baby’s ward.” I have often wondered whether I would have gotten the care I needed in the other ward. I doubt it.
Here’s another example: Years ago, eager to meet a friend, I sped down a highway in Georgia–passing a black driver and then seeing a cop pull over the black guy and not me. I was probably going 75 miles an hour; he was probably going 65. He was driving while black; I wasn’t.
Those are two of countless examples from my life of privilege.
I should also note the everyday, structural advantages I have gotten by living in our sturdy but flawed national house: great schools, great communities, a smile when I offer my resume, access to any place with nary a second look. No one has ever treated me badly because of my skin color, not that I can recall anyway.
I never asked for privilege. I did not create it. But I have gotten it.
Now, I might not be responsible for how the house was built or how it has evolved over the years–and who it houses well and who it houses badly. But it’s my job, as one of 330 million occupants of that house, to do something about it. Rather than just putting buckets under leaks and taping the rattling windows, it’s my job to help get down to the bones and fix the structural problems.
How we fix the house can be a matter of debate. Liberals have some good ideas, and so do conservatives. But we can’t avoid the matter forever. Using the latest tools–the equivalent of the housing inspector’s infrared lenses that spot flaws under the structure’s bones–we need to find the broken parts and repair or even replace them.
Isabel Wilkerson’s new book is priceless for many reasons. But its greatest value, for the debate over structural racism, might be this metaphor of the dilapidated house. It gives us a way to understand our common home–and its flaws and the job that needs to be done–without the self-serving and avoidant claims of innocence.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
To start, let me say how much I admire Seth Abramson and the work he has done in the last few years.
Fearlessly and diligently, he has documented the sprawling cases of collusion, coverup, and corruption in the Trump White House. A lawyer, a former criminal investigator, and professor of communication art and science at the University of New Hampshire, Abramson practices what he calls “curatorial journalism.” That is, he pulls together the complete public record–journalistic accounts, books, reports, interviews, and more–to create a unified account of what happened. He curates existing sources into one mega-narrative.
For this, Abramson deserves our eternal appreciation. His books will provide a great foundation for historians who seek to make sense of this mad age. He is also, by all accounts, a terrific person. I’m a fan.he
And so I hate to say the next word: But . . .
But along the way he makes a strange mistake. He tells his story in the present tense, presumably to create a you-are-there immediacy and urgency. With the right subject, this can be done effectively. Andre Agassi’s memoir Open, written by J.R. Moehringer, uses the present tense too. It works because Agassi’s story is relatively simple. It involves a limited number of characters and does not require reference to hundreds of articles, reports, and accounts.
Abramson’s story is much more complicated. In almost every paragraph, he needs to place even the simplest event into a broader context. He has to define terms and note sources. To tell a story, he often has to refer to previous and (sometimes) future events. Often, to make a simple observation he has to provide an extended description of whole sequences of other events, with all kinds of strange names (often, Russian and Saudi!) and arcane relationships.
Abramson’s reliance the present tense undermines his work for two reasons.
First, to maintain the present tense he often has to change the tense that others use. That means lots of brackets to change verb forms. So many brackets creates a distraction.
Second, to provide context, he constantly switches tenses. These switches create cognitive whiplash. We have to tell ourselves, through the story, that the present is really the past. So when he switches to the past tense, to say what happened before the scene in question, we have to go through a conscious process of asking: Wait? What? When? Especially with a complex subject matter, you should never require the reader to make an extra effort.
Consider the following passage from Abramson’s forthcoming book, Proof of Corruption:
According to the New York Times, the “sobering” Crimson Contagion data, which circulates within the Trump administration in October 2019, “[drives] home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.” Nevertheless, after the COVID-19 outbreak begins in the United States, President Trump will falsely declare that “nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion” and “nobody ever thought of numbers like this.” In fact, writes the New York Times in March 2020, “his own administration had already modeled a similar pandemic and understood its potential trajectory” and “accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.” In addition to ignoring the lessons of the Crimson Contagion report and the work product of economists contracted by the White House, Trump also, per Politico, “ignore[s]” a sixty-nine-page 2016 National Security Council document, “Playbook for High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents,” that “provide[s] a step by step list of priorities” in a pandemic.
(You can see a whole excerpt of his new work here.)
Abramson’s problem goes beyond the confusion with tenses. Too often, he gets in his own way. He uses long setups and attributions. Since he uses so many footnotes, these are often unnecessary.
So how do you fix this? It’s simple, really: When talking about the past, use the past tense. The drama of any story comes not from the tense but from the actions and issues being described. The less work you make the reader do, the more she can focus on what’s happening. And believe me, Abramson tells a harrowing tale.
Writers often try to be clever when simplicity works better. As I sometimes tell my students, always begin an account with this simple formula: First, this happened. Then that happened. Something else happened. Finally, the whole shebang concluded when another thing happened.
Usually, you can write using only the simple past tense. Sometimes it helps to use simple past perfect to provide a backdrop (“He had just graduated from college when he met her at a party”). And sometimes it helps to use the progressive past perfect to describe continuous events in the past (“She had been planning to move when he asked her to marry him”).
Of course, we don’t need to use the past tense all the time. In fact, this blog post uses the present tense because it describes issues that we all face right now. We also use the present tense to describe what happens in artistic works (e.g., “Hemingway sets For Whom the Bell Tolls during the Spanish Civil War” and “At the end of A Farewell to Arms, Catherine dies”).
But when describing past events, use the simple past tense as much as possible. Don’t distract the reader. Avoid being too clever. Let the subject of your work create the drama.
To write clearly, almost always use right-branching sentences. Use left-branching sentences only when you command total control of language.
To understand this concept, think of the image of a tree. The trunk represents the main aftion of the sentence. The branches represent descriptions needed to provide essential details for the reader to understand the point.
Here’s a classic right-branching sentence:
Willie Mays was the best player of his generation: a consistent hitter, a menacing power threat, and a daring baserunner, with a sure glove and a cannon for an arm.
In this passage, we know the subject and verb before we get the details. We could not get lost because the author states the point clearly in the first six words. What follows is an elaboration of those six words.
Let’s see how we might express the same idea as a left-branching sentence:
As a consistent hitter, a menacing power threat, and a daring baserunner, with a sure glove and a cannon for an arm, Willie Mays was the best player of his generation.
Here, we get the details before we discover the subject and verb. We have to wade through details before we get to the main point. In a short sentence like this, we can get away with an occasional left-branching sentence. But we risk losing the reader if we write a long sentence, with dozens and dozens of words, before we get to the subject and verb.
Still, done well, the left-branching sentence can be work of art. It creates drama and intrigue by listing all kinds of details before getting to the subject and verb. Done well, the left-branching creates suspense. The reader eager anticipates the point at the end.
The best example of a left-branching sentence comes from Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” King was in jail for his part in the Birmingham Campaign of 1963, one of the most consequential moments of the civil rights movement. He smuggled this classic essay out of jail on scraps of paper. His assistant Wyatt Tee Walker typed it up. In this passage, King answers the question of his liberal friends and conservative critics, who forever counseled patience in the battle for basic fairness and dignity:
But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
In this 316-word masterpiece, King opens with ten vivid images of the indignities of racism and segregation. Each one is like a scene in a movie. Each one invites empathy. each one leads, inexorably, to King’s explanation of “why we find it difficult to wait.”
In the May 24 New York Times, Maureen Dowd uses a left-branching sentence to gasp at Donald Trump’s endless capacity to distract the American public from crises spiraling out of control:
On Thursday, as China played King Kong with Hong Kong; as unemployment rose to 38.6 million; as broken dams unleashed a flood in Central Michigan; as the president continued to stubbornly and recklessly claim he was taking hydroxychloroquine, causing sales to soar; as the news sunk in that if the U.S. had acted even a week sooner on social distancing that 36,000 people might still be alive; as Senate Republicans finally cemented themselves to Trump and his crazy schemes; as Trump stuck to his threat of withholding federal funds to Michigan and Nevada if those states enabled voters to vote; as a partisan know-nothing was put in charge of all our intelligence; as Trump pulled out of another major arms control pact; as Mike Pompeo basked in getting Trump to fire another inspector general (this one looking into a backdoor deal to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and brazen grifting by the Pompeos), the cliffhanger president made sure the focus was on just one little thing: Would he or wouldn’t he wear a mask as he toured the Ford plant in Ypsilanti?
In this 182-word wonder, Maureen Dowd offers a series of vivid images of world crises as Donald Trump revels in his reality-show theatrics. The power of this sentence comes from the litany of horrors followed by an empty man’s obsession with attention.
To make these sentences work, King and Dowd use signaling devices. For King it’s the word “when”; for Dowd it’s the word “as.” The repetition of these words, at the beginning of each example, signals yet another horror. These words tell the reader: Hang in there, you need to hear what follows before we get to the ultimate point. With the end of this repetition, the reader will be ready for the kicker–the point of the whole sentence.
For inexpert writers, a long left-branching sentence is a danger zone. You should mark it off with yellow police tape and then break it down into manageable pieces. But in the hands of a master, an occasional left-branching sentence creates a series of vivid scenes, suspense, a swelling of emotions, and then–boom!–a powerful point.
But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim;
when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters;
when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;
when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people;
when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”;
when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you;
when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”;
when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”;
when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments;
when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–
Trunk on the Right
then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
On Thursday, as China played King Kong with Hong Kong;
as unemployment rose to 38.6 million;
as broken dams unleashed a flood in Central Michigan;
as the president continued to stubbornly and recklessly claim he was taking hydroxychloroquine, causing sales to soar;
as the news sunk in that if the U.S. had acted even a week sooner on social distancing that 36,000 people might still be alive;
as Senate Republicans finally cemented themselves to Trump and his crazy schemes;
as Trump stuck to his threat of withholding federal funds to Michigan and Nevada if those states enabled voters to vote;
as a partisan know-nothing was put in charge of all our intelligence;
as Trump pulled out of another major arms control pact;
as Mike Pompeo basked in getting Trump to fire another inspector general (this one looking into a backdoor deal to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and brazen grifting by the Pompeos),
Trunk on the Right
the cliffhanger president made sure the focus was on just one little thing: Would he or wouldn’t he wear a mask as he toured the Ford plant in Ypsilanti?
Never in our lifetimes have we faced a challenge like the coronavirus. Coming at a time of intense division and mistrust, we must volunteer to give up our way of life in order to save our way of life. We must sacrifice not just for the people we love but for the ones we don’t.
How will we do? No one knows. In America, we got off to a dreadful start. We delayed action, at all levels. Because of widespread skepticism of facts, we have ignored evidence and science-based strategies. Because we have become addicted to trivial things — we are “amusing ourselves to death,” in the words of the late Neil Postman — we have struggled to mobilize against our greatest threat.
How are we, as writers, to think about the coronavirus pandemic? What should we do?
Let’s start by noting that the current crisis is one hell of a story. It makes Jaws look like a game of Bingo at an old folks home.
As writers, it’s our duty to use our skills to understand the magnitude of the story. Events move so quickly — so far away and often so invisible — that we risk losing memory of this experience unless we make a point of writing it down. Right away.
Record your own changing moods. Note the changes in your neighborhood. Check in with family and friends — not just the current roster, but people you have lost track of. Make sure they are OK and share your experiences and hope and fears. Take some videos for you to consider later.
Avoid getting sucked into the cyber version of reality. Social media can offer great glimpses of everyday reality. But it can also pull us into spirals of anxiety. We need our sanity to survive. People make their biggest mistakes when stressed.
Think like a storyteller. Think about the passions and throughlines of the people you know and the people you read about. What secrets lurk beneath the surface? What heroic powers await a call to action? What barriers will get in the way?
I recently interviewed Will Storr, the author of a brilliant new book called The Science of Storytelling. Storr, a great teacher as well as nonfiction storyteller, explores narrative by way of the recent research on neuroscience. I will post the Q&A on the website soon.
Storr offers the simplest and best definition of plot I have ever read: “The job of the plot is to plot against the protagonist.” Plot is not just a series of events that force the hero to act and change; plot is a conspiracy against the hero. Brilliant.
So what are the elements of modern life plotting against us during this crazy, unnerving pandemic? If we understand that question, we will not only get a great story. We will also get powerful insights into our jobs as citizens of the world.
In dark times, I think of Viktor Frankl, the neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the sadism of the Holocaust.
To survive, Frankl taught, we need to find a way to pause and not just react. “Between stimulus and response there is a space,” he wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Meaning requires action–conscious action. But to act well, we need to think first. We need to avoid being reactive. That pause will enable us to assume full responsibility. Which brings us to another great insight from Frankl.
“Ultimately,” Frankl writes, “man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” To act, you must the willing to accept responsibility for your own life.
What if other people do not follow the same caring ethic? All the more reason to do the right thing. We have a better chance if we understand both.
There, dear reader, lies the essence of storytelling … and the challenges we face together, right now.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Communication is the lifeblood of professional life. Whatever their specialized knowledge, skills, or tasks, people need to communicate with colleagues and clients inside and outside the organization.
How can we understand the power of communication?
McKinsey consultants use the “T” model to describe their work. The vertical bars (|) represent the activities of distinct operations of the enterprise: R&D, production, marketing, sales, distribution, and more. The crossbar (—) represents the need to communicate and connect with people outside their primary operations
Workers—especially in technical, specialized fields or with large corporate structures—usually focus on the activities inside their specialized roles. That makes sense. In cutting-edge fields and legacy businesses alike, competitive value comes from specialists doing things that other people can’t do. Special knowledge and ability offer special value to the company.
No matter how good the work they do inside their “I” silos, the best organizations foster connections across the silos. They create crossbars that connect people across the organization, especially at the top and middle levels. Only by keeping each other posted on new issues and developments can the organization coordinate its activities.
The Six Essential Skills
So how does this horizontal communication occur? To work at optimal levels, professionals need to master six essential communications skills: Conversations, Interviews, Presentations, Emails, Memos and Reports, Public-facing communications.
The Elements of Writing provides a complete program for business professionals to master all six of the communications skills. The program includes not only seminars and workshops on these essential skills, but also followup guidance for managers to bring their teams into the fold.
Conversations—Connecting / Empathy
Conversation is the essential lubrication of business—whether you’re managing a department, selling products and services, or working on a project. A British survey found that people have 27 conversations a day, lasting an average of 10 minutes apiece. That’s 270 minutes—four and a half hours. Americans might be more taciturn (yeah, right), but talking will always be at the center of professional life.
Interviews—Digging / Curiosity
The more detail and insight you need, the more you need to dig. That’s where interviews come in. An interview is a structured, goal-oriented conversation. Unlike conversations, interviews tend to be one-sided. One side’s needs matter more than the other’s. A good interview is less a give-and-take and more a process of step-by-step discovery, which requires deliberate followup, strategic issue-hopping, clarifications, and connecting dots.
Presentations—Highlighting / 2+2 Rule
A presentation is a conversation of many, led by one or a few people. The trick is to present material that “lands and leads.” As filmmakers understand, an audience can absorb only so much information at a time. So the speaker must provide information in small doses; if the information “lands,” the audience can absorb that information and make sense of it in their own way, for their own purposes. And the presenter can lead the group in productive ways.
Emails: Acting / Conciseness
Emails are like nudges, with simple presentations of essential information for action. The key to writing good emails is clarity of purpose. Because business professionals take in hundreds of emails a day, they need to understand the purpose by reading the header—and then efficiently read only essential information about one idea in every email.
Memos and Reports—Signposting and Detailing / Organizing and Unfolding
Memos and reports are take-away pieces with one idea but multiple parts. They require thought and reflection, often among many people. A good memo states the One Idea clearly and then organizes the whole piece to state and detail all of the essential considerations for that One Idea. Good memos and reports organize information logically, with clear signposts for skimmers. (Note: All readers are skimmers)
Public Pieces—Reaching Out / Engagement
Communication with outsiders differs from communication with insiders. Public-facing pieces must be, at the same time, more intimate and more general than inside pieces. They must speak to the audience with personality—with concern, empathy, a desire to help, and (often) a dash of humor. So whether you’re writing a speech or a blog post, it helps to imagine one person in the audience. At the same time, the piece must appeal to a vast audience. This requires thinking of all the issues and concerns that your one imaginary person might need or want to know about. It also requires understanding their time frame. Web copy might require extreme conciseness, while a speech could engage the audience for 30 minutes or more.
What next? During the strange separations of the coronavirus pandemic, businesses offer their professionals online programs to improve their skills across the board. Writing and communication should be at the top of the agenda.
Wherever he went, Alfred Hitchcock carried a small book called PLOTTO. The book provided a mix-and-match formula for storytelling.
By taking an idea from three categories–A, B, and C–the “master of suspense” could fashion the plots that terrorized the world for decades. Now, you can get it all here…on a single page.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
The challenge of philosophy, the ancient thinkers said, is to “know thyself.” But as he turned 50 in 2015, Tommy Tomlinson struggled with a different, more difficult question: How did I get this way?
Happily married and surrounded by friends, he struggled silently with the problem now pandemic in America. He was obese—morbidly obese, in fact—and in danger of keeling over from a heart attack at any time.
On the day of setting resolutions, New Year’s Eve of 2014, Tomlinson weighed 460 pounds. People rarely talked about it, but his obesity spoiled every aspect of his life. He was a success as a journalist, a popular columnist for the Charlotte Observer who also wrote for national publications like ESPN the Magazine. Despite his success, he had to think about his weight wherever he went. Before meeting people for a meal, he had to scope out the restaurant ahead of time. He had to think about the ordeal of climbing stairs. He had to strategize every element of his otherwise satisfying life. Life was one compensation after another.
Like tens of millions of other Americans, Tomlinson had tried lots of diets and tried to burn calories on the street or in the gym. But if he dropped 10 pounds, he gained them all back—sometimes more.
When he told his literary agent about scoping out the restaurant where they met, the agent knew Tomlinson had to tell his story. The result is the tragicomedy of a memoir, The Elephant in the Room. That book is not just Tomlinson’s story. It’s his answer to the great question: How did I get this way?
It’s complicated. The child of working class Georgians, Tomlinson grew up in a culture defined by family reunions, snacking during commutes, college parties, and drive-thru windows—and by barbeque, fried chicken, burgers, cakes, chips, beers, and deep-fried everything. Food was everywhere, a constant delight but also numbing, a matter of compulsion as much as desire.
It’s a story of triumph but also, sometimes, failure. This battle is not won easily. So how’s Tommy Tomlinson doing now? Not bad, he says: “I’m doing fine on weight … lost about 100 pounds, hurt my back, gained a little back, but am headed back down the scale again.”
The Elephant in the Room, recently reissued in paperback, has earned raves. Curtis Sittenfeld says it’s “warm and funny and honest and painful and poignant.” The New York Times praised Tomlinson’s “clean and witty and punchy sentences, his smarts and his middle-class sensibility.” Kirkus Reviews says: “He doesn’t hold back in his comments about his needs and wants and interjects enough humor to offset the more serious parts of the narrative and keep the pages turning.”
I am as impressed by Tommy Tomlinson’s writing soigne as by his bravery in confronting such a hard question. So I decided to seek him out. An edited transcript of our conversation:
You’ve gotten an amazing response for this book. How does it feel? Emotionally, it’s a risky book. You’re jumping off a cliff.
I’ve been incredibly grateful for all the response from writers I admire and strangers as well. I’ve probably gotten a couple thousands emails and just recently I got a five-page handwritten letter from Austria. What was especially gratifying about that letter is that this guy was not dealing with weight issues. He had other issues like depression and he saw parallels. That’s exactly what I was hoping for, that people would see themselves in the story.
That’s the definition of good writing. The more specific you get, the more universal. Only when people see and feel something do they have empathy for that other person.
I heard a podcast interview with the songwriter Mary Gautier. She has done cowriting with veterans and spouses of veterans. How did she get them to tell their stories? She said there’s the generic story, there’s the personal story, and below that there’s the deeply personal story. The deeply personal story is universal.
The details of the story might not be universal, but the subtext can relate to anybody. And that’s what I was shooting for.
What gets at the deepest level? Is it just going into increasing discomfort? I like to think of writing as pointillism, so is it adding more dots? What is the difference between going deep and going really deep?
Sure, making yourself uncomfortable helps. But to me it’s the details that matter. I thought about which details would illustrate the points I want to make, which ones provide a subtext and a larger meaning. The right details make it powerful.
That’s the sorting that I did. I started with a lot of stories I could have told. Then I narrowed it to the ones that carried the most symbolic or metaphorical weight.
Why did you write this book? I’m sure it involved a lot of pros and cons. What if people read it the wrong way? Do you want to expose yourself? What it it lands like a thud? So what was your process for deciding to write this book?
You’re describing my thoughts pretty closely. The topic came to me in 2011. I met my agent in New York and he asked the usual question: “What are you thinking about lately?” I told him that I had Googled the interior of that restaurant the night before to make sure there was a comfortable place to sit. I made sure I got there early and scanned the place like a gangster and figured out what would be the safest place to sit. I lived my whole life that way, like an obstacle course.
I had a wife I loved and people who cared for me but I was miserable a lot of the time because I could not solve this one puzzle. He said: “Well, dude that’s the book.” I knew right away he was right but I was afraid of it, what I would have to reveal about myself and how it would affect the people I cared about.
Years later [in 2014] I was working for ESPN the Magazine and started working on a story about Jared Lorenzen, the biggest quarterback anyone had ever seen. He played in the NFL for a while, now he was playing minor league football in Lexington, Kentucky, and he was 400 pounds. I went to Kentucky and we talked about all the things that had been in my head and weighed on me all these years. It was really cathartic for me. As I finished that story, I realized I could see a way to doing mine.
When people do memoirs, the writing process is a process of discovery. Only when they put their fingers on the keyboard did they realize that they thought this or remembered that.
When I started, I didn’t have much of a clue about why I got so big in the first place. What about my early life contributed? As I worked on the book, I saw connections and started to have feelings and insights that I had not had before. It caused me to be self-reflective in a way that I hadn’t been before. I had been reflective about other people’s lives, but I failed to hold myself to the same standard.
We all have issues about weight or drinking or the way we were raised or relationships. We tend to deal with it in a fleeting way. But writing a book, you have to go deep.
After the book was done, someone asked about my writing routine. My wife said, “I could tell your writing routine: You would get up, have breakfast, write for three or four hours, come out of the office, and sleep for two hours. You were so emotionally drained.” It was true. It was exhausting to dig into that stuff in a deep way and confront things I had only done in a fleeting, shallow way before.
What people did you interview to fill in the blanks of the story?
I sent questionnaires to 30 people, saying, “When you think about me, what do you think about? Do you think about my weight? When I’m not around and my name comes up, what do people say?” I discovered that my friends were really worried about me. They asked, “Is there something we can do” and “What’s going to happen when he’s not around?”
I did deeper interviews with my wife and my mom—long sit-down interviews that we recorded. Those thoughts informed everything. We had never just sat down and talked about this stuff in that way. They were uncomfortable conversations. If I published nothing, they would still be useful to me. And I thought they would be useful for other people trying to understand their own issues.
It’s almost like arranging your own intervention. And it’s a way of coming together with friends and family in a new way.
I never thought about it being an intervention, but that’s actually pretty accurate. My friends said we want to get you help but didn’t know how to do it. It was a wakeup call for me and a new insight about how they saw me from the outside.
Was there anything that totally blew you away—something you never thought about before?
My mom told me she and my dad would lie in my bed and try to figure out how to deal with me and my weight. Should they yell? Take me to doctors? Get me out of the house more? Intellectually I knew they had to have had these conversations. Just the image of them lying there sleepless—that hit me really hard. Seeing that movie in my mind was devastating.
For the reader, that’s something that brings empathy because they can imagine—and they’ve been part of—conversations just like that.
You’ve devoted your whole life to being a writer. It shapes everything you do. How and why did you became a writer? Who your influences?
I come from a family of storytellers. At family reunions, as a little kid, I got to run around and listen to the conversations of adults. My parents grew up in that oral culture, where part of your value was, could you sit on the porch and tell a great story? I absorbed all that as a kid.
I was a devoted reader because my parents were devoted readers. They were not educated people but they were readers. My dad’s favorite two books were the Bible and the Bass Pro Shop Catalogue. My mom, to the day she died, was a devoted reader of romance novels. So there were always books. I went to a library where we read all the Hardy Boys books, the Nancy Drew books, and lots of stuff.
One of the sacred times in our household was when the afternoon paper came at around 3:30. My job was to go and divide the sections up between my mom, my dad, and myself. From the time I was little I had this notion that storytelling was important and the news mattered.
I always wrote poems and short stories and all kinds of terrible stuff during high school and college but I still didn’t know what I wanted to do until my junior year when I went to an open trial for my college newspaper, The Red & Black, at the University of Georgia. I did a couple stories and I immediately knew that’s what I wanted to do the rest of my life.
Where did that satisfaction come from? I’m guessing 90 percent from being able to express yourself and maybe 10 percent the thrill of recognition and the byline.
It might have been more than 10 percent. I remember my friends would clip out stories I wrote and put them on my door or someone in my class would say, “Is this you?” and it was a thrill. It’s still a thrill.
There’s stuff that reporters do because it’s their job, and there’s stuff that writers do because it matters to them. What was your experience?
The big transition for me was when I realized I cared nothing about institutions and I cared about people. I covered city hall and the state legislature and cops and courts. When I started writing about people and their stories, that’s when I got engaged.
Every person I write about, I learned about myself in the process. Every time I went deep with someone else, I hoped it would show a little piece of our commonality. That’s been the big theme of what I’ve tried to do over the last 20 years. At our core, we’re more alike that we are different.
Do you remember a moment when you were bound to be a people writer and not an issues writer?
I did a story for the Observer about a group of autistic kids going through music therapy. They respond to music in ways they can’t respond to spoken language. The loved the experience of reporting that story.
I was becoming invisible in ways that led to more meaningful stuff. The therapy class was at a local college—and the teachers were 19, 20, 21 years old, all young women. They would get together and discuss their students. I went to these meetings for months every day and one of those meetings one of the women asked another if their periods had changed. Yeah, they had. I’m sitting there realizing I’m just a fly on the wall.
Your writing reminds me of my favorite columnists, like Mike Royko. When I get to the end of a great column, l want to say, “Aren’t you going to keep going?” What I love about your book is that you do keep going.
A column needs to make an emotional point, in an engaging way that’s accessible to anybody. I wanted to do something different than everything else in the paper. Rather than presenting a dossier of information, I want it to feel like we’re sitting together on the front porch and I’m telling you what happened.
Bob Greene talks about hanging out with City Hall reporters in Chicago. They would have a drink and talk about what they had written for the next day. Then someone would say, “What really happened?” Bob Greene said he wanted to write about that stuff. That’s also what I wanted to write about. What’s the humanity behind the story? That requires building to an emotional point.
When you’re writing a book, some people say it’s just a bunch of little things that are stitched together. But actually, that’s not quite right. All of these pieces have to make a much larger whole thing.
When I was writing this memoir, I was always conscious of what it was building toward. Each scene stands for itself but it also has to carry some meaning that will pay off at the end. Does this scene matter for what I want the book to ultimately say? The whole scaffolding of a book is a lot bigger.
Did you have a sense of the whole thing at the beginning or did the arc of the story change?
When I started I didn’t know where I was going to end up. Part of the process was going through this deep thinking. I hadn’t done that before. I knew I was building a deeper understanding of myself. I knew I wanted to set up that idea but I didn’t know what it would be.
What authors influenced you when writing this book?
I loved to read Nora Ephron, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and more contemporary people like Tom Junot.
I really admired David Carr’s memoir and Mary Carr’s three books. There there were three memoirs that dealt directly with being overweight—Roxanne Gay’s Hunger, Libby West’s Shrill, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy.
Was there a book on another topic that you used as a model?
There’s a book by James McManus, Positive Fifth Street, about the World Series of Poker, and it’s also about murder in Las Vegas. The poker part took me into a world that I didn’t know about and he was my tour guide into that world. I wanted to be a tour guide into the world of being overweight. A lot of people literally cannot fathom how somebody can get so fat. I wanted to describe that as clearly as I could so people would get it. That’s what makes books great—they take you into a world you’ve never been and make it part of you…
Do you have tips for writers? What are some tricks you’ve learned along the way?
I came up with 15 tips for my class at Wake Forest. Be a human being. Don’t be a reaper of information. Don’t interrogate the people you’re talking to—have conversations. Tell the story you need to tell while being as gracious as possible. Tell the story as if you’re talking to someone across the table rather than just giving information.
Be as simple and clear as possible. Remember that every story has two tracks—the plot and the subtext, what it means. The subtext has to come together in a powerful, emotional way by the end.
Also: Endings are always more important than beginnings. If you just get started and come to a powerful ending, that’s better than having a great hook and then the story peters out. Sometimes I could write a great hook and move that to the end.
Everyone gives the advice to be as simple and clear as possible. But that’s a goal, not a technique.
Anything that feels like writing, cut it out. If you have a beautiful piece of writing but it’s not contributing to the story, take it out.
Also, if you’re stuck, just tell the story. Sit down and turn on the voice recorder and just tell the story. When you do that, all the writing BS gets that in the way, you will get rid of it. You might stumble and get stuff out of order, but that’s easy to fix.
When all else fails, fall back on the ultimately plotter—just give a straight chronology. I tell my students to structure their writing like this: First, … Then, … Then, … Then, … Finally, … That gets people out of being too self-conscious of being writers. Then you can adjust it to make it sparkle.
That’s really meaningful. The more you can write without feeling like a writer, the better you are. For tens of thousands of years, we didn’t write, we just told stories. That’s what’s in our DNA. It’s all based on that chronology and then putting pieces where they can be more powerful. So when in doubt, write it out; after you get it down, then you can play with it.
By the way, keep what you don’t use. You never know what you might use later. So don’t throw it away. And be proud of doing it. But always remember that your service to the reader is telling a story.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Maybe the greatest challenge of writing is what comes before writing: gathering materials.
Often, we are so eager to put words to paper that we start drafting before we have the necessary materials — stories, portraits, facts, definitions, background information, and so on.
We begin with a topic and then start to write what we know about that topic. Alas, what we know at the beginning of any project is a lot less than we need.
When you don’t have enough materials to build something–whether it’s a house or an essay–there’s a tendency to fake it. When you’re missing key information, you pretend you don’t need it. Or you use other information that doesn’t quite answer key questions. You generalize.
Suppose, for example, I wanted to tell the story of a bus that travels from San Francisco to the 1963 March on Washington. The bus is filled with civil rights activists of all types, young and old,. professional and working class, black and white and Asian, and so on. On this journey, the people on the bus talk, debate, sing, sleep, and eat. They get to know each other and deepen their commitment to the cause of civil rights.
So far, so good. But such a description doesn’t really tell us anything about the people or their journey. To really say something interesting, you need specific vignettes. You need to zoom in on the conversations. You need to capture the people, as they cluster together and interact.
That’s what Haskell Wexler does in his classic documentary The Bus. Wexler and his film crew were on the bus for the whole cross-country journey. They shot miles of film. They never outlined what the film would say until long after they gathered the materials for the film.
Haskell Wexler, if you don’t know, was a pioneering documentary filmmaker. Medium Cool, his documentary about the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, is considered one of the most radical experiments in film history. He did other documentaries on the Weathermen (Underground) and the Occupy movement (Four Days in Chicago). He was also cinematographer for Mike Nichols (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night), Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and Hal Ashby (Bound for Glory). He died in 2015 at the age of 93.
Here’s the thing: When Wexler and his crew were shooting The Bus, they had little idea what information they were capturing. They turned on the cameras, put microphones in front of people, and let the machines record the moments. When the march was over, they sent the tins of film to a lab for processing. Then they watched hundreds of hours of footage. That’s when they discovered what they had.
They did not try to assemble their story until they had all the raw materials they needed. Wexler didn’t write storyboards before the bus journey began. He also didn’t start to craft his sequences along the trip. He didn’t get together with his crew in Iowa and say, “OK, let’s start putting together our documentary. How shall we start? How shall we end?”
No, Wexler waited until he gathered all the material he could possibly gather. Then–and only then–he could start to put together his story.
I interviewed Wexler when I was working on Nobody Turn Me Around, my narrative account of the March on Washington. I was at first surprised when he told me he had no idea–no idea at all–what the documentary would be about until months after the march.
“The film is made in the editing room,” he told me. There is no way–no way at all–he could even begin to figure out his story until long after he had gathered his materials.
“A lot of times, the bus makes noise and I don’t know what’s being said, what’s going on. A lot of times I ’m not physically close to the person. A lot of times I don’t really hear. I don’t like to point the camera close to people’s faces, if I can get it otherwise. So the people talk to the sound person, not the camera. And I don’t hear what’s being said.”
Wexler knew some of the characters he was shooting. After all, he lived with them for days. Here’s an example. During the trip, one of the bus passengers urged him to interview an old man named Joseph Freeman. Back in 1919, Freeman was a laborer in Washington, D.C. When he left work one night, he had no idea a race riot was under way. A bunch of thugs surrounded him and tried to pull him into an alley. He escaped, jumped on a train and went all the way to San Francisco. Now he was coming back to Washington fir the first time. (See Freeman at 1:21 in the above video.)
Wexler had his crew shoot Freeman talking with a young marcher. But he didn’t know if the material was any good till he got back home.
We writers should be like Haskell Wexler. We should gather material–tons of material, for more than we could ever imagine using–without worrying how we might arrange it. We should read books and periodicals, dive into archives, read oral histories, conduct interviews, study videos and audios, and analyze data sets.
But we should never start writing until we have a lay of the land–until we have the materials we need.
Like Wexler, we should understand the basic subject we are exploring, as much as possible, at the beginning of the project. And we should consider different lines of inquiry.
But we should avoid all temptation to write until we have tons of material. When we get that material, we should read it all and tag the different ideas. When I tag ideas in my notes files, I highlight the ideas and put them in brackets <like this>. That way I can use the FIND function in my Word software to scan my files for key ideas.
At that point, I know what themes and ideas I need to organize in my final piece. Then I can start to come up with the right structure for my piece–and start writing.
Whatever you write, don’t even think about organizing your material until you have gathered a rich collection of materials. Let the research guide you. You’ll never get stuck again.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Edwin Wong might be the most unusual literary critic and theater mogul you ever know. And he might be one of the most creative, too.
His new book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy, offers an update on (arguably) the most important form of literature. According to Wong, tragedy poses the same kinds of high-stakes risks you might find on Wall Street, in SEALs teams, and in nuclear brinkmanship. The hero confronts a massive problem and has to make a calculated guess about what to do. Since the hero is larger than life, full of energy and ego, he often takes the biggest gamble of all.
Classic dramatic theory focuses on hamartia, the hero’s tragic error or flaw. But to Wong, the problem is not that he made a tragic mistake–although that could be the case too–but that he played the odds and lost.
Inspired by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, Wong is fascinated by the low-risk/high-consequence decisions that can throw the world off its axis. The hero makes perfectly reasonable decisions that backfire. To Wong, that’s the stuff of tragedy.
Consider Macbeth. Under classic theory, Macbeth’s tragic flaw is powerlust and ego, not to mention his inability to resist his wife’s dastardly scheme. But for Wong, risk provides the fulcrum for the tragedy. Macbeth could have pulled off his scheme, if only …
Risk creates the excitement, a glimpse into characters’ throbbing minds and souls, not to mention suspense about the outcome. Of course, tragedy is a different genre than thrillers. But the best literature turns on Wong’s notion of risk. Do you want to call Julius Caesar a history, A Confederacy of Dunces and Huckleberry Finn comedies, and The Power Broker a political biography? Fine, but they’re also tragedies. Wong’s risk theory has lots to offer all these genres. Tragedy simply ups the ante.
Wong’s approach offers insights for the long tradition of tragedy but is especially pertinent to the modern condition. For most of history, the consequences of decisions were for the most part local. Today, even minor decisions can have global repercussions. Also, we live in the age of science, where calculation of odds has become commonplace. many bemoan that this calculation takes the heart and soul out of life. The Age of the Algorithm can, in fact, suck the agency out of even the most strong-willed people. All the more reason for Wong’s brilliant thesis.
If you think Wong is steeped in the data-driven theories of econometric analysis, think again. He is steeped in the classics, for which he earned an M.A. at Brown. His touchstones are Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, along with contemporary writers like Arthur Miller and Richard Jessup.
Wong, 44, who lives in Victoria, B.C., is a plumber by trade. When he first wrote his masterwork, academic publishers told him to try theater presses; theater presses told him to try academic presses. After a year of to-and-fro, he self-published it. Concerned that the book would get no attention, he teamed with the Langham Court Theater in Victoria to start an international competition for writing a risk tragedy. In its first year, it has already become the world’s biggest theater competition. The first winner is the New York playwright Gabriel Jason Dean for In Bloom, the tale of a journalist who uncovers a sex ring but, by taking certain risks, upends countless lives.
I talked with Edwin by email and phone. He can be reached at melpomeneswork.com. You can get his book on Amazon.
Charlie Euchner: You begin with a bold claim–that tragedy has lost its place in modern literature and storytelling. It is, you say, a “tired art.”
Edwin Wong: While tragedies are still being written, writers don’t call them tragedies. They can be histories. They can be drama. They can be biography. But not tragedy. Tragedy seems to be a dirty word. Maybe it’s because it’s associated with kings, queens, and other one-percenters who have lost the crowd. Maybe it has a mystique with pity, fear, catharsis, harmatia, hubris, and other concepts that seem distant, out of touch with today’s audiences. I think, however, that people get the idea of risk. Rebranding tragedy as a theatre of risk, a place where risk goes awry might be able to bring the term tragedy back. Maybe it’s not the art of tragedy that’s tired, but the term tragedy.
CE: You argue that all great tragic acts are risks–gambles, willful acts to change circumstances, calculated to upset the order of things. Why is that? What makes a tragic character so prone to throwing the dice rather than working through problems? Is it a matter of character or circumstance?
EW: Both character and circumstance motivate characters to take on risk. Caesar in Shakespeare’s play takes on risk by going to the Forum despite all the ill omens, dreams, and warnings telling him to stay home. But because he is Caesar, he’s as constant as the North Star, so once he makes a choice, he has to stick to it. Brutus, however, takes on risk because of circumstance. He comes from a family of tyrant slayers and he’s afraid Caesar will declare himself a king. Time is running out, the clock is ticking, he must act quickly … [The leading characters] take great and decisive action rather than deal with things in a more tempered way: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune …”
CE: You note that “the thrill of gambling drives tragic heroes to hazard higher enterprise.” So is it all about playing with fire? Is a great gamble necessary to truly understand the stakes of a challenge? Is this existential moment the only thing that can awaken us—and reveal the deeply hidden dangers and horrors of life?
EW: Tragic heroes have an appetite for life, to want it all and to want it now. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine has to conquer the world, one kingdom is not enough. His Faust is similar. It’s not enough to digest all of theology, law, medicine, and science. He has to have the entire cosmos. If you could ask Oedipus or Tamburlaine or Faust, they would say they take high-risk gambles to experience all that life offers. They think they can overcome any hidden dangers and horrors. They believe in their supreme capacities. They have the “best-laid plans of mice and men.”
By going all-in, they expose themselves to too much risk. And the unexpected catches them off guard. Then they lose all. But they’re not thinking they will lose all. It’s like that poker game between the Cincinnati Kid and Lancey “The Man” Howard in Jessup’s novel. The Kid goes all-in on the last hand. He should win. But the unexpected happens. Lancey beats him. When The Kid asks Lancey how he did it, all Lancey says is: “I made the wrong move at the right time.” Appetite is the word I associate with tragic heroes. It’s the desire to experience all of life to the fullest for the thrill of it all.
CE: Could you have made this thesis before the rise of rational choice and game theory? How much do these insights lend to your thinking about tragedy? Or is it deeper than that–that in a nuclear and global age, countless acts can result in catastrophe? Is risk theory an apocalyptic theory?
EW: Countless acts can result in catastrophe. I like to say that yesterday’s local risks are today’s global risks. One example would be the Irish Potato Famine in the 1800s. To increase yields, farmers went to a monoculture and planted one variety of potato. Unfortunately, that breed was susceptible to a certain fungus, which devastated yields for almost a decade. It was catastrophic, but local. Today, with GMOs, there is a tendency to plant superior yielding monocultures globally. What if these modified crops have a secret, hidden Achilles’ heel that we don’t know about? Now the ramifications will be global. It’s the same with war. With the threat of a nuclear conflict, war has global consequences. This isn’t like Athens and Sparta duking it out on the Peloponnese two-thousand years ago.
I’m fascinated by gambling and, in particular, stock market bubbles: Dutch tulip mania in Newton’s time, the South Sea Bubble, the Great Depression. In all these cases, a real opportunity arose. For example, the New World was opening up to trade when the South Sea Bubble started inflating. Then people start piling in. Next, people start going all-in. And that’s when the trouble starts. When you go all-in, you expose yourself to all sorts of unpredictable risks. That’s what I see tragic protagonists doing: Going all-in. That’s when the trouble starts.
It’s fascinating to look at the protagonist’s actions through rational choice and game theory. For too long people have been looking at the protagonist’s actions as an error for which they pay a comeuppance. What if the protagonist has made a good, solid bet that another rational agent, should they have been in the protagonist’s position, would have also made? It’s only the unexpected low-probability, high-consequence event that throw things awry. This way, tragedy is more a lesson in risk management than a lesson in ethics. More things can happen than what we think will happen!
CE: The risk theater follows Aristotle’s narrative arc, but with different emphasis — from temptation (Act I) to wager (Act II) to casting the die (Act III). In this sense, the “resolution” seems to have more to do with upsetting the universe than setting it right. Is that a fair statement?
EW: Absolutely, heroes upset and test the limits of what’s possible. In Aristotle, drama’s end goal is to elicit pity and fear. We identify with the hero. The hero could be us. So we feel pity and fear (since the hero could be us). When the hero falls, we’re purged or cleansed of these emotions.
In risk theatre, the telos is to elicit anticipation and apprehension. We experience anticipation because we are expecting some kind of gambling act. We say to ourselves, What human value will the protagonist wager? And then, when the gambling act is revealed, we feel apprehension because we know that the unexpected event is coming. What will happen?
CE: Might we restate the risk theory like this: We live in an age in which we cannot solve problems, only push them along and reveal new aspects of the problem; therefore, characters (and their storytellers) desperately reach for the “Hail Mary” of risky moves? In other words, risk theater shows the essential unsolvability of problems.
The characters, I think, do believe they can solve problems. They don’t foresee, of course, the unexpected low-probability, high-consequence event coming out of left field though. But yes, since the characters often lose all, I could see how the audience could walk away from risk theatre pondering the unsolvability of problems. How can the problem be solvable when you can’t see the unintended consequences? I hadn’t thought of this but, yes, I see how people could see it this way.
CE: What is for you, the most telling moment of tragedy? Is it that moment of calculation, resolve, vacillation, when the hero either hedges his bets or throws caution to the winds?
The moment of tragedy that gives me the shivers is when a character “gets it,” understands that their best-laid plans have [produced terrible consequences] because of an exceedingly low-probability, but high-consequence event. In Macbeth, it’s when Macduff tells Macbeth that he was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.” In Death of a Salesman, it’s when it suddenly dawns on Loman that his insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive. In Mourning Becomes Electra, it’s when Lavinia realizes (to her horror) she’s become her mother and Orin realizes he’s become his father. In this moment, each character realizes the power of chance and blind luck over their intentions, motives, and strategies. The smallness of human intention in the face of the vastness of the random element…
CE: As Aristotle noted, resolutions of great dramas have two qualities: they are surpising but at the same time feel inevitable. Is this a reflection of Littlewood’s Law, namely, that we can expect to see one-in-a-million occurrences about once a month? That our life is filled with “storms of the century,” and it’s the dramatists’s job to point them out and make (some) sense of them?
EW: Exactly! To me, tragedy dramatizes not the event that happens 99 times out of 100, but the event the happens 1 out of 100 times. I think the tragic playwright’s job is to dramatize risk to get people to think about risk. Then it’s the audience’s job to think about risk, to ponder and wonder: “What happens when more things that I thought could happen happen?” By showing the triumph of the one-in-a-million events, tragedy offers a lesson in risk management. It may only happen one time out of a million, but man, when it happens that one time, it sure has far-reaching consequences! And yes, absolutely, I think we should be thinking about risk and “storms of the century” because, like you say, Littlewood’s Law says, they actually happen once a month.
One of my favorite plays is Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. It’s the only play in the canon where you can statistically prove the odds of what happened and what did not happen. Civil war. Seven attacking captains (one of whom is Eteocles). Seven defending captains (one of whom is his brother Polyneices). The city has seven gates. What are the odds that the brothers will be assigned to the seventh gate? The odds are unlikely, about 2 percent or one out of 49. What are the odds that the brothers are assigned to the other gates? In 48 out of 49 times, the brothers don’t go to the final gate and kill themselves and spread pollution. But that’s not what Aeschylus dramatizes. He dramatizes the one-out-of-49 outcome, the least likely outcome. Of course, the audience knows what’s going to happen at the beginning of the play. But Aeschylus suppresses this outcome with all his tools as a dramatist. When it does happen, the audience is “surprised.”
CE: What would you nominate as two or three great tragedies of our time? Would you include Philip Roth’s American Pastoral or films like Chinatown and The Godfather? Would you consider a great biography like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker?
EW: Absolutely, films and biographies can definitely be tragic. The Godfather is a great example. Do you sacrifice the family, and keep the business strong, or do you sacrifice the business, and watch the family fall apart? In the world of The Godfather, you can’t have both. The opportunity cost of losing the next best thing makes it tragic.
CE: You make a distinction between open and closed systems and forward- and backward-looking stories. Do you know Jim Carse’s work Finite and Infinite Games? Might the problem be encapsulated like this: Tragedies involve characters who don’t understand or appreciate the importance of “keeping the game going”?
EW: Wow, I will have to read this book. What a powerful premise.
Some first thoughts: Yes, most characters are going for something temporal, or finite: wealth, status, power, glory, the opportunity for revenge. Some characters, are part of something bigger. Take Orestes in Aeschylus’s The Oresteia. He seems to be part of an infinite game. His actions transform the crude “eye for an eye” retributive justice of the heroic age into the enlightened “trial by jury” system of the archaic and classical ages. But of course, Orestes isn’t aware of this. He just wants to save his own skin and for the Furies to stop chasing him!
You could write a tragedy where the hero thinks that he is in a finite game, but loses all because he is actually in an infinite game. Or vice-verse. This would be very interesting to see.
CE: Isn’t risk theater, ultimately, about characters with different ideas about what is the “price to be paid” for their actions—and different concerns about who pays those process?
EW: Yes, absolutely! Because characters have different ideas about what they are willing to ante up to achieve their desires, tragedy is a valuing mechanism for human values. How much is the soul worth? To Faust, it’s worth 24 years of world domination. How much is compassion or “the milk of human kindness” worth? To Macbeth, one Scotch crown. And yes, different people can pay the price as well. So in Ibsen’s Master Builder, Solness pays the price by giving up happiness, but also all those around him must give up their happiness as well. I think one of the fascinating things about risk theatre for audiences is to see what characters are willing to pay, and for what end.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
You are in grad school, working for your M.A. or a Ph.D.
To succeed, you need to write a dissertation or thesis. This is a major project–50 pages or so of dense writing in the hard sciences, hundreds of pages in the humanities and social sciences. Chances are, you’ve never written anything that long. What do you do? How do you start? How do you pick a topic? How do you set goals and organize ideas? How do you write? How do you edit your drafts?
Most programs don’t offer much good advice. Where I went, I heard “Don’t get it don’t right–get it done” and “Say what you’re going to say, say it, and say you said it.” Not terribly helpful.
In this post, I show you ten simple strategies that you can use–starting right now–to get the project done faster than all your peers. The trick is to break the project into manageable pieces, follow the right sequence, and do at least something every day.
(The post is most relevant for work in the humanities and social sciences. But many of these tricks will be helpful for work in the hard sciences as well.)
Start by treating the project as a management challenge. Good managers set a clear goal goal (the whole) and keep track of all the pieces (the parts). In some ways, writing a thesis is no different than running a grocery store or coordinating a lab experiment. To succeed, you need to break projects down, work in a smart sequence, get clear and useful feedback, keep track of all raw materials, and make good final decisions.
And so, without further ado, ten simple tricks for managing your dissertation process.
1. Find a topic that intrigues you–then constantly narrow and expand that topic.
You will live with your topic, 24/7. You better love spending time exploring it.
Yes, love.
Some graduate students select a “practical” topic–one that’s limited, with lots of data, with a clear research question that (might) yield a clear answer. Their “practical” thinking might include the prospect of getting a publication. If you do all that and still find a “practical” topic rich enough to intrigue every single day, that’s great. Practical + Intriguing = Winner.
But do not talk yourself into a topic because your advisor or someone else thinks it makes sense. Sure, explore all reasonable possibilities. But if you feel dread in the pit of your stomach, be careful.
For sure, you need to be able to do the research. You can only write about a topic if you can get access to the data, lab experiments, archives, interview subjects, and so on, depending on your field. If you can’t get the raw materials, you can produce the final product. depending on your discipline, you’d also benefit from colleagues with whom you can share ideas and critiques.
But if you don’t love your topic, you won’t have the zest to do the research and struggle to make sense of it.
So here’s what you do: Make a list of a bunch of different topics, then check them out for their passion and practicality. Look for the sweet spot — the topics that both fascinate you and promise lots of access to information. If you get lots of data, you’ll love the project more than if you can’t find any data. And if you love a topic, you’ll be better at digging for data.
2. Focus, maniacally, on finding The One Idea.
Most dissertations start out as a “topic.” But they need to finish as an “idea.” That idea has to serve as the North Star for everything you discuss. (For a detailed blog post on this challenge, go here.)
Let me explain the distinction. When I began my research, my topic could be stated like this:
Almost every major league city in the U.S. is now facing pressure to build new stadiums and arenas for its teams. When teams threaten to leave unless they get their new palace, mayors and civic leaders cave in to their pressure. And so cities (with state and regional governments and authorities) are spending hundreds of millions to benefit private franchise owners.
That was fine–to start. But eventually, I had to find my ONE Idea. Here’s how I concluded:
In the battle over team location, leagues and their teams hold two advantages: (1) They are part of a monopoly and (2) They can move. They use these advantages to “steer” public dialogue. If everyone in the community got together to decide stadium proposals, they would usually lose. Why? Because they do not improve local economic development. But the sports industry’s unique traits allow them to steer and control the dialogue and bargaining. So they usually win.
The “topic” said: Something happening. The “idea” said: Here’s the one factor that determines the result.
3. Carry (and use) a cheap notebook wherever you go.
Every day, you have 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts. Most of those thoughts are trivial and fleeting. You are happy to brush them aside as soon as they arrive. But you might have (I’m guessing) 100 thought that are worth keeping and developing. Those ideas arrive, unbidden, as we sleep and shower, walk and drive, doodle in a meeting and sit in a lecture.
Unless you capture your ideas when the arrive, you almost always lose them. Some variant of the diea might pop back later, but you can’t count on it.
Notebooking ideas also helps you process them. By transferring an ideas from a shower “aha” moment to ink on paper, you begin to transform those ideas. One idea leads to another. One concept reminds you of another concept.
I suggest getting a cheap and flexible notebook. Too many people spend $20 on a
4. Outlines for dissertations: Yay or nay?
Usually, the first thing your advisor asks you to do is write an outline. Don’t! Outlines can be awful straitjackets that limit your research and creativity and keep you from breakthrough ideas.
Instead of an outline, keep a running list of problems and ideas you want to explore. You might want to keep that running tab on Evernote, some other notes app on your phone, or your cheap notebook from Staples. Whatever works.
At first, don’t try too hard to organize the ideas. Once you have 20 or so topics, you’ll want to cluster them into different categories. Fine. But don’t think of it as an outline or blueprint. It’s really just an extended log of ideas.
Don’t worry too much about separating Big Ideas from small ideas. They’re all important. My nephew did a dissertation at Cal-Berkeley on robotics. His Big Idea was that nature offers powerful lessons for designing the way robots move and perform actions. But to explain that idea, he had to give lots of definitions, describe the literature on animal movements, explain ideas about miniaturization and batteries, describe distinct coding challenges, and more. You need all kinds of ideas, big and small, to help you explain The One Idea.
Another point: You can’t always know what ideas are Big and which ones are small until you develop them. The Big Idea of my dissertation, many years ago, concerned the structure of dialogue in cities. That idea started out as a side note. As I got deeper into my research, I realized that it explained the whole issue. It started as a trivial aside and then became my Big Idea. Since you cannot know which ideas will bloom, gather them all. Don’t worry how important they might be until later in the process.
5. How do you organize your notes and research materials?
In many ways, an ambitious project is as much a management process as a creative process. Just as a supermarket manager manages the food deliveries, the departments and aisles, the equipment, the workers, and so on, you as a dissertation writer will manage your books and articles, notes and transcripts, lab results, spreadsheets and other data holders, videos, paper and electronic files, and, of course, fragments and drafts.
Your key tool is the folder, both paper and electronic. Into each folder, you can put all kinds of resources. To make it work, you need the right categories and sub-categories. In my work, I have two kinds of categories–topics and types of materials.
Take a look at the computer folders for my forthcoming book on Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 Western Tour for the League of Nations:
Click the image to get a careful look. The first column shows all of the major folders in the project. The second two columns show what’s in a couple of those folders.
It’s not always easy to figure out the best topics for the folders. They have to be as simple and intuitive as possible. You don;t really know what makes sense until you’ve gotten deep into the work. I renamed and reorganized the folders countless times. Every time, it gets easier to find what I want.
A good organization also makes it easy to get a gestalt view of the project. Any time I want to get a bird’s eye view of the project, I view my folders.
6. Understand the research challenge.
Some research will revolve around one kind of information. Research in biochemistry will revolve around lab work; research on literature will revolve around the text. But many research projects involve a wide range of research challenges. When I wrote Nobody Turn Me Around, a study of the civil rights movement, I used books, journals, and periodical; papers and oral histories in archives, museums, and libraries; videos and artifacts; interviews with both experts and participants in my story; and site visits.
My challenge was to blend together all this information to create a compelling story with a compelling point.
Whats the best way do do this? If you get into the habit of creating fragments, it will be easy. You’ll write about specific moments (scenes) and specific ideas (summaries). Different research materials will be useful for different fragments. Some of my favorite fragments for Nobody Turn Me Around came from videos; others from interviews; others from archives; others from a blend of sources.
Don’t decide to do a fragment based on a single piece of research material (like a great oral history or video). Instead, remember to figure out what One Idea you want to convey in the fragment. Use whatever speaks to that One Idea. It could be obe poece of evidence or it could be many.
7. Write fragments first–and organize them into distinct categories.
The biggest mistake most writers make–besides using traditional outlines–to to try to write whole chapters from the beginning to the end. It cannot work. Any sophisticated piece of writing is really a collection of smaller fragments. Therefore, write fragments.
A fragment is a short piece about one aspect of a subject. It could be as short as a few hundred words or as long as 10 or 20 pages. It depends on the complexity of the subject, the audience’s knowledge of key concepts, the density of the writing, and more.
I first discovered the fragment idea while reverse-engineering Truman Capote’s true-crime classic In Cold Blood. Capote does not use traditional chapters. Instead, he collects and arranges short fragments into four sections. Each fragment takes the story one step forward–never more.
8. Don’t obsess about its overall structure … but do play around with the possibilities.
Every piece of writing is a journey, which takes the reader from one place to another different place. So when you organize your fragments and chapters, think of that journey. Where do you want to “meet” the reader at the beginning? What does the reader know at the beginning? Then, where do you want to take the reader? What do you want them to know at the end that they didn’t know before?
Once you know the beginning and end, figuring out the steps gets easy. It’s like taking a trip. When I took a cross-country trip, I could figure out all the middle steps once I knew I would start in Charlottesville, Virginia, and end in San Diego, California. I could break the trip into eight-hour legs, each of about 400 to 500 miles. At each stop I plotted my way to the day’s destination. I even decided when I wanted to take a detour, like my visit to my college pal randy or a few hours at the Grand Canyon.
That’s how writing a big project works. Don’t outline the piece in the traditional way. Instead, break it into mini-journeys. Go to just one destination in each mini-journey. Collect a bunch of mini journeys on different topics. Then when you have enough — it could be anywhere from 20 to 40 of them — see what order works best.
Great writers like John McPhee and Robert Caro create 3×5 cards or sheets of paper that note their books’ many pieces. They tape or tack them on a wall, stand back, and look at the overall shape … then move them around. They spend countless hours, at the end of their process, moving these pieces until they fight the perfect flow from beginning to end, in all the fragments, sections, chapters, and whole work.
9. Edit like a pro.
In every great creative work, the finishing touches can spell the difference between good and great. If you’ve done an amazing job researching and writing, congratulations. You are nine-tenths of the way home. But that last one-tenth can determine who reads it, what kind of respect you earn, and how it might evolve into a book or articles.
I have described a simple and fail-safe editing process in The Elements of Writing, but allow me to sketch out some simple procedures and techniques.
First, go from big to small. You would not begin a kitchen renovation with the detail work on window ledges and plates for light switches; you’d begin with the basic structure–the walls and flooring, electricity and plumbing systems, cabinets and appliances, etc. After dealing with these big pieces, you’d move to smaller elements like furniture, woodwork, lighting, painting, and window and other details.
The same goes for big pieces of writing. Once you have gathered and organized your fragments into a whole work, start to examine all the elements. Start with the overall structure. Does your ONE Idea structure all the pieces? Do all the sections and chapters take us on a journey to that One Idea? Does each section and fragment explore one distinct piece of the whole? Does it start strong and finish strong? Then focus on smaller details? Do all these pieces move, like a pendulum, from scenes to summaries? Do all the paragraphs state and explain one idea? Then focus on the granular details: clunky phrases and repetition, words and phrases, spelling and grammar, and of course style and flow.
Start big, go small.
10. Give yourself a productive (not overwhelming) routine.
Writers give each other all kinds of advice on the writer’s life. Work in the morning. Work at night. Write at least two hours a day–no, four hours. Do research first, then write. No, write as you gather information. Stop in mid-thought. Set an agenda for the next day. Go where your information and imagination leads you.
Look, everyone’s different. You have to find your own routines. But I do have some ideas that everyone seems to accept.
First, write something every day. If you want to set a target, like 500 words a day, great. But write something. My experience is that you should almost always avoid big word targets. Why? Because you’ll usually fail. Better to say that you’ll write something every day than 500 words and miss your target. People tend to abandon goals when they fail to meet them. But you should be able to write something every single day. And here’s the magic: When you write something every day, you will often get into a groove where you accomplish more than you would have ever imagined. If you can stay in that groove, great–keep going. The next day, just say you’ll write something. You might only write 250 words, but that’s OK. Your work will set you up for bigger days later on.
Second, read something every day. When I was in grad school, my friend Nathalie had to finish her thesis in a year because she was moving back to Paris. But she refused to deny herself fun exploring the U.S. So every day she photocopied and read five journal articles. She set aside time, between classes, to knock off 10 or 20 or 30 pages at a time. These articles accumulated and before long she had lots of information to explore her topic.
What you need to read will vary according to your discipline and topic. But set a reachable daily goal–and meet that goal every day.
Third, schedule your other work. Whether you need to interview subjects, travel to archives, or conduct experiments in a lab, keep some kind of calendar. We tend to do what we put on a schedule. Again, don’t get too ambitious. But the more explicit you are, the more real these tasks become.
Fourth, avoid all distractions. This might be the most important tip of all. You cannot think if you get interrupted by texts, Netflix shows, noise in the apartment, friends who want to go get a beer, etc. You need total concentration. You will be at least twice as productive with total concentration than with fragmented work time. So when you work, just work. Focus on just one challenge at a time. Turn off your phone. Nobody needs you when you’re working. You’re not the president or CEO; you just a grad student.
Don’t just turn off your phone. Put it in another room. Studies show that a phone is distracting even if it’s off and face-down on the table. The phone’s mere presence is a siren song. Get rid of it. If you really love your phone and all its magical apps, think of it this way. If you remove it during your work time, you’ll have more time to immerse yourself in it later.
Do something to get into the flow. I often listen to New Age/acoustical music (my go-to site is Hearts of Space). Research shows that the rhythms and wavelengths of New Age music improves concentration. You get lost in time as you move deeper and deeper into your subject. When you need to puzzle out a problem, you can isolate the key ideas and think about their relationships. To me, the key to acoustic music is that I rarely tap my toes. If I listen to Springsteen or Rachmaninoff, I start paying attention to the music. My attention shifts from work to tunes. Somehow, this doesn’t happen with Libera or Andreas Vollenweider or Clannad or Enya.
By the Numbers: Distraction
The hardest thing to do these days is to concentrate. But that’s the single most important skill for writing. Here are some relevant numbers, from Deloitte Global Mobile Consumer Survey’s survey of 1,634 smartphone users in July 2017:
47: Number of times smartphone users in the U.S. check their phones each day.
85: Percentage of people who use the cellphone while talking to family and friends.
80: Percentage of people who check their phone within an hour of going to bed or getting up.
35: Percentage who do it within five minutes.
47: Percentage who have tried to limit their cell use in the past.
30: Percentage who have successfully limited their cell use.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • Sign up here for a weekly newsletter for tips and hacks.
• If you want to transform writing in your organization, let’s talk about setting up an in-person or Zoom seminar. For a free consultation, email us here.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Daniel Menaker likes stories that go “spooling off” in different directions, in unpredictable but necessary ways. His own life—as a red diaper baby, high school teacher, fact checker, editor, and writer—has had its own way of spooling off in different directions, sometimes tragically and sometimes humorously.
Menaker’s first story treated, fictionally, the death of his brother Mike. In a family touch football game one Thanksgiving, Mike came down hard on a pass play and ripped his ligaments. He got surgery, which should have fixed the problem. But weeks later, he contracted a septicemia infection and died. He was 26.
Just like that, the Menaker household was ripped apart. At the time, Menaker was working as a fact checker for The New Yorker. That job offered means of distraction until Menaker finally found the words to confront his family’s tragedy. His first story, “Grief,” appeared in the January 20, 1974 New Yorker.
Fame for humor came when he and Charles McGrath wrote a parody of a book called The Best. Not long after the publication of that parody–titled, naturally “The Worst”–Roger Angell came to Menaker’s desk waving a piece of paper. “Sorry, you’ve got to give the payment back,” said Angell, the magazine’s literary editor. “It’s a New Yorker tradition.” Wait—what? “It’s a rule,” Angell said. “Anyone who gets a fan letter from Groucho Marx for his first humor piece has to give the money back.” The letter is now framed in his country house upstate.
Menaker’s career as a writer and author is enviable. He rose to become fiction editor of The New Yorker. He published novels and collections of stories (Friends and Relations, The Old Left, and The Treatment, which became a movie), a book about conversation (A Good Talk), and a memoir (My Mistake). He rose to become editor in chief at Random House, working with writers like Alice Munro, Salmon Rushdie, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Elizabeth Strout, David Foster Wallace, and Billy Collins. He’s also taught writing at Stony Brook.
He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife Katherine Bouton, an editor and writer.
Charles Euchner: Why did you decide to write? Who were your influences? What early lessons did you learn about writing?
Daniel Menaker: My mother was an editor at Fortune. She was an expert in grammar and rules. She was a classics major at Bryn Mawr. She was exigent about rules without being a pain in the ass about it. I just heard a boy say to another boy, “If you want to ride on the bicycle, get the f— on the handlebars,” and she said, “I wonder what part of speech f— was in that sentence.” I never heard her use that language before. When I referred to the famous jewelry store as Tiffany’s she said “If you say Tiffany’s anymore I will disown you. It’s Tiffany.” That was the background.
After college I became a teacher at the Collegiate School and Friends Seminary. I was staying out of the Vietnam War. I loved teaching and was pretty good at it. I would have kept on teaching except for grading papers. That was so onerous to me. It’s not that they were terrible, but it took an incredible time to do it well.
Then I got a job as a fact checker for The New Yorker. I was around writers and stylists and copy editors and people who cared about language. That begins to get installed in your neurons, practically.
Partly out of the long span of grief about the terrible event in my family, I was a very good fact checker. I needed to concentrate on something. I was very exigent and careful and respectful. I did what I was asked to do. I was taught well—the guy who ran the department was helpful and patient.
William Maxwell [the magazine’s fiction editor] coached me. He made his retirement contingent on me being allowed to be an editor. There were older editors, all in their 70s. People wanted to have some change but there was no reason to fire them. He said, “I’ll go but you have to give Dan Menaker a chance.” That was 1976 and I floundered around and then began to find my footing.
CE: And moving from editing to writing…
DM: The thing that made me decide to write was my brother’s death. I always felt guilty about it. We were close—I was shocked and my family was devastated. But I didn’t decide to write—it decided me.
I continued writing and the psychological pressure and the grief and the mourning eventually gave way to the professional aspect of it. I wrote my first book of stories—it was pretty dreadful, except that one story. I did a two-book deal and I couldn’t write the second book. So I returned the minuscule advance, $2,500. [The editor] told me he had never received a repayment of an advance, without asking for it, so he framed it as an example of good conduct.
I just kept on writing. My first nonfiction essay was about TV news, which came from years of watching TV during a grief-stricken state that lasted for a decade. There were formulae. It was scripted, from the introduction of reporter to the signoff. Lewis Lapham liked it and published it in Harper’s.
CE: The key thing for any story is coherence, not literal truth, right? A piece of fiction doesn’t require that every detail be correct. Like with your novel The Treatment …
DM: I was in analysis for ten years and the analyst I was working with bore a strong resemblance to the character in the book. But if you’re talking about correspondence between real life people and people in the book—the dialogue and events and conversations—close to 80 percent is fictional.
Roger Angell once came in with a story by Susan Minot (“The Accident”). He said, “This story is very troubling.” I asked why. I thought it was really good and sad. He said, “I know this family and it’s based on her mother’s death.” Well, I don’t care about that. Fictional stories and novels have to work as what they are, like a painting. If you try to find out who the subject was and that the artist had an affair and her husband killed himself—none of that matters to the painting.
It’s very interesting to read about writers and painters’ lives. But what do you do with an anonymous poem like “O Western Wind”? Nobody knows who wrote it, but it is so beautiful …
CE: Who were your academic influences?
I was taught aesthetics by Monroe Beardsley at Swarthmore, who taught that every work has to be judged on its own isolated qualities. You can ask a writer about what his or her poem or story is about, but they can be wrong. I have this militant feeling about fiction having more to do with the presentation of sentences than any correspondence with real life.
Headley Reese taught a seminar on Baroque art and modern art. We would go to the museum and he would not talk about Rembrandt’s life. He would say, “What do you see in this painting?” It was a time where there was a great deal of new criticism, focused on the objects themselves. It was in full swing at that time.
CE: What kind of research do you put in?
DM: Almost none. I’ll check if I care about getting some geography right or the years of a presidency; I’ll be a fact checker for myself. I just reviewed Oliver Sacks’s posthumous book. In writing the review, I looked stuff up. At one point I simply couldn’t call to mind the ten famous writers about science and medicine in the last decade or so, so I just Googled “most important books about science and medicine.” There’s a condition, anomia, where you can’t remember names.
I’ve worked with historic fiction writers and they do a lot of research. I tend to stick more closely to my own life. I don’t need to know a lot of historic background.
CE: What about writing a memoir? How do you make sure to get that right?
DM: I relied heavily on memory. No one has pointed out any gross errors. I do have family documents—letters, obituaries. I found out about my father’s membership in the Communist Party [by talking with] an FBI guy who investigated by family. I read the Venona Papers. They mention my family. For the New Yorker stuff, the archives are online. I can check to see the first Alice Munro story I edited.
Memoirs are shaky, in my opinion. They’re not the same as autobiography. They’re much more loosey-goosey.
CE: Now, on to storytelling tactics. The best place to start is with in media res, right?
DM: That’s right—start in the middle, with action. That tendency is an outgrowth of movies. In the 20s, 30s, and 40s, suddenly there would be a scene and you would figure out what was happening later.
But that was also true with nineteenth century writers like Charles Dickens. He has a novel where you start with two people on a dingy raft on the Thames looking for a body. You have no idea why there are there. Pride and Prejudice has the same kind of immersion—Mr. and Mrs. Bennett arguing about who’s going to marry their daughters. Other authors do it—Fitzgerald and Alice Munro and J.M. Coetzee …
CE: It works well, in media res, but it works better with some authors than others. What’s the difference?
DM: What really works is when an author startles me—and that doesn’t happen very much—in a way that’s not a gimmick, that feels legitimate. Look at what Coetzee is doing in Disgrace. Hilary Mantel—her first novel is very domestic and close to home, about a social worker, but it had that same necessity and it’s startling.
When I was a kid, anything would grab me, because everything is new. I hadn’t had 50 years of editing. You get a little jaded. Or things become overly familiar.
CE: Who provides the greatest surprise?
Alice Munro. She’s an amazingly complex writer who hides her complexity under the most conversational, seemingly casual narration, but oh man, it is complicated, especially from the standpoint of time. She uses time almost as if it was a place. … Little by little, she begins to zero on the psychological and thematic concerns of the story that are not narrative, even though she uses narrative. Often near the end you have a dead-center target of some revelation or something that contradicts or changes something.
All this is in the service of her conviction that she’s writing about the chaos of the human heart. She ends up in the middle of the target and what you find is so basically elemental, so affected by drives and childhood that you don’t know about. But she ends up nowhere. Here’s what happened and why it happened, but it doesn’t make much sense.
CE: So it has a very strong arc. But it’s not a simple or obvious arc.
DM: Exactly. The resolution is an un-resolution. It’s a literary and eloquent and down-to-earth demonstration of chaos that rules most of us.
CE: When you write something, do you plot it out or do you do one page and the next—
DM: When I write, I know pretty much where it’s going. I know the plot and the five or six things that have to happen. It would be surprising if it went off direction. But there are these side streets that you don’t see till you get there.
In my new novel, a sequel to The Treatment, the shrink is 85 and only has a couple old patients. The teacher is now the headmaster and someone on the board wants to fire him. He’s a patient of Dr. Morales. He wants the headmaster to know, but he is precluded from telling.
CE: So you know the basic structure, but you can improvise along the way—
In this new novel, this guy goes to his wife’s funeral at Riverside Chapel. Since she was a very philanthropic and social sort, I decided that I could, with some humor and knowingness, create a list of people who attended the funeral. Some are friends and some have very fancy social names and some have names that are conglomerations. I didn’t plan that. I like lists and list humor; they seem funny to me. Since this guy’s a teacher, maybe some of his students will come. It’s as if you can play with a toy—you didn’t expect to find that toy.
CE: What do you make the state of publishing these days?
DM: It’s fine. Books are selling well. The supposed takeover of ebooks has not happened. They have reached a certain level and they’re useful. And the projections that they would be 80 percent of the market has not worked out. I have a theory that when two-year-olds start with Goodnight Moon, and they’re reading a real book, that feeling is never going away.
There was a time, six or seven years ago, I thought publishing was in serious fiscal trouble. It’ll never be a huge profit center.
Publishing is really gambling. You put down money on a table with a bet. Six out of seven times it doesn’t succeed, it doesn’t earn back the advance. But that seventh time, that other bet…
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
When you talk about the subjects of Robert Caro’s magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies–Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson–you have to look at them from two perspectives.
Before Caro, or B.C., they were viewed as great men whose legacy was marred by their personal flaws. This conventional wisdom is true as far as it goes, but it’s been told so often, and in such familiar ways, that it begins to take on a cartoonish quality. I remember the celebrations of presidents at one of the Democratic conventions describing Johnson as having a heart “as big as Texas.” That’s how you described Johnson: Like other successful politicians, only bigger.
Except that neither Moses or Johnson was anything like the complex, Shakespearean figures that Caro has revealed in his works. After Caro, these two figures–and dozens of other supporting characters, like Moses’s mentors Al Smith and Belle Moskowitz, or LBJ’s mentor Sam Rayburn, to take a few examples–are pulsing with energy. Just as important, these works are also pulsing with whole new ways of looking at the world.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is about a good a definition of genius that you’ll ever find.
How does he do it? The simple, and true, answer is that he researches the hell out of his subjects. Fans complain that Caro is taking too long with the fifth volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, covering his five-plus years in the White House. But as Caro explains, there is no other way:
While I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And finding facts–through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing–can’t be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time.
Researching the hell out of his subjects is just one of the many lessons for writers in Caro’s new book Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing (Knopf, April 9). Caro’s brief work–and, by the way, this is the first and last time the words “Caro” and “brief” will ever appear in the same sentence–offers a master course in the art and craft of writing.
In this little book, Caro shows how and why he picked his subjects, how to find the throughline and plot the story’s arc, how to conduct archival research and interview subjects, how to write great scenes, explain complex processes, how to write with style, and much more. Here are a few highlights:
Subjects
The British historian Arnold Toynbee once said that history is just “one damn thing after another.” Clever line, but untrue. History is a way of revealing something about the human condition. A great work of history, then, aspires not just to tell a story–about a person or place, event or period–but reveal some truth about life. The purpose of Caro’s works is to understand power.
“From the very start I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the man I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times – particularly the force that is political power. Why? political power? Because political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about.”
To achieve this requires much more than writing one damn thing after another. For Caro, biography must serve as a “vessel for something even more significant: examination of the essential nature—the most fundamental realities—of political power.” And what should serve as the vessel? For Caro, it was a subject “who had done something no one else had done before” and then figure out how he did it.
For another author, biography could be the vessel to explore art or love or psychology or sports. Whatever its purpose, it cannot be just a recounting of what happened.
Research
Discipline–exploring every possible angle, looking at every piece of evidence, chasing down every lead–is the key to all great nonfiction narrative. Caro learned that lesson early, as a reporter for Newsday. He once got a call about the corruption behind the disposition of an Air Force base on Long Island. Come see these documents, a source told him. And so he did. He spent all night reading the documents and taking copious notes.
His editor, who had previously ignored him, was impressed. From now on, he said, you will be an investigative reporter. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.”
He took that advice to heart, making it his mission to dig deeper than anyone ever dug before on his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson.But when he got to the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, he knew he had to be more selective. The library held 40,000 boxes containing 32 million pages.
No one of historical importance wants his career to be investigated without fear or favor. Historic figures spend their lifetimes creating a mythology. They do not want it dismantled.
Therefore, the biographer must start far away from the subject. When Caro started work on his Moses book, he refused interviews for years. So did his top aides. When Caro took on Johnson, most of LBJ’s aides were and friends and family were circumspect. So Caro draw a set of concentric rings on a piece of paper.
The innermost circle with his family, friends, and close associates, and I was prepared to believe that he could keep me from seeing them, and probably the persons in the next circle or two, also. But surely, I felt, there would be people in the outer circles – people who knew him but were not in regular contact with him – who would be willing to talk to me. And, in fact, there were, and, as I was later to be told, Commissioner Moses was more and more frequently encountering people who, unaware of his feelings, said that this young reporter had been to see them.
To know a subject, Caro suggests, you need to find a way to get the subject’s colleagues and family and neighbors talk. You can’t just show up and expect people to talk. You have to show a commitment to really know the subject. And so Johnson moved to Texas. It was then that people started to tell him more than the hackneyed old stories: “I began to hear the details they have not included in the anecdotes they had previously told me – and they told me other anecdotes and longer stories, anecdotes and stories that no one had even mentioned to me before–stories about a Lyndon Johnson very different from the young man who had previously been portrayed.”
Interviewing
Interviewers have to be persistent and reach their subjects on a deeper tlevel than they even understand themselves. But sometimes they also need to be manipulated. As a reporter for Newsday, he was working with a reporter named Bob Greene to expose a charitable organization that was using “the bulk of its money on a luxurious lifestyle for the director and his mistress.” They had the evidence but needed the organization’s director to acknowledge it. “When you talk to him, don’t sit too close together,” their editor, Alan Hathway, told them. “Caro, you sit over here. Greene, sit over there. You fire these questions fast—Caro, you ask one; Greene, you ask one—I want his head going back-and-forth like a ping-pong ball.” The ploy worked. the director got rattled and revealed more than he intended. They had their story.
After Caro worked on The Power Broker for years, Moses agreed to a series of long interviews. Caro had done so much work that Moses had to give him time now if he wanted his point of view in this definitive work. Now Caro’s task was to take in all that Moses had to offer.
Silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it–as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. … When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break the 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 there.
It’s just a dogged pursuit of facts. No good interview is possible without the research to back it up. You interview someone to learn more things–but before that, you need to have enough facts to push and prod the subject. When you know some significant part of the story, then listening becomes golden.
When interviewing people, Caro pushes them–to the point of annoyance–to describe what they saw and heard and felt. It’s not enough to say the limo ride from the Capitol was quiet; Caro wants to know what that quiet was like. It’s not enough to decry the viciousness of racism; Caro wants to know what it felt like for blacks to attempt, time and again, to register to vote and get rejected by cracker election officials.
If you talk to people long enough, if you talk to them enough times, you find out things from them that maybe they didn’t even realize they knew.… My interviewees sometimes get quite annoyed at me because I keep asking them “What did you see?” “If I was standing beside you at the time, what would I have seen?” I’ve had people get really angry at me. But if you ask it often enough, sometimes you make them see.
Caro prods interviewees to remember what it was like to sit in a particular place or walk along a particular road. Sometimes they tell him but it doesn’t make sense until he recreates the scene.
One scene is especially notable. When he first came to Washington as a congressional assistant, LBJ would arrive at the office out of breath. On the last part of his morning walk to the capitol, he broke into a run. Why? Caro retraced the steps, again and again, but didn’t notice anything. Then he realized that he should retrace LBJ’s trip early in the morning.
At 5:30 in the morning, the sun is just coming up over the horizon in the east. Its level rays are striking that eastern façade of the capital full force. It’s lit up like a movie set. That whole long facade—750 feet long—it’s white, of course, white marble, and that white marble just blazes out at you as the sun hits it.
With that extra effort, Caro was able to be there–in the same time and place as the excited young congressional aide would would become president–and put the reader in the same place. That one moment captures the excitement better than anything else could.
Puzzles
All great stories present puzzles inside puzzles. The ultimate puzzle is about the characters and the vents of the story. Who is he? What makes him tick? Why does he do what he does? Why did X happen and not Y?
To understand complex topics, look for the moments when something big changes. Notice the turning points, even if no one has ever seen those moments that way before. While interviewing the LBJ story, poring though archives, Caro noticed a change in tone in letters written to LBJ early in his congressional career. In his earliest years in Congress, LBJ looked like every young legislator. He sought the favor of his seniors. Then the letters showed something different. “in which they were doing the beseeching, asking for a few minutes of his time. What was the reason for the change? Was there a particular time at which it had occurred?” Caro pursued the puzzle until he discovered the reason. Johnson got monied interests to funnel contributions to Congressmen though him. Suddenly LBJ was the money man on the hill.
One of the oldest puzzles concerned the 1948 Senate race. After Coke Stevenson was declared the winner, a recount in Precinct 13 found 200 extra votes for Johnson and two for Stevenson. That gave the election to LBJ. Most people treated the election as a “Texas size joke, with stealing by both sides.” But Caro needed to know. After searching bars and other old haunts, Caro finally found Luis Salas, the man behind the discovery of those extra votes.For years Salas lived in Mexico, but he had recently moved back to a trailer park in Texas. Salas not only agreed to talk, but also to share his memoir of the incident. He wrote the memoir because “I am running short of time, feel sick and tired… Before I go beyond this world, I had to tell the truth.” No one had ever gotten this first-hand account–this confession–before. And so the mystery was settled. LBJ did steal the election.
Exemplars
Caro’s books are known for their heft. He’s written thousands of pages on his two subjects. He offers detailed examination of complex topics and intimate portraits of the people and places and scenes. But in those books are smaller stories that serve as parables for the larger epics. They are intimate accounts of ordinary people and how their lives were affected by these two political giants.
The most excerpted section of The Power Broker, a chapter called “One Mile,” tells how Robert Moses built the Cross-Bronx Expressway right through the neighborhood of East Tremont. This route led to the demolition of 54 six- and seven-story apartment buildings. He could have shifted the highway just two blocks and only demolished only six buildings. Community people asked him to do just that but he refused. Caro’s story is a devastating story of the destructiveness of power–and the callousness of the man behind it.
In the LBJ books, Caro tells of how electrification transformed the lives of rural Texans … how civil rights laws overturned brutal systems of racism … how LBJ began to use his ruthless tactics to control campus politics as a college student … his his brief period teaching in rural Texas have him empathy for the poor and dispossessed. These stories ring with energy and power because they are about ordinary people and how their lives were shaped by the was power was deployed.
Being There
To understand LBJ, Caro learned, he had to understand his father Sam. As he learned Sam’s story, Johnson’s cousin Ava decided Caro needed a reality check. He needed to see how foolish Sam was to settle in the Hill Country. So she told Caro to drive her to the Johnson ranch. When they got there she told him: “Now kneel down.” He did. “Now stick your fingers into the ground.” He could not move the whole length of a finger into the ground. The land had almost no topsoil. It looked like a lush land with its endless expanse of grass. But it could not produce anything. Sam was snookered by the appearance. Lyndon vowed not to make the same mistake.
Most biographies depicted Johnson as a popular BMOC in college. But Caro heard lots of rumblings that this was a myth. One of Johnson’s old classmates, Ella So Relle, grew agitated when Caro kept asking questions. “I don’t know why you’re asking all these questions,” she said. “It’s all there in black-and-white.” Where? In the Pedagog, the college yearbook. Caro had read it and found nothing of interest on Johnson. He want back and looked his his copy and again found nothing there.
He called Ella and asked her to tell him what pages she was talking about. Those pages had been skillfully razored out of the book. When Caro went to a local used bookstore to see other copies, the pages in question were also cut. Finally he found a complete copy, filled with stories alluding to Johnson’s early days as a political manipulator.
Writing
Before writing the actual draft of a book, Caro tries to articulate the point he wants to make. He writes one to three paragraphs that summarize the driving idea of the book. The process can take weeks. So what might this summary say. Caro summarizes his first Johnson book, The Path to Power:
That first volume tries to show what the country was like that Johnson came out of, why he wanted so badly to get out of it, how he got out of it, and how he got his first national power in Washington through the use of money. That’s basically the first volume–at the end of it, he loses his first Senate seat, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to come back. When you distill the book down like that, a lot become so much easier.
With that North Star, he begins to write an outline of the book. He posts those pages on his wall so he can see the whole book at a glance. Then he writes detailed outlines of chapters, which is really the whole chapter without the details. A long chapter might get a seven-page brief. Then, each chapter gets its own notebook, filled with all the chapter’s stories and quotations and facts.
Caro writes his drafts longhand on white legal pads, three or four times. Then he types these drafts on an old electric typewriter, using legal paper and triple spacing to leave lots of room for editing. Some drafts have more pencil marks than type.
He starts each day by reading the previous day’s output. “More and more frequently when I reread the stuff I wrote in the late afternoon the day before, it was no good and I had to throw it out. So there was no sense in working late; I stop earlier now.”
Writing takes enormous concentration. “Any interruption is a shock, a real jolt,” he writes. Once, working at the Frederick Lewis Allen Room at the New York Public Library, someone tapped his shoulder to go to lunch. “I found myself on my feet with my fist drawn back to punch the guy,” Caro says.
Research and early drafts make art possible. It’s the Michaelangelo Principle: To produce art, you chip and carve a massive hunk of granite until you find, inside it, your own David. Caro’s original drafts of The Power Broker were more than a million words. He cut that down to 700,000 words.
Style
When writing the preface for The Power Broker, Caro struggled to describe just how totally Robert Moses had transformed New York with bridges, highways, tunnels, beaches, parks, housing, dams, and more. Then he remembered reading Homer’s Iliad in college. Homer listed all the nations and all the ships that went to fight in the Trojan War. The epic’s use of dactylic hexameter gave this list a sense of drama. And so Caro, in describing the long list of Moses projects, made them sail across the page, as if ships going to Troy.
“I thought I could have a rhythm that builds, and then change it abruptly in the last sentence,” Caro remembers. “Rhythm matters. Mood matters. Sense of place matters. All these things we talk about with novels, yet I feel that for history and biography to accomplish what they should accomplish, they should have to pay as much attention to these devices as novels do.”
Genius
Lyndon Johnson was one of America’s greatest tragic heroes, a Shakespearean figure who transformed a nation but got brought down by his own demons. Johnson, Caro says, had “a particular kind of vision, of imagination, that was unique and so intense that it amounted to a very rare form of genius – not the genius of a poet or the artist, which was the way I had always thought about genius, but the type of genius that was, in its own way just as creative: a leap of imagination that could look at a barren, empty landscape and conceive on it, in a flash of inspiration, a colossal public work, a permanent, enduring creation.”
Here’s my definition for genius in a nonfiction writer: Someone who is intensely curious about the world and how it works, someone who wants to show it whole but also reveal its contradictions. To achieve this ambition, the writer restlessly explores issues that others consider settled or uninteresting or beyond anyone’s ability to know. This restless exploration depends on a commitment to facts–gathering them, checking them, making sense of them. And then, when the facts are gathered and organized, they are used to construct a work that reveals something fresh about how the world works.
By this definition, I think we’d have to say that Robert Caro is a genius. His body of work is as great as that of any biographer–or maybe any nonfiction writer, or maybe even any writer–now alive.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Charles V. Bagli is the best investigative reporter on real estate in the American capital of real estate.
Reporting for The New York Times, Bagli tracks the big deals and the seismic shifts of the city’s development and land use—and the often-dirty politics of the industry.
Journalism was not on Bagli’s mind until his late 20s. He went to Boston University to become a filmmaker but the school of communications required students to wait until their junior year. By that time, he was involved in the antiwar movement and was working with the radical historian Howard Zinn. He worked as a labor organizer for six years. Then, as a husband and new father, he says, “I decided I had to grow up.” So he applied to be a plumber’s apprentice in Springfield, Massachusetts—and he applied to Columbia Journalism School. He got into Columbia and took his family to the big city.
Right away, he had doubts. A professor heavily critiqued his first submission. “The professor just rips it apart and I’m sitting with my head in my face and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’ve done the wrong thing,’” Bagli remembers. “Fortunately, I hung around and improved.”
In retrospect, Bagli had the right stuff all along. He loved telling stories, even if his writing was “just throwing words on paper and hoping people would wade through to understand it.” His proudest moment in high school was screening a short movie that ended with the hero “running across a field and there’s a pretty woman and the Dylan song comes up, ‘If dogs run free, why can’t we?’” The audience loved it. Heady stuff.
Bagli also liked spending time with people from diverse backgrounds. “I always get energized when I bump into people. As a journalist I am constantly meeting new and different people.”
Because of his organizing background, Bagli figured he would be a labor reporter—“not knowing there weren’t labor reporters anymore.” He wrote for the Brooklyn Phoenix, Tampa Tribune, Morristown Daily Record, and New York Observer before landing with The New York Times 20 years ago.
Charlie Bagli met with my class “Writing the City,” at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, in October 2018. Here are some excerpts from our class conversation.
Bagli decided to embrace covering real estate, one of the orphans of journalism. Real estate is a difficult beat for two reasons. First, real estate coverage often involves fluffy PR pieces packaged with advertising, so reporters run into trouble with editors when they take a critical approach. Second, real estate is a complex topic that drives away reporters who want to rise quickly by covering sexier beats.
I wasn’t intimidated. I became self-taught. When I got a job at The Observer in 1987, I was covering the east side of Manhattan, from 14th Street to 96th Street, and there was a building boom going on. One by one, I met the developers and their lawyers and their PR people—and their opponents on projects too—and I made my own maps of who owned what. I set out to know the subject well so people couldn’t BS me. I wanted to become something of an expert.
The beat I have covered for 30 years is at the intersection of politics and real estate in New York. I thought real estate was one of the twin pillars of the economy [with finance]. You could not know New York without knowing real estate. In New York the mayor is a powerful figure and the city council not so much—except in one area, which is land use. Look at every politician, where they get political contributions, it comes from real estate. Real estate gives inordinately at both the city and the state level.
To make complicated topics understandable, a real estate reporter has to avoid insider lingo and find pithy ways to express complex, mind-numbing issues.
Because the subject is complicated, you have to constantly put yourself in the mind of the reader. What do they know? What can they get through? I can’t use jargon. Do you know the term ULERP? It means Uniform Land Use Review Procedure. I don’t use that term in a story. I’m always looking to break things down in a brief and useful way.
So you have little techniques. During a brief stint as a business reporter in New Jersey, I was doing a story about popcorn. I can’t remember if popcorn was going up or down. Anyway, I wanted to illustrate how much people ate popcorn, I calculated how much space in Giants Stadium would be filled with all the popcorn kernels people used in a year. It’s a lot of work for one sentence, but people know what you’re talking about.
In 2013, Bagli published Other People’s Money, the story behind the development and redevelopment of Stuyvesant Town in Lower Manhattan. The book grew out of his reporting for The Times on the redevelopment of the complex.
I got a tip in 2006 that Stuyvesant Town was going up for sale. I started looking into the whole history and writing it into my stories. The place was sold for a record-setting price. Anyone who knew about housing thought they paid too much—it was like a death march from the day they bought it in December 2006. They went out of business in January 2010. Meanwhile, over 10,000 apartments, 80 acres, were demolished.
Writing a book is always a journey into what you don’t know—after thinking you knew everything. Bagli was especially intrigued by the story behind the original decision to create the complex.
I thought I knew the whole story and I started digging in more. It ranged from meeting someone at a bar who said, “I know someone who lived in Stuy Town.” I met this succession of people, all with fascinating stories about Stuy Town and its culture. Like Playground 9, if you couldn’t play really good basketball you can’t get on the court. Catholic kids went to Catholic schools, Jewish kids went to public schools. It was a fascinating place.
In the 1940s—Manhattan was all working piers on East Side and the Jersey side, and near the piers were factories and warehouses, stonecutting operations and breweries. That started to fade from the scene and Mayor [Fiorello] LaGuardia was looking for new housing to deal with New York’s perpetual housing crisis. The insurance companies were some of the biggest in the world and they were huge employers—people filling out forms. Met Life was the biggest corporation in the U.S., with its headquarters on Madison Avenue and it was like a little city. They had a small hospital inside an a couple levels of cafeterias. LaGuardia and Moses bullied Met Life into thinking about it.
When Met Life said, ‘We’ll do this,’ they wanted to knock down 500 buildings. In Met Life’s library they had pictures of all the buildings. They didn’t want to replace any schools or churches. They wanted complete control over who entered this complex. This was possibly the first gated community. They didn’t allow black or Latin families to move in.
The chairman of Met Life was an interesting guy. He left school at 14 and saw people going into the Met Life building and got hired to work in the mailroom and he rose to become chairman. Part of his rise was based on taking over some buildings that Met Life had financed and went bankrupt and he made them profitable. New York was expecting a million GIs to come home. So they built Stuy Town. It had a legendary status, with a 10- to 15-year waiting list to get in. Lots of firefighters, teachers, cops. And the people who lived there stayed there. It was a haven for the middle class.
I felt like an archeologist. I discovered letters back and forth between LaGuardia and the chairman of Met Life. The first letter from LaGuardia was basically, “If a person is otherwise qualified, you can’t discriminate based on race.” Scrawled on top was written “not sent.” The response from chairman was “not sent.”
“Creative destruction” is a constant subject of Bagli’s work. In 1967, families in the Lower East Side were forced out of their homes to make way for an urban renewal project. After the buildings were demolished, real estate and political interested battled over the area. Finally, the Bloomberg Administration brokered a deal to build new housing and former residents were invited back. That’s when Bagli met David Santiago, who was planning to move one of the units.
I always though the different neighborhoods were what made New York so interesting. I loved walking through garment district, that was one of the few places where you could see people actually working as opposed to disappearing into glass towers. There was the printing district, the flower district. These places are gone now.
In the 1960s they ousted all these Puerto Rican families and said they were going to build new housing and nothing was built for 50, 60 years—they were parking lots all that time. They never made good on the promises. Racial and ethnic politics was why nothing was built. There had been a series of coops in that neighborhood. Every time there was a plan to build housing, the coops fought it. They were able to defeat every attempt. They said we need jobs, not more housing—they didn’t say they didn’t want minorities.
They were opening the first building and a lot of people were returning to the neighborhood. I found David Santiago. He was a restaurant guy. Then a couple weeks after the building opened, I got a call from one of the activists and she said, “David died the day he was throwing this housewarming party.”
It was so interesting when he was alive to talk about the neighborhood. It was a poor polyglot neighborhood, with the Puerto Ricans and the Italians mixed in with the Chinese and a large Jewish community. David had these memories that were really interesting—and increasingly forgotten—as this tsunami of gentrification washed over Manhattan and Brooklyn.
His was a good story to tell because he reflected what happened in that neighborhood. His family was pushed out when he was seven. He had a wisdom about what the neighborhood was about. He had lied about his age and joined the Marines. Every experience was different but he reflected something about the whole neighborhood. He talked about the mobster in the social club that would give him a coke in green bottles.
His death gave me the room to talk about him. So I was sucking up all the details. A lot of stuff doesn’t get in, but of you don’t have it all, you don’t get that one telling detail that just makes the story.
The first job of a journalist is to get the story—the names and places, the events and consequences, all with good sourcing and evidence. The second job is to make it interesting. Sometimes you get something exciting but “bury the lead”—that is, put the best stuff where a reader might not find it.
I was working at the Tampa Tribune in Hernando County. It was like the old South there. I was the new guy so I was covering cops and courts. One day I heard over the police radio that something was happening at a nursing home. I went over and a guy went in with a gun and shot his wife and he turned it on himself.
My job was to talk to everyone about it. I went to their trailer and talked with his son. They owned a Honda touring bike and went everywhere together. The son ended by saying, “This was an act of love,” because his mother was wasting away and his father couldn’t bear to watch that. That’s a golden line—an act of love juxtaposed with the murder. I buried it in the fifth or sixth graf. Later I thought, “What were you thinking?”
A lot of people look for the first couple grafs and then they’re gone. When it says “Continued on page 7,” how many people take the jump?
With the rise of the Internet—and the shrinking “news hole” in print editions—newspaper reporters do not have as much space to explore their subjects.
The size of stories is smaller than it used to be. The editors use to say try to keep it under 2,000 words because otherwise it becomes a “special project” and then more editors get their hands on it and muck it up. Now it’s more like keep it to 800 to 900 words. So you have to condense.
You know you’re done, ready to go, when you’ve answered all the questions that your editor asked.
As an established investigative reporter for The Times, Bagli has freedom to roam around the city and explore all possibilities. That means spending time on the street and following up tips. Some tips lead nowhere. Others lead to scoops.
Sometimes you get a call out of the blue. You know Felix Sater, the Russian pal of Trump? I write about him in 2007. I got an anonymous call telling me about this guy Felix who changed one letter in his name so you couldn’t Google his past. One night he’s celebrating at a bar on Third Avenue and he gets in an argument and breaks a Margarita glass and stabs the guy in the face—he guy had 100 stitches—and he runs and the cops caught him. He was part of a mob scene of Wall Street, pump and dump. He was also working on Trump Soho, a condo/hotel. It was a financial disaster.
So this [tipster] is telling me these stories. I’m thinking, this is great if it’s true, but how much time am I going to have to figure out whether its true? You’re constantly doing triage and sometimes you’re right and sometimes not.
Turns out everything this guy said was true. I didn’t know his name but people call you all the time and sometimes they’re BS. I heard when he was indicted for the Wall Street scam and I got the police report when he stabbed that guy in the bar. I called American University, which had a center that tracked Russian mobsters and his father was in the mob. I figured out my source—he had been indicted with Felix for this scam on Wall Street and he was a straight guy and the worst day of his life was when he met Felix. So it was revenge, absolutely.
If you lie to me, I consider it a cardinal sin. If I fail to ask the right question, that’s only a venal sin. This is the Catholic in me. I want to put the fear in them, that if they ever lie to me I will kill them. It turned into a great story. I thought it would break up his relationship with Trump but it didn’t.
Like prosecutors—think Robert Mueller—investigative reporters work their way from the outside to the center of the story. So Bagli made sure he had all his facts about the Trump-Sater relationship before he called Trump, a longtime source for decades.
This is my interview with Trump.
“Donald do you know this guy Felix Sater?”
“No, not really. I’ve met him and I know the chairman of the company, Bayrock.”
The chairman was a former Soviet official who became a billionaire, who’da thunk it?
“Oh, didn’t you go to Colorado with Felix?”
“Colorado? I don’t know if I’ve even been to Colorado.”
“No, Donald, you remember you gave one of your inspirational speeches there. Felix was there.”
“There were thousands of people there. How can I account for every one of them?”
“Yeah, but Donald, he got into the limousine with you when you left and then you then went down to Denver and talked to this developer…”
I like to have the answers to all my questions before I ask them. That way I know when somebody’s … fibbing. So I wrote the story [thinking it would create a split between Trump and Sater] but the relationship continued though 2016. And then he became part of history.
Sometimes the best stories are outside the center of the industry. Jersey City and other markets across the Hudson River have boomed as New York real estate prices have pushed people out of the city—and as developers have speculated wildly.
I did a story recently about Journal Square in Jersey City. I walked around and thought this is not a neighborhood. There are so many streets criss-crossing. Its hot because the waterfront is done, Grove Street is done. The next stop on the PATH train is Journal Square. So it’s going to happen.
You have the two Kushner brothers who hate each other and they want to build three towers each. It’s a recipe for disaster. You can’t put that many units in a neighborhood all at once. They compete with each other. Murray Kushner’s first tower is up. Charles had an empty lot and lost authority from the city. He thinks he’s persecuted because of his relationship with the Trump administration.
I still wonder whether that neighborhood is going to turn. The next stop is Harrison, where they’re building like crazy near that soccer stadium. A lot of public money, idiotic money I thought. Ten to 15 years later, they’re not building. It’s a tiny community across the river from Newark.
There’s a lot of outflow from New York because New York is wildly unaffordable. If you’re on the outer rim with public transportation you’re in good shape. You can get from Newark to Penn Station in 15 to 20 minutes. Try to get from Times Square to Coney Island in less than 90 minutes.
Before going all-in on a story, Bagli likes to visit the neighborhood and see what it’s like.
I’m thinking about doing a story on the Museum of Natural History. They want to expand [by] 230,000 square feet. About 11,000 square feet, or a quarter acre, would encroach on Theodore Roosevelt Park. Some residents have sued to stop the expansion. I want to go and see how it’s used—how many are local people walking the dog or teaching a kid to ride a bike, and how may are tourists using the museum. You could say it’s only 100,000 square feet, but sitting in the park and getting seeing who does what the story.
There are real tradeoffs here. Is this a matter of “rules are rules,” so they shouldn’t get the park space? Or should other considerations come to play? You’ve got to be there and know the people in the area—who lives and who are the businesses.
Before deciding whether to write the story, Bagli decided to attend a court hearing on the activists’ challenge of the museum takeover as “arbitrary and capricious.” Even if a museum’s use of a quarter-acre of public space might be seem a minor issue in a city of 8 million souls, it illustrates the broader issue of the private use of public land.
This issue of parkland is a big thing in New York City. In Queens, at Flushing Corona Park they’ve already carved off for a big piece for tennis and then the Mets stadium and in the Bloomberg era they wanted to put a soccer stadium there. Why are they handing it over to a privately owned entity and shortchange the rest of the neighborhood?
In the park there’s also some crummy soccer fields and very active leagues. The owners of the leagues say we’ll renovate the fields and run clinics. So you had different views in the community. You had people who were doubled and tripled up in housing and others who lived in community and their kids played soccer and it seemed tantalizing. But it’s more space for private use instead of public use. That’s an issue.
Sometimes, news coverage moves beyond the public enthusiasm for certain development and exposes the secret deal-making of powerful elites.
The High Line is nice but I only hear foreign languages there—it’s a tourist trap—and you can’t stand still, you’ve always got to dodge people. It’s a very expensive bauble and it’s for the tourists.
There’s a dirty secret involving West Side zoning. In 2005, it was owned by CSX Railroad and the city was trying to get CSX to take it down. Over time, these guys came up with the idea of turning it into a park and raised public and private money. The landowners underneath wanted it down so they could do something with their property in the shadow of this structure.
Daniel Doctoroff [the top economic development official under Mayor Michael Bloomberg] wanted all this stuff to happen on the West Side. Doctoroff said, “I’m going to rezone your land. If it’s manufacturing, its worth so much, but if it’s for residential development, its value goes up exponentially.” So they spiked their opposition and got the residential zoning.
You could argue that was a dirty deal. Or you could argue that by doing it, even before Hudson Yards, you had development right along the High Line. All those buildings are new. They didn’t exist before.
Covering crime and mob-related activities can get dangerous. Bagli remembers covering shady characters from Florida to New York.
I was writing about art theft in New York. I had friends who knew the mob, the Genovese family, I wasn’t going to compete with that. And the art world is exotic and interesting. I wrote about this gang getting into art theft—they went from electronics to art. They would steal Monte Carlo SS’s. They had police radios. Once they stole a cab, parked it at the southeast corner of Central Park, and phoned it in to 19th precinct and said, ‘Someone robbed a cabbie and the guy fled into Central Park and the cabbie went after him.’ The police got there and there’s a cab with the door open and the engine running. They’re looking around. That was a distraction. The thieves drive a stolen car through Jindo Furs and steal half million worth of furs. They know where the police are because they’re tuned into the 19th precinct. And they’re out of there.
I got onto this and at the time New York was one of two cities in the country with an art cop. They grew their hair long and dressed in black after a while. The other was Los Angeles. I started writing about this guy and I knew a lot about him and I knew they were close to turning him. They turned a driver, a wheelman. They get arrested and they’re in court and I have a big story that comes out their first day in court.
I walk into the Queens courthouse and I’m the only civilian there. Everyone else is either supporters of the bad guys or prosecutors. Two of the defendants come to me. I had written about some scam they and their mother had done. This is like a line out a movie: “Write anything you want about me. Don’t write about my mother.” Over time I became friendly with the leader of the gang. I’d go to the federal lockup every couple of weeks. I wanted to write a book about it. It’s made for a movie. This guy led the gang, even the night that they were arrested he told the wheelman the customary thing, which was, “We’re going to have to work tonight.” Which means there was a job but he was smart enough not to tell everybody where the job was. So the cops are staked out at two places in Manhattan…
He scared the hell out of my wife when he called us at home. She was less scared when Trump called and threatened to sue me.
And then there was the story of the trailer-park murder in Florida…
When I was in Florida, there was a case with a high school student and mother were arrested. The allegation was they killed the father. The father was an asshole who slept with his daughter and had a kid. They were in the woods at a trailer. They must have had an argument and he said, “I’m getting tired of you, the baby’s next.” He goes to sleep and she shoots him between the eyes. They bury him. Nobody knows about it for a year.
One night I’m meeting a source at a high school football field and someone pulls up in the lot and she recognizes them and so she runs. I go back to my car and he follows me. My heart was beating a little faster. I drove around and he kept following me. He wouldn’t get off my tail. I pulled into a stranger’s driveway and he sat behind me for a while before he finally drove off. I didn’t want him to know who I was because I didn’t want to put her in jeopardy.
A popular perception is that mobsters and criminals will leave reporters along as long as they get the facts out—so the mobsters know what others know.
I don’t know if that holds true. Jerry Capeci wrote about the mob for years for the Daily News and he has a site called ganglandnews.com and they all know Jerry. As long as he writes a straight story and he’s got it right, what are they going to do? But when the crack wars were going on in New York, I don’t know if some 16-year-old with a mag 10 had a code of honor that I’m not gonna shoot that guy. I wouldn’t count on that.
The writer’s ultimate job is to attract and hold the reader’s attention. Bagli praised Mark Singer for his ability to do that with the elusive topic of magic.
Singer wrote an article in The New Yorker about a magician named Ricky Jay. This article was brilliant. How do you make that really work? Magic’s a visual thing. He opened with a scene where he’s at a house party and they’re sitting around and he’s doing card tricks and he’s getting razzed and he slams the cards down and a card appeared in a bottle. I was mesmerized. I want to know more. It’s a brilliant piece of writing. It draws you in. It’s a difficult thing to write about.
I’m sure he wrote those scenes over and over till he got them right. You think: “Would my sister or mother or aunt want to ready this story?”
Writing long-form narrative—especially books—requires finding two or three compelling characters to “hang” the whole story and complex issues.
A while ago I was approached about writing a book about rebuilding downtown after 9/11. If I write a book that a lot of people will read, how do I do it? Who do you unfold the story around? Only a few people were there from 2001 to 2016, and I sure didn’t want to do it around Larry Silverstein.
To write a compelling book about rebuilding, you want to unfold it around something. After 9/11, the elite in real estate and politics were meeting off the record to say what should we do downtown. But there were also people who lost family members and they wanted a memorial. But residents didn’t want to walk past a cemetery all the time. Planners said lets bring back the street grid like before it was a superblock. I could write about the meetings and treachery and double dealing but you gotta sustain the story. How?
You have to ask who is my audience and what do they want to know? What are the assumptions they have?
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Like other journalists of this late-print/early-digital age, Tina Cassidy has taken on a number of challenges as a writer. And more than most, she has succeeded.
Cassidy was a reporter for ten years at The Boston Globe, where she covered business, politics, and fashion. A Rhode Island native, she published articles in the Providence Journal as a high school student. She studied journalism at Northeastern University. After college she worked for the Boston Business Journal and the Associated Press before joining the Globe.
Since leaving the Globe, she has written books about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the process of being born, and, most recently, the battle for the women’s vote.She is now executive vice president and chief content officer at InkHouse, a national public relations and digital marketing agency.
She is active in civic affairs as a board member of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and as an activist for women candidates and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was a founding member of the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, a national organization dedicated to coverage of state and local government.
She lives in the Boston area with her husband, Anthony Flint, another ex-Globe reporter and author of acclaimed books on architecture and planning, along with their three sons and a Norfolk Terrier named Dusty.
Charlie Euchner: You began your writing career as a journalist. In your years with The Boston Globe, you also worked a number of different beats. Too often, beat writers get stuck in a rut, writing the stale old thing year after year. Can you talk about your experience covering different topics?
Tina Cassidy: I had pretty good self-awareness about when I needed a new beat. The clues included the feeling that I had exhausted interviewing all experts on the topic; that nothing I was writing about was surprising or felt new anymore. Weirdly, it was as if I had a biological clock timed to switch beats — typically every four years. Not sure if that was a coincidence or, as with a college degree, that’s about how long it takes to become an expert on something.
CE: Can you tell me about starting out as a teenager in Rhode Island. What kinds of stories did you do and what kinds of lessons did you learn then, about writing and reporting, that you remembered and applied thereafter?
TC: I wrote some articles for my hometown paper The Cranston Herald, mostly about school-related issues, and I was a stringer for the Providence Journal‘s West Bay briefs section; I think I got paid $25 per submission, which felt like a lot at the time. What I learned is that local journalism is essential, that people really care about what’s going on in their community and that there are stories all around us that go uncovered but shouldn’t. Today’s collapse of local journalism is a dangerous thing. Research has found that when community papers shut down, polarization increases. This is the last thing we need.
CE: Are there any stories for the Globe that you were especially fond of? Can you say a thing or two about them?
TC: “Fond” is not the word I’d use. But the most memorable ones for me were covering the 1996 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Green Bay Packers (there was more drama off the field than on); JFK Jr.’s deadly plane crash; being in New York City on 9/11 and running toward the World Trade Center when it collapsed–and then somehow managing not just to survive but to run uptown in high heels and file a story before the special edition; and covering the 2000 Presidential election, from being on the bus with John McCain to looking at hanging chads in Florida.
CE: How did you make the transition from short pieces to full-length books? Some people think of books as collections of shorter pieces, and there’s some truth to that. But books need not only detailed stories and ideas, but also a sense of wholeness. So what helped you make the leap?
TC: The leap felt more like a continuation for me. I only write nonfiction and I am a compulsive writer who thrives on deadline. (I wish this weren’t the case.) If I sense a good story, I can’t stop myself from writing about it. At the heart of journalism and writing books is either a great story or the attempt to answer a big question.
My first book, about the history of childbirth (Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born) sought to understand how modern birth had gone so off the rails. I wanted to survey the historical and cultural landscape to see why it was that every generation and every culture had its own way of giving birth as a way to put modern birth in perspective.
My latest book, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the Right to Vote, is a great story that had not really been told before, pitting a little-known suffragette against a president whose multiple biographies may include a paragraph on suffrage (and his opposition to it) but little more. So it was a blue sky topic for me.
CE: Who are some of your role models as writers? Who do you try to emulate? What “tricks of the trade” do they offer to you as a storyteller, explainer, and book author?
TC: I’ve always admired nonfiction writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, who bring a journalistic eye and curiosity to their wildly different styles of writing. I can’t say I try to emulate anyone but I have worked hard to change my own writing style as I transitioned from journalism to writing books.
My first book editor, the wonderful Elisabeth Schmitz of Grove/Atlantic, told me to slow down my writing. Pacing is something they don’t teach you in journalism school. So I’ve worked on that. I also have to work at showing, not telling. I am always editing myself on that front.
CE: What’s your biggest challenge as a writer? How do you manage problems? Are you a plotter or a pantser? What “tricks of the trade” have you picked up over the years.
TC: I am a plotter. Structure is the first thing I figure out. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t change, but I need a road map to clarify the story or the question I need to answer — to proof it out. For my book on birth, it was about organizing millennia of history not chronologically but around subjects such as pain, fatherhood, postpartum.
For my book on Jacqueline Onassis (called Jackie After O) it was a tight chronology of one transformative year. So I built the structure, month by month, on a timeline. For my current book on Alice Paul, the heart of the book spans Wilson’s two terms as president. Plotting that story arc was fun but most challenging!
CE: Can you reflect on living in a writing household? I assume that you and Tony have lots of conversations about reporting, research, and writing. That’s very cool.
TC: Living with another writer means someone is always picking up the slack for the other. When I’m on book deadline, my husband is managing more kids stuff and meals and vice versa. It also means we truly understand the exhausting agony that writing induces, we can encourage each other and help each other get unstuck. Of course, there is also the brutally honest feedback (often accurate and helpful) that we give each other. My husband is always my first editor, though he doesn’t really have a choice because we live the process together. Thankfully, he is a brilliant thinker and writer.
CE: Tell me about your new book on the women’s suffrage movement and Woodrow Wilson. It’s a classic setup–pitting fallible protagonists against a fallible antagonist. How did you move from topic to story? What were some of the surprises and revelations for you, both about the subject and the writing process?
TS: I was scrolling twitter on vacation and came across the trending hashtag for #womensequalityday, which celebrates the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. I clicked and within an hour, learned about the leader of that suffrage movement, Alice Paul. The next logical question for me was what did the president think of Paul? Turns out, Wilson was the perfect foil – he did not believe the Constitution should give women voting rights. I was surprised to see that many Wilson biographies barely mentioned suffrage, and if they did, it was brief. Paul had been relegated to more academic biographies. I saw an opening and enjoyed weaving these two individuals together.
Excerpt: ‘The Advancing Army’
The following is an excerpt from Tina Cassidy’s new book, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2019), 304 pages
The women slowly made their exit from the East Room and returned to their new headquarters. After four years of toil and hardship in the damp basement on F Street, the CUWS, NWP, and the movement Paul reignited, were finally in a sunlit space, in a place of prominence. Cameron House stood at 21 Madison Place, on the edge of Lafayette Park—the green space in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The building—a wide, three-story, brick townhouse—had several benefits. First, it was visible and just two hundred steps away from the White House; the Wilsons could see the suffrage flag fluttering from its perch on the third-floor balcony. Second, there was ample space to work and entertain guests—from tourists and strangers walking in off the street to catch a glimpse of the women, to those attending ever-expanding fundraisers. There were also bedrooms to accommodate Paul and others, eliminating their daily commute. Paul was now using Susan B. Anthony’s old desk, a Victorian cylinder roll-top that Anthony’s secretary had donated to the NWP.
When the indignant suffragists walked through Cameron House’s front door, they entered into a great hall with a large staircase and a fireplace that burned eternal. Paul was there, waiting for them, ready to stoke their anger as they dropped into comfortable chairs in front of the flames and asked the question again: How long must we wait?
With the women assembled in front of the fire, Paul pitched a carefully orchestrated idea, which she asked Blatch to present. Cameron House. “We have got to take a new departure,” Blatch told them.
“We have got to bring to the President, day by day, week in, week out, the idea that great numbers of women want to be free, will be free, and want to know what he is going to do about it. We need to have a silent vigil in front of the White House until his inauguration in March. Let us stand beside the gateway where he must pass in and out so that he can never fail to realize that there is a tremendous earnestness and insistence in back of this measure.”
So far, with Paul as their leader, the women had marched four years earlier, in 1913, in the largest and most outrageous protest America had ever seen. They had assembled an eighty-car brigade to deliver signatures from all over the nation. They had testified, editorialized, and reorganized. They had formed their own political party. They held May Day parades in nearly every state in the union. They fundraised and actively worked to defeat Democrats. They had a booth at a global exposition, collected a miles-long scroll of signatures, and drove it cross-country from San Francisco. They dropped leaflets from the sky and a banner from the House chamber’s balcony. And they had sacrificed one of their own. On this day, in front of the crackling fire at their new headquarters, with the White House at their backs, they may have been exhausted, but they were neither depleted of ideas nor the passion to continue the struggle.
They listened as Blatch offered a new form of protest. In America, pickets had become a common union tactic, typically ending in violence. But suffragists had been employing the practice as well. Blatch had used pickets in her Votes for Women campaign with the New York Legislature in 1912, so when she delivered her final plea to the women of Cameron House, they stirred.
“Will you not,” she asked, “be a ‘silent sentinel’ of liberty and self-government?”
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
In many professional schools–business, public policy, public health, medicine, and law–students learn through the “case method.” Students read case studies, usually 10 to 20 pages long, about a specific situation that presented real-world professionals with a difficult dilemma. The case study details the history, issues, concepts, and conflicts involved in the case. Then, in class, the professor and students discuss the best approach op the dilemma.
Students love case studies because they offer the kind of “real world” challenges that they might face in their careers. Professors love them because they offer a great vehicle for exploring key theories and concepts and stimulate great discussion and debate. Professionals find them useful for exploring the knottiest problems they face in business, government, and nonprofit organizations.
So what makes a great case study? Five key elements, which I will explain in this post: (1) A time- and issue-bounded dilemma that would be difficult for even smart and seasoned professionals; (2) brief explanations of issues and concepts; (3) The backstory, with vivid characters and moments and a “narrative arc”; (4) data and other information that students can use to support different positions; and (5) Scenarios that could lead students in several different directions.
I have been involved with case studies for years. While serving as executive director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard, I worked with case writers and used cases in seminars with graduate students. Later, at the Yale School of Management, I was a case writer and editor. So I have a special appreciation of their value.
Before we get to the case study “formula,” let’s explore why case studies are such great learning tools.
The Power of Great Case Studies
Case studies are also great for businesses and professional organizations. Most professionals encounter a limited number of difficult challenges. The specifics differ, but the challenges are regular. If the company can capture these challenges in case studies–and then debate the kinds of issues that come up and how to respond–the organization will perform better.
Let me give you an example.
David Luberoff, a friend and colleague at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has written a number of terrific case studies on urban transportation issues. One concerned the “Big Dig,” Boston’s multi-billion-dollar project to remove the elevated Interstate 93 and replace it with an underground tunnel. This project has been described as both a boondoggle and a visionary work of urban revitalization. Without taking sides, Luberoff explores the project’s origins, political pressures and tradeoffs, engineering and design challenges, and spiraling costs. David’s case study offers great value not just to professors and students, but also to policy makers. As a longtime resident of Massachusetts, I wish the state and city had a case study like this when the Big Dig project was first proposed and debated.
Here’s another example:
One of the most popular case studies at Harvard explores a 1970s controversy over a proposal to develop the Park Plaza Hotel, near the Boston Common. Written by Colin Diver, it asks a specific question: “What should Miles Mahoney do?” Mahoney was the head of the Massachusetts agency with authority over such projects. When he decided that the Park Plaza failed to meet five of six key criteria, he ignited a firestorm of protest. The city’s mayor, the redevelopment director, and the project’s developers all lobbied the governor to reverse Mahoney’s decision. Then the developers “revised” their proposal and the governor responded favorably. But the “new” plan was really the old plan. Should Mahoney have held his ground, against all the leading development and political interests–or should he have caved in?
Got time for one more example?
I recently talked to a doctor friend, in a major midwestern city, who was developing new systems for managing extreme health problems like addiction, chronic disease, and homelessness. All too often, my friend explained, hospitals treat patients like products on an assembly line. Patients comes along and health-care professionals address one or two challenges and then put them back on the streets. But effective care requires coordinated help, with social service agencies, families and friends, employers and others, as well as health professionals. How should the hospital coordinate this challenge? What kind of investments should it take? And once the work is done, how can the hospital learn from the experience? A case study would provide the perfect learning tool for doctors, nurses, and others to identify issues, problems, and opportunities for similar situations.
In each of these cases, case studies would be great not just for classes, but also for professionals on the job. Each would give professionals useful frameworks for debating and decision making on their own issues and problems.
So how do you create a great case study?
The Elements of a Great Case Study
A great case study, like a great book or movie, provides a complete, satisfying experience. A great case study brings the audience into a different world, where ordinary people struggle to solve difficult problems … where people struggle to assess the costs and benefits of different actions … where people often struggle against each other to pursue their interests and ideas.
Now, let’s take an overview of these elements of a great case study.
(1) A time- and issue-bounded dilemma
A case study should never–EVER–attempt to provide a comprehensive or universal answer to a problem. As policy makers and managers, we often want to develop policies that solve a big problem. But that’s exactly what you should avoid doing with case studies.
Whatever problem you take up, make sure you discuss specific people, addressing specific challenges, at a specific time and place.
Let me illustrate with the dilemmas of some case studies I wrote for the Yale School of Management:
Manchester United Football Club: How should investors determine a value for Manchester United, the most successful sports team in the world, when it goes public and offers stock shares on the market?
Samsung Electronics: Should Samsung attempt to beat Apple, head on, in the smartphone market?
Herman Miller: How can the producer of high-end furniture maintain its character as a value-based company while expanding its operations with acquisitions of other companies with different cultures?
San Miguel de Proyectos Agropecuarios: Should San Miguel, the producer of the superfood amaranth, expand operations as a for-profit or a civic-oriented company?
These questions are not only practical. They also give people a “north star.” They provide a model that all smart leaders and managers should follow, which is to focus on The One Thing. No matter how complicated a problem is in business, government, or the nonprofit sector, people need to figure out what matters most. Good case studies model how to do just that.
(2) Explanations of issues and concepts
In most professional situations, people must deal with a wide range of technical issues and ideas. In order for students to address the dilemma, they need a working knowledge of these issues and ideas. Some readers of case studies do not use this technical vocabulary, so they need guidance to the issues under discussion.
Therefore, case studies need to clearly define technical terms. These definitions should provide enough examples for the reader to see how the terms are used.
These terms can be defined in the body of the text or in “sidebars” or “boxes” outside the main columns of text. When these terms are simple and straightforward, I suggest offering the definitions in the main text. The more you can create a “flow” for the reader, the better. But when you need to define and explain several terms–and when the terms require some time and attention to understand–I suggest using sidebars or boxes. That way, readers can find terms easily if they need help understanding a passage.
(3) A story, with vivid characters and moments
As Jaques tells Duke Senior in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
Likewise, all professional challenges are really challenges, which play out as stories and need resolution.
Therefore, give your audience a story. As we have explored elsewhere, a story takes a simple structure:
Beginning: To start we get introduced to the characters and their world–and their dilemma. The characters offer a vehicle for exploring the different elements of the challenge, why they’re hard to solve, and what possible responses might present themselves.
The story often begins in media res, Latin for “in the middle of the thing.” We see the protagonists facing some difficult dilemma and wondering what to do. In this scene we get to know the characters and the world, their motivations and limitations. Then, once we see the character at this moment of truth, we can explore the backstory (how they got here in the first place) and the challenges moving forward.
Right away, we need to start learning about the values of the characters and organizations. People’s choices depend on what they want to achieve in life. The values of “Chainsaw Al” Dunlop (Scott, Sunbeam) differ from those of Steve Jobs (Apple), Wendy Kopp (Teach for America), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), or Angela Ahrents (Burberry, Apple). And of course, their values differ from the people who run the departments and programs of these companies.
In all difficult dilemmas, people struggle to reconcile their values and goals with those of others inside and outside the organization.
Middle: In the middle lies the struggle. Decision makers face a number of options, none of which is perfect. All the options carry costs as well as benefits. And so they struggle to figure out the best course of action. They gather information, they look for angles, they debate, they argue, they cajole and bargain. This deliberation has many starts and stops, many points where people and issues could have gone in different directions.
The case study should reflect all of these issues and options. Ideally, the case study breaks them down into separate fragments, with headlines and subheadlines, so the readers/students can explore these issues, one by one.
End: In a class drama, the final section of a story offers a resolution of the dilemma. In a case study, the final section does not offer one resolutions but suggests many possible resolutions. This is the basis of class discussion and debate. Should the company take the product to market … move into a new product line … embrace this or that marketing strategy … go public with a stock offering … keep or fire its CEO … invest in new or different R&D … create a new partnership … lobby for or against government legislation of regulations … ? These are just some of the dilemmas that students face.
In the end, the students will propose–and then argue, in class–which resolution to give the story.
This is the power of the case study. It invites everyone–the professor and students and professionals–to finish the story.
Stories are powerful learning tools because they invite the reader to become part of the story. The author Neil Gaiman puts it best: “In reading, you get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.”
(4) Data and other information
If you need good narrative to give the dilemma a shape–and to engage the reader, with empathy and imagination–you need good data and other information to analyze the dilemma.
The data and information depend on the case and dilemma. It could include statistics, testimony and quotations, definitions, excerpts from company records, and descriptions of products.
So where should you put this data? Some cases cite the information at the place where the case study’s characters might use them. Consider this example from my case study of Herman Miller, where I describe the company’s acquisition of the retail company Design Within Research:
Over the years, DWR had experienced extreme highs and lows. The company went public in 2004, valued at $211 million on opening day—70 times total earnings the year before. Management increased the number of physical stores to 63 by 2006, but the expansion was too much, too fast. “We got cocky, silly, fat,” one top official later admitted. … John Edelman and John McPhee took over in 2010. … Immediately, they overhauled DWR’s operations and moved headquarters from San Francisco to Stamford, Connecticut. Quickly, they closed 30 stores. They developed a new retail strategy and increased sales from $113 million in 2010 to $218 million in 2013.
In this case, data was essential for understanding the flow of the narrative. It belonged in the text. Too much data, of course, would have interrupted that flow.
As an extra resource, you might want to put other data and information at the end, as “exhibits.” In that Herman Miller case, here are some examples of these kinds of exhibits:
• Descriptions of iconic Herman Miller products (text)
• Excerpts from Herman Miller’s mission statement “Things That Matter” (text)
• Leadership of Herman Miller (biographies of CEOs, board chairmen, and presidents)
• Images of the Herman Miller campus (photographs)
• Herman Miller financials (statistics)
• Trends in manufacturing in a variety of industries (statistics)
• Major company acquisitions of Herman Miller (list)
What to put certain data and information is a judgment call. When you’re deciding, answer three questions: (1) What does the reader need to know when? (2) What is essential information and what is an extra resource? (3) What enables the best possible flow for the reader?
(5) Scenarios that lead in different directions
Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Once we have offered students the stories and information, the dilemmas and the context, the technical terminology, we need to guide them toward responses.
Usually, the best scenarios begin with a single question: What should X do?
After posting that question, offer key concepts or models to guide debate. Give people different “angles” on the debate, so they can consider all possibilities. These angles will be great for the debates that occur among students, professors, professionals, reporters, or whoever is reading and discussing the case study.
Let me give an example. I wrote a case study about Samsung’s battle with Apple over control of the smartphone industry. The key question was: What should Samsung do next? Should Samsung try to battle Apple over the high end of the market? Should Samsung compete where Apple already has captured the market (like the U.S.)? Should Samsung pick a more fluid, open market (like India or China) before Apple wins dominance? Should Samsung focus on the longterm battle by investing in R&D to great the next-generation phone?
We might rephrase these questions more broadly: Fight locally or fight in a bigger arena? Focus on a niche or a whole product line? Win with superior products or cutting-edge marketing? Battle to win now or later? Attack directly or pick an outside fight? Seek advantage from government or not? Get outside investments or devote existing resources?
These are broad questions frame the debate in a way that almost any company, in any industry, faces. These “frames” get readers thinking about their own challenges. That’s the ultimate value of a case.
One Last Thing . . .
A good case study works magic. It brings people into the world of business, politics, health care–whatever field where professionals need to make hard decisions.
As Katherine Boo and Suzanne Goldsmith write, in The Washington Monthly: “What case studies have in common isn’t length but the ability to recreate the historical moment, in all its complexity and idiosyncrasy.”
A compelling way to focus on what matters–and to debate complex issues–is exactly what we need to do our jobs well, whatever our profession.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Harry and Mary were still working at the Justice’s apartment when I arrived. Harry asked to see my calling card.
“My what?”
“Why, your calling card, of course. And if it doesn’t look just right, you’ve got to have a new one printed.”
I laughed and said, “I don’t have any calling card. I never did have one. Where I used to live we just didn’t seem to need calling cards, and when I got to Harvard I never bothered to have one made up..”
“Lord Almighty!” gasped Harry. How do you think you’re going to get along in Washington without a calling card? Where do you come from, boy?”
–The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox
When a young man named John Knox traveled to Washington and went to the chambers of Supreme Court Justice James McReynolds, he might as well have been invisible. He didn’t bring a calling card.
In those bygone days, newcomers carried cards to introduce themselves. A calling card symbolized professionalism and stature. Without a card–preferably, an engraved card–the job seeker was considered gauche and inadequate.
These days, we use cover letters in place of calling cards. Cover letters introduce the job-seeker to the employer, with the hope of beginning a conversation about employment.
Most cover letters are bad. Bland and unfocused, they say too much that employers don’t care about–and too little that employers actually want to see.
A great cover letter offers direct, tangible proof that the job seeker can help the employer do something important, with a minimum of fuss and the potential for something great.
1. The Power of a Cover Letter
Almost always, the cover letter provides the first encounter between employer and job seeker. In lieu of a real, face-to-face introduction, the cover letter gives you the chance to say who you are and why you can help.
Unfortunately, most cover letters disqualify the job seeker. Bad cover letters show that the candidate lacks the professionalism, rapport, relatability, or skills to do the job. And so they go straight to the reject pile.
If the candidate is qualified, a good cover letter will prompt the hirer to look more closely at the resume–and to invite the candidate in for an interview.
The best cover letter reveals something–not everything, but something–about your essence as a person and as a professional.
The cover letter offers an opportunity to step outside the details of your career and education and accomplishments and speak–intimately, one on one–to the potential employer. You can begin to forge a human relationship with the hirer, to indicate the specific ways in which you might her life better.
What do I mean by “essence”?
The essence of something is its most distinctive qualities. After you have cleared away all the details, the timelines and projects, and all the distractions, the essence is what remains. When you see someone’s essence, you say: Ah yes, I get this person. I understand this person’s critical values and attributes.
You can find a person’s essence in a story, an experience, a project, or a relationship.
If you’re seeking a job, you want to show your essence in a way that makes the recipient visualize you on their team.
2. Do Research Before You Write a Word
Hate to tell you, but you have lots of work to do before you even think about what you should write.
Before you present yourself, you need to educate yourself about the jobs in your field and how they align with your own background. And you need to find language that shows the obvious connections between your profile and their job.
Create an inventory of skills, accomplishments, and values
Take a piece of paper and create three columns–one for skills, a second for accomplishments, and a third for values.
If you have a good resume, this should be easy. But don’t get lazy and reply on the resume. Create a completely new document using these categories.
Write down everything you can say about yourself for each category. Get everything down. Even if you’re iffy on a skill or accomplishment, write it down. You can cut it later.
Then translate these listings into something specific, something tangible and visual.
We have a tendency–especially in academe and the professions–to use abstractions. That’s fine; buzzwords offer a great shorthand for interacting with colleagues. But when you reach out to a potential employer, you want to help them to see you.
Let me repeat that for emphasis: When you reach out to a potential employer, you want to help them to see you. Our brains come alive when we can visualize something. If I say “social justice,” it doesn’t mean much; but if I say “run community meetings” and “conduct surveys to gather community input” or “serve on a grassroots committee on water runoff,” the reader can picture me doing these activities.
So rephrase every abstraction on your three lists. Show what that abstraction means with phrases that show you doing something. Don’t say “data specialist”; say, “At Place X, at Time X, I used Tool X or Process X to examine Trend X or Problem X.” All those X’s refer to specific things. They are visual. They allow the reader to see you in action.
Research job sites
Don’t just randomly search for jobs and then respond. Instead, do a complete search of all the possible jobs that you would like to win.
Start by going to the online sites. If you have a good presence on LinkedIn, try thyat. Also go to Indeed.com and Grassdoor.com.
Enter all the words that describe your skills and interests.If you’re a city planner, type words like planning, planner, geography, GIS, environment, housing, city, urban, parks, streetscape, urban village, transportation, transit, TOD, streetscape, neighborhood, and grassroots, to name a few.
Use only the terms that speak to your skills, experience, and values. You don’t want to apply for a job that would make you miserable. Don’t search “grassroots planner” if you hate community meetings; don’t search “GIS” or “quantitative” if you hate spending hours crunching data at your desk.
Save the job listings that might be interesting. The best approach, in my experience, is to bookmark the posts in a special folder called “Job Search.” (If you don’t know how, click here.)
When you have identified jobs that sound intriguing, look for the keywords in the ads. Write them down.
Compare attributes–and identify The One Thing
Now finding the right jobs is a simple matter of comparing your attributes with the job postings’ key words. Decide which jobs you might want to get. Take a job’s key words and figure out how you might want to pitch yourself.
Here’s where it gets tricky. If you’re applying for a professional job–even an entry-level job, after college or grad school–you probably have lots of interests and abilities. That’s great. But when you seek a job, you cannot list all those attributes in a cover letter. A cover letter has to be short.
Your cover letter should give the recipient a clear vision of the superpower you bring to the job. A Russian parable goes: “When you try to catch two rabbits, you don’t catch either.” If you use a cover letter to list all your attributes, you will fail to convey your essence–what makes you distinctive and special.
So identify the ONE Thing that you want the reader to see when considering your application. (For more on “The One Thing,” see this recent post.)
Do Not Just Restate the Resume
When you apply for a job, you almost always provide both a cover letter and resume. The cover letter offers a way to make a quick hello–and to distinguish yourself from the hundreds or even thousands of other candidates.
Many candidates are tempted to offer a complete summary of their careers. They list jobs, responsibilities, projects, and results. They often quote people praising them. Often–way too often–they use bullet lists to show the range of experiences and skills.
Some people use the cover letter to review the resume. That’s a mistake–usually a fatal mistake. Hirers can read your resume. If you have created a good, well-formatted resume, they can get a sense of your career, skills, and aspirations in a matter of seconds.
Don’t do that. That’s what a resume is for.
3. A Minimalist Approach?
The best advice you’ll ever get about writing comes from Polonius, a character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Polonius, the father of Laertes and Ophelia, says: “Since brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.”
Good idea. Keep it simple. Keep it short. But how?
I am writing in response to the opening for xxxx, which I believe may report to you.
I can offer you seven years of experience managing communications for top-tier xxxx firms, excellent project-management skills, and a great eye for detail, all of which should make me an ideal candidate for this opening.
I have attached my résumé for your review and would welcome the chance to speak with you sometime.
Best regards,
Xxxx Xxxx
That’s fine for a position that requires a simple list of attributes. It’s like advertising something by offering a simple recitation of attributes and benefits. That’s fine for many products–basic food and clothing, taxi fares, movies in a theater, meals in a diner, and so on. When you’re selling commodities–that is, goods and services that lots of people offer–this approach works just fine.
Maybe They Want To Know More
But maybe–just maybe–you are a unique person with just the right experience, skill set, and personality for the job. If that’s the case, you probably want to reveal more about who you are.
These days, most hirers want to understand your character. They want a sense of what you would be like working in their organization. The absolute requirement is that you can do the job–that you have the necessary skills and experience.
But they also want to know: Will you be bright and creative? Will you be an engaging and challenging colleague? Will you be creative? Will you identify solutions that others miss? Will you lead and follow well, depending on the circumstances?
They want to see you. They want to visualize what you will be like in the office, in meetings, working in teams, representing the organization outside the office. They want a sense of how you handle problems. Therefore, let me suggest another brief but more intimate strategy for writing a cover letter.
A More Revealing Cover Letter
You can write a cover letter that fits on one page and grabs the hirer. It’s a simple formula. Let’s get right to it.
Opening salutation
If you are writing to a specific person, say “Dear Mr. Gates” or “Dear Ms. Jones,” or “Dear Dr. Zhivago.” Don’t use first names. Show you respect them, first and foremost, as professionals.
If you don’t have a specific name, use a general title, like this: “Hiring Manager.” Since this is a business letter, use a colon rather than a comma.
Whatever you do, don’t say “Hi” or “Hey.”
Introduction
Referencing the resume, indicate how you could help the employer. Focus on the hirer’s needs. Indicate something about your spirit as well.
Do one–just one–of the following:
• Reveal one aspect of your biography: Say something about your background–something unique about your story that might matter to the hirer
Growing up in Silicon Valley, building computers and participating in coding competitions, I have always looked forward to a career in tech. At the same time, my family has always been active in environmental causes. So when I saw your position for a GIS expert or a major parks project, I knew I found my ideal job.
• Reveal one aspect of your values or approach: Hint at how your values and commitments have driven you to achieve.
To manage teams, I take a three-part approach: (1) Engage the professional on my staff. (2) Set big goals with intermediate goals that advance our cause every day (3) Provide regular feedback. This approach fits the job for project manager at Acme Consulting.
• Reveal one aspect of your results: Show how you have achieved something great, somewhere. Hint at how you can produce this kind of accomplishment to your new job.
Since taking over as interim marketing director, Acme Widgets Inc. has increased its B2B sales by 35 percent and its B2C sales by 20 percent. Now I would like to bring my skills and experiences in web marketing to your firm’s growing marketing department.
The goal here is to offer an enticing glimpse of your value as a colleague. Don’t go into detail in the intro. Just signal that you have something real–something tangible and concrete–to offer.
Avoid all abstraction. If you cannot see it, don’t write it. Don’t say you’re a problem solver; indicate a knotty problem you solved. Don’t claim to be a great bargainer; describe a bargain you struck. Don’t say you care about equity or grassroots participation; show yourself doing something to get people involved to get a fair shake.
Be specific. Paint a picture.
Your achievements/results
Now you can go into some depth on results you have achieved. Here’s where you can get narrative.
Set the stage by stating a specific time and place. Describe the problem. Then show how you made things better. Describe the specific actions you took. Describe a barrier (a deadline, resistance, a lack of resources, whatever). Then show how it all turned out.
Try something like this:
In the summer of 2017, I coordinated a community planning process at Bronx River Park that led to the adoption of a new master plan. Working with 12 community groups, I planned cleanups, evening concerts, and fundraisers. In three months, we got on the Bronx borough president’s agenda and got media attention to the area.
Once you have given your narrative–again, with as many visuals as possible–you can connect this experience with the job you seek:
I hope to bring this hands-on organizing work to your agency’s environmental advocacy work.
That’s all. paint a picture, then make the picture relevant.
Go deeper?
This is optional. If you have shown how you achieve results, you will get the hirer’s attention. But you may want to go deeper.
If so, isolate one quality that will bring great value to the company. Provide more fine-grained detail to show yourself at work, providing value for the organization. Something like this:
This kind of grassroots work, I think, has the potential to give greater credibility to the organizations work. When people feel part of a process, they are willing to speak up at community meetings and in local media. They also get friends and neighbors involved. It’s a win-win. We get their energy and support; they get connections to friends and neighbors.
Show how that work led to a great result for the company. maybe close with a quick statement of value.
Conclusion
Restate your interest, this time with something specific about how you see yourself contributing to the company. Convey your enthusiasm. Make them what to get to know you. Be friends, without being presumptuous. Like this:
Again, I am eager to explore ways I can help your organization. I hope we have a chance to talk soon. Thanks for your consideration.
That’s all it takes. No groveling or posturing. Just a simple statement of respect and interest.
Closing salutation
Be warm but professional. “Best regards” and “Sincerely” work. Avoid the overly stiff (“Sincerely”–too boilerplate) or overly familiar (“All my best”–ugh; they don’t even know you). Keep it simple. Then type and sign your name.
Other Considerations
• Know their world
In an informal way, show that you know and appreciate the employer’s work. Say something specific about their organization, its reputation, its uniqueness, etc. Speak as a colleague. Like this:
Having followed the park planning process in Queens in recent years, I know you have been a key player in raising funds and getting local experts (like architects, environmentalists, and educators) involved in the community. Your volunteer work after Superstorm Sandy was especially impressive. So I would be honored to join your team.
Show you are one of them, with your values and insight.
• Be Confident, Not Cocky
Some applicants get hesitant because they don’t think they have enough experience. They will make try to explain why their inexperience might be overlooked. They’ll say something like: “While I have only been working on GIS for a year, I have developed a strong working knowledge…”
Don’t do that. Don’t emphasize your limitations. Instead, emphasize the abilities that you do offer. Say something like this: “In my GIS work, I have analyzed the causes behind gentrification in big cities, identified possible sites for new housing construction, and analyzed the changing ecologies of coastal areas since 1980.”
The reader of that passage now has a way of imagining how you’ll fit in. If you can do these tasks, you can also do other tasks.
• The Question of Informality
We live in the age of informality. Students wear PJs to class. Adults wear baseball hats to the office. People style their hair like anime characters and decorate their flesh with tattoos. Professionals open letters with “Hey.”
I’m not going to pass judgment on this informality. But hirers will.
A hirer generally wants to see you at your best. They want to know that having you on staff will not require getting a babysitter. They want to know you’ll get dressed like a professional, show up on time, work hard on company time, avoid childish distractions, listen intently in conversations, and think before you speak.
The cover letter offers a hint–a minor hint, but the only evidence at first–about your overall seriousness and maturity.
So speak clearly and simply. Be direct. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t use “bro” lingo. Whatever you do, don’t be a smart ass. Don’t crack jokes, as if you’re old fraternity brothers at a reunion. Don’t gossip or make cracks about people. Don’t be self-deprecating.
Be a pro. Speak with simple assurance and professionalism.
• Make mass applications?
Don’t cut and paste your prose from an application for another job. Write each cover letter fresh. If you want someone to pay you the big bucks–and give you a desk and a computer–give them the courtesy of your complete attention when writing your cover letter.
One hiring manager complained: “Nothing gets a cover letter tossed in my trash faster than seeing another publication’s name in the ‘to’ field.” Oops.
• Proofing your letter
Don’t make grammatical mistakes or misspell words. Nothing says sloppiness more than avoidable mistakes. Fairly or not, the hirer will assume you’re as careless in your job as you are with your cover letter. Even if you’re seeking a job as a firefighter or engineer or cook, the hirer gets a bad vibe with dumb writing mistakes. It’s even worse if you’re seeking a desk job that requires attention to detail–as a graphic designer, say, or a coder.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Most of us only get one life to live. But Garrett Peck, a Washington-based historian, has had three. By day, he’s Corporate Man, working for a major telecommunications company. At nights, he’s an author. On weekends, he’s a D.C. tour guide.
Peck’s latest book, The Great War in America: World War I and Its Aftermath, explores the politics and social issues of America during the Great War. It’s a compelling read, full of drama and insights about a bygone age. Peck is an old-school historian. He does not want to overwhelm you with his theories and counterfactuals. He simply wants to recreate the past. In this age of “alternative facts,” his mission could not be more important.
I learned of Peck’s work while researching my own book on World War I. In the course of my work, I have devoured books on Woodrow Wilson, the war, America’s social conflicts during and after the war, and more. Peck’s is in the top tier.
Other books have a strong Washington focus. Titles include Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t (2011), The Potomac River: A History (2012), The Smithsonian Castle and The Seneca Quarry (2013), Capital Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in Washington, D.C. (2014), and Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America’s Great Poet (2015).
His own “just the facts, ma’am” modesty aside, Peck’s work often explores the contradictions inherent in social life. The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet (2009) explores the inherent contradictions of America’s brief ban on alcohol.
A native Californian, Peck serves on the board of the Woodrow Wilson House and is a member of the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of D.C.A U.S. Army veteran, he is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and George Washington University. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Charles Euchner: You are the rare writer who manages to keep a “day job” while also finding time to write ambitious books on important topics. How do you discipline yourself? When do you write? Do you have a big working outline, then work on one piece at a time?
Garrett Peck: I’m a workaholic. That’s closer to the truth than I should probably admit. I have a very busy day job at a large telecom company, and then I write nonfiction books on the side (seven books so far), which always require a tremendous amount of research. And then I’m also a part-time tour guide, which I fell into as a way of promoting my books but has taken on an enjoyable life of its own.
I’ve long told people who want to go into writing: “Don’t quit your day job.” Writing is a tough profession: it’s time consuming, the pay stinks, and you’re competing against all that free content online. Most books sell just a few thousand copies, and getting literary reviews is a challenge. A day job can provide you all kinds of benefits, like financial stability, health care, and retirement savings. And it bears reminding: there is no dignity in poverty.
Of course, my advice is completely hypocritical, as I’m quitting my day job (taking a management buyout) in March 2019. So then my avocation printed on my business card will really become true: Author. Historian. Tour Guide. (I have my mortgage paid off, so that’s how I can afford to leave Corporate America.) But seriously, folks: if you’re a writer, don’t quit your day job.
CE: Publishing is a tough racket. Book enthusiasts don’t always buy books. I know that I go to lots of book talks and don’t always buy.
GP: Whenever I give a book talk, I usually observe that about a third of an audience springs for your book. The others go home empty handed. This is a statistic that has held up since I published my first book in 2009 and hundreds of book events since. Again, you’re competing against “free,” whether that’s Wikipedia or someone checking your book out of the library. It makes it harder to earn a living as an author.
CE: Back to your advice about keeping the day job. It’s hard to keep a strong focus for a large project like a book.
GP: Having so many jobs and activities can really be distracting. That said, I’m pretty disciplined about writing. I try to get a little done every morning before the conference calls begin, and I usually dedicate Saturdays to writing, if I’m not out leading a tour. Fridays at work are usually pretty quiet, so I can a lot done then too. It’s key to schedule time when you can write – and then sit down and get to work. As Barbara Kingsolver has said, the muse has a terrible work ethic, and you’ll usually have to go on without her. Be disciplined about it. Books don’t write themselves.
CE: On top of it all, you’re a tour guide ….
GP: I love being a tour guide, by the way: you get to use your imagination to build a story and share a bit of history with like-minded people. Thus far I’ve developed about fifteen tours around the Washington, DC area (you can see them on my website, garrettpeck.com), and all of them I developed from my writing.
I daresay I get paid better as a tour guide than an author. Thus the paradox: writing a book enables me to create and lead a tour where I actually make the bulk of my living. Tour guiding also develops practical skills like leading a large group of people (“herding cats,” I call it), always knowing where the restrooms are (it’s the first question everyone asks), and using your inner diva to project your voice like an opera singer. Superstar!
CE: Most of your books are set in Washington. D.C., where you live and work. The classic advice for writers is to “write what you know.” But of course, that only goes so far. Most writers begin ignorant of their subjects–at least compared with what they need to know to produce a great book.
GP: Write what you know. I actually love that advice, as it holds true for most people. Or alternatively (as they say in sales): Sell the bananas on the cart. Only you know you, and you have a library of content and lifelong experiences inside of you.
I’m working on a book about Willa Cather and how she created Death Comes for the Archbishop. Now that was someone who wrote what she knew! Out of her dozen novels, half of them take place in frontier prairie towns. Although the town names change, every one of them was Red Cloud, Nebraska, the town she grew up in, and most of the fictional characters were actual people. She endlessly mined her childhood and her hometown.
On the other hand, your own experiences can only take you so far. You also need to do plenty of research into a topic, and commit the time to develop your ideas. As you see in sports, very few people are naturally gifted. Most successful people in sports have practiced, practiced, practiced their way to the top.
CE: How does your knowledge of D.C. shape your topics and research?
GP: I’ve lived here since 1994. I know and love a lot of the history – there’s always something new to uncover – but that’s just the starting point. Any nonfiction research project is going to require me to dive into the archives on a treasure hunt. It’s a fun experience. When you go down the rabbit hole of research, like Alice in Wonderland, you have no idea where you are going to come out. And that’s part of the adventure. It’s kind of a solitary activity, but it comes with many rewards, like the time I was going through C&O Canal Company records in the National Archives and randomly found a signed letter by Francis Scott Key, the Georgetown lawyer who wrote our national anthem. That was kind of cool.
CE: How would you describe your process of putting together big projects? Books require major investments of time and energy. Because of their large scale, they can get out of control. How do you manage it all?
GP: Imagine a book is like a giant dump truck that drops off a million bricks, whose driver tells you, “Here’s your house! Now go build it.” You have to start somewhere: a foundation.
I tend to research and write at the same time. That is, as I go through one source, I type up my notes and capture important ideas and quotes and put them into my draft manuscript. Pretty soon the content starts suggesting an outline for how to organize the material, and thus are born chapters and subsections. That tends to just flow naturally. (Look! I just split an infinitive. Sí, se puede! Yes, we can!)
When writing a big, big topic–like The Great War in America, which took me about four years to research and publish–you will collect far, far more material than you can actually use. So that’s where you have to be like Medea and kill your children. I make it easier on myself by asking: Does this material help answer the question I asked in the beginning, my thesis? If the answer is no, then it’s gotta go.
But don’t just delete the material: rather, cut-and-paste it into a new document. I call mine “Deleted Content,” and it’s there for you should you need to reference it. And that way you needn’t feel bad about removing something you worked hard on. You may get to use it for another project someday.
CE: Nonfiction writers have an advantage and a disadvantage: They can’t make things up. That forces us to do deep research, in order to piggyback off other people’s experiences and knowledge. The disadvantage is that when we run into a topic without any real records, we cannot make stuff up. We have to find clever ways to fill the gaps. What are your thoughts and approaches to these issues?
GP: Oooh, this is a bit of a philosophical question. I’m very much about the facts, which are even more important in this post-truth era. Cold, hard, provable facts. Yes, the truth can be discerned, and the facts are almost always out there. I have zero tolerance toward revisionism: making up a new story to suit your convenience. The current occupant of the White House loves doing this. Sorry to get political, but it’s true. He’s a fabulist and a chronic liar. And his lies are easy to fact-check.
But what happens if you have a few missing pieces of the puzzle? I think in that case that is okay to speculate the possible outcomes with your readers – as long as you make it crystal clear that you are speculating. You can come to reasonable conclusions about what directions the facts point toward, while also acknowledging that alternatives may exist.
As I said, though, don’t get into revisionism. That’s where you get to make up a whole new outcome that the facts don’t support. For example, many in the South think that the Confederacy might have won the Civil War if Stonewall Jackson had lived. That’s pure unsubstantiated conjecture (Jackson died in 1863 after the Battle of Chancellorsville, two years before the war ended). And could one general have made all that much of a difference? I kind of doubt it. The space-time continuum only goes in one direction, and you don’t get do-overs. So repeat after me: No historical revisionism. The facts must always trump lore, mythology, and speculation. Facts, not fictions.
CE: Have you always been a history buff? What history writers have inspired you? Do you model yourself off any great history authors? Or maybe even some fiction writers? If so, how? How would you describe your aspirations as a storyteller, explainer, and stylist?
GP: History has inspired me ever since I was a kid. In the summer before the fourth grade, my family took a driving vacation across the country from Sacramento to visit relatives in Minnesota. We stopped along the way at many historical sites, and was struck by their meaning, even at such a young age. Seeing a site is different than just reading about it in a book.
As a kid, I was blown away by Mount Rushmore and the four presidents’ faces carved there. But as an adult, I look at Mount Rushmore more skeptically and think, We blew up part of a mountain to build giant god-like statues of our favorite presidents?! Isn’t that idolatry? The Black Hills are holy to the Sioux Indians, and yet we went and turned it into a tourist trap. Your perspective changes as you get older and you realize the impact our actions have on other people. Such is the gift of self-reflection.
CE: Tell me something about your ambitions, style, and inspirations as a writer.
GP: My ambitions are to spend the rest of my days writing history books and leading tours, things I can concentrate on full time now that I’m leaving Corporate America. I’ll likely never be J. K. Rowling or Jonathan Franzen, or constantly have guest appearances on CNN like presidential historian Michael Beschloss. And that’s okay. But I can be successful in a small way if I can put food on the table, cover the basics (“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden), and find time to keep pursuing an avocation I just adore.
CE: Do you model yourself off any great history authors? Or maybe even some fiction writers? If so, how? How would you describe your aspirations as a storyteller, explainer, and stylist?
It’s funny, but I’ve never really studied the writing styles of different authors, nor compared them to my own. I have my own style, which is refined in part on where I got my professional start: writing magazine articles. Breezy, somewhat informal, yet informative.
I certainly have my favorite authors, largely because of their craft in telling stories. And trust me: whether you’re teaching a class, writing a book, or leading a tour, it is all storytelling. I’ve long appreciated James McPherson, the dean of Civil War historians, as well as historian David McCullough and his detailed histories and analysis.
From the fiction side of the house, I love how sparse Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway constructed their stories and even their sentences. They were so straightforward and to the point. Or how F. Scott Fitzgerald could stretch a metaphor into something beautiful and heartbreaking. I read Fitzgerald and think, if I could only write like him! But I’m not Fitzgerald. I’m me.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
In another post, I describe the importance of finding The One Idea for everything you write.
I have both succeeded and failed in this quest.
Success: Nobody Turn Me Around
About a decade ago I was in the midst of writing a book about the 1963 March on Washington. At the same time, I was maniacally studying the elements of writing. I devoured books and articles about the brain, learning, memory, storytelling, and writing mechanics. I looked for any and all insights that would give my book the drama that the subject demanded.
That’s when I first realized the importance of The One Thing. The brain, research shows, simply cannot manage more than one idea at a time. Sure, as research in the 1950s showed, people can remember a list of seven ideas or things. But that doesn’t mean they can do anything with those ideas. To really act in the world, people need to focus on one thing.
At all levels of my book, Nobody Turn Me Around (Beacon Press, 2010), I tried to identify The One Thing that should serve as a North Star for readers. Here’s what I came up with.
The book
The One Idea, driving everything else in this book, is this: The March on Washington was essential to hold together the disparate factions of the civil rights movement, at a time when support was fraying for the movements integrationist and nonviolent ideals–when President Kennedy’s civil rights bill offered an opportunity to create historic reform.
The book explores all kinds of issues, but they all relate to the need to hold the movement together.
This throughline animated every action of the movement’s organizers (Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, and others) and allies (Kennedy, congressional supporters, leading celebrities, ministers, organizers, and more). It also animated the opponents (like Strom Thurmond and other congressional segregationists, conservative intellectuals, the FBI, and others), who worked to divide the movement.
The parts of the book
The book had five parts, mirroring Aristotle’s narrative arc. Each section had One Idea:
1. Night Unto Day: In the wee hours of August 27, 1963, people made their final movements to the march. Dr. King prepared his speech, ignoring advisors’ counsel to avoid talking about a “dream.” Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin set the march’s goal: to put the movement’s bodies on the line to force Washington to act–and to do so nonviolently. Meanwhile, thousands streamed into the capital, with varied values and goals but a commitment to following the movement’s highest ideals and to ignore figures on right and left who would divide the movement. The One Idea: United, we stand.
2. Into the Day: As people arrive at the Mall, the systems are in place for a successful march. bayard Rustin successfully managed all the logistics, as did the Justice Department. The One Idea: Plan it right to avoid problems.
3. Congregation: As the March on Washington began, the movement’s far-flung members were on full display. They came from all walks of life, from all over the U.S. and beyond. They included rich and poor, intellectuals and laborers, blacks and everyone else, radical and moderate, Northerners and Southerners, religious and nonbelievers, believers in nonviolence and “any means necessary,” and more. The One Idea: There is unity in numbers and diversity.
4. Dream: After performances from musicians and speeches by notables, the afternoon program began. Each of the ten leaders of the March offered their own perspectives, from a faith-based confession of apathy (Matthew Ahmann) to a youthful cry of impatience (John Lewis) to a movement veteran’s call for reform (Roy Wilkins) to a labor leader’s warning about America’s world reputation (Walter Reuther) to an urbanist’s call for jobs and opportunity (Whitney Young) … to the transcendent call for a dream (Martin King). The One Idea: Civil rights is the underpinning of all progress.
5. Onward: At the end of the day, everyone returned home, determined to fight for civil rights in their communities, aware that that fight would be long and hard. The One Idea: Struggles require fighting hard, not just expressing grand ideals.
Each section has One Idea. Each of those ideas, in some way, supports the book’s One Idea.
Fragments in the book
Each of the parts comprises a number of smaller pieces–what I call “fragments,” vignettes and background information. Fragments range from a page and a half to nine pages. Each fragment advances the One Idea of the section, and therefore the One Idea of the book.
Let me mention a few examples–the sections that offer portraits of Phil Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King. Each brought an essential quality to the civil rights movement. Randolph insisted on mass demonstration. Rustin insisted on nonviolence. King understood that the movement had to be transformational, inspiring courage and commitment.
Those three forces–body, mind, and soul–were essential to pursue the movement’s long-term strategy. They were also essential to hold the movement together (the book’s One Idea).
Paragraphs and sentences in the book
Every paragraph and sentence also contains just One Idea also. This is important. All too often, writers treat the paragraph as simply a container for a bunch of ideas. In his book on writing, Steven Pinker actually argues that “there is no such thing as a paragraph.” When we break the text into paragraphs, Pinker says, we’re doing nothing more than providing “a visual bookmark that allows the reader to pause.”
But that’s not right. When you look at great writers, from Hemingway to McPhee, you see how they state and develop just one idea per paragraph. In my classes, I require students to label each paragraph with a “tabloid headline.” That way, they learn not to stray off course. If anything in the paragraph does not address the label, it’s gotta go.
I’ll offer just one paragraph from my book, about the writer James Baldwin, for illustration:
In all of his years in the U.S., Baldwin struggled to understand his own alienation. “It was in Paris when I realized what my problem was,” he told the New York Post. “I was ashamed of being a Negro. I finally realized that I would remain what I was to the end of my time and lost my shame. I awoke from my nightmare.” The whole race problem, Baldwin argued, required the same kind of rebirth nationwide. But he despaired that such a rebirth would not occur. Black communities from Harlem to Watts were committing slow suicide with violence, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and alienation from schools and jobs.
My tabloid headline for this paragraph would be “Alienation of All” or “Split Souls” or some such. By the way, that paragraph speaks to the One Idea of the book, its section, and its fragment.
Think of each One Idea as part of a Russian nesting doll. The One Idea of the whole piece contains The One Idea of all its smaller parts.
Failure: Little League, Big Dreams
I didn’t fully understand The One Idea when I write a previous book about the Little League World Series.
Originally, I hoped to present the drama of the LLWS the way the documentary Spellbound presented the National Spelling Bee. I wanted to show different contestants prepare and then advance through many rounds until the drama of the final competition.
And so I tracked the monthlong Little League tournaments, from districts to states to regions to the final tournament in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Along the way, I found some great stories and explored some fascinating issues. When it was over, I spent time in the hometowns of the two finalists in Ewa City, Hawaii, and Willemstad, Curacao. I learned lots more.
Then I started writing. I liked what I wrote, mostly anyway, but it lacked the power and drama. The deadline approached and I turned in a draft. My editor liked it. We debated titles. We settled on Little League, Big Dreams. I didn’t like the title; it seemed too mushy and too upbeat for the story I wrote. But the publisher gets the final call on titles. So we passed the manuscript to a line editor.
Then I had a eureka moment. I realized that one word captured the essence of the book. I called my editor. “Can I have more time?” I said. “I figured out what it’s about–hustling.” The book was about the kids’ hustling, their dedication and earnestness, their willingness to work hard for something. But it was also about a more negative form of hustling–coaches manipulating rules, driving kids too hard, helicoptering and bullying parents, Napoleons who run the local leagues, pressure from sponsors, the glaring spotlight of TV. I wanted to give the book a simple title–Hustle or Hustling–and realign the text to tell that story. It would have taken just a week.
The answer was no. “We’re too far into this,” he said. “Sorry.”
Without The One Idea, the book was a mishmash. One reviewer said it was like a long Sports Illustrated article, not a book. She was right. Books gain their power when they state and develop One Idea, with a variety of stories and exposition.
If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.
–Russian proverb
In projects small and large–everything from an email to a book–we often struggle to develop and state a clear point. Too often, we spit out a mess of ideas rather than deliver a clear message. The result is confusion–for both the writer and the reader.
To think this problem through, I recommend a business book by Gary Keller called The One Thing. The answer for all business problems, Keller argues, is to be clear on a simple question: What’s “The One Thing” that matters most for your business? The same principle holds for writing. To write well–clearly, with energy and creativity–you need to know what is “The One Idea” that you want to convey to your readers.
Keller is the founder and CEO of Keller Williams, a real estate company that beats the worldwide competition on all the key measures, like the number of agents, the sales volume, and the number of units sold. He is, in other words, a salesman, and good salespeople understand communications. They know how to approach a prospect, how to connect, and how to close. Their knowledge, properly understood, can be applied to any challenge involving communications and relationships.
It’s worth quoting Keller:
People can actually do two or more things at once, such as walk, talk, or chew gum and read a map; but, like computers, what we can’t do is focus on two things at once. Our attention bounces back and forth. This is fine for computers, but it has serious repercussions in humans. Two airliners are cleared to land on the same runway. The patient is given the wrong medicine. A toddler is left unattended in the bathtub. What all these potential tragedies share is that people are trying to do too many things at once and forget to do something they should do.
When you try to do two things, one or both suffer from inadequate attention. But when you figure out The One Idea, magic happens.
When you have a definite purpose for your life, clarity comes faster, which leads to more conviction in your direction, which usually leads to faster decisions. When you make faster decisions, you’ll often be the one who makes the fastest decisions and winds up with the best choices. And when you have the best choices, you have the opportunity for the best experiences.
The single greatest challenge in life–in all endeavors–is to decide “The One Thing.” If you’re a business, what’s The One Thing you offer that your competition does not?
The ‘One Thing’ for Books
Keller’s book The One Thing is, naturally, proof of his thesis. His book focuses on a single idea–namely, that success requires a total, fanatical dedication to one single approach to your challenge.
After reading Keller’s book, I surveyed my shelves to see what other books focused on just one idea. Here are ten seminal books that state and develop just one idea:
• Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: All people and organizations face a simple choice when they don’t like how things are going in their organization: leave, speak out, or stick around.
• Peter Thiel, From Zero to One: To succeed in business, find a product or service that no one now offers (zero) and become the single, dominant provider (one).
• Konstantin Stanislavski, The Actor Prepares: To portray a character, feel what you would feel if you were in that situation.
• Greg Albert, The Simple Secret to Better Painting: To produce engaging art, put key elements off-center.
• Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: Companies can fail when they do everything right. As they refine their production process, they can lose control of their business by farming out parts of their production process.
• Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies: The real divide in politics and policy concerns people’s attitude to change. Dynamists love change and seek to play a part in making it happen. Stasists fear change and fight it at every step.
• Karl Marx, Capital: Everything in market economies turns on the battle over “surplus value”–its creation and distribution–and that battle is inherently expansionist and unstable.
• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty: All political arrangements should be subjected to a single question: What arrangements produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number? Over the long haul, the greatest happiness requires guaranteeing the widest possible freedom for individuals (something known as “rule utilitarianism”).
• James David Barber, The Presidential Character: All presidents (and all leaders?) can be assessed by two dimensions–their levels of energy and affect.
• Arthur Schesinger Jr., The Cycles of American Politics: American politics moves, back and forth, from periods of government expansion and reform to periods of government contraction and conservatism.
I could list 50 more books, but you get the idea. In each of these works, the author states and develops just one idea. The book’s idea, though, is so powerful that it requires us to look at it from a number of different angles, the way a jeweler examines a diamond.
Identify The One Idea for All Levels of Writing
Identifying The One Idea is essential not just for books, but for everything you write.
For every email, letter, memo, report, proposal, query, RFP, web copy, speech, presentation, make sure you can name The One Idea you want to discuss.
Sometimes, when I teach this idea, I get pushback. Strangely, the pushback comes most intensely on smaller pieces, like emails and memos. “Do you really want me to send two emails just because I talk about two issues,” business people ask.
“Yes,” I respond.
Let me explain.
Whenever you communicate, you need to make sure your audience knows exactly what you want to accomplish. Confusion at any point will create a long string of confusion. Confusion results when one idea gets mixed with other ideas.
Suppose you send an email about two issues in your company–like whether to spend X dollars on a new web consultant and what strategy to take on the Y campaign. You’re sure about X but uncertain about Y; meanwhile, a colleague is uncertain about X but sure about Y; another is sure about both; yet another is uncertain about both.
Inevitably, the conversation gets tangled and confused. When you zap ideas back and forth, people are talking about both … or are they? (Cue Hitchcock’s Psycho music here.) As both conversations continue, people aren’t always sure what they’re talking about. Some discuss X, others Y, and others both; meanwhile, others drop out. The conversation gets vague and muddied–or, worse, a few know-it-alls take over. Meanwhile, the string of missives fills the email queue. Unless you settle both issues, the emails keep coming.
If you send one email on one issue you can isolate the issue till it gets settled. The issues are always clear. You don’t lost in a thicket of confusing messages about many topics. You focus wholly on one topic that can be settled, one way or another.
The One Idea, of course, can contain several sub-issues. But those sub-issues should relate to The One Idea. You can’t veer off to other topics. Otherwise, you create uncertainty and confusion: “Hold it–I thought we were talking about X. How did Y get into the conversation?”
When people get confused, they often drop out. You hoped to “save time” by knocking off two ideas–two rabbits–at the same time. But now you don’t know the status of either.
When your pieces have The One Idea, everyone gets on the same page. You always know the topic of discussion. You always know the issues, the pros and cons, and the to-do list. You know when the issue gets settled–and when it still needs attention.
How to Do It: Gather, Sort, Apply
So how do you find The One Thing for your writing? And how do you respond when readers say they want a bunch of things? Take it in stages.
First, gather lots of material. Start by brainstorming what you already know. Get it all down on a single piece of paper, so you can see it all at once. Look at that sheet. Draw lines and arrows showing relationships.
Once you have a picture of your current mind, figure out what’s missing. The extent of your research depends on your topic and the scale of your project. Do research. Talk to people. Google the topic. Search databases online. Go to the library. Dig into archives. Do surveys or experiments. Analyze data.
Second, sort your ideas. Let the ideas play out. Don’t rush. When you rush, you have a tendency to force your preconceived ideas on yourself.
As you sort your material, write down possibilities for The One Idea. You should have lots of candidates for most of your project. You will think X is your One Idea. Then you’ll think it’s Y. Then you’ll think it’s Z. That’s OK. It’s important to consider a range of possibilities. You’ll only find your One Idea if you have considered–seriously–lots of ideas.
Third, discover and apply your One Idea. See if you can organize the different level of your piece to The One Idea. If something doesn’t fit, ask why. It might be that you’re wandering off topic. Or it might mean that you have not sharpened your One Idea well enough. Continue to play with your ideas.
Often you cannot discover The One Idea until you’ve been struggling a long time. That’s fine. This is a process; it’s not flipping a switch. Once you get The One Idea, you can use it to restructure and sharpen your points. All the work–all the research, all the debate, all the confusion–will be worth it because you’ll produce a piece with total clarity.
Push for the One Idea
So my advice to you: Push yourself to identify the One Idea. Whatever you’re writing–an email or a report, an article or a book, a speech or web copy, and RFP or a proposal–make sure you have One Idea.
The football great John Madden insisted that only one quarterback can lead a team. When two QBs share duties, you lose. “When you have two,” he said, “you have none.”
Sometimes it takes a long time. Usually, you change your mind as you proceed through research to rewriting to rewriting to editing. That’s OK. But when you get it right, it will give meaning and unity to everything in the piece.
(Oh, by the way. Did this essay state and develop just One Idea?)
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Every great story contains a bunch of basic elements–complex characaters who offer glimpses into the variety of human motivation, action that reveals motivation and conflict, details that offer glimpses that most readers would miss, and more.
To many, the setting offers the container of characters and action. To others, the setting is like an all-present “extra,” which affects the story as much as any character or conflict.
The best advice I ever got on setting came from Mark Kramer, the gifted author and former curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. The trick, he said, is to set the action in “small, knowable” spaces.
Sitcoms succeed when they do just that. Think of the TV-oriented living room in All in the Family or the art/antique-oriented living room of Cosby. Think of the regional branch of Dunder-Mifflin in The Office. Think of the snazzy swingles apartment in Friends. You get the idea.
The Advantages of Small, Knowable Places
Small, knowable places offer a number of advantages for description:
‘Put Three People in a Room’: The filmmaker Martin Scorsese was once asked for advice on how to write a good scene. His answer: “Put three people in a room.” When you put two or three people in a limited space, you can see their dynamics without complication.
Three people might include two characters plus the knowledge of a third character or issue. In Thomas’s Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs, for example, Hannibal Lecter confronts Clarice Sterling with her demons. The setting is Hannibal’s jail cell and the area just outside the cell. The cell contains spare, bolted-down furniture. On the walls are Hannibal’s detailed drawings of European scenes, done in charcoal and crayon. Outside the cell is Clarice and a chair. The cell’s bars separate the two, but the bars seem to disappear as Hannibal baits Clarice about her tragedies and fears.
Contain the Story to Prevent Narrative Sprawl: The storyteller’s ultimate job is the same as a magician’s–to direct the attention of the audience. The storyteller and magician both say, in effect: “Look here, not there.”
The best way to say “here, not there” is to keep “there” out of the picture. So zoom in on the small place and moments that you want to audience to see. Keep the other stuff offstage.
Focusing on “here, not there” can also ratchet the tension. Consider Stephen King’s creepy novel and film Misery. The first tense moment comes when Paul Sheldon drives off the road in the middle of a snowstorm. We see him, alone in his car, and wonder: Will anyone rescue him? Being stuck in that car with Paul–“here, not there”–gets our minds racing about what’s happening out there.
The answer finally comes in the person of Annie Wilkes, a psychopathic fan who takes him home. The bed where Annie puts Paul will be the “small, knowable space” for most of the book. The tension rises as we realize Annie’s sick obsessions. All the time, we wonder: Will anyone figure out that Paul’s missing? Will anyone come knocking on Annie’s door? When that time comes … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you.
Avoiding Distractions: In a small space, the focus is on the characters and their struggle. You can’t get distracted when you place two or three charactersm in a room and have them interact.
Avoiding distractions is especially important when people have their “come to Jesus” moments–when they have to make hard decisions about their values and behavior. It’s hard to make decisions when you;re surrounded by a clamor of competing demands. How many times have you faced a tough call and had to go to a quiet place to focus on the decision?
Give your character a small, knowlable space to act, speak, listen, hesitate, and debate, without distractions. You will be amazed how much it supercharges the other scenes in the story.
Showing the Character Struggle Against Limits: In a small place, you can show the characters struggling against their limits. Most people’s limits are psychological, and a small place provides a great way to isolate those limits.
Imagine, for example, someone getting news of a great tragedy in a small place, like an office. How does she react? First, she has to absorb the news. To gain privacy, she closes the blinds that separate her office from the rest of the workplace. Then zoom in and capture her emotions. Her only connection to the outside world is her phone, so you can focus on how she decides whether to call someone. Finally, you can show her getting ready to leave. Does she try to pull herself together, to pretend nothing’s wrong when she walks through the office door?
We can pay close attention to the character when she’s in a limited space. We don’t get distracted by other people or by the swirl of activity nearby.
Symbolizing Some Larger Aspect of the Story: Small spaces are often rich with clues about someone’s character. On the wall are pictures and mementos from the past, indicators of friends, family, jobs, hobbies. Some artifacts are purposeful–that is, the owner of the space put them there for comfort or inspiration, as well as their usefulness. Other artifacts are accidental leftovers–that is, the owner of the space did not think much about them, but they still reveal the character’s habits and ways of life.
A small space reveals loads about the values and desires of the characters. People inhabit their small spaces differently. Some decorate it, some don’t. Some are elegant, some aren’t. Some display their allegiances (like a school or company or team), some don’t. Show show off their knowledge (with jammed bookshelves) and others their wealth (expensive art and furniture).
Revealing Contrasts Between Characters: In a small space, you can emphasize the contrasts between characters. In a larger space, the characters can look the same. In a larger space, with lots of characters, we see those characters as abstractions. But when we get close up, we see them as one-of-a-kind individuals.
When you see a crowd coming in or out of a subway, everyone looks the same–especially from a distance. It’s just one big mass of humanity. Then when you get inside the train, you can pause and look around. You notice how different everyone is–the Wall Street trader, the tattooed student, the dolled-up department store clerk, the kids on their way to school, the construction workers, and so on. The small space–and the way it suspends time–gives you a chance to look closely.
Revealing Contrasts Inside and Outside the Small, Knowable Place: People act differently depending on the location. A man acts differently in the small, knowable space of his home than in the small, knowable space of his office or club or parents’ home. We can see these people’s different “sides” in bold relief when we put them in different places.
Contrasts, by the way, lie at the very core of great stories. In every great story, characters struggle to reconcile the different demands placed by their different worlds. At home, a parent needs to care for partners and kids; in the neighborhood, she needs to develop networks of friends and helpers; in the office, she needs to work efficiently and professionally, with a minimum (usually) of intimacy. And so on. Place not only reveals character; it also shapes character.
Creating an Extra Character in the Story: In a sense, the setting is the “extra” character of your story, creating possibilities and barriers, just like the flesh-and-blood characters. We see this in sports all the time. Classic venues like Fenway Park (home of the Red Sox) or Bryant-Denny Stadium (home of the Crimson Tide) are packed with attentive, fervent, and loud fans. Some venues give their teams a real home field advantage.
When I lived in Boston, I went to Red Sox games all the time. The atmosphere was electric, even in a mid-season game where the Sox were losing 7-2. If a Sox player got a hit, the crowd would come to life. Two or three hits and the place had a World Series atmosphere. Sox players fed off the energy. Home gives almost everyone an edge. From 1871 to 2015, teams did better at home in all but one year. The advantage is even greater in basketball, where refs making tough calls get swayed by the crowds.
All this raises a question: How can we find the right small space to focus our action. To begin, let’s look at one of the greatest TV series ever–AMC’s Mad Men.
Case Study: The Elevator in Mad Men
Mad Men set 59 scenes in elevators in the first 85 episodes. Why? Well, for starters, it’s hard to find a cheaper set. Also, elevators offer terrific transitional spaces; people come and go, introducing or concluding scenes, in elevators. Elevators are public places–but when the door closes, they can turn in to private spaces.
But also, as Mark Kramer pointed out, elevators clear away all the distractions so you can focus on the characters, conflicts, and tension. “It’s the simplest of sets,” the Journal‘s John Jurgensen writes.
Two of the great Mad Men scenes focus on the status of women in 1960s America.
The first scene of the whole series features Peggy, a young woman from Brooklyn headed to her first day of work at Sterling Cooper. She stands, stiffly, as three men leer and cackle. “Can you take the long way up?” one tells the black elevator operator. “I am really enjoying the view here.” It’s a perfect preview of the show’s examination of the system of class and power in 1960. This simple scene also introduces us to the characters we will see developed over the next several years. We get a good glimpse at their characters–and their room for growth–right away.
The longest ride comes when Don and his former mistress stand together, silently, for 43 seconds in Season 6. Without a word, the two contemplate their failed relationship–and the audience contemplates everything that came before. It was a perfect coda to the story. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner says: “I made sure that I had built enough time into the episode that I could let this thing play out to its excruciating end.”
An even better scene comes in “The Beautiful Girls,” from the fourth season. In that episode, Don’s daughter Sally arrives unannounced at the firm, where Don’s secretary Megan comforts her; Peggy meets a Village Voice journalist named Abe, who insults her in a discussion of woman’s place in society; Joan learns that her husband is being sent off to Vietnam, then has a tryst with Roger (which will produce a child) after getting mugged in an alley; Don’s affair with Faye reveals the splits in their personal and professional lives; and, for good measure, the matronly secretary Miss Blankenship dies at her desk.
What better way to cap the scene than to show the convergence of the three main survivors–Joan, Peggy, and Faye–standing in the elevator, silently, after an exhausting day?
These few moments allow us to absorb the whirlwind of activity that happened before. The scene also symbolizes how women–and all of us–are “alone together” to face life’s challenges.
Other Great Small, Knowable Places
So what kinds of places are small enough to contain the story, without distractions, while also conveying the values of the characters and society?
Let’s consider a half-dozen examples from literature:
The ship in Homer’s The Odyssey: At the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus began his long journey home to Ithaca. Odysseus and his crew get off the boat, from time to time. But the ship centers the story.
My favorite scene occurs when the ship approaches the Sirens. It poses a life-or-death challenge. On the one hand, Odysseus wants to hear the transcendent voices of the Sirens. On the other hand, if he listens to the Sirens, he will get seduced and chase them, abandoning his men. At the advice of Circe, Odysseus followes a clever solution. He will have his men lash him to the mast so he can listen without the danger of leaving; meanwhile, his men will fill their ears with wax and pilot the ship beyond the Sirens.
The raft in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn: This is the ultimate modern road trip. Huck and Jim escape the constraints of their hope to find adventure on the Mississippi River. Huck and Jim confront numerous dangers along the way–pirates, bounty hunters, weather–but also get to know each other. Huck deepens his appreciation for Jim as a full human being. Quiet time on the raft, freedom from the noise of “sivilization,” allow Huck to get to know his companion.
“There warn’t no home like a raft, after all,” Huck says. “Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” The raft gives them freedom–but freedom of a certain sort. Huck and Jim can barely steer the raft. The currents of the river take charge. That’s a profound lesson in a world where “sivilization” tries to control every thought and movement.
The boat in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: Santiago is a pathetic old man with the story begins. After going 84 days without catching a fish, he is considered “salao” by the townspeople. The boy is banned by her family from joining the old man. Then Santiago catches a great marlin and the struggle begins. After three days of struggle, Santiago develops a bond with the fish. But he finally hauls him in and straps it to the side of the boat. Now he must fight off the sharks who smell the marlin’s blood.
Hell in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit: No story does such a great job containing a world of emotions in a such small, knowable place. That small space is Hell, and it focuses all the action and dialogue on the characters and their inner lives. Could Sartre have used a larger, sprawling setting? Could he have shown the characters before their death and assignment to Hell? Could he have shown the moments in their lives when they earned eternal damnation?
In this spare place, even the smallest details standout–like the bare lightbulb, which is always on, preventing the three characters from getting decent sleep or escaping the others’ gazes. Such a detail would have gotten lost in a more complex space. But here, it stands out and reveals much about the characters and their situation.
Maybe. But Sartre’s purpose was to reveal the characters–and, especially, his point that “Hell is other people.”
The motorcycle in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Management: Over 17 days, the author traveled by motorcycle from Minnesota to California. The time on the bike allowed him the opoirtunity to take in lots of sites and to muse philosophically. The bike both contains the story and allows contact with the outside, as Pirsig explains:
In a car you’re always in a compartment. … You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.
The bike is also an artifact, an object worthy of attention. The bike must be maintained. When something breaks, Pirsig has to fix it. That requires skill. So is it hard? “Not if you have the right attitudes. It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard.” That’s the ultimate lesson of this story of a man, his son, and their bikes.
The room in Emma Donaghue’s Room: A woman is held captive in a small room by a kidnapper, where she raises her young boy. To protect her son from the loss of innocence, she pretends the room is a wonderland. Together, mother and son watch the seasons come and go from a small window. They watch TV and read stories. This isolation is cruel but the mother uses it as an opportunity to love and teach her child.
The room offers a fresh perspective on the comings and goings of ordinary life.
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. … I don’t know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. … I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there’s only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.
To avoid your story getting spread around, like butter, concentrate the action in small, knowable spaces.
How Do You Decide on Your Small, Knowable Place?
So what kinds of places are small enough to contain the story, without distractions, while also conveying the values of the characters and society? The limits are endless:
• A room, any room, in a house or apartment.
• A bench or other contained space in an open area, like a park or a plaza.
• An office–especially a small corner or nook.
• A locker room for a sports team.
• A deserted island.
• A classroom, lunchroom, or detention room of a school.
You get the idea. Any place is OK as long as it’s small and contained. And when you have a huge place–think, for example, of the Grand Canyon–be sure to zoom in on a small piece of that space. From that perch, you can contemplate bigger things. Danny Glover explains this idea (in a small space, by the way) to Kevin Kline in the film Grand Canyon.
To contemplate big ideas, then, locate yourself in a small space. Use that small space as a perch, a place to get intimate.
The Ultimate Benefit: Plot Your Story With Small, Knowable Places
So what kinds of places are small enough to contain the story, without distractions, while also conveying the values of the characters and society?
Alfred Hitchcock, cinema’s master of suspense, sometimes plotted his films by first describing places. Once he identified the locales, he developed characters and storylines to fit those places. Hitch explains:
Of course, this is quite the wrong thing to do. But here’s an idea: select the background first, then the action. It might be a race or might be anything at all. Sometimes I select a dozen different events and shape them into a plot. Finally—and this is just the opposite of what is usually done—select your character to motivate the whole of the above.
Hitchcock built The Man Who Knew Too Much this way:
I would like to do a film that starts in the winter sporting season. I would like to come to the East End of London. I would like to go to a chapel and to a symphony concert at the Albert Hall in London.
Once he had a setting, Hitchcock figured out which characters belonged and what they would do in that setting.
Whether or not you use Hitchcock’s approach, survey all the possible scenes as you develop your story. If you write about sports, consider the stadium, practice fields, locker rooms, bars, and after-hours nightclubs. If you write about the civil rights movement, start with the streets, lunch counters, churches, schools, and jails. If you write the life of a high school, think about classrooms, corridors and stairwells, pizza joints and Saturday night party spots.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Writing involves more than writing. In fact, writing is a vanity project unless you can get someone to pay you to publish your work.
As much as anyone in this 24/7, always-on, don’t-leave-your-phone-behind world, editors are overworked. They work through piles of ideas from hopeful writers. Most of them are bad, impractical, boring, impractical, tone deaf, and [insert flaw here]. As a writer, you need to stand out from this dreck. You need to be the bright spot in the editor’s day.
Here’s the lesson in a nutshell: Like readers, editors respond when they find a story or an idea that they simply can’t put down. They want to find something fresh, active and alive, provocative, counterintuitive.
So let’s talk about how to brighten your editor’s day. Let’s talk about creating a kick-ass pitch letter.
The Story’s the Thing
You have to hook the reader with your story, especially with the main characters and their dilemmas, struggles, and inner turmoil. Readers need a stake in the writing. They need a rooting interest. The more you give editors that, the better your chance to sell your article or book.
People buy fiction (and often nonfiction too) on the basis of whether you can hook them in the first paragraph. So don’t waste any time with pointless introductions. Get right to the business of seducing your reader. Show how it’s done. Show the editor you’re pitching that you are the writing equivalent of a pickup artist.
So how do you hook and intrigue the reader in your pitch letter? Before exploring that, let’s set up a quick case study.
A Case Study: The Parable of the Prodigal Son
Let’s pretend we want to write an article or a book about the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Jesus tells this tale to teach about human nature–about the power of love, the inevitability of mistakes, about learning and forgiveness, about jealousy and grace, and so much more. (If you want a great book-length treatment of this parable, see Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son.)
Here’s an abbreviated version of the story from the Bible (Luke 15: 1-32):
A man had two sons: an older, responsible one and a younger, more adventurous one. The younger one said, “Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me.” When the father gave him his inheritance, he journeyed to a far country.
The younger son then wasted his inheritance with riotous living. Then a famine devastated the land. To survive, the younger son got a job feeding swine. Tired and wasted, he would happily eat the husks he fed the swine. He decided to return home to apologize and beg for a job.
When his father saw him approaching, he ran and embraced him. “Father, I have sinned against heaven,” the younger son said, “and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”
But the father said to his servants, “Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” And they began to be merry.
When the elder son grew jealous and angry, his father came out and begged him to join the party. The older son recounted his many years of loyalty and hard work. Hurt, he said: “You never gave me a party. But as soon as your younger son came, you killed for him the fatted calf.”
The father told him: “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”
Now, suppose you wanted to pitch this story to an editor? What might that look like?
The Pitch Letter in Five Parts
You should be able to pitch this story–as an article or a book or even TV series–in a one-page letter. The trick is to excite the reader. Hook reader in right away with a scene, then explain how this scene fits into a larger story, and then provide some practical ideas for the project. Let’s explore it, step by step.
1. Introduction: Let Me Introduce Myself
Open, with the briefest hello that says something about the story. Introduce yourself if you must. But wrap that introduction into the first part of your pitch.
For the Prodigal Son, the intro might go like this:
“I write to you about my 74,000-word novel, The Deplorable Returns, a tale that reveals the major motivations of human beings–their fall from grace and their road to redemption.
Avoid talking about yourself. There’s plenty of time to do that if you intrigue the reader with your story.
2. You Are There
Next, give the reader a gripping scene. This is your opportunity to show off your best storytelling. Zoom into the story at a tense moment. Show the dilemma of the characters in their bodies, movements, tentativeness, halting words, and so on.
If you were selling the prodigal son story, you might open with the moment when the father’s joy intersects with the “good” son’s anger and confusion and the prodigal son’s hope. Zoom in and get physical. It might go like this:
After years of whoring and drinking in a distant land, a young man runs out of money and is humiliated doing menial work. Humbled, he decides to come home to beg his father for a laboring job. He doesn’t expect much. After all, when he left home, he rejected everything his father stood for. Surprisingly, his father embraces him when he gets home and calls for a party. All is well. Or is it? The older brother, who has been righteous, now feels slighted. He sulks and complains that his father is playing favorites.
In this narrative, move back and forth from positive to negative notes: Something good happened … then something bad … then hopeful … then scary … then uplifting … then deflating … And so on.
The prodigal son pitch could take another angle. We could have shown the drama of the son leaving home. We could have zoomed in on his dissolute living abroad. We could zoom in on the older son, following the rules and honoring his father but full of anger and resentment. We could show a scene of the sons fighting, and then zoom out to reveal their father and the story before the younger son’s return.
Pick the scene that best brings your reader into the drama you want to convey. Make it a real sample of the kind of writing you want to do.
Whatever scene you choose, let the reader get close to the moment. Show specific people doing specific things, with hopeful and then catastrophic consequences that force people to face the truth. Be totally visual. Get the reader’s mind racing. Get gritty as hell. Do that for, oh say, 40-50 words.
3. Here’s the Bigger Picture
Then step back and ask, in essence, How did we get here and where are we going? Provide a broader context. This broader context will help the reader to imagine the whole story–without your detailing it so much that the suspense is ruined. The followup paragraph might look like this:
This scene was just part of a larger filial drama. As the story opens, we see the father and his sons laboring at the farm. The father teaches his sons the virtues of good living. But sometimes those lessons require failure–venturing out into the world, making mistakes, learning from mistakes, and deciding to make amends. That setup leads to the homecoming. What follows is even more dramatic.
And so on. You get the idea. After giving the reader a dramatic moment, step back and put it into context. Then hint at larger dramas and lessons.
4. Why You–and Everything Else–Should Care
Now say something about your project and concept. You might mention the genre, how the project came along, or how it says something that modern readers would appreciate. As a prompt, consider starting with a reference to the present moment.
The Deplorable Returns offers an intimate look at a modern dilemma of families and communities everywhere. The story explores all three corners of the family drama–the importance of a strong parent who can teach their children but also allow them to make mistakes and learn; the value of duty and loyalty, as well as the potential for those virtues to breed resentment; and the necessity of adventure, mistakes, and redemption.
And so on.
5. So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu
Quickly–before you lose momentum from your dynamic narrative–wrap up. Write one or two sentences about why this could be B-I-G. Again, for the prodigal son parable, you might close like this:
This story offers a timeless drama of failure, redemption, hope, and forgiveness. I would love to explore more details about the story, my plan to research and write it, and how it might fit in your publications. Might you be interested?
Congrats! You’re finished. Or are you?
Other Tips for a Winning Pitch Letter
• Read it aloud: Read your draft aloud. Read it fast and read it slowly. Read it backward, paragraph by paragraph. When you read it, break it up by phrases. Emphasize the nouns one time and the verbs another time.
• Simplify, simplify, simplify. When we summarize something big and complex, we tend to pack too much information. We jam ideas into our paragraphs like sardines into tins. Don’t! Do not make the reader track back to figure out who’s who, whats’ what, and where’s where. Introduce people and dilemmas slowly; let then u-n-f-o-l-d.
• Put everything into action. Show action to show the character doing something specific. Put something in the character’s hands. Show something happening nearby. Catch the character switching his attention and actions.
• Avoid boastful or tentative language. Yes, we know you’re the perfect person for the project. But don’t boast. Let your writing and record tell the story. At the same time, don’t be defensive. I know someone who mentioned that he had a “professional editor” read his manuscript. Ouch. That made him look tentative and defensiveness. (He shouldn’t be. He’s brilliant.) Let your ideas and storytelling prowess win the day.
• What about the “high concept”? Some publishers love the “high concept” idea–that is, the unique angle that cracks open a complex or overly familiar topic. You might know about The View from Flyover Country, by Sarah Kendzior; A History of the World in Ten Cocktails, by Wayne Curtis; or The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Curtis. These books provide unique overviews by taking a unique, usually neglected perspective. Better than that is …
• The ONE Idea: Try to build your book or article–and therefore, your pitch–around a single idea. Sure, you can explore more than that single idea–but do it with reference to the big, driving idea. Think of these classics: A.O.Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty; Peter Theil’s FromZero to One; and, of course, Gary Keller’s The ONE Thing. Each states a simple concept, then looks at it from different angles, like a jeweler looks at a gem.
That’s you–offering an editor, not to mention that editor’s readers–a gem.
When you watch a great period television show or movie, it’s always fun to see the artifacts that help to revive bygone periods in history.
Every prop reveals something about the characters, their community and culture.
Artifacts being us into a particular time and place. The objects say something about the values of the characters. Holding a Wall Street Journal signals something different than a New York Post. Putting a glass on a doily reveals something different than putting it on a piece of mail. Chopping vegetables with gleaming knives on a butcher-block cutting board says something different than dumping a can of Hormel chili into a pan on the stove.
Props also provide something for the characters to use; they give us an excuse for action. Let’s call this the Party Rule. When people go to parties, they need something to hold. My parents propped cigarettes between forefinger and ring finger as they gesticulated at parties in the 1950s and 1960s. College students hold Solo plastic cups of beer at frat parties. Millennials always hold smartphones.
Whatever your story, use artifacts to reveal everyday life–and to give your characters something to keep their hands occupied.
Look at this passage from “Fun With a Stranger,” a short story by Richard Yates:
Miss Snell kept a big, shapeless old eraser on her desk, and she seemed very proud of it. “This is my eraser,” she would say, shaking it at the class. “I’ve had this eraser for five years. Five years.” (And this was not hard to believe, for the eraser looked as old and gray and worn-down as the hand that brandished it.) “I’ve never played with it because it’s not a toy. I’ve never chewed it because it’s not good to eat. And I’ve never lost it because I’m not foolish and I’m not careless. I need this eraser for my work and I’ve taken good care of it.
A simple object—a key prop in a classroom, a small knowable place—offers instant insight into a stern, dreaded primary school teacher.
Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being uses the letter to the editor to symbolize Tomas’s decision to take a moral stand and risk his privilege. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses a girlfriend’s letter to symbolize innocence and separation. In In Cold Blood, Truman Capote uses a number of objects and events — the radio, the diary, the insurance policy, letters — to condense a wide range of emotional ideas.
These objects represent larger ideas. This is not heavy-handed symbolism. You might remember the conversations in 10-grade English class about how Santiago carrying the staff in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea “symbolizes” Christ’s cross and crucifixion. There’s no need to get so heavy. Let’s just say that objects reveal or represent something about the story’s characters, actions, or ideas.
I realized the full power of the prop when listening to a radio interview with the economist Barry Bluestone. Talking to Tom Ashbrook of NPR’s “On Point,” Bluestone described working at a Ford plant during his college summers in the 1960s. Bluestone actually brought an object to the studio for show-and-tell.
“This is a two-barrel carburetor from 1964,” Bluestone announced, as if the audience could see. “It went into a Mustang and there’s a good chance that I built that thing.”
Bluestone then recounted watching a worker at a McDonald’s restaurant a few days before. “I’m looking at a guy operating a fryolator and he’s going through the exactly same motions that I went through but he’s making one-fourth what I made.”
When I heard this, I was amazed. Simply bringing an object into the conversation, acting as if we listeners could see it, Bluestone activated the visual parts of our brains and our memories. He put us on that assembly line in Roseville, Michigan, and in that fast-food restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts. The power of props to enliven a scene—even when you can’t see them—is profound.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
One of the hardest jobs for writers is describing a complex process. In everyday life, we tend to gloss over the complexities of things. When we turn a car ignition, write a draft of a story, play a board game, cook a meal, or bargain in the marketplace, we pay attention only to the external appearances of things.
But you can’t write well unless you can explain complex processes. Here are a few ideas about this challenge.
The process process
Explaining a complex process is itself a complex process. Such an explanation requires close attention to a number of separate streams, as well as how the streams feed into each other. Each stream depicts a series of events. The streams do not operate independently. Often, the streams feed into each other. So we have to relate the streams to each other–and to the river–to describe the complex process. In the final analysis, this requires mastering the art of signaling.
Defining a complex process
First, let’s define what we mean by complex process. Here’s a tentative definition”
A complex process is a system of separate series of events or relationships, which somehow relate to each other and create a larger whole.
To see what I mean, think of the complex processes we see in cities—the ecology of a park, the economics of a sector, the operations of a business, or the maintenance of order on the street. Each one is complex, involving a number of different streams. The park, for example, involves animal and plant life, weather and other natural processes, the design and maintenance of the space, the usage and traffic at the park, the staging of events, and so on.
An economic sector, to take another example, involves products and markets, workers, technologies, taxes and regulations, and so on.
We would never claim to understand these complex processes unless we could describe their different streams.
Streams of processes
Now, let’s explore what we mean by these separate streams. The stream is simply a metaphor for a sequence of events. Often, the stream can be considered as a description of action. Sometimes, the stream can be considered a description of related ideas.
If you can describe an action, then, you should be able to describe a complex process. Just think of the complex process as a collection of related actions. To describe an action, we say, in effect: First, … Then, … Then, … Then, … Finally, … To describe a complex process, we describe three or four or more such actions.
Suppose you wanted to describe the complex process of a political campaign. We might break it down like this:
Mastering the issues and developing a platform: First, … Then, … Then, … Then, … Finally, …
Campaigning and public events: First, … Then, … Then, … Then, … Finally, …
As we describe those separate streams, we might note when one stream affects the others. We might indicate, for example, how polling affects the development of a platform. Or we might describe how elite support (like newspaper editors and interest-group leaders) shapes advertising.
Besides describing each “stream” of the process, we also need to capture the unifying themes. Not just with the campaign, but with all such descriptions of complex processes, we need to answer the question: What gives a campaign coherence–or prevents it from gaining coherence?
The elements of a process
To begin any process description, start by identifying all the pieces of the process. By naming and defining these elements, you make it easier to explain how they all relate to each other.
Consider an analysis of a car transmission. As the name suggests, the transmission is the part of the car that transmits power from the engine to the wheels. A slew of parts are necessary for that process, including the input shaft, countershaft, the output shaft, drive gears, idle gear, synchronized sleeves or collars, gear shifter, shift rod, shift fork, clutch, planetary gears, torque converter, oil pump, hydraulic system, valve body, computer controls, governor, throttle cable, vacuum modulator, seals, and gaskets.
Once you’ve defined those terms, show how they operate in a number of separate sequences. First, … Then, … Then, … Finally, …
Most complex processes have different kinds of processes. Your car may use a manual, automatic, or a continuously variable transmission. The processes vary for these different types.
The point is to break things down into their simplest component parts–making sure to define the parts and then to show how they interact.
Not analysis
Do not confuse a description of a complex process with an analysis. The two seem similar. Both show you “how the world works. ” They often show causality. But they differ about their levels of certainty and universality.
Process pieces tend to focus, modestly, on specific, one-and-only streams of events. They say, in effect, “This is what I see.” Analysis pieces tend to focus on general, many-times-over phenomena. They say, in effect, “This doesn’t just happen once or twice; it happens, predictably, over and over.”
Analyses usually take two critical steps. First, they gather enough data to provide a representative sample of the subject. Second, they attempt to identify the causal relationships that determine how the process works.
Reporting, not arguing
A description of a complex process is a kind of reporting job, involving careful observation. A description of a process description does not necessarily show what causes what. It simply lays out what can be observed, what happens and in what setting and in what sequence.
A description of gentrification, for example, shows a range of activities that happen—real estate values changing, newcomers “discovering” the area, risk-takers investing in properties, longterm residents moving out, new lending taking place, “oddball” activities rising, and so on. This description does not necessarily analyze how or why all these activities happen or to what effect.
An analysis, on the other hand, needs to explain the causes of these activities. An analysis needs to gather evidence to make generalizations about these activities.
Details, details, details
As in other kinds of writing, details make these descriptions come to life. But the details differ in process descriptions and analyses.
Process details are like a camera zooming in on action. That camera captures moments for us to notice possible patterns. Often, those details show one-and-only moments, without trying to universalize.
The details of analysis, on the other hand, always look to universalize. They say not “I saw this” but “Everyone will see this, over and over. ”
The anthropologist’s way
You might think of a process piece as a work of anthropology or ethnography. Clifford Geertz, in his classic work The Interpretation of Cultures, uses the term “thick description.”
Geertz calls for “deliberate doubt” and “the suspension of the pragmatic motive in favor of disinterested observation.” One of the writer’s primary jobs is to see things that other people don’t. To do that requires patience. Writers, like anthropologists, need to make a conscious effort to overcome their automatic inclinations.
If we tend to look in one place, we need to make ourselves look elsewhere. If we are naturally interested in one kind of person, place, or event, we need to make ourselves interested in another. This is, in a sense, a Zen practice; it’s all about living consciously.
‘Pre-analysis’
You might also think of a process piece as a pre-analysis piece. To describe a process, you observe patterns. You note the way things work. But you focus on description, not on making judgments.
Geertz argues that careful observation is the beginning of scientific explanation. Only when we observe closely, with as little prejudice as possible, can we “grasp the world scientifically.” In a process piece, you don’t seek to persuade other people to agree with your “take” on how the world works. You do, however, suggest some tantalizing possibilities. And your observations might pave the way for later analysis. But first things first.
A test
Here’s a quick test.
If you’re writing a process piece and you begin to explain why things work the way they do—with the certainty of a scientist—then you’re probably going too far. Stop and get back to detailed descriptions of what you observe.
Observation can be harder
In a way, a process piece can be harder to write than an analysis. Process pieces avoid jumping to conclusions, explaining what it all means. But that goes against our nature.
As neuroscientists have demonstrated, people have a tendency to want to explain everything they see. People are not usually content to simply watch and observe something unfold. They need the need to explain why or why not things happen.
Nietzsche had a term for this pushy desire to make sense of everythin,g even without the necessary information. He called it the “will to knowledge,” which he related to the “will to power.” Both are kinds of compulsions, unhealthy for people trying to live fully.
A life skill
Writing about process requires no small amount of constraint. We have to learn how to be “in the moment,” rather than always jumping to conclusions. That takes great resolve. To avoid getting pulled into the undertow of analysis—the compulsion to explain and persuade—we need to cultivate a sense of mystery and curiosity. But when we master writing about process, we combine the mind of a scientist with the soul of a poet.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
People are storytelling creatures. We evolved to tell stories.
From 30,000 to 100,000 years ago, out great ancestors began telling stories. It happened around the time that the size of clans expanded and those clans began to wander longer distances and then come home again.
Sitting by fires or in caves, by streams or in mountains, our ancestors told tales that helped them understand the day-to-day perils and potential of life. They warned each other of predators (“Bear in woods!”), discussed the weather (“So hot!”), angled for advantage with potential mates (“Hubba, hubba”), and taught their young with stories (“In my day …”).
More than anything else, the power to tell, hear, and remember stories separates humans from other species. Other species eat, find shelter, reproduce, and make things. Some species—like apes, chimps, whales, and birds—use language. Others—including chimps, birds, dolphins, and elephants—use tools. But as far as we know, only humans tell stories.
Stories take us away from the here and now, move us emotionally and intellectually, and help us understand and organize our lives. “We experience our lives in narrative form,” the novelist Jonathan Franzen once remarked. “If you can’t order things in a narrative fashion, your life is a chaotic bowl of mush.”
So what are the essential skills of storytelling? Consider these seven “must haves” for all stories:
1. Develop Compelling Characters
Start with characters. Nothing excites our brains more than images of our own kind. We’re a narcissistic species, so find or create characters with strong qualities. Make sure you know the characters’ deepest desires. Present these characters in all their complexity—avoid cardboard heroes and villains—and show how they deal with conflict and adversity.
Put those characters on a journey. Put them into action. Show how they interact with different people and situations. Show them fretting and fighting, arguing and negotiating, holding and helping, guessing and calculating, wondering and deciding. Emphasize the word show.
Put these scenes in a setting that helps tell the story. To really bring your story to life, find the details about your settings that help explain the characters and action. How you depict places—homes, offices, schools, parks, cars, camps, churches, prisons, streets, and parking lots—will set the parameters for your characters and stories.
2. Show the ‘World of the Story’
Every story needs a container. We need places for characters to go and to interact. Simple enough.
But places do more for storytelling than to offer a sandbox for characters to play. They also offer insights into the values and abilities of the characters and community.
The world of the story shapes how people feel and behave—and are perceived by others. Well-designed places make it easier for people to do what they want to do. They boost people’s energy and focus. Poorly designed places disorient people, sap their energy, and alienate them from others.
Put your characters in different places. Note how they change as they go from home to school to work to mall to ball field to theater to pizzeria to pub. Place determines possibilities. Create settings that make the characters who they are.
3. Give the Reader Action and Emotion.
We live in the Age of Science.
Science has made all kinds of wondrous things—cities and skyscrapers, cars and rockets, machines from digital pens to and the energy to fuel them, medical miracles and yottabytes of data. Those advances come from a vast accumulation of data, equations, rules and laws, and analyses. It’s all very abstract.
Which is great. But …
To connect with readers—to get and keep their attention, to explain complex ideas—you need to show action and tap into emotions.
Animals—including the human animal—are programmed to respond to movement, sounds, touches, smells, and changes in the environment. Action arouses our attention. Your job as a writer, quite simply, is to attract and keep people’s attention. So show action.
What do I mean by action? It could be anything from a wink or nod to a riot.
A scientist named Paul Eckman has developed a whole system for interpreting people’s “microexpressions.” As the name suggests, microexpressions are small and often last for just fractions of a second. A psychologist named John Gottman can assess the likelihood of marital bliss in couples by watching their microexpressions for five minutes.
So, you see, you don’t need a lot of explosions or chase scenes to show something meaningful happening.
So what makes someone’s wink or nod “action”? And does that mean everything that moves, great and small, is action?
Action must matter. Somehow, to count as action, something has to change. Suppose I sit in a crowded theater and nod when a speaker says something. If our story focuses on the speaker, my nod doesn’t change anything. It’s not meaningful; it’s not, therefore, action. But suppose the story focuses on me and my struggle to understand an idea. When I hear the speaker’s words, I nod. That nod constitutes action if it changes my story.
What about emotion? Do stories really need emotion?
Absolutely. Emotions don’t just help people stay engaged. They also help people to understand. In fact, brain researchers have found that rational thought is not possible without emotion. The intellectual development of many autistics, to take one example, gets stuck when they cannot develop or express feelings.
Emotion compresses ideas. If I feel emotional when I visit my old primary school, it’s because that image distills all kinds of ideas—about my family, friends, childhood, hopes, fears, successes, failures, losses, and more. When I need to understand something about education, my emotions help me to organize my ideas.
4. Provide Details that Show Something New
Just as action arouse the reader, so do details. So what do we mean by details?
You could look at details at two levels. On one level, a detail refers to anything specific in a piece of writing. So if I describe a cafe, I might provide details about the tables, the aroma, the crowd, the murmurs of conversation, the interaction of customers and baristas, and so on. But there’s a problem.
Most readers could anticipate most of these details. But it doesn’t make sense to just tell the reader what she already knows. Readers want to learn something new, not get told what they already know. Readers want to be surprised.
So that’s the second level of details. To be effective, a detail requires some kind of surprise. As a writer, you need to discover new and fresh information and insights, something that adds to the reader’s knowledge. So before you include a detail in your descriptions, ask: Would this surprise the reader? Would it add something new to her knowledge or experience?
For inspiration, consider this passage from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables:
There were corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate.
The appearance of the butterfly in such a grim scene is surprising. But it makes sense. Whatever tragedy happens, life goes on. Look for the details that offer not just a surprise, but also a contrast–and which speak to the larger realities of life.
5. Organize Events Into a Narrative Spine.
The most important of all resolutions. In this day of blogging and cable TV shout programs, everyone has an opinion. Which is fine. But if you really want to capture your reader’s attention, tell a story. For most writing, you can tell stories at least once a page. If you tap into the reader’s hardwired love of narrative, you will be to explain even the most abstract concepts.
Put the reader in a time and place, with a character struggling to realize some goal and encountering resistance. Use concrete details. Try to inject at least one surprise in every paragraph of narrative.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Aristotle, in The Poetics 2,500 years ago:
A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.
An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.
A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it.
A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end haphazardly, but conform to these principles.
Dividing all drama into a beginning, middle, and end might seem simplistic. And many authors violate the rule. The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once quipped: “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” But for most stories—and for other kinds of communication as well—readers need a journey that moves through these stages.
6. Give Characters Props.
A simple object—a key prop in a classroom, a small knowable place—offers instant insight into a stern, dreaded primary school teacher.
Avery Chenoweth, a wonderful storyteller, told me he uses props to break out of writer’s block. “If I’m stuck, I get my characters to work with their hands–fixing a light bulb, changing a tire, anything sweaty and detailed that will get me into his or her skin. Being in that intensely focused problem transports me out of my chair and into the page.” But you don’t have to wait for writer’s block. Show a character working with his hands to start a scene or an analysis.
I realized the full power of the prop when listening to a radio interview with the economist Barry Bluestone. Talking to Tom Ashbrook of NPR’s “On Point,” Bluestone described working at a Ford plant in during his college summers in the 1960s. Bluestone brought an object for show-and-tell. “This is a two-barrel carburetor from 1964,” Bluestone announced, as if the audience could see. “It went into a Mustang and there’s a good chance that I built that thing.” Bluestone then recounted watching a worker at a McDonald’s restaurant a few days before. “I’m looking at a guy operating a fryolator and he’s going through the exactly same motions that I went through but he’s making one-fourth what I made.”
When I heard this, I was amazed. Simply bringing an object into the conversation, acting as if we listeners could see it, Bluestone activated the visual parts of our brains and our memories. He put us on that assembly line in Roseville, Michigan, and in that fast-food restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts. The power of props to enliven a scene—even when you can’t see them—is profound.
Wherever you set your story—at home or work, out in the larger world or on the road—create a container for the characters and action. Show the characters develop themselves there. Put objects around them; better yet, put objects in their hands.
Once your characters have established themselves in small, knowable places, they can venture into the big, unruly world outside.
7. Use Storytelling Techniques Even for Technical Subjects.
S.I. Hayakawa, a linguist who also served as a college president and a U.S. Senator, used the image of a ladder to explain the range of ideas that people need to use. At the low rungs, we see lots of detailed information-specific people, places, actions, and results. At the higher rungs of the ladder, we see abstract ideas—concepts like war, justice, fairness, and mind.
He called the “the ladder of abstraction.” And he explained that good communication requires climbing up and down the ladder, to talk at the appropriate level of specificity or generality.
I like to think of it this way. All writing is about storytelling. It’s just that some stories are on the lower rungs of the ladder—and others are at the higher rungs of the ladder.
Stories talk about particular people doing particular things in particular places at particular times, with particular results. So: Dorothy pined for a place “over the rainbow” after being shooed away by her aunt and uncle and attacked by an angry woman named Miss Gulch. Then a tornado came along and …
Analysis talks in categories, in generalities—at the higher runs of the ladder. Rather than talking about specifics, analysis gathers up whole batches of information to talk about how things tend to happen. Now think of Dorothy as just one of countless children.
So: Young people need to belong and feel special. When adults ignore or scold them, they dream of going someplace else. Not just Dorothy, but young people everywhere and all times. Not just Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and Miss Gulch, but all adults. Not just over the rainbow, but any kind of place far from the pains of growing up.
Get it? When you tell a story, get particular; when you analyze, generalize.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Students often ask me to explain the “one or two tricks that I absolutely need” to write well.
If I could distill the lessons of writing into one trick, I would say: Be simple and direct. Tell the reader who does what … again and again.
But writing is obviously more complex than that. So allow me to present ten essential skills for writing mechanics.
1. Write Great Sentences, Always.
Someone once asked Ernest Hemingway what he does when he gets writer’s block. His answer: I write one true sentence. However long it takes, Hemingway said, he struggles to get just the right words to express a thought. He thinks about who or what he’s writing about—the subject. He asks himself what they’re doing—the action. And he considers who or what this action is acting upon—the object.
Here’s how Hemingway’s character explains the process in his A Moveable Feast:
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.
Once you write “one true sentence,” it’s easier to write another sentence … then another … then another. Before long, you’re writing paragraphs, then pages. No more writer’s block.
So how do you write one true sentence? I just told you. Write a subject … then a verb … then an object.
Nothing else matters unless you write great sentences. If you can write great sentences, over and over, you will become a good writer. If you can’t, forget it.
Too many writing teachers fail to teach their students how to write good sentences. They get so caught up with the five-paragraph structure and “compare and contrast” and quotations that they don’t explain how to build a great sentence.
Even professional writers create vague, meandering, inexact, and boring sentences. Focus on writing simple, sturdy sentences. You can write some elaborate sentences, too. But first, write simple and “true” sentences. Then you can do anything as a writer.
2. Use Simple Words.
In order to facilitate the cognitive process and to eradicate any potentiality of miscommunication, it is imperative that each and every writer employ solely the most efficacious and uncompounded locutions in each and every one of his or her compositions.
Got it? No? Let’s try again.
Use simple words to prevent misunderstandings. The mortal enemy of good writing is pretension. Teachers, students, politicians, CEOs, op-ed writers all have egos. They want to sound “smart.” So they use big words to convey the vastness of their vocabularies.
But remember this: Never write to show off your vocabulary. Write to convey ideas—period.
Always look for the smallest, simplest word to convey ideas. That doesn’t mean using a steady parade of monosyllabic words. You need to find the word that bests expresses your ideas, whether they’re short or long. So use a long word if it’s the best word. But always err on the side of short words.
3. State and Develop Only One Idea Per Paragraph.
The great thing about writing is that it’s a creative process. You discover ideas as you write. Sometimes you discover ideas that you didn’t even know you had. As you consciously write about a topic, the subconscious feeds all kinds of surprising ideas.
That’s also the difficult thing about writing. Let me explain.
If the sentence is the most important unit of writing—and it is, as we see in Commandment 3—then the paragraph is the second most important unit. And the amazing creativity of writers can make for some awful paragraphs.
When you write, one idea sparks another … then another … then another.
But if you express every idea, as they occur to you, you will never develop the first idea—the one you intended to discuss in the first place. So your paragraphs become collections of undeveloped ideas.
I like to think of paragraphs as “idea buckets.” State and develop one idea in every paragraph. Put one thing in every bucket. Don’t ever develop more than one thought in a paragraph.
Every time you write, label every idea—in bold face type or with marginal notes. Whenever you see two or more ideas in a paragraph, break up the paragraph into as many pieces.
You’ll notice that you never developed the ideas you stated. So go back, develop every idea—complete every paragraph. Then end the paragraph, and get to work on the next idea of the next paragraph.
As it says on the shampoo bottle: Rinse, repeat.
4. Break Down Complex Ideas Into Chunks.
Sometimes, you have no choice but to use complex words. The world, after all, is a complex place. You want to be simple, not simplistic.
When you describe complex ideas—the M-C-M sequence in market exchange, the controversies surrounding global warming, the sequence of actions to program software, the lighting and shutter speed of a camera, the process of fission—break them down into manageable chunks.
Every complex thing really consists of many simple things. Most readers, when guided through a sequence of simple pieces, can understand those complex wholes.
John McPhee, perhaps the greatest nonfiction writer of our time, almost never uses a word fancier than he needs. To create color and movement, he uses ordinary words precisely. To explain a complex concept, he also uses ordinary words. You can open any McPhee work and pick a random paragraph to see just how well ordinary words work. I did just that with The Curve of Binding Energy, his book about the dangers of nuclear proliferation.
The material that destroyed Hiroshima was uranium-235. Some sixty kilograms of it were in the bomb. The uranium was in metallic form. Sixty kilograms, a hundred and thirty-two pounds, of uranium would be about the size of a football, for the metal is compact—almost twice as dense as lead. As a cube, sixty kilograms would be slightly less than six inches on a side. U-235 is radioactive, but not intensely so. You could hold some in your lap for a month and not suffer any effects. Like any heavy metal, it is poisonous if you eat enough of it. Its critical mass—the point at which it will start a chain reaction until a great deal of energy has been released— varies widely, depending on what surrounds it.
On and on McPhee goes, describing the most complex topics with simple little words. Occasionally he must introduce a technical idea-like U-235, or critical mass—but he always gives us a simple explanation.
Patience allows McPhee to get small words to do big jobs. He understands that the best way to explain something is not to pile on ideas like men in a rugby scrum, but to spread them out like wedding guests in a receiving line. Simple words and sentences, presented one at a time in the right sequence, make it possible to explain even the most complex ideas.
5. Avoid Sardine Writing.
By the time you sit down to write something — a memo, a description, story, an argument — you usually hold several different ideas in your head. Most of these ideas are related, in some way.
But storytelling and explaining requires separating those idea clusters, and parceling out ideas one by one. If you overwhelm the reader with too many ideas at once, the reader won’t have a chance to really see, hear, and feel what you mean.
In general, each paragraph should state and develop just one idea. To discipline yourself, label your paragraphs as you go. Pretend to write headlines for a tabloid like the New York Post or Daily News. Keep your labels short and zippy. Humor helps by getting you to boil the idea to its special meaning.
When you develop one idea at a time, your reader will be able to follow your story, explanation, or argument.
6. Develop Style By Mastering the Basics.
Years ago took a couple of teenagers to a vintage baseball game. Vintage baseball offers an antidote to the modern game. The game is slow and ordered by manners that would please Amy Vanderbilt. But it’s also brisk. Players spend no time strutting or preening. They come to play.
At that game, I met the man whose life has embraced both rebellion and nostalgia. Jim Bouton rocked organized baseball in 1970 when he published Ball Four, an expose of the outrageous and puerile exploits of big-leaguers. But as he aged, Bouton embraced the game’s traditions. Over his life, his style shifted from breaking the rules to honoring the game.
I introduced Bouton to my charges and asked: What’s the best way to develop the best pitching motion?
“Long tossing,” he said.
Long tossing is just what it sounds like—throwing the baseball over long distances, as much as 200 or 250 feet. To throw long, you can’t worry about what you look like. You have to lean back and then rock forward, slinging your arm forward like a slow-moving whip. Most people long-toss the same way, with just small variations for their size and strength. But long tossing offers nothing fancy.
After tossing from the longest distances, you move closer and closer to your partner. When you get to the standard pitching distance—60 feet, 6 inches—you are pitching with your natural style.
And so it goes with writing.
Style in writing comes only after the long tossing of building great sentences, paragraphs, and longer passages. When you do all the little things right, your style slowly emerges. You develop tendencies—toward shorter or longer sentences, greater or lesser use of commas and semicolons, formal or vernacular speech, more or less use of quotations and statistics and other forms of explaining.
As you master the basics, pay attention to the maneuvers of different stylists. When I was first writing for publication—in a small weekly newspaper on Long Island—I idolized Red Smith, a columnist for The New York Times. I also admired Hemingway and Fitzgerald, read biographies, and pushed myself to understand some philosophy. I noted the maneuvers of these writers and occasionally copied them. Which is fine.
Mostly, though, you will discover that your truest style comes from the voice you find mastering the simple tricks and maneuvers of language.
7. Pay Attention To What Does Not Belong.
Architects and sculptors think in terms of solids and voids. An architect, for example, knows that a building’s beauty and utility depends on the space where people move around as much as the structural elements. Architects regularly debate what FAR, or floor-to-area ratio, best accommodates different activities.
Likewise, good writers know that what they leave out matters as much as what they put into a piece of writing.
Ernest Hemingway called this the iceberg method. Make enough information visible–above the surface of the water, metaphorically speaking–so the reader can understand, for themselves, what lies beneath the surface.
Suppose, for example, you want to describe a moment in a great sports event, like the 1969 Super Bowl or 1999 Women’s World Cup championship. You wouldn’t describe everything about the game. You wouldn’t explain the basic rules of the game. You wouldn’t need to introduce readers to superstars like Joe Namath or Brandi Chastain. Instead, you would say only enough to help readers tap into their own knowledge. You might refer to Namath’s brash prediction or Chastain’s sports bra to draw the reader into the story.
The better you know your audience, the more you can draw the readers into the story. When you know (roughly) what the reader knows about a subject, you can leave all but a few cues and reviews out of your account. When the reader gets involved in your story by drawing on her own knowledge, she will pay more attention to what you have to say.
Sometimes, in other words, less is more. You will excite your readers’ imaginations more if you don’t bore them with what they already know.
8. Edit Using the ‘Hide and Seek’ Method.
Your brain is the most powerful—and the laziest—part of your body. The subconscious part of the brain holds a vast storehouse of ideas, feelings, impulses, and automatic systems. The conscious part of the brain manages deliberate decisionmaking. But the conscious mind can only handle one or two or, at most, only three things at a time.
Therefore, when you look for problems—in anything, not just drafts of writing—one at a time. I call it “Hide and Seek.” You need to track down these errors, one by one, rather than trying to catch them all at once.
Don’t try to fix everything, sentence by sentence. Your brain will crash and burn. Instead, look for the common problems of writing, one by one.
1. Start strong: Start by checking if you start every sentence strongly, with a clear statement of who does what.
2. Finish strong: Then see if you end every sentence with a bang—some kind of point, question, or image that propels the reader to the next sentence.
3. One idea per paragraph: Then check your paragraphs. Make sure every paragraph states and develops just one idea. Label the ideas as you go. If you have more than one idea in a paragraph, take it out. Either delete it or use it in another paragraph.
4. Action: Then make sure you use action verbs; avoid “to be” and “to have.”
5. Words: Now look at your other words. Do you use specific words, so the reader can see, hear, and feel what’s happening? Do you limit your use of adjectives and adverbs?
6. Modifiers: Look for sentences that seem to go on forever. Here’s a trick for that: Look for prepositional phrases, which modify nouns. I have seen sentences with a dozen or more prepositional phrases. So what? Here’s what: Every modifier takes you a step away from the action—and adds to the length of the sentence.
7. Punctuation: Finally, get all the punctuation right. Think of punctuation as a form of traffic control. Stop with periods, pause with commas, look ahead with colons, merge with semicolons, warn of uncertain conditions with question marks and exclamation points.
Step by step, attack the problems in your piece. If you just focus on one issue at a time, your brain will veer in on mistakes like a heat-seeking missile. And you won’t get pooped before finishing the job.
9. Read Your Drafts Aloud.
You know how embarrassing it is to hear your voice on a recorder for the first time? You never know what you sound like until you get away from your own head. Hearing a recording makes your sounds — your selection of words, the ways you put them together — objective.
Every time you listen to your writing, you get outside your own tunnel vision and into the world of the reader. Ultimately, the best writers put their reader’s concerns first. As I tell my students, the writer should think of himself as the reader’s servant. The writer should do everything possible to make the reader’s job easier and more enjoyable. If you write clumsily, you put a burden on the reader.
You can set up your computer to read your text back (for PC directions, click here; for Mac instructions, click here). You can also use other online tools, including from Natural Reader, SitePal, AT&T, and Cepstral.
10. Always Serve Your Audience.
I’ve saved the best for last.
Lots of writers write for themselves. They discuss issues, and arrange their words, for their own amusement. That’s OK, I suppose. But …
To become a real writer, serve others. Your ideas and words matter only if you connect with the audience. Don’t show off. Don’t get vague or obscure. Don’t confuse matters. Don’t go on and on. Say something worthwhile, in a way the reader will understand and appreciate.
So who is your audience? That depends, of course. But here’s how to think about it.
Your reader is someone like you—intelligent, caring, alert, open to ideas—but simply has not done the work needed to understand your topic.
Speak plainly to your readers. They are busy and distracted. They need to know what you have to tell them. But they will get frustrated and leave—or just miss your point—if you don’t deliver your ideas clearly and simply.
Mad Men is not only one of the greatest TV shows of all time. It’s also a guide to the techniques of persuasion. Here are a half-dozen of those techniques, arranged by the arc of life.
The Innocence of Babies: ‘You’ve Got the Cutest Little Baby Face’
In her new job at Cutler, Gleason, and Chaough, Peggy devises an ad campaign for Koss headphones. The ad shows a man in a toga, listening to music on headphones. The slogan: “Lend Me Your Ears.”
Then a comic’s appearance on “The Tonight Show” creates a crisis. The comic jokes about an Army G.I. in Vietnam who cut off the ears of Vietcong and created a necklace with the ears. The G.I. was court-martialed. The incident, symbolizing the brutality of the war, has gone viral.
And so late one December night, Peggy gets a call. The people at Koss are upset about the potential association of the headphones with the atrocity in Vietnam. The slogan “Lend Me Your Ears” has to go. Koss will air a commercial on the Super Bowl and needs a new campaign—right away.
At first, Peggy resists. “As horrible as this is,” she says, “I don’t think anyone has made this connection outside of this comedian.” But the client insists on a new campaign. So Peggy gets to work.
She brainstorms the way Don Draper taught her. She writes a letter to a friend, describing the product, , how it works, how it makes her feel, why she loves it so much. As she brainstorms, she gives the headphones to her boyfriend Abe and asks him to think of words that describe the experience.
As Abe gets carried away by the music, bobbing and swaying, she smiles. That image plants a seed.
Peggy and three of her underlings continue to work on the campaign on New Year’s Even Her boss Ted Chaough shows up to offer moral support. Peggy shows Ted an outtake of a shoot of a guy “clowning around” while listening to music on Koss headphones.
Peggy describes her latest idea: “I think you can show him with no sound, making these faces and no music and saying something like: ‘Koss headhones: ‘Sounds so sharp and clear you can actually see it.’”
Ted is immediately impressed. He likes it better than the “Lend Me Your Ears” campaign. “Makes me smile more than the original,” he says.
Tip: Evoke the Universal Appeal of a Baby
What will viewers of Peggy’s ad experience when they view the images of a pudgy, smiling man, softly rocking and swaying to the sounds from Koss earphones?
Subconsciously, they will see a cute baby. And that image will arouse feelings of attraction, a desire to approach and engage. Baby-like traits include a round face, high forehead, big eyes, and a small nose and mouth. Psychologists call this cuteness factor a “baby schema.”
Cute infants are rated as more likeable, friendly, healthy and competent than the less cute infants, an effect that may be mediated by the baby schema. Furthermore, cute infants are rated as most adoptable. The baby schema response can have behavioral consequences. For example, cute infants are looked at longer, and mothers of more attractive infants are more affectionate and playful. Other factors such as an infant’s behavior or the caretaker’s familiarity with the infant may also be important for adult’s evaluation of children. Nevertheless, our results show that baby schema in infant faces is an intrinsic trigger of cute- ness perception and motivation for caretaking. This effect generalizes to adult faces with enlarged eyes and lips who elicit more helping behavior than their mature counterparts.
As Linda Meisler and her associates found, the cuteness effect translates to the design of products. When a product has many of the same expressive traits as babies—like a Volkswagen Beetle or a Mini Cooper—people are attracted in the same ways they are attracted to babies.
Cuteness doesn’t just arouse people. It also prompts a need to dosomething. Consider an experiment by Yale graduate students Rebecca Dyer and Oriana Aragon. The psychology students presented 109 subjects with pictures of cute, funny, or normal animals. They asked the subjects how they wanted to respond after seeing the pictures. How much did they agree with statements like “I can’t handle it” and “Grr” and “I want to squeeze something”?
The cuter the image, the more respondents agreed with those statements about needing to act on their feelings.
Then, to test the response further, Dyer and Aragon conducted another experiment with 90 respondents. The purpose of the study, they told the subjects, was to test motor activity and memory. Dyer and Aragon gave subjects sheets of bubble wrap and told them to pop as many bubbles as they desired. Subjects viewing the cute images popped 120 bubbles; those viewing the neutral slides popped 1`00 in the same period of time, and those viewing the funny slides popped 80 bubbles.
In the right context, cuteness sells. If the Koss ad prompts automatic smiles, if it causes the viewer to want to approach the subject of the ad, it will cause people to at least consider getting headphones.
Peggy understands the power of this attachment to babylike cuteness. Remember the first season when Peggy gave birth and immediately gave up her baby for adoption? The nurse brought her the baby and asked her if she wanted to hold it. She refused. She knew that if she held the baby, she might want to keep it.
She knew the power of a baby to arouse uncontrollable feelings. And now she was using that power to sell earphones.
Help for the Overwhelmed Mother: Keep It Simple
The conclusion of Roman Polanski’s horror movie “Rosemary’s Baby” gives Peggy and Ted an idea for the St. Joseph’s Aspirin account.
In that scene, Rosemary has given birth to the devil’s baby. A crowd gathers in a living room to look at this unusual creature. An Asian man snaps pictures. Rosemary decides to raise the child, as best as she can, even though it is full of evil.
Peggy wants to depict Rosemary’s sense of being overwhelmed to sell St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin. The TV commercial will take the point of view of the baby, who is surrounded by forces trying to force themselves on him.
Peggy asks Don to sit down and pretend to be the baby in the commercial. Imagine, she says, feeling completely overwhelmed as a series of people press a solution on the infant with a headache or some other minor malady.
“What you need is a mustard plaster,” a crazy old lady, played by Peggy, says.
“You need a compress,” says a wrinkled old man, played by Ted.
“How ‘bout a bowl of chicken soup?” says an annoying nebbish neighbor.
One by one, the faces in the crowd press in on the baby. A Japanese man takes a picture, causing the scene to go white with the popping of the flashbulb.
Finally, the baby sees his radiant young mother. She holds out a St. Joseph’s aspirin. Ted intones the message of the ad: “You don’t need anyone’s help but St. Joseph’s.”
Tip: Find the One Thing to Overcome Overwhelm
Childbirth is a joyous occasion for new parents and their families. After months of anticipation, an innocent being enters the world. In a room filled with flowers and balloons and cards, the newborn coos and cries to the delight of loving family and friends. The miracle of birth touches even the most cynical among us.
Underneath those joys are (often) fear and pain and a sense of overwhelm. Most modern mothers usually do not have to worry about losing their baby or dying in childbirth. But childbirth can be a major operation, which requires both physical and psychological recovery. The famed doctor T. Berry Brazelton notes:
The immediate neonatal period is fraught with constant adjustment. Often she feels she has not fulfilled her ideal regarding delivery. … Any minor difficulty with the baby—psychological, psychophysiological—even the normal drowsiness of the newborn is blamed upon herself. These guilty feelings may obstruct her early adjustment. … Emotional depression joins forces with physiological depletion to produce the commonly recognized “blue period.”
Most young mothers—and fathers too—experience a feeling of being overwhelmed by the experience. Other people’s efforts to help them sometimes make young parents feel even more overwhelmed. In this time of transition, young parents welcome simple answers to their problems.
Peggy’s St. Joseph’s Aspirin pitch exploits young parents’ need for simplicity in a suddenly complicated life.
The ad depicts the infant as the overwhelmed character. Surrounded by busybody family and friends, the baby cries for help. That help comes when the baby’s mother—beautiful and radiant, who has nurtured the baby for months and now offers absolute love and sustenance—comes to the rescue. She holds out an aspirin made especially for children.
But make no mistake: It’s the mother who really needs the help that St. Joseph’s Aspirin offers. The mother needs to comfort this extension of herself—and to overcome the insecurity that comes with the awesome responsibility of motherhood.
Peggy has entered the most euphoric and scary moment in the mother’s life. She has stilled the noise with a simple offer of relief.
Tapping the Memories (and Projections) of Family
Kodak has invented a new device for projecting slidesonto a screen. It’s a wheel that holds the slides in slots, and turns around to capture one image at a time.
It’s a funny device—old-fashioned and cutting-edge at the same time.
Few inventions are older than the wheel. The wheel turns in countless machines—cars, engines, factories, shelving, doors.How much can you say about a wheel?
But at the same time, this wheel offers a great innovation. Until now, slide shows required placing one slide into the machine at a time. Making presentations was a clumsy process. It’s hard to produce a flow, to explain a sequence of ideas or tell a story, with those constant interruptions.
Now this new technology makes it easy to project a seamless, continuous show.
After much soul-searching—looking though old family photographs, reflecting on the passages of life—Don discovers the answer.
In his presentation to the Kodak executives, Don starts by discussing the lure of technology.
“Technology is a glittering lure. But there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.”
Don tells about his first job, writing copy in-house for a fur company, he talks about his Greek boss, a man named Teddy, who extolled the virtues of “new” because it “creates an itch.”
So Don sets up the explanation of his idea not with an abstract discussion, but with a story, with a character the audience can picture right away. Who cares if Teddy actually existed—or if the ideas Don attributes to Teddy were his. Don is creating anticipation with his sentimental yarn about his mentor.
Teddy, Don says, also understood that newness can be trumped by a deeper value—nostalgia. “It’s delicate,” Don says, “but potent.”
Now Don signals to turn on the projector. As he turns toward the screen, he talks about the deep meaning of nostalgia.
“Nostalgia, in Greek, means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.”
Now Don gives a slide show of his own family—Don and Betty and Sally and Bobby—at a cookout, on Christmas morning, playing on the sofa, kissing.
“This device isn’t a space ship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards … forwards … it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”
The images click, one after another, to illustrate the power of memory and longing, dreaming and loving.
Don connects this device to the merry-go-round in an amusement park or a county fair, which creates a never-ending swirl of smiles and memories. This merry-go-round symbolizes family, youth, innocence, and memory.
“It’s not called the wheel,” Don tells his stunned Kodak clients. “It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels, round and around, back home again, to a place we know we are loved.”
Tip: To Understand Desire, Tap Into the Past
Nostalgia, the old quip goes, ain’t what it used to be.
In fact, it ain’t. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, doctors treated nostalgia as an illness. In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, nostalgia was considered a mental disorder. But now research suggests that it might actually offer benefits.
Nostalgia, researchers say, happens in all cultures across history. It inspires art, music, architecture, understanding of history, teaching pedagogies, and much more. So it must offer some kind of help in understanding and navigating the world.
Nostalgia operates on three dimensions.
First, stories and artifacts of nostalgia often conjure up a specific person important to the community. In families, we think of a grandparent or a parent. In politics, we think of legendary personages like John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. In sports, we think of transformative figures like Babe Ruth or Vince Lombardi.
Second, nostalgia focuses on a specific place. Family homes, old buildings or stadiums, lakes and beaches, workplaces and bars—all burn images into our memories. When we talk nostalgically, we remember what the place looked like, sounded like, even smelled and felt like. It’s a total sensory experience.
Finally, nostalgia often revolves around a specific event. The most memorable events involve surprise. Birthdays, promotions, weddings, first dates become the stuff of nostalgia. So do formal ceremonies, which draw people from distant places. But routine events and rituals—Thanksgiving dinners, summers at the lake, bar mitzvahs—also tap our nostalgia.
Don Draper’s carousel pitch merges these three elements perfectly. His slides show people, places, and events that touch all families emotionally. The very process of sharing family pictures is itself a nostalgic act; people do it when they come together for special moments..
To connect the past with the future, understand the power of nostalgia.
What Matters: Glamor or Functionality?
Playtex has given the Mad Men a challenge: Make its practical, utilitarian bra sexy.
The men at Sterling Cooper theorize, like graduate students, the deeper meanings of the bra—identity, appearance and reality, psychology, and the power of the subconscious.
Paul Kinsey reports that Playtex “has an amazing bra, but it doesn’t take you anywhere.”
After a murmur of approval from Don, Paul continues his thesis on the psychology of women.
Women, he says, have fantasies—but they’re not fantasies of adventure, of travel or conquest. Instead, women fantasize about matters much closer to home. And they live those fantasies every day.
“It’s right here in America—Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe,” he says. “Every single woman is one of them.”
He walks the other Mad Men to the door for a peek into the vast open office space of the firm. Their eyes dart from one secretary to another. Here is a woman with brunette hair and a businesslike dress, like Jackie. There is a woman with blonde hair and a more suggestive dress. Jackie. Marilyn. Jackie. Jackie. Marilyn.
Don is impressed. Peggy is too, but she doesn’t see herself in either role.
“I don’t know if all women are a Jackie or a Marilyn,” she says. “Maybe men see them that way.”
Pete falls back on a standard chauvinist line—that women care only about pleasing men, so all products should be designed for men.
Sal distills the discussion.
“You’re a Jackie or a Marilyn,” he says. “A line or a curve. Nothing goes better together.”
Don later summarizes the thinking to Duck Phillips: “Jackie by day, Marilyn by night.”
Tip: Appeal to People’s Views of their Whole Selves
How we look at people depends on whether we see them as whole beings or as a collection of their body parts. We see figures like Jacqueline Kennedy as a whole—a refined, educated, charismatic wife, mother, and social icon. We see figures like Marilyn Monroe as a collection of body parts—lips, cheeks, hair, breasts, legs, and bottom.
Sexism—viewing women as less than complete, whole beings—results in part from this bias.
In an ingenious 2012 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, research subjects viewed photographs of both men and women from the waist up. Then they viewed two more pictures—the original picture and another with one of the body parts altered in some way.
After looking at the pictures, respondents were asked which picture they had seen before. Men and women both identified the altered pictures of women by focusing on the body parts. They identified the altered pictures of men by looking at the whole pictures.
People look at objects in two ways—globally or locally. When we look globally, we see the whole image or idea; we might call this the right-brain or forest approach. When we look locally, we focus on the discrete parts of the picture or idea; we might call this the left-brain or trees approach.
The tendency to look at women locally—that is, to pay attention to their lips or breasts or hips or legs, rather than their whole body—objectifies women. It makes women important not for their whole selves, but for their pieces.
But all is not lost. In another experiment, the researchers showed subjects pictures of letters made up of collections of tiny letters—an H made up of lots of tiny T’s, for example.
When participants focused on the little pictures—all the T’s—they then viewed women as collections of body parts. But when they focused on the big picture—the single H—they viewed women as whole persons.
“Our findings suggest people fundamentally process women and men differently,” says the study, written by Sarah Gervais of the University of Nebraska and four colleagues. “But we are also showing that a very simple manipulation counteracts this effect, and perceivers can be prompted to see women globally, just as they do men. Based on these findings, there are several new avenues to explore.”
The upshot: With prompting, all of us can view women as Jacqueline Kennedys rather than as Marilyn Monroes.
Focus on What People Want, Not What They Fear: ‘It’s Toasted’
Don has been struggling for weeks to come up with a new idea for Lucky Strike.
Finally, Don has to deliver. But in his meeting with his Lucky Strike clients, Don’s doom deepens as they complain about U.S. regulators.
“Might as well be living in Russia,” says Lee Garner, Jr., the son of the company’s chairman.
“Damn straight,” his father says, as the smoky table breaks out in coughs.
Roger Sterling, the Mad Men’s silver-tongued front man, expresses concern for their plight. “Through manipulation of the media,” he says, people have a “misguided impression” that cigarettes cause death.
But that only angers the clients.
“Manipulation of the media? Hell, that’s what I pay you for!”
Not ready to make his presentation, Don stares at his notes.
Pete Campbell, the accounts manager who fears any unscripted moment, jumps in. He repeats a marketing consultant’s idea about making the “death wish” the driving idea of a campaign. “So what if cigarettes are dangerous,” he says. “You’re a man!”
That only enrages Lee Garner, the head of the company.
“Is that your slogan: ‘You’re going to die anyway, die with us?’ … Are you insane?”
The Lucky Strike clients begin to leave. Then, after a long silence, Don speaks.
The government’s ban on health claims, he says, might be a blessing, he says. It means that none of Lucky Strike’s competitors can make those bogus claims either.
The feds have cleared away all the confusing claims of cigarette manufacturers. Health claims, in fact, invite debate—they remind people of all the reports about cancer, emphysema, heart disease. Now, with the health claims gone, so are the reminders of tobacco’s deadly properties.
“This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal,” Don says.
A clever company—and its clever ad firm—can now grab market share with a clever campaign.
Don leaps up to the easel. He starts asking questions. How do you make Lucky Strikes?
Garner is unimpressed, but his anger has disappeared.
“We breed insect-repellant tobacco seeds,” he says, “plant them in the North Carolina sunshine, grow it, cut it, toast it—“
Don has what he needs.
He writes the following on the board:
LUCKY STRIKE. IT’S TOASTED.
Silence takes over the room. First incomprehension. Then recognition. Then excitement.
“It’s toasted.” That’s a fact. It contains no health claim. And yet it sounds so healthy, so natural.
The perfect end run around the whole controversy.
Tip: When the Truth Is Ugly, Reframe
People who face uncomfortable truths have two choices: They can face the issue directly or devise strategies of avoidance.
To face any issue directly, we need to be “mindful.” That is, we need to consider, openly, to all of the issues, concerns, fears, and conflicts of the matter at hand.
At the core of honesty/mindfulness is acceptance of even the scariest, most uncomfortable truths of life. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the great teachers of mindfulness, says: “Mindfulness practice is really a love affair with what we might call truth …how things actually are, all embedded here in this very moment.”
So that’s one approach. The other approach is avoidance.
Avoidance is the opposite of a love affair with truth. It’s a fear or even hatred of truth. It’s a desire to deny and squelch all information that might challenge a difficult habit or idea. Here’s how a psychologist named Trish Bartley describes avoidance:
Avoidance is an almost universal response to painful experience. It is part of the behavioral repertoire available in the face of danger, where the body is physiologically primed to get into fight, flight, or freeze mode. Avoidance may be conscious or more automatic, and can operate at the level of cognition (deliberately not thinking about aspects of the diagnosis), behavior (avoiding situations that remind you of cancer), or affect (distracting oneself from negative emotions. At its extreme end, avoidance can become denial.…
Avoidance happens either directly or indirectly. Direct avoidance entails denying or swatting away the truth. Indirect avoidance entails simply pretending the truth doesn’t exist.
Most persuasion entails aspects of both truth and avoidance of truth. The most moral persuasion offers the audience information and insights that allow people to make the best decisions.
But self-interested persuasion—the approach that Don Draper is devising for his clients at Lucky Strike—is largely an exercise in avoidance.
That tobacco industry’s avoidance once took the form of outright lies, claiming that tobacco actually enhanced health. At other times it focused on the taste and physical pleasures, and at other times the social benefits. When health dangers arose, tobacco companies introduced innovations—like the filter tip and low-tar and low-nicotine brands—that promised (falsely) to provide a safer smoking experience.
Now, with the “toasted” campaign, Don simply changes the subject. “Toasted” sounds wholesome and natural. It doesn’t deny the health risks of smoking. But it gives the smoker an opportunity to avoid thinking about them.
The Need to Choose Authenticity: ‘It’s Not Ann-Margret’
A star was born in 1963. And what was obvious about her appeal—her busty, wholesome good looks—sometimes obscured the charisma that she brought to the silver screen.
The star, Ann-Margret, played a high school girl named Kim McAfee in the movie Bye, Bye Birdie. Kim won a competition to participate in the final performance of a rock star named Birdie, who has been drafted by the Army and is leaving to serve.
The high point of the film is its opening, when Ann-Margret sings a song written especially for the movie. Her energy—sexual but safe—bursts onto the screen.
Now Pepsico wants to use that excitement to sell Patio, its new diet soda. And so the executives at the soda company ask the Mad Men to adapt Ann-Margret’s effervescent scene to a commercial for Patio.
After showing the opening scene to Don, Peggy asks whether Ann-Margret’s voice is “shrill.”
“She’s throwing herself at the camera,” Don says. “It’s pure. It makes your heart hurt.”
The Mad Men find an Ann-Margret type, film her homage to the “Bye, Bye Birdie” number, and show the clients their work.
“Bye, bye, sugar!” the alluring young woman in the commercial croons. “Hello, Patio!”
But when the lights go up, there’s an uneasiness in the room.
“I don’t know, this isn’t what I thought it would be,” the client says. “There’s something not right about it. I can’t put my finger on it.”
“It’s an exact copy, frame for frame,” accounts manager Ken Cosgrove protests.
“I’m sorry, I wish I could explain it but it’s just not right,” the client responds.
After the clients leave the room, Harry Crane agrees with the clients: “It’s true. It’s not right. It doesn’t make any sense. It looks right, sounds right, smells right. Something’s not right. What is it?”
Roger understands the ineffable quality of charisma. He looks at his young ad man. “It’s not Ann- Margret,” he says, arching an eyebrow and walking away.
Tip: Know What’s Authentic
How do we know what’s authentic? It’s something that we feel, deep down, based on a lifetime of experiences with real and fake things. And experts can tell in the blink of an eye.
Consider the kouros that an art dealer named Gianfranco Becchini tried to sell to the Getty Museum—until, in a blink, experts on art warned was a fake.
A kouros is a Greek statue that dates back six centuries before Christ. Archaologists have found only 200 of these relics, so another would be a great find.
When Becchini offered to sell the statue for $10 million, the Getty inspected the relic. Becchini offered documents to verify its authenticity. The Getty hired a geologist to inspect the statue. Using the latest equipment, the expert concluded that the statue was genuine. It was made of dolomite marble and it was coated with a layer of calcite—just what you would expect with an old object like this. The people at the Getty were giddy.
But when the statue went on display, art experts immediately suspected something was wrong. Federico Zeri sensed something about the statue’s fingernails that didn’t seem right. Evelyn Harrison intuited that something was amiss in the first split-second she saw it. Thomas Hoving instantly thought it looked “fresh” for a 2,600-year-old relic. Geogios Dontas said he “felt as though there was a glass between me and the work.”
Something in these experts subconscious told them the kouros was a fraud. Their collective centuries of experience working with ancient art burned images into the brains of what an authentic one looked like. They didn’t have to think to know; in fact, thinking might have undermined their assessment. And this statue didn’t pass muster.
Malcolm Gladwell recounts the case of the fake kouros in Blink, which argues that people make smart decisions without thinking. In a wide range of situations—gambling, chicken farming, marital relations, hiring decisions—people can make good decisions in a snap.
That’s why the Patio representative didn’t like the Ann-Margret lookalike. Superficially, she looked and sounded like Ann-Margret. But there’s only one Ann-Margret.
Creating Ersatz Family in a Distracted Age
To overcome it, embrace it. —Nietzsche
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. —William Butler Yeats
What happens when groups fall apart? When the anchor gets pulled away? And how can the center be restored in a time of tumult?
Those are the key issues at play as Don Draper struggles to become relevant once more in Mad Men’s mythical advertising agency Sterling Cooper and Partners, just as Peggy Olson struggles to find a pitch for a fast food restaurant.
Sterling Cooper loses its mojo when Draper, its creative mastermind, Don Draper, is banished from the company and then brought back only to be humiliated and marginalized.
Lots of creative people still work at the agency. Peggy has a first-class mind; as Pete says in his ever-insulting way, “You know, she’s every bit as good as any woman in this business.” Stan’s got his own creative chops. Ginsberg is a genius—that is, until his paranoid schizophrenia kicks in and he begins to imagine conspiracies in the VW-size IBM computer humming in the glass room.
But every team needs a leader, someone who not only has the brains to solve problems, but also creates a guiding vision and makes everyone better. That’s Don. But because of his boozing, self-destructive ways, he has been dislodged from his leading role in the firm. Now, even though he’s still a partner, he is a minion whom other partners humiliate at every turn. Even his protege Peggy looks down on him.
Now Peggy is leading the creative process for the Burger Chef campaign. Burger Chef is one of the many McDonald’s wannabes. To grow, it needs an identity. It needs to speak to people’s inner longings the way McDonald’s does. It needs to come to mind when distracted and harried Americans need to eat but don’t want to cook or even take TV dinners out of the fridge.
Peggy comes up with an idea aimed at the era’s frazzled mother: Make Burger Chef an expression of love. “All the research points to the fact that mothers feel guilty,” Peggy explains in her pitch to Lou Avery, SC’s new creative director. “And even when they get home they’re embarrassed. Our job is to turn Burger Chef into a special treat, served with love.”
Somehow, Peggy says, “we need to give mothers permission” to take the easy way out and order a bag of fast-food burgers and fries. To Lou, the answer is simple: “Well, who gives moms permission? Dads.”
Peggy’s TV commercial shows a mom in a car with her two kids. The mom is talking to herself about all the things that need to be done: Let’s see. Check that list for the marching band fundraiser. Get the sink trap checked. Get Jim to take down the storm windows…. Then, as she realizes that her husband’s about to get home, the kids start complaining that they’re hungry. “One more stop,” mom announces. Then, as if in a dream, a handsome man comes bearing a bag full of Burger Chef food—and then kisses her deeply. It’s Jim, the husband! Triumph!
The idea is forced, but Lou is too witless to know and Don knows that he can’t speak up. Later Don suggests changing the POV from the mother to the kids. Still resentful and scornful of Don, Peggy rejects Don’s idea as “terrible.” But she’s got this nagging feeling that her own pitch is terrible too.
How can Peggy get the Burger Chef pitch right?
Working on a weekend, Peggy is surprised to see Don come into the office. She dismisses him for presuming to save the day. “Did you park your white horse outside?” she huffs. “Spare me the suspense and tell me what your save-the-day plan is.”
Don has no plan, but he knows how to start over. And so Don and Peggy start brainstorming a new concept.
Now, over the course of the episode, all of the characters in this drama look more alone than ever. Megan leaves for L.A. after a brief visit. Pete’s estranged wife avoids him, his child barely recognizes him, and his new amour leaves for L.A. Joan rejects Bob’s foolish proposal. No one’s happy. No one belongs to the kind of family these ad gurus celebrate in commercials. And Peggy, who sleeps alone every night and gets testier by the day, is full of regrets.
“Does this family exist anymore? Are there people who eat dinner and smile at each other instead of watching TV?” She’s pensive. “What the hell do I know about being a mom?” Peggy’s just turned 30 and now frets about never making her own family.
Don admits his own worries: “That I never did anything … and that I don’t have anyone.”
“What did I do wrong?” Peggy asks.
“You’re doing great,” Don says.
Finally, after letting down her guard and getting in touch with her real feelings, Peggy has the ability to follow Don’s advice earlier in the scene. “You can’t tell people what they want,” Don told her. “It has to be what you want.”
So Peggy asks: “What if there was a place where there was no TV and you could break bread and whoever you were sitting with was family?”
She’s finally got her campaign.
At the heart of the best Mad Men stories beats an existential truth. The truth of this story was expressed best by Orson Welles: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone,” Welles said. “Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”
That’s the foundation for Peggy’s new Burger Chef campaign. The fast-food joint isn’t just for takeout. It’s a third place, between work and home. It’s a gathering place for family, friends, classmates, colleagues, everyone. The traditional family might be disintegrating in the heat of the 1960s, but the core need for companionship—to overcome the aloneness of life—remains.
Peggy and Don introduce the idea to Pete at a Burger Chef restaurant. “Look around,” Peggy says as she parcels out cokes and burgers. “I want to shoot the ad in here.”
“It’s not a home,” Pete grumps.
“It’s better,” she says. “It’s a clean, well-lighted place. … It’s about family. Every table there is the family table.”
And so the three of them—whose only true family is each other—eat their meal. In a scene reminiscent of Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” the three are alone, together.
Finding Your Zen Set Point: ‘I’d Like to Sell the World a Coke’
Don Draper’s journey has been a long one, from the bloodshed of Korea to the hustling of New York to the utopian promise of California.
By 1970, Don’s lies and betrayals have caught up with him. He has failed in two marriages. He remains close to his daughter Sally but barely knows his sons. People he cares about have died, at least one because of him. He heard about another, the department store heiress Rachel Mencken, only because a model in a casting call rekindled his lust. His value, as an ad man, is his ability to extract the hope and joy from life’s tragedies and ugliness long enough to turn them into a pitch. Now it looks like he’s lost that ace card.
So Don takes a road trip. He first tries to track down a waitress who he had a short affair with. His lies don’t fool her ex-husband. His standard practice—to use his charm to win people over, until he gets bored or scared and drifts away—doesn’t work. So he goes further west. He arrives at the home of the real Don Draper, the one from whom Dick Whitman stole an identity and a ticket home from the war. There he meets Stephanie, the real Don’s daughter, who has endured tragedies of her own. Stephanie takes him north, to an esalen retreat in northern California. This is not a comfortable place for Don. Here, people speak unspeakable truths. When a woman attacks Stephanie in an encounter group, she flees. The next morning, she is gone. She takes Don’s car, so he is stuck at the retreat for two or three more days.
The guilt that Don has been carrying—for all his life as Don—leads him to despair. He calls Peggy. She’s angry. Where the hell have you been? Get back here! Don’t you want to work on the Coke account? But another account is far from where Don want to be right now. He cracks.
“I messed everything up. I’m not the man you think I am,” he says. Peggy’s confused. She knows about his philandering and alcoholism, but not about growing up in a whorehouse, going AWOL in a war, or stealing another man’s identity.
“I broke all my vows. I scandalized my child. I took another man’s name. And made … nothing of it.”
After saying goodbye to Peggy—is he going to commit suicide?—a sympathetic woman brings Don to another encounter group. Here he listens to an anti-Don—a loyal, reliable, unremarkable, unnoticed, and unappreciated normal—who breaks down because he is invisible to everyone in his life. Don walks across the room and embraces him. The two cry. For the first time, maybe ever, Don can hear and care about another person on that person’s own terms.
In the next scene we see Don, sitting lotus style, on the edge of a hill. Dozens of others sit nearby. A bell chimes. The gathered, all together chant their mantra: Ommmm. For a flash, a Mona Lisa smile crosses Don’s face.
Fade to one of the iconic television advertisements of all time—Coca-Cola’s “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony).”
What just happened? Matthew Weiner, the creator and head writer for Mad Men, obviously wants to maintain some room for debate. Maybe Don, having found peace—if only for a brief ommm—has decided to pursue a new life of enlightenment. But then, as he contemplates the oneness of the world at a time of war and riot and “ credibility gaps,” imagines people of all ages, races, creeds joining together. What brings them to gather is sharing a Coke, the modern equivalent of breaking bread.
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony.
I’d like to hold it in my arms
And keep it company.
Or maybe not. Maybe Don embraces the communal life, while Peggy and the other creatives at McCann Erickson dream up the Coke ad. Maybe Don sheds his fake identity, befriends the invisible man, joins in a new communal life . . . We’ll never know. After all, it’s an ambiguous ending, right?
(Well, maybe not. Creator/director/writer Matt Weiner explains his final episode in this interview.)
If Don does in fact go from an experience of oneness to masterminding an ad campaign that exploits the longing for oneness, what are we to think of him? That he’s just a cynical con man? That, on the edge of enlightenment, he can’t stand the truth and needs to return to his life of lies? Maybe. But Edward Boches, an ad man and professor at Boston University, has a different idea:
“Somehow Matthew Weiner actually understands the motives that drive creative people,” he says. “They need to create. They can’t stop. They can doubt themselves. They can try to escape. They can question the value and purpose of what they do, but the never-ending urge to make something creative that solves a problem never goes away. And when a good idea comes? You have to see it through.”
Bird fly, fish swim, creators create. Don Draper finds himself—truly finds himself—when he creates something fresh and new. Fulfillment comes not from sitting on a hill, vibrating, but by doing something that changes the way people experience life.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
An old TV commercial for Berlitz showed the training of a German coast guard watchman. The supervisor shows the new man all of the monitoring equipment and then leaves him alone to man the controls.
Later, a distress signal comes in: “SOS, we’re sinking! We are sinking.” The new watchman is confused. “What are you sinking about?” he asks.
Success and failure in communications often depend on a single word—even a letter or two. The way most people write today—in business, education, government, even journalism and publishing—is the result of an accidental, ad-hoc process of learning and mislearning. We need a better way. And the emerging science of reading and writing offers the path.
These days, everyone is a writer. A survey of Fortune 500 companies found that 70 percent of professionals must write on the job. And when they’re not writing, they’re reading their colleagues’ writing. My father, an engineer, could get away with not writing. So could most other professionals—developers, bureaucrats, scientists, philanthropists, business people. few people ever had to write a generation or so ago. And when they did write, they didn’t have to write much.
Old, Failed Approaches
So we’ve never had a fail-safe system for teaching and learning how to write. Writing instruction—in school, in business, and in writing seminars—takes two opposing approaches.
First, there’s scolding. Rather than showing us how to master all the discrete skills of writing, teachers shake their heads and wag their fingers and fill our drafts with red ink. So you’ll get back a draft with remarks like: Don’t you know about passive voice? This passage is awkward. Get the punctuation right. This is not a good topic sentence. Avoid run-on sentences. I need better evidence. What’s your thesis? Too often, these comments do little more than tell you what’s wrong. They don’t tell you how to make it right.
And then there’s coddling. Ever concerned about encouraging students, the coddler sets no standards at all. So you’ll hear teachers say, in one way or another: Anything you write is great, because there’s only one you! Don’t worry about punctuation or grammar or getting the words just right. Just write! You get this approach in “creative writing” and other programs designed to encourage students to explore. Nice idea. But it doesn’t work.
Neither of these approaches breaks writing down to its basic skills, and shows the learner what to do, step by step. Imagine if we learned other skills—like how to drive a car—the way we learn how to write.
Scolding: What’s wrong with you? Just drive? Don’t ask me how! Just move the car into traffic, without lurching or hitting anyone. And when you parallel-park, don’t ask me how. Just do it!
Coddling: Whatever way you want to drive is just fine! You’re special! There’s only one you! Don’t worry about those other drivers! So what if they can’t figure out what you’re doing. Just keep driving. Marvelous!
When you learn to drive, you break down every move into pieces. Then you practice—intently—until you get it right. You focus on one skill at a time, until you get it just right. You get instant feedback, not just from the instructor but also from other drivers and the car itself. If you stall, you know you did something wrong. You also learn that you need to care about others on the road. More than anything else, you learn to manage your own mind. You learn how to pay attention, how to be a “defensive driver,” how to compensate for blind spots.
Go With the Brain
We need an approach like that for learning how to write. Luckily, the burgeoning research on the brain—on cognition, attention, learning, skill-building, problem-solving—offers powerful insights for mastering the writing process.
When I’m teaching writing—to high school and college students, teachers, business people, social workers, and other writers and editors—we explore “what the brain wants.” The brain is the boss of everything we do. If you work at cross-purposes with the brain, it will not perform as well as possible. But if you give the brain what it “wants,” you’ll succeed.
Over the last generation, we have learned more about how the brain works than ever before. And so we know “what the brain wants.” And what the brain wants, you better give if you plan to connect with your audience—whether it’s your colleagues inside the organization or your clients, vendors, policymakers, industry leaders, or the buying public outside the organization.
What Does the Brain Want?
So what does the brain want—and what doesn’t the brain want? And how can that knowledge guide our development as writers?
The brain wants:
Clarity and guidance: We need to know where we are. We hate getting disoriented or lost. So you need to tell the reader what she needs to know, as quickly and as simply as possible.
Predictability, reliability, and patterns: Everyone wants a sense of where they’re going—without having to pay too much attention. If we had to process all of our sensory inputs, we’d explode. One researcher calls the brain a “prediction machine.” We need to assess not just what’s going on right now, but also what’s about to happen.
Specificity: The brain wants specific images, sounds, and ideas. The more vague we are, the more unsettled and disoriented we feel. But when we get specific information—not just the five W’s (who, what, when, where, and why), but also the one-and-only details that set them apart, we are engaged. “Mississippi” tells more than “big river”; “Aristotle” reveals more than “Greek philosopher”; “double helix” says more than “genetic structure.”
Change, action, and surprise: Our brains evolved to detect change. If we’re foraging for food, we need to notice when a predator lurks. When something surprising happens, we jolt into a heightened state of attention and readiness. Because action activates all our senses—sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste—we come alive when we see action.
Completeness, closure, and wholeness: We need to know “how it all turns out.” Nothing nags at our consciousness—and drains our energy—more than an unresolved problem. When we solve a problem or answer a question, we feel immense satisfaction. Only when we finish something do we feel we can move on.
Look closely at these desires. You might notice that they’re also the elements of stories. Humans are, in fact, a storytelling species. Nothing sets us apart from other species more than storytelling. Other species eat, drink, sleep, find shelter, reproduce, and even use tools and language. As far as we know, only humans tell stories. Stories excite and engage us; stories create order and make sense of the world. we could not live without stories. Luckily, everyone loves hearing and telling great stories. We’re wired for narrative.
The Brain Wants a Story
Now, let’s get back to writing. What does this tell us about the best way to master writing?
Simple: If you can master the skills of storytelling—and, as part of the process, give the brain what it “wants”—you can write well. And you can have fun in the process.
Storytelling has a simple structure, which Aristotle outlined in The Poetics 2,500 years ago. Aristotle called it the “narrative arc.” Every story, Aristotle taught, has three parts. In Part 1, you get to know the world of the story—the characters, where they live and work, their values and desires. In Part 2, you see the hero (and other characters) struggle to achieve his goal. Along the way, he faces greater and greater barriers. As the story progresses, the character learns more and more about how the world works and about himself. Finally, in Part 3, the hero comes to a new understanding about himself and the world. Aristotle calls this “recognition.” Once the character reaches this greater understanding, he “reverses” himself and sets out to live life in a new way. The story winds down.
You can see the narrative structure—and the five basic needs of the brain—in this graphic:
This three-part structure of storytelling reveals the basic structure of all writing. Every element of writing—the sentence, paragraph, section, chapter, article, story, analysis, and so on—takes this basic 1-2-3 structure. In a sense, everything you’ll ever write is a story. Once you master the basic structure of stories—and some simple, specific strategies for building stories—all the other challenges of writing come easily.
I have seen poor and mediocre writers become strong writers in a matter of weeks by applying this system. I have seen good writers become masters of the craft. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s not. Remember, we are all born storytellers. Storytelling is part of our DNA. Storytelling is as natural for us as eating and drinking.
When we teach people how to write with this natural system—this brain-based approach that’s already built into our brains—we will become a world of skilled writers. Why not? It’s who we are.
Everything begins with action. Nothing arouses the reader like action. Descriptions of action actually activate the parts of the brain associated with action. And for good reason. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt notes, action “has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries.” We can never predict where an action might lead. When we depict it well, we command the reader’s complete attention.
Beats
Human expression requires a pulsing give-and-take. Just as people are wired to sing and dance, to love and play, we are also wired to share stories. And we love stories that show people acting and reacting. When people do things that matter, that push forward a story or argument, we cannot help but be riveted. Whether it’s a great moment of dialogue, witty banter, a complex puzzle explained well, or even a well-constructed joke, we love to watch people play ping pong with stories and ideas. In such situations, we do not want to miss a beat.
Characters
Giving stories fizz, of course, requires characters that we want to know, both in the real world and in the world of make-believe. A vibrant cast of characters reflects the human drama across the world and across history. Those characters also reflect the traits that we all find competing inside our own hearts and minds. We all have a hero within, and an anti-hero too. We all have a wise self and a foolish and impetuous one. We are rational, and we are artistic. We are creative and destructive. And when the characters in a story reflect this human complexity, we cannot help but tune in.
Details and Evidence
Details, details, details. Cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham notes, the human brain is not wired for abstraction. We need to live in the “here and now.” Once you give the reader a concrete world, you can show the abstract ideas that undergird that world.
Editing
But if the devil is in the details, strong writing requires being selective about those details. To find that mot juste, that word that tells, we need to edit, edit, edit. We need to take a sythe to our tangled prose and whack away the phragmites that choke the river’s flow. We need to make our nouns and verbs strong . . . and agreeable. We need to make sure each sentence starts strong and finishes strong. We need to craft paragraphs with purpose.
Form
And then give it all form. Some tales and theses require a straight line from A to B. Some stories start in the middle (in media res), others start at the end (like Pinter’s Betrayal), and still others in circles (like Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same”).
Grammar
Whatever form our stories tell, we need to mind our manners, which means, in writing, good grammar. Do verbs agree with verbs? Do the verbs say what you need them to say? Do you direct traffic adequately, with punctuation? Grammar gives writing a strong foundation. It’s like the street grid in a town: It helps us to get around without tripping over ourselves.
Hanging
Once we have created that predictable terrain, we can tease and play with readers with the cliffhanger. “The job of the artist,” Francis Bacon said, “is to always deepen the mystery.” You will always keep the reader’s attention if you make them ache for more information. Be like Hansel and Gretel, dropping breadcrumbs along their path. Make sure the reader always wants to continue, by sprinkling the group with unanswered questions and surprising answers.
Into the World of the Story
But where? When we go into the world of the story, we have the frame and canvas for everything that happens. Every story needs “a small, knowable place,” which helps to define the characters and dilemmas, without distracting the reader. In that setting, the characters can laugh and cry, scheme and fight, deny and learn, and grow.
Jazz Riffs
And, of course, play. Jazz riffs provide the playful tempo to writing. Words are internal music. Let loose the saxes and trumpets and drums of your language. Look loose, but know, always, that every moment of apparent spontaneous expression requires total mastery of the instrument.
Kinesthetic, Visual, Auditory
And what play is possible without the senses? The best writers help us to understand how everything feels (kinesthetic), looks (visual) and sounds (auditory).
Leads
Remember in media res, starting in the middle? Now I’m in the middle, talking about how to start. Maybe I should have started the alphabet with L. Oh, well. Anyway, you only get one chance to make a lasting impression. Your lead should grab the reader and never let go. In your opening lines, you want to intrigue, puzzle, stun, question, set up the reader.
Metaphors and Similes
Sometimes the best way to show what is, is to say that what isn’t actually is. Metaphors tell the reader that one thing is another: “All the world’s a stage” (Shakespeare). Similes, comparisons using like and as, offer a more modest approach: “Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed toward me like towers of Pisa” (Nabakov, Lolita). Explain one thing by referring to something else. As Dan Willingham says, learning is really just a process of remembering in a new way.
Narrative
But of course, such images are like nutrition-free bon-bons without a point. To give it a point, you need to begin one place and end another. Narrative takes the characters through a journey, which produces challenge and change. Do you take your reader anywhere?
Order and Numbers
But the best stories come in the right order. Start strong, finish strong. And use numbers to convey meaning. One isolates the character or idea. Two sets up a partnership or opposition (or a tense partnership, or friendly competition). Three offers dynamism: Every corner of the triangle shifts with the nudging of another corner. Four or more? It’s just a grocery list—which is good for, well, buying groceries.
Paragraphs
Think of paragraphs as rooms in a house. One purpose for each. Receive guests in the parlor. Cook in the kitchen. Eat in the dining room. Watch TV in the den. Work in the study. Sleep in the bedroom And so on. Give each paragraph a singular purpose. Keep it simple.
Questions
Each paragraph—and every piece of writing, as a whole—needs to raise a question. “Then what happened?” works for many stories. “Break it down” works for arguments.
Research and Reporting
How do you know? Inquiring minds want to know. To know anything, you must first search. Use books and articles, links and clips, interviews and questionnaires, experiments and observations. Pull the needles from those haystacks and build your own structure.
Sentences
Maybe we should have started here. After all Action—A, above—tells who does what to whom. And that’s the ideal core of every sentence: Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) or Subject-Verb-Predicate (SVP). As Papa Hemingway said, write “one true sentence”—a strong, taut, clear statement of what happens. If you do that, you will have the cornerstone of your edifice. Then you can put more and more stones, and build something strong and beautiful.
Thesis
What’s it all about? The Thesis wants to tell you. It’s all very simple: X → Y. Something causes something else. Or: Something plus something causes something else. All he world can be unlocked with causal statements.
Unexpected
Surprise! Without surprise, life is not an adventure, just an endless loop of a tape. If someone picks up your writing, you owe them a surprise. Tell them something they don’t know. Give readers something new to take home. Make every piece like a trip to a great department store. Give them something they would never find on their own.
Verbs
Just do it! A simple slogan for athletic shoes makes an important point. Life lies in action, in doing, in getting onto the field and stretching and straining to the limit. Make sure you show just how active life can be. Even when explaining indolence—like a day in the life of Oblomov—use action verbs.
Words
Treat every word like a gem. Look it over. See it’s different colors, the sharpness of its edges, its beauty in different lights, its character in different settings. And when you got to the Word Shop, just as when you go to the jewelry store, be picky. Buy just the right ones. And put them in the right place in your sentences. Unlike gems, words are free. That’s all the more reason to choose with discrimination.
eXplaining
Remember this: First one thing, then another. Avoid the temptation, when your brain holds all the answers like an old memory chest, to show everything you have at once. Let your stories and explanations unfold . . . like this: u n f o l d. First one thing, then another.
Yo-Yoing
Imagine Beethoven’s Fifth with only the pounding notes, or just the sweet ones. It would be monotonous, and draining. We need to shift back and forth, from one mood to another, from one kind of expression to another. Describe, then explain. Go from scene to summary. Show the reader the scene up close, then zoom out. Show a moment of anger, then love; fear, then relief; tension, then release; brain-straining, then simplicity.
Zip It Up
All good things must come to an end. The ending is the destination—the realization or dashing of the characters’ dreams. To end—to zip it up—you need to tell the reader the story’s over, leave an impression, and maybe even drop one last surprise.
To understand a subject, we need to understand not just how to do things well, but also how to fix what’s wrong. And so, by popular demand, I have gathered a dozen examples of flawed sentences and paragraphs.
Each passage presents a unique challenge to the writer and editor. Usually, you can fix these passages by breaking them down, shortening the sentences, emphasizing the subject and verb, and clearing out the digressions.
(1) Make Sure to Say Who Did What
One of the more thoughtful essayists today is David Brooks of The New York Times, who covers politics, technology, brain research, economics, and social issues with a deft touch. But here he stumbles:
Hotels, sneakers, iced tea and even ice cream is now marketed to people on the basis of psychographic profiles and the result is a profusion of unusual products and distinctive experiences.
What’s wrong? Two things. First, he fails to get his first subjects and verb to agree (“Hotels, sneakers, iced tea and even ice cream” is plural), creating a small (but important) moment of confusion. Second, he fails to develop two separate thoughts before connecting them.
To fix this minor kludge, break the sentence into two. To connect the thoughts, use a simple transition (“as a result”). In each sentence, make sure to say exactly who does what. Like this:
Markets now use psychological profiles to hawk hotels, sneakers, iced tea, and even ice cream. With more information about what consumers want, corporate America offers a profusion of unusual products and distinctive experiences.
Brooks has legions of fans (like me) because he does such a good job explaining abstract, cutting-edge research to nonspecialists. But in this passage, he let himself wander. Take your time, David; even when you want to connect ideas from different worlds, just state one thought at a time.
(2) Keep Subjects and Verbs Close Together
To make a point clear, be sure to connect the subject with the verb. When you deal with two distinct points in time, be sure you know what’s doing what and when. Consider this confusing passage from an article about a former baseball player named Ryan Freel who committed suicide:
This passage makes it seem like Freel was suffering from CTE at the mass. In fact, the mass under discussion was his funeral.
To avoid confusion, put actors, actions, places, and times together. One actor was Freel; other actors were members of his family. Talk about each in turn, like this:
Freel suffered from CTE, family members said at a private mass on Sunday.
Notice that I deleted the attribution. I think you could include the attribution in a later sentence, as you explain the issue in more detail. My goal here is to avoid veering off in different directions.
(3) Watch Out for Meandering Passages
Lots of writers lose the reader right away. Rather than telling the reader what’s happening, they meander along. Take this sentence from Sports Illustrated’s website:
Even last Thursday, when Yankees manager Joe Girardi’s strategy of sacrificing an AL East title—in order to set up a first-round matchup with the Twins—his club’s traditional whipping boys—instead of with Cliff Lee and the Rangers was close to paying dividends (New York then had a 2-0 series lead on Minnesota), Girardi refused to admit that this had ever been his strategy at all.
The writer uses 47 words to get to his point: Joe Girardi denied blowing the division. The meandering gets in the way of the point of the sentence. Meandering also creates confusion. The phrase “instead of with Cliff Lee and the Rangers was close to paying dividends” takes the reader in two separate directions. Punctuation would help. But what would help more is starting and finishing strongly. Like this:
Manager Joe Girardi still denies that the Yankees purposely lost the AL East title. When the Tampa Bay Rays won the title, the Yankees got a first-round matchup with the Minnesota Twins. The Yankees såwept the Twins in three previous playoff series. By losing the division, the Yankees avoided the Texas Rangers and their ace, Cliff Lee.
The new version cuts twelve words and gives the reader four simple sentences.
The revised passage also offers more information—that the Rays won the title and the Twins lost their last three series to the Yankees. Rambling has a way of making writers forget to tell the readers facts like that. Short, declarative sentences demand clear information.
(4) Avoid the Long and Winding Road
Sports writer Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News has a tendency to write long and meandering sentences, as if he’s arguing in a bar and dare not pause lest someone else enter the conversation.
In this 2012 passage, Lupica explores the misfit between the Boston Red Sox and their manager, Bobby Valentine. Amid rumors that the Red Sox plan to fire Valentine, Sox President Larry Lucchino offers a lukewarm endorsement of the manager. Lucchino does not embrace Valentine; he only says that his job is safe for the final month and a half of the season. Then Lupica says:
That is exactly where we are with the Red Sox and with Valentine, who will eventually take the fall for everything that has gone wrong since the Red Sox were still ahead of the Yankees a year ago, right before they played the absolute worst September ever played by a team that had nearly gotten to 40 games over .500 before that. …
This stream-of-consciousness sentences meanders over time:
The present: That is exactly where we are with the Red Sox and with Valentine
The future: who will eventually take the fall for everything that has gone wrong
The past: since the Red Sox were still ahead of the Yankees a year ago
More detail on the past: right before they played the absolute worst September ever played by a team
Modification of that detail: that had nearly gotten to 40 games over .500 before that.
How do we revise this 62-word monstrosity? Break it up! Take a look at this sentence-by-sentence revision:
So it goes with the Red Sox and Valentine’s uneasy relationship. Eventually, Valentine will take the fall for everything that has gone wrong with the team. He’ll suffer not just for his team’s failures, but also for team’s funk since September 2012. After going almost 40 games over .500—and leading the Yankees in the standings—the Red Sox played historically badly to blow their playoff hopes.
Lupica might not like my rewrite. He and his imitators at the Daily News love the breathless string of ideas. Maybe they think it sounds like an old-timey coach rambling on about the good old days. But clarity and accuracy should be the primary goals of all writing.
(5) Don’t Use So Much Color It Gets Muddy
Since most readers get their daily news online, as it happens, writers for magazines need to give readers behind-the-scenes glimpses of the news makers. In this passage, Newsweek describes an event involving the company that built the website for the Affordable Care Act, popularly know as Obamacare. The company, CGI Federal, gathered his workers to celebrate landing the contract for the job:
Most attendees stayed in the resort’s Chateau Lafayette hotel, a replica of the Ritz-Carlton in Paris, and at a formal dinner under the elaborate chandelier in the ballroom, George D. Schindler, the president of CGI Federal, spoke of the company’s big profits that year and its bright future.
This sentence describes two different facts: (1) where people stayed and (2) what the company’s president said. The reporter is trying to make a connection between the company’s luxury accommodations and its hubris. But the facts about the luxury, a celebration, and the company president’s remarks.
To make the point better, the author could have broken the sentence in two and offered a more direct connection between the luxury and overconfidence. Like this:
CGI workers stayed in the resort’s Chateau Lafayette hotel, a replica of the Ritz-Carlton in Paris. To celebrate the Obamacare contract, they gathered for a formal dinner under the elaborate chandelier in the ballroom. George D. Schindler, the president of CGI Federal, spoke of the company’s big profits that year and its bright future.
Even readers who followed the rocky rollout of Obamacare don’t know much about CGI Federal. If you want to peek behind the curtains at CGI’s culture, you need to take one glimpse at a time.
(6) Block that Metaphor!
No one covers sports better than Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post. But even the great Boswell falters. Here, he mixes four metaphors. Most football fans won’t care. But he sounds like a hack here, and he’s not. Take a look:
Yes, it’s happened again. Now it’s the Shanahan era, once trumpeted, now down in flames, that takes its place in the line — for bitterness, for ugly endings and for the endless blame game that always accompanies Snyder’s flops — with the departures of Norv Turner, Marty Schottenheimer, Steve Spurrier and Jim Zorn.
Let’s review the metaphors:
• once trumpeted
• down in flames
• takes its place in the line
• endless blame game
• Snyder’s flops
Let’s just say Boswell had a bad day. And let’s add that the Post’s desk editor failed to save Boz from his flaws. Now, let’s fix his cliché prose:
Yes, it’s happened again. The Shanahan era, once a cause for hope, has failed. Shanahan has become part of the Redskin’s sorry recent history — marked by bitterness, ugly endings, and blame. That’s how it works with Snyder’s failure — with the previous departures of Norv Turner, Marty Schottenheimer, Steve Spurrier, Jim Zorn, and, soon enough, with Shanahan
To be sure, most of Boswell’s readers would follow his logic easily. But the best writers not only speak to knowledgeable readers, but to people with a casual interest in the subject.
(7) Stop Meandering
This Boston Globe article explores a familiar topic—conflict of interest among state officials. In this case, the head of the state’s gambling commission failed to disclose that one of his friends had a stake in a project that he was responsible for managing. But this sentence, while short, manages to wander off the subject:
After Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn toured the former industrial site in Everett where he was thinking of building a casino in November 2012, state gambling commission chairman Stephen Crosby didn’t mention that one of the land owners was his former business partner.
Because this sentence meanders, it makes a key fact unclear. What happened in November 2012? Was that when Steve Wynn visited? Or was it the time to build a casino?
Fixing this little mess is simple. Just separate the separate thoughts into separate sentences. Like this:
Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn toured the former industrial site in Everett, where he was considering building a casino, in November 2012. But Steve Crosby, the state gambling commission chairman Stephen Crosby, failed to mention that one of his friends owned a key parcel of land at the site.
Separating these thoughts not only makes the passage clearer; it also makes it fairer. The passage describes two events—the casino mogul’s visit and the gambling regulator’s relationships. Together, they suggest something fishy is going on. But separating these ideas gives readers the room to make their own conclusions.
(8) Don’t Be Too Pushy
We write to persuade. Even when we just want to describe something, matter-of-factly, we aim to get someone else to believe something we believe. Problems arise when we push our opinions so hard that we confuse what we’re saying.
For an example, consider Peggy Noonan, a conservative opinion writer for The Wall Street Journal. Noonan, who write speeches for President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, seems to have three passions: loving Reagan, loving Pope John Paul II, and not loving Barack Obama. In her almost-weekly pieces against President Obama, she piles insult upon insult, as if you say: Have I told you that I really, really dislike this guy and people who like him?
Take a look at this 51-word sentence from May 2013:
The president, detached and defeatist when he isn’t in your face and triumphalist, let David Remnick, in the New Yorker interview people keep going back to as the second term’s Rosetta stone, know that he himself does not expect any major legislation, with the possible exception of immigration, to get done.
In one swing, she bashes Obama for being detached, defeatist, in your face, triumphalist. For extra measure she slights New Yorker editor David Remnick for his interview with Obama, as well as “people” who found the interview revealing. That’s six raps on Obama and his sympathizers. Finally, she gets to her point: Obama has a limited legislative agenda for the rest of his second term.
Noonan, of course, gets paid to express her opinions. My purpose here is not to disagree—personally, I have mixed feelings about the president—but to help her write better sentences.
So let’s fix her mess by breaking it into more digestible pieces:
When the president does not attack Republicans and celebrate himself, he retreats to a detached and defeatist posture. Obama told David Remnick of the New Yorker—in an interview that liberals consider the second term’s Rosetta Stone—he has low expectations for the rest of his term. With the possible exception of immigration, Obama sees little hope for action on any major issue.
I kept all of Noonan’s insults, even sharpening the swipe at people who liked the New Yorker interview.
I cut the average sentence length from 51 to 21 words but increased the length of the whole passage by 12 words. As a general rule, of course, shorter is better than longer. But the primary goal of all writing is readability. To make all of Noonan’s points clearly, we need to use more words.
(9) Avoid Corporate-Speak
Writers in large organizations—like government and corporations—tend to avoid direct speech. Why? Here are four reasons:
(1) People in organizations want to avoid saying anything that might offend their constituents.
(2) They tend to speak an “insider’s language” that is abstract and unfamiliar to outsiders.
(3) To make sure they make their point, they often repeat themselves.
(4) They try to pack too much information into a sentence or paragraph.
All four tendencies are visible in this paragraph, taken from the website of a major financial rating service:
Altogether, a total of 950 natural catastrophes were recorded last year, nine-tenths of which were weather-related events like storms and floods. This total makes 2010 the year with the second-highest number of natural catastrophes since 1980, markedly exceeding the annual average for the last ten years (785 events per year). The overall losses amounted to around US$ 130bn, of which approximately US$ 37bn was insured. This puts 2010 among the six most loss-intensive years for the insurance industry since 1980. The level of overall losses was slightly above the high average of the past ten years.
How to fix this monstrosity? Start by identifying the major ideas in the passage. I see two—recent disasters and their costs and the new “norm” of disastrous weather events. So I broke the paragraph into two, then trimmed the details and repetition that turns off readers. Here’s my rewrite:
Natural disasters made 2010 one of the six worst years for losses since 1980. Some 950 natural disasters caused financial losses of $130 billion, of which only $37 billion was insured.
Risk from environmental catastrophe has become the norm. The world experienced an average of 785 catastrophic events in the first decade of the 2000s.
This rewrite cuts the passage from 96 to 55 words and the average sentence length from 24 to 13.75 words. More important, it eliminates needless hedges and emphatics and focuses on hard facts.
(10) Avoid Too Many Modifiers
Now we shift our attention to academic writing. Scholars have earned a reputation for tedious, vague, and abstract writing. Look at this passage, from an academic journal article about the civil rights movement:
After the Second World War, the general drift of American public opinion toward a more liberal racial attitude that had begun during the New Deal became accentuated as a result of the revolution against Western Imperialism in Asia and Africa that engendered a new respect for the nonwhite peoples of the world, and as a result of the subsequent competition for the support of the uncommitted nations connected with the Cold War.
Get it? I didn’t, at least the first few times I read it. Only by hunting for the subject and verb—and then breaking it down into shorter pieces—did I fully comprehend what the writer was trying to say.
So why does this passage go awry? In a seventy-two-word sentence, the author uses sixteen prepositions—after, of, toward, during, as, of, against, in, that, for, of, as, of, for, of, and with. So many prepositions demand too much from the reader. It’s disorienting, like asking a driver to turn sixteen times to travel a short distance.
What do prepositions do? They create modifiers—details that offer new information about nouns and verbs. But do we need so many modifiers? I don’t think so.
To rewrite that passage, I removed all but a handful of prepositional phrases. Then I broke the passage into digestible pieces. Look at this new version:
After World War II, Americans adopted more liberal attitudes about race. The New Deal began this process. Revolutions against imperial powers in Asia and Africa created new respect for the nonwhite populations. The Cold War also prompted the U.S. to consider how racial strife damaged America’s image in the Cold War.
The new version breaks one monster sentence into three ordinary sentences. It uses fifty-one words, twenty-two fewer. And it uses only five prepositions—about, against, in, for, and in—instead of sixteen.
Writing is hard, often painful, work. After a long research slog, First you have to do research, sometimes taking hours to track down or check a fact. Most of what you gather, you cannot use. If you are not spending hours on the cramped and dark stacks of the library, you sit zombie-like in front of a glowing screen. Only on rare occasions do you get to conduct first-hand research, with travel, interviews, and observation.
Then comes the painful process of actually writing, putting down one word after another. And then, once you have a draft, the really hard work begins—rewriting, revising, getting critiques from others. And as soon as you turn an essay in, you realize all the mistakes and omissions you made.
As the legendary sportswriter Red Smith once said: “Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.”
Well, that is one way of looking it. But while writing requires a lot of hard work, it is also one of the most exciting of all pursuits. Writing offers an opportunity to wrestle with important topics, express your most passionate thoughts, and even nourish your ego. Writing is a process of discovery. Even when you think you know what you want to write, you always discover something new.
Here are some simple rules to follow to become a better writer. Master them all, and there’s no basic writing you cannot do.
1. Relax.
Anxiety paralyzes the brain. Writing, playing with ideas and seeing what works, should be fun and creative. When you get stuck, don’t dig a deeper ditch. Try something else. Brainstorm (See No. 2).
Imagine real-life situations, involving specific people, scenes, and action (see No. 3). Think about dilemmas people might want to solve. Or pick a passage from a reading and try to see how it fits into the larger scheme of things. If it helps, imagine exaggerated, even comical or nonsensical, situations.
2. Brainstorm.
Especially at the beginning of the writing process, but also throughout the process, you need to explore every possible idea and piece of evidence possible. Think of every situation and concept that could have a bearing on your subject. Do not sort ideas until you have allowed them first to flow unobstructed.
Try to brainstorm ideas onto one sheet of paper. If you need a big sheet of paper, that’s fine. But you need to see everything in one place. Once you have brainstormed, you need to separate concepts from illustrations or facts. Then you need to consider what the most important or surprising ideas or relationships might be. Ask yourself the kind of questions that would interest you if you were a reader or audience.
3. Visualize.
Try to visualize real-world situations, and then understand the cause/effect relationship arising from that situation.
Close your eyes and imagine a scene from a movie. Visualize characters struggling over something important. Think about the tensions between the characters—and also those within each character.
In order to get to important concepts, we need to imagine the real-world implications of those concepts. The battles over issues like abortion, divorce, torture, immigration, medical care, labor relations, and countless other issues matter not because of some abstract ideas. They matter because they affect real people. To understand abstract ideals, you need to understand the human conflicts behind them.
Once we can visualize real-world situations, we can begin to see patterns that explain human behavior.
4. Keep things simple.
The best way to present complex ideas is to break them down, simply. Always look for a simpler argument and a simpler way of expressing that argument.
Look for the simple subject-verb-object statement in every sentence. Whenever possible, express things in the simple S-V-O form: “Derek Jeter booted the ground ball” or “President Bush criticized antiwar activists.” Of course, you will need more complex constructions too. But always make sure you know who’s doing what.
Consider the basic elements of a sentence here:
SUBJECT (Noun, pronoun, sometimes modified by adjectives) –> VERB (sometimes with an adverb) –> OBJECT (noun, pronoun, sometimes modified)
“Derek Jeter booted the ball.” “She lost her keys.” “The President blamed Congress.” “The chef fired the cook and dish washer.” “The rowdy fans three paper cups at the controversial outfielder.”
Or think of is this way:
SUBJECT (a noun, however simple or complex–what the sentence is all about) –> PREDICATE (tells something about the subject, usually starting with a verb)
“The book gave me a lot to think about.” “The president has a lot of unfinished business.”
And then add those pieces that give writing greater depth and clarity:
Word clusters — Verbal phrases (prepositional [”The statue on the table“], verbal [”To eat is essential”], gerundal [”Swimming is fun”], participial [”Exhausted from a day of swimming, Leila watched a movie”], infinitive [”To make a good first impression creates new opportunities”]) and clauses (independent [”Isabel ate lunch in the cafeteria before classes”], dependent [”When Isabel ate lunch in the cafeteria before classes, …”])
That’s pretty much everything you will ever find in a good sentence. Keep it simple, and you will never lose your way.
5. Be a constant gardener.
Look for ways to express your ideas more simply. Look for common errors of grammar and spelling. Harry Shaw once wrote: “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.” To present ideas clearly, we need to clear out the clutter—needless words, repetitive sentences, clichéd statements, unrevealing quotations. We need to make sure the writing’s architecture reveals itself as clearly as the foundation and shell at a construction site. And we need to make sure to use simplest sentence structure—usually the S-V-O structure.
Here are the most common problems of grammar and style:
• Wordiness, repetition, overstatements, and statements of the obvious
• Sentence fragments and run-on sentences
• Problems with proper names and second-reference pronouns
• Double negatives
• Hanging participles
• Wordy introductory fluff (“It is interesting to note…,” “From the dawn of time…”).
• Tense and voice confusions
• Subject-verb agreements
• Commas, colons, and semicolons
Here are the most common problems of word usage:
• Affect and effect
• It’s and its
• It/its and they/their
• There and there and they’re
• That, which, and who
• Lie and lay
• To, too, and two
• Like and as
• Who and whom, whose and who’s
• Medium and media
• Less and fewer
One trick for cutting clutter is to read drafts backward. Read the last section first, then the next-to-last section, all the way to the opening section. Backward editing offers two benefits. First, it helps you avoid getting swept away by your own prose. Second, it helps you to envision the structure of your writing.
Also, search for instances of “to be” and “to have.” Those constructions usually obscure rather than clarify matters.
6. Do not get argumentative.
You want to make your argument so compelling that even skeptics are eager to embrace and further your argument. If you are doing your job, people with other perspectives will see the merits of your case. You do not need to put down others’ arguments to make your own.
Eagerly anticipate and present opposing arguments, not just to counter them, but also to engage as broad a readership as possible.
No matter how right you are, someone somewhere holds a different perspective with some validity. If you appreciate a different perspective, you will sharpen your own thinking.
7. Discuss issues with other people and read aloud.
To be a good writer, you also need to be a good speaker. Speaking is just writing on air, at least in some ways. The better you speak, the better you can write.
Writing is often understood as a solitary business. And, to be sure, we need to get away from the noise of everyday life to think through difficult problems and apply ourselves to writing. But you cannot flip the “social” switch all the time. You need to connect writing with other people. Writing is, after all, communication.
In our modern age, we have radically separated important and related ways of thinking—writing and speaking, words and images, right and left sides of the brain, thinking and action. But if we want to do anything well, we need to work on all these skills.
Speaking about issues gives you greater mental flexibility and confidence. Anyone can speak well, which gives you greater confidence. Speaking forces you to give your thoughts some kind of order. Speaking extemporaneously also taps into the deep reservoirs of knowledge that usually gets stuck below the surface of your consciousness.
Reading drafts of writing aloud helps you imagine how readers will take in your words. Will they stumble? Will they get confused? Will they get lost? Will they understand your point? Will they visualize your ideas?
Jordan Peterson is a modern Mark Twain or Charles Dickens.
You might think of him as the bestselling author of The 12 Rules for Life or as the controversial opponent of speech-control laws in Canada or as the YouTube sensation who has challenged us all to buck up and take responsibility for what we do with our lives. He is all that and he is also an original thinker who blends psychology, philosophy, and spiritual texts in order to face up to the challenges of modernity.
But his real power comes from storytelling. And like Twain and Dickens, he has brought this power to the lecture circuit. I was lucky enough to see him in a recent appearance in Connecticut.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Scientists have the stereotype of brainy figures with a penchant for abstraction.
Medical researchers study microscopic processes that require special tools and powers of deduction—abstract stuff for anyone. Science is, after all, an unbiased search for truth, a world of abstraction, proofs, and testing. In lab work, scientists seek to identify how the world works, piece by piece.
Pretty dry stuff, eh? No, not really.
In fact, the best researchers often rely on stories to understand the complexities of their research. By understanding their petri dishes as great stages, with dramas that unfold the suspense of a thriller, they can better explore the phenomena of the world.
Every experiment provides dramas with vivid characters with goals, conflicts, and setbacks. And groundbreaking research creates the kind of cliffhangers and surprises that would make Agatha Christie or Alfred Hitchcock proud.
Years ago, I talked with medical researchers at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. My goal was to learn about the power of narrative in research. Here’s what I found out.
Machines, Parts and Wholes
For Rodolfo Llinas, it’s impossible to understand the intricacies of the human body without remembering old stories and constructing new stories.
Dr. Llinas, , the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and chairman of NYU’s Department of Physiology and Neuroscience, remembers the time, as a child, visiting his grandfather at his psychiatry practice. Young Rodolfo witnessed a patient having a seizure. “I thought he was going to die,” Dr. Llinas said.
“There’s something wrong with the man’s brain,” his grandfather told him. That statement posed questions that Llinas has investigated his whole career. Is the brain separate from our being? Or is the brain, in essence, the whole self? How do we understand how the brain operates?
As a boy, then, Dr. Llinas discovered an approach to problem-solving that would help him understand the brain. He began thinking of the brain–and all of life itself–as a complex machine that can be understood by taking it apart and putting it together again. Soon he disassembled the family’s Victrola and reassembled it. “All of these parts by themselves had no property,” he recalled. “But as a whole, they would make music.”
Rebuilding the machine helped Llinas appreciate its “elegance.” Simple outside, it was complex inside. “Once you understand something at that level,” he explains, “it’s yours.” The Victrola gave the aspiring scientist confidence—and a metaphor for research.
“The universe is understandable,” he says. “There are some unknowns, but it’s not mysterious.”
Metaphor and Suspense
Like Llinas, other researchers also turn to metaphors and stories to find answers amid mountains of data. In their quest for groundbreaking knowledge, researchers often find insight in the ordinary. They seek out surprises and evidence against their arguments. And while digging deep in their own specialties, they also look for ways to connect their work with other scientific puzzles.
Llinas’s colleague Gordon Fishell also makes sense of data by comparing it to other things and putting it in a drama. “At the end of the day, the scientist is a storyteller,” he says. “In prehistoric times, cave dwellers didn’t have a hell of a lot to do but tell stories. Whoever holds the big stick gets to talk. You get to hold it as long as you hold the audience.”
Research, he says, creates a similar kind of suspense. Researchers ask tough questions and develop a collection of answers—some right and some wrong. In their labs, at conferences, and in their writing, they “iterate stories.” In this process, the wrong answers are just as important as the right ones, for they force you to think harder.
Surprise–Or Not
At conferences, Fishell makes a practice of guessing what speakers are going to say. “If people go through details and I know where the story’s going, I’m bored. I’m more interested when they say, ‘We did this, but didn’t get the result.’”
The willingness to make mistakes—countless ones—is what enables researchers to reach. “Whether you’re Spike Lee or Ingmar Bergman or a scientist, it’s all the same,” says Fishell. “Creative people create.” Suspense drew Susan Schwab, assistant professor of pathology at NYU, from one field to another.
Schwab avoided biology because she considered it little more than “memorizing names and pathways.” But as a graduate student in environmental science at the University of California at Berkeley, she could not understand the aerodynamics of fine particulates as a cause of childhood asthma. So she took an undergraduate biology class “it was basically the coolest thing I ever experienced.” The professor, Nalabh Shastri, made the mystery of learning his touchstone.
“His biology was one of how do we know what we know,” Schwab says. Stories are only as good as their surprises, Fishell and Schwab said. At conferences, Fishell says, he makes a practice of guessing what speakers are going to say. “There’s a rhythm to it,” he said. “People are going through details, and I know where story’s going. But I’m bored if that’s what they do. I’m more interested when they say, ‘We did this but didn’t get the result.’”
The suspense starts before experimentation begins. “There’s suspense about whether you’re going to get the right tools to ask the question–whether you’re going to be able to do the right experiment.” As a staffer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Schwab sought to show that the organization’s policy stances were right. Now she seeks to disprove her own ideas.
Proving–and Disproving–Hypotheses
“It’s very important that you are always working to disprove your hypothesis,” she says. “It helps to have a nice neat picture or story and hope you’re always working to disprove it.”
Evgeny Nudler, a biochemistry professor at NYU, says hypotheses are best considered steps toward finding something else. “You start researching on thing, you get a result that you can’t explain, and you have two choices—either pursue or forget about it. The unexpected result is the most interesting thing in the end.” At its best, one narrative spins off new narratives, says Nudler.
Colleagues sometimes criticize him for “a lack of focus,” Nudler says. But intellectual wandering lead the lab in new directions and inform the continuing work of old projects.
One spinoff project involved the transcription process that controls blood pressure and erections—and contributed to the development of Viagra. “I’m interested in hardcore biochemistry,” Nudler says. However elaborate and far-reaching the narratives of their work, Fishell and Schwab say, scientists ultimately need to follow their subjects’ leads.
The Challenge of Observation
“There’s a quote I read somewhere, we can never do an experiment, we can only hope through careful observation that nature will reveal its secrets,” Fishell says. But only to acute observers. “It really matters who’s doing the experiments,” Schwab said. “Things are pretty subtle. The best experiments are always viewing and looking at each stage until you notice things. Even if you use genetically identical mice, there’s always going to be variation, and so having somebody who can watch carefully” is essential.
The drama never ends. “You’re getting clues all the time,” Schwab says.
Narrative Medicine: A Growing Movement
If you take the 1, 2, or 3 trains to Morningside Heights, you’ll see this narrative approach not just in research, but also in the care of patients. Rita Charon, a doctor at Columbia University, developed the practice of “narrative medicine” when she struggled to understand a difficult patient.
Dr. Charon remembers the moment when she became the doctor she was meant to be. Early in her career, Charon did not always take the time to understand her patients’ lives and problems. Then along came a patient named Luz. When Luz complained about headaches, Dr. Charon prescribed acetaminophen. Later Luz asked Dr. Charen to fill out paperwork for disability benefits. Rushing to an appointment, Dr. Charon signed the forms.
But she wondered about Luz’s plans. She imagined that Luz might be abusing the system. Dr. Charon felt guilty about her brusque treatment of Luz. So she asked Luz to come in for a visit.
Luz then explained her real reasons for seeking disability benefits. The oldest of five girls, who lived with her father and uncle in Yonkers, Luz had suffered sexual abuse since she was twelve years old. Now that she was twenty-one, she wanted to rent an apartment in Manhattan and care for her sisters. She wanted to spare them the abuse she had experienced.
After learning Luz’s real story, Dr. Charon enlisted social workers, emergency shelters, and support groups to work with Luz. She helped Luz find a Manhattan apartment and also cared for her dying father. Oh, yes: Dr. Charon also continued to be Luz’s physician.
That experience, Rita Charon says, convinced her of the need for doctors to make storytelling a part of their care for patients. It’s not enough, she decided, to isolate symptoms and disease for treatment. It’s also not enough to analyze patterns of behavior, like diet, exercise, and relationships.
To provide care, doctors need to understand their patients’ stories. Doctors need to know how their patients got from Point X to Point Y before they can help them go to Point Z. And so Dr. Charon has become a leading figure in “narrative medicine,” a movement to get doctors to write and tell stories about their experiences. Telling stories can transform the way we care for people.
We live in an age when people’s unique stories get lost in the maw of bureaucracy and technology. Professionals in all fields—medicine, law, business, and education—follow complex rules and procedures but do not always understand the people they work with. Administrators, meanwhile, swim in an ocean of statistics and procedures, isolated from the larger dramas of life.
But when you engage people in stories, you give them something to grasp to make sense of their situations. Stories offer all of us—not just doctors and patients, but all of us—an approach to create richer lives for ourselves. Stories make us human; they make us whole. Stories might not make all things possible. But they give all possible things a chance to come true.
A Dangerous Backlash Against Medical Narrative
Peter Kramer, the author of Listening to Prozac and other popular medical works, writes passionately in The New York Times about the power of stories to guide medical care. Despite the rise of narrative medicine, Kramer says, the medical profession has in recent years rejected storytelling as unscientific, irrelevant, and even dangerous.
“In the past 20 years, clinical vignettes have lost their standing,” he says. “For a variety of reasons, including a heightened awareness of medical error and a focus on cost-cutting, we have entered an era in which a narrow, demanding version of evidence-based medicine prevails. As a writer who likes to tell stories, I’ve been made painfully aware of the shift. The inclusion of a single anecdote in a research overview can lead to a reprimand, for reliance on storytelling.”
But stories often clarify issues better than screens of chi-square, regression, and other data.
Kramer tells the story of a man who, in 1954, was hospitalized for panic attacks. Treatments failed. He slipped into decades of substance abuse and depression. Then in 1995, at age 70, the man sought psychiatric treatment when he became suicidal. The doctor treated him with Zoloft. After six weeks, his suffering faded. He lived 19 more years–happily.
So what does this story prove? Nothing, at least definitively. But it does suggest something about the possibilities of treatment, the dangers of mistreatment, and the need to care for each patient on his own terms.
Stories, more than statistics, can touch the deepest part of people’s being. When people read case studies, they see themselves. So they can feel less alone, more hopeful. They can redouble their resolve to find answers.
In a sense, stories are part and parcel of statistics. A single story represents just a single data point, so in that sense it’s insignificant. But a collection of stories is a sample, properly organized, becomes data. With data, we can work toward scientific knowledge. We need more than one story–or two, five, ten, 20, or 100 stories–to draw definitive conclusions. But stories do offer a start–for conversation, questioning, theorizing, and understanding. We dismiss the power of stories at our own peril.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
You are a writer–here and now. How do you figure out what to say about the overwhelming complexity of the day’s issues?
The human tendency, especially in public affairs, is to train the eyes forward. Look to the future. If X, Y, or Z is a problem now, think about how to address it in the future. Figure out what could happen, then devise solutions.
Speaking of the #MeToo movement, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times, note this prospective/predictive mindset. “All of us have long been told that the key to gender equality is looking to the future,” Kantor and Twokey, who published the breakout pieces in The Times a year ago. “Study and work hard. Lean in. Build the pipeline. Look to our daughters.”
But there’s a problem. To focus relentlessly on the future is to operate with blindfolds. “To move forward, we have to excavate the past,” Kantor and Twohey write.
Most people, especially people in politics, are obsessed with the question: What next? To focus on excavating the past sometimes seems like an indulgence. Shouldn’t we move on?
Most of us know people who are stuck in the past. They relive childhood dramas, family dysfunction or school or work disappointments. They cycle the old stories, over and over. In this cycling, they spin their wheels. They don’t move forward. And life demands moving forward, doesn’t it? Life doesn’t wait for you to resolve your “issues.”
But if the #MeToo has taught anything, it’s that the past doesn’t go away. Even when people try to “move on,” repressing the bad stuff in order to build something new, the past remains alive in our subconscious, in our worldviews, in the rules we accept, in our patterns and habits and routines. When we move on without reckoning the past, we get stuck in what Vishen Lakhiani calls the “culturescape.”
The past repeats itself, or at least rhymes, until it is brought into the open and addressed.
The #MeToo movement shows the power of excavation. Thanks to #MeToo, people are questioning their basic understandings about how we–men and women, boys and girls–get along. Long-suppressed memories and ideas are coming to the surface. Not only do women reassemble their pasts, but men do too. A retired Pittsburgh newspaper reporter, for example, remembers witnessing a rape as a teenager and now takes responsibility, for the first time.
#MeToo could trap us in the past, as a nation of victims and survivors. But that danger doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t look back. Rather, it means that we need to look backward in order to understand the present and the options for the future.
I like the word excavate. It suggests a purposeful digging, to discover something you don’t know so you can understand the world better now. When anthropologists do a dig, when they excavate a site, they don’t get “stuck” in the past. They bring that past into our growing understanding of human culture. Excavating issues like sexual abuse, then, doesn’t mean getting stuck in the past. It means making sense of the past, so you can live in the present and create a future.
We often say that the writer’s greatest job is to bear witness–to notice what’s going on, record it, and share it. That’s true. But we cannot bear witness, much less look ahead intelligently, until we understand the past.
I wrote this brief tribute after Bill Nack died in 2018.
When I think of Bill Nack, I want to call him one of the great sportswriters of our time. But he was really one of the great writers, in any field, of our time.
The reason is threefold. First of all, he was a hell of a reporter–dogged, tireless, determined to keep working till he got all the details right. Second, he was a great stylist. He did things with words that I never saw anyone else do. He built every sentence on a strong foundation. On that foundation he worked magic, with revealing ideas and images and telling phrases made possible by his first-rate intellect and great reporting.
Third, he had a great heart. He cared about everything he did. In one of my favorite pieces, Bill was assigned to find the mad genius Bobby Fischer, the chess master who degenerated into a ranter of anti-Semitism and ugly conspiracy theories. Ahab sought his whale with gusto. He worked his networks and tracked rumors and sightings. At one point, Bill found himself at the Los Angeles Public Library, which Fischer was rumored to haunt. Then … there he was!Bobby Fischer! But when Bill found his whale, he let him go. Whatever Fischer’s news value and however crazy his behavior, Bill decided, he should be left alone. The search, it turns out, was the story. Bill not only knew how to go; he also knew how to stop.
Secretariat: Bill’s Greatest Subject
Everything Bill did, he did with heart. He was most famous for his masterful book about the racehorse Secretariat. During that magical summer of 1973, when Secretariat electrified the Watergate-weary nation in his romp to the Triple Crown, Bill knew the horse better than anyone. In the weeks before the Belmont Stakes, he lived in the stables with the horse. He knew everyone in racing because he loved his subject and he wanted to share it with others.
I met Bill in 1978 when he was a columnist for Newsday and lived in Huntington, N.Y., my hometown. He called me after I won a scholarship to Vanderbilt (for which he had been a judge the year before) and we went to lunch at a Greek joint on New York Avenue and then to his house near Huntington Bay. We talked about books and writing. He gave me a collection of essays by Dwight McDonald. His daughter danced in and out of the room. Over the years we connected once in a while.
Years later, when I was teaching writing at Yale, I decided to use Bill’s brilliant piece “Pure Heart,” about the death of Secretariat. I wrote to him to learn how he came to write the story the way he did.
‘Pure Heart’: Brief Excerpts
To set the stage, Bill’s story begins like this:
Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion barn, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular. Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Ky., where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.
“We were all shocked,” Swerczek said. “I’ve seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did.”
Soon we understand that “the horse” is Secretariat and we get a glimpse into Bill’s passion. He writes:
Oh, I knew all the stories, knew them well, had crushed and rolled them in my hand until their quaint musk lay in the saddle of my palm. Knew them as I knew the stories of my children. Knew them as I knew the stories of my own life. Told them at dinner parties, swapped them with horseplayers as if they were trading cards, argued over them with old men and blind fools who had seen the show but missed the message. Dreamed them and turned them over like pillows in my rubbery sleep. Woke up with them, brushed my aging teeth with them, grinned at them in the mirror. Horses have a way of getting inside you, and so it was that Secretariat became like a fifth child in our house, the older boy who was off at school and never around but who was as loved and true a part of the family as Muffin, our shaggy, epileptic dog.
On a trip to Kentucky, Bill learns that Secretariat has a terminal illness. Over the years, he has visited Secretariat on a regular basis. He decides to visit the horse and his keepers, one last time. The story ends when Bill hears the news, on the phone in his hotel room, that Secretariat has died.
The last time I remember really crying was on St. Valentine’s Day 1982, when my wife called to tell me that my father had died. At the moment she called, I was sitting in a purple room in Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas, waiting for an interview with the heavyweight champion, Larry Holmes. Now here I was in a different hotel room in a different town, suddenly feeling like a very old and tired man of 48, leaning with my back against a wall and sobbing for a long time with my face in my hands.
I love “Pure Heart” because it is the perfect alchemy of mind, heart, and soul. It’s a personal story, told with emotion, but there’s not a manipulative word in the whole piece. There’s something deeply true in the story.
How Did Bill Write ‘Pure Heart’?
When I wrote to Bill asking for the story behind “Pure Heart,” I did not expect such a robust response. But Bill was a generous man with a love of writing. He liked to talk shop. Here’s what he said:
I didn’t even want to write “Pure Heart” after Secretariat’s death. I had been writing about him for so many years, in so many forms, that I felt I’d written enough. But my best friend, Time sports editor Tom Callahan, urged me on several occasions over the winter of 1989-90–the months after the horse died–to do a final piece for Sports Illustrated as a way of bringing the whole saga full circle.
I resisted, not wanting to revisit the feelings of loss, all the emotions it would engender, until I finally faced the idea that I had to write it, that I owed it to the story to finish it.
That early spring I broached the idea of a final, first-person memoir with SI‘s managing editor, Mark Mulvoy. He immediately told me to get started. I wrote it in one 24-hour day of Derby Week in Louisville, at the Galt House, beginning it at 9 a.m. on Wednesday morning and finishing it at 9 a.m. on Thursday morning.
The Story of the Ending
I had told a couple of the editors about the autopsy report revealing the massive heart, and they loved it. When I wrote the end of the story as it finally appeared, about me finding out the horse had died and my reaction to the news, I then spent three more exhausting hours trying to figure out a way to flash forward to the autopsy, but none of my ideas worked. The ending with me standing in that room sobbing with my back against the wall was the natural end of the story, but I was determined to get that anecdote in.
Around noon, the magazine’s executive editor, Peter Carry, called and said, “Bill, What are you doing? I heard you are trying to write a new ending to include that autopsy report.” I said I was. “Don’t. Stop. Leave the ending alone. We’re considering using the autopsy at the beginning of the story, as a precede.”
The Story of the Beginning
An hour later, editor David Bauer called and asked me to write a 200-word precede about the horse’s death and the autopsy that followed. “Where are you going to put it?” I asked. “At the beginning. As a precede that will run in large type before the actual story.”
“This is going to ruin the lead,” I said. “It’ll be like we had two leads and couldn’t decide which one to use, so we ran both of them.”
“No, it won’t,” David said. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see. And don’t mention the horse’s name. Just call him ‘The horse.’ The reader will figure it out. We want to use the autopsy story but it does not fit at the end. You couldn’t have written a better ending and any kind of postscript would ruin it. So just give me 200 words about the horse being put down and then the autopsy. Very simple and straightforward.”
And so, somewhat skeptically, I wrote those 200 or so words. That precede was a brilliant idea, I must confess, and the autopsy story became one of the most oft-told tales in the lore of thoroughbred racing. Secretariat became the horse who had the giant heart, the biggest motor, the engine that never stopped beating. And it was all true.
It was a perfect story about a perfect tribute to a perfect horse. Read “Pure Heart” and read Bill’s backstory and you get an idea of what real writers do.
Bill closed his note with an invitation I wish I had found a way to accept.
“We must have lunch someday … at a Greek restaurant. Ever in D.C.?”
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Branding is essentially a merger of storytelling and promise-making.
Here, the advertiser/brander says to the audience: Experience this moment, this sensation, this satisfaction.
Now, put yourself in that moment. Get in that world. Anticipate it. Feel it. Get sensual.
Rinse, repeat.
A brand is a story that the audience #experiences automatically. It’s an experience that is so positive and so reliable that it becomes Pavlovian.
Experiencing a great brand is like experiencing the Fourth of July. Christmas Eve. Wedding-day jitters. The first child. A golden wedding anniversary. Graduation. Opening Day.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
So how does Pixar find its pixie dust? Magic? Inspiration? The Law of Attraction? Um, nope.
It’s hard, grinding work, with the insistence on getting all the big things — and all the little things — right. The process can hurt some precious feelings along the way. But it works.
The storyboard artist Emma Coats has revealed the 22 rules of storytelling that produced hits like Inside Out, Onward, The Incredibles, and more.
We can assume, given its raft of megahits, that the Pixar people know how to translate these narrative tricks into screen gold. But what if you need help applying storytelling skills into words?
In my book The Elements of Writing, I not only offer storytelling techniques, but also techniques for writing, style, and editing. How you express the story–in words–determines whether the characters and story come to life.
You can get a sense of my system with this outline ofThe Elements of Writing. After listing the writing skill, I offer a case study showing how to apply the skill. Most of the case studies come from great literature, film, and journalism.
The Core Idea—The Golden Rule of Writing
• Make Everything a Journey: Brent Staples’s “Black Men in Public Space’
• Start Strong, Finish Strong: William Nack’s Secretariat
• Take the Landscape View: Applying the Landscape View
Act I: Storytelling
1. Narrative
• Give Your Story a Narrative Arc: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood
• For Complexity, Show More Than One Arc: Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power
• Show Characters Hitting Brick Walls: Homer’s The Odyssey
• Nest Journeys Inside Journeys: Andre Agassi’s Open
2. Characters
• Compile Dossiers for Your Characters: Sherlock Holmes
• Explore Characters’ Lives, Zone by Zone: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Find Your Characters’ Throughlines: Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement
• Use the Wheel of Archetypes: L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (55
• Spin the Wheel of Archetypes: Gregory Maguire’s Wicked
3. World of the Story (69
• Create Small, Knowable Places: Emma Donaghue’s Room
• Map the Character’s “Circles of Life”: Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’
• Use Place to Explain Character and Ideas: Robert Caro’s The Path To Power
• Use Place to Explore Identity: Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing
• Place Stories in a Larger World: Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep
4. Action and Scenes
• Depict Specific, Deliberate Actions: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men
• Use Speech-Acts to Propel the Story: William Shakespeare’s Othello
• Build Actions into Scenes: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
• Create a Mystery to Surprise the Reader: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
5. Rhythm and Beats
• Use beats to Move Stories Forward: Casablanca
• Use Beats For Descriptions: Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass
• Yo-Yo Scene and Summary:Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Lucky Jim’
6. Details
• Find Details By Looking Inside-Out: Isabel Chenoweth’s ‘Hanging Out’
• Isolate Details to Make Big Points: The New York Times ‘Portraits in Grief’
• Use Status Details to Reveal Ego and Desire: Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full
• Put Details into Action: Journalism fragments
Intermission: On Style
7. The Senses
• Help the Reader to Feel: Scott Russell Sanders’s ‘Under the Influence’
• Help the Reader to See: Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi
• Help the Reader to Hear: Varieties of Onomatopoeia
8. Wordplay
• Tap Into Life’s Everyday Rhythms: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
• Use Metaphors and Similes to Orient and Disorient: Rick Reilly and Thomas Lunch
• Riff by Playing with Words: Roy Blount Jr.’s Alphabet Juice
• Remember that Good is Great: Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House
9. Numbers
• Use Ones to Highlight People, Places, and Issues: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead
• Use Twos to Establish Oppositions and Complements: The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry
• Use Threes to Reveal Dynamic Relations: Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters
• Use Lists to Show Complexity: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
Act II: Mechanics
10. Sentences
• Follow the Golden Rule for Sentences: Coverage of national Crises
• Give Every Sentence Clear Blasts: Ringo Starr and the Beatles
• Create Revolver Sentences: Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage
• Make Some Sentences More Complicated: Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence
• Alternate Short and Long Sentences: Ernest Hemingway’s journalism
11. Words
• Use Simple Words, Almost Always: John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy and In Suspect Terrain
• Use Longer Words as Precision Instruments: The American Sesquipdalian
• Use Active Verbs, Even to Describe Passivity: Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov
• Avoid the Verbs To Be and To Have: Using ‘to be’ and ‘to have’
• Avoid Bureaucratese and Empty-Calorie Words: George Orwell’s ‘The Politics of the English Language’
• Avoid Aggressive Adjectives and Adverbs: Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Girl of the Year’
12. Paragraphs (223)
• Make Every Paragraph an “Idea Bucket”: Journalism fragments
• Follow the Golden Rule in Every Paragraph: James Van Tholen’s ‘Surprised by Death’
• ‘Climb the Arc’ in Most Paragraphs: Martin Luther King’s ‘Mountaintop’ speech
13. Composition
• Make Every Piece a Journey: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
• Find the Right Shape: The Bill Clinton story
• Slot Your Paragraphs: Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Terrazzo Jungle”
• Make Transitions Virginia Wolff’s ‘Ellen Terry’
Intermission: Technical Procedures
14. Grammar
• Make Sure the Parts of Speech Get Along: Approaches to the his/her problem
• Use Punctuation to Direct Traffic: Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power
• Select the Right Word: William Safire’s ‘On Language’
15. Editing
• Search and Destroy, From Big to Small: Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
• Fix Problem Paragraphs With Tabloid Headlines: John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty
• Edit by Reading Aloud and Backward: C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves
• Murder Your Darlings: Raymond Carver’s ‘One More Thing’
• Use Beats to Make Arguments: On the Electoral College System
• Use Cliffhangers to Drive Analysis: Barry Bluestone’s ‘The Inequality Express’
• Use the Senses in Arguments and Rhetoric: Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ Oration
• Allow Ideas To Unfold, One by One: ‘Falling Man’
17. Questions and Brainstorming
• To Get Started, Spill Your Mind: Brainstorming nonviolence
• Ask This-or-That and W Questions: Brian Lamb’s interviewing techniques
• Always Ask: What Causes What?: What’s the ‘best’ form of government?
18. Framing
• Use Testimony of Experts and Others: The Debate Over Global Warming
• Consider Hypotheticals and Scenarios: Social contract theorists
• Find a Super Model to Guide Analysis: Super models of social science
19. Making a Case
• Climb the “Ladder of Abstraction”: Garrison Keillor’s Lena and Ole Joke
• Identify and Operationalize Variables: The causes of fatigue
• Crunch the Numbers: Edward Glaeser on Urban Vitality
• Play the Game of Halves: Exploring the causes of war
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
That book, an instant classic, argues that politics is not a battle between right and left, red and blue, or even corporate and government orientation. It is really a battle between dynamism and stasism. Dynamists are optimistic, open, inventive, eager to embrace the tumult that has become the way of the world. Stasists are more pessimistic, fearful of tumult, and willing to go to great lengths to bridle the forces of change.
How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning? Do we declare … that “we’re scared of the future” and [decry] technology as “a killing thing”? Or do we see technology as an expression of human creativity and the future as inviting? Do we think that progress requires a central blueprint, or do we see it as decentralized, evolutionary process? Do we consider mistakes permanent disasters, or the correctable by-products of experimentation? Do we crave predictability, or relish surprise?
The dynamism-stasism battle cuts across all other divides in modern life. Democrats and Republicans each contain lots of stasists, from crony capitalists to public-sector unionists to evangelicals fearful of modern inquiry and freedoms. Almost by definition, stasists are declinists and can only prevail by thwarting progress. Dynamists, on the other hand, can be found (not always) in Silicon Valley, bustling cities, science, new media, the arts, and the battle for human rights.
Now a columnist for Bloomberg and a regular commenter on social media, Postrel lives in Los Angeles.
Charlie Euchner: I always appreciate a writer who offers a powerful new lens for exploring complex issues. So I admire writers like A.O. Hirschman (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty), James Carse (Finite and Infinite Games), Jane McGonigal (Reality is Broken), E.E. Schattschneider (The Semisovereign People), and Eric Berne (The Games People Play).
That’s what you did in The Future and Its Enemies, with your distinction between dynamists and stasists. You obviously strive for making things as simple as possible, while respecting the complexity of your subjects. Do you have a process for honing your subjects and ideas to their essence. How do you do it?
Virginia Postrel: What I call intellectual infrastructure often comes about unintentionally, as I collect examples that interest me without trying to fit them into a particular pattern. At some point, I start to see commonalities and dichotomies and a pattern emerges. I then test and refine it. Sometimes this is a gradual process and sometimes I have an epiphany and everything just clicks into place.
The stasis-dynamism dichotomy in The Future and Its Enemies evolved from earlier work I’d done on green ideology, where I was struck by the idealization of stasis. That led me to think about its alternative, as well as to see other manifestations of stasis as an ideal. When I was working on The Power of Glamour, on the other hand, I had an a-ha moment when I realized the parallels between glamour and humor. That epiphany made it possible to actually define what type of phenomenon glamour is.
CE: How did you come to write The Substance of Style and The Power of Glamour? Both deal with finding the value in topics that people often dismiss. Why did these topics (and for that matter, your current work on fabric) call out to you?
VP: I’m attracted to topics that are important but overlooked. I’m easily bored and put a high premium on new material and original thought. If everybody already knows something, why bother to repeat it?
In the case of The Substance of Style, I began to notice the rising importance of aesthetics as a source of economic value while I was researching The Future and Its Enemies. The idea for the book started with the trend, but then it forced me to think about why aesthetics is valuable to people, which led me to delve into aesthetics as a source both of pleasure and of meanings beyond the status competition that has always been the go-to explanation for economists and many other social scientists.
I never would have expected to write about glamour, since I tend to be interested in the kinds of details glamour hides. But Joe Rosa, who was a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, asked me to write the introductory essay for a catalog accompanying an exhibition on glamour in architecture, industrial design, and fashion. Once I took that on, I realized how pervasive, interesting, and poorly understood glamour is. Several years later I embarked on a book to understand it.
CE: Writing about abstract or complex subjects can be hard, even for the most skilled writers. Your work is strong on every level–sentence, paragraph, section, and whole piece. What secrets do you have for that? How do you “block” the issues at different levels of writing to stay clear and on track, saying the right thing at the right time?
When I was a young writer at Inc. magazine, my editor used to write “weak and vague” in the margins of our articles. It drove our small team crazy, because everything was clear to us and, of course, “weak and vague” is itself a vague critique that didn’t tell us what to do, only what the problem was. Responding to that criticism over and over again forced me to learn about how to be specific. My training there and earlier at The Wall Street Journal taught me that general statements need specific examples, not only as support but to give the audience something to picture.
Even people who like patterns and abstractions are still sensory, story-telling creatures who find arguments easier to follow if you give them specifics that hold their attention. Thinking of examples can also force you to clarify your thinking: Does your pattern really work? What are the exceptions and complexities? Are there examples that contradict it?
As editor of Reason in the 1990s and a New York Times economics columnist in the 2000s, I often had to explain—or help other people explain—complicated technical material. My rule of thumb was: the more complicated the material, the simpler the sentences. Subject-verb-object. If this, then that. Break it into small pieces. The harder it is to understand, the easier it should be to read.
I create categories to organize my own thinking, as well as to give readers intellectual infrastructure they can apply elsewhere. I put a lot of thought into how I structure my books, which is tricky because I’m not a narrative writer. That can require some difficult tradeoffs. The Power of Glamour had to build a theory before it could apply it, which meant that some of the most interesting chapters—on history—come later in the book.
For The Fabric of Civilization, I quickly realized that the obvious structures—chronology and type of fiber—wouldn’t work. A chronological account would be a library, not a book, and separating cotton from silk from wool from synthetics wouldn’t highlight interesting parallel themes. So I’m using a combination of stages of production and themes. The first chapter, for instance, is about fiber and also about how humans alter nature. (There’s no such thing as a “natural fiber.”) The second is on spinning and work, the third on weaving and code, and so on. This structure allows me to span different textiles, different time periods, and different places, while also highlighting important themes in human history and culture.
CE: When you were developing as a writer, did you model yourself off another writer? And as a critical thinker/analyst, were there writers or thinkers who also modeled the way to break down problems and construct responses?
VP: I didn’t consciously model myself on another writer, although I was certainly influenced by The Wall Street Journal’s style. I read its features growing up and it was the first place I worked in journalism. But unlike the WSJ or most other journalistic writing, I’m prone to piling up series and using appositives. I like to multiple versions of the same thing, a tendency I credit to the influence of the Hebrew Bible via my mother reciting Psalms—and explaining the metaphors and structures—to me when I was very young.
Although my writing doesn’t resemble his, I got good advice from the legal scholar Richard Epstein when I embarked on my first book. He warned me against trying to research everything in advance. “Divide the book into three parts,” he said. “Then divide the first part into three parts. Then start on the first of those three parts.”
CE: In an age filled with so much propaganda and misinformation, arguing as blood sport, what do you think is the best approach for writers on current issues? It seems to me that you have taken a one-two punch. First, you concentrate on your own projects and refuse to get distracted. Second, while you speak out, you consciously refuse to get involved in the cycle of outrage and response. Is that right? How can you describe the writer’s role in society in such a crazy time?
VP: Know thyself. Know what you care about and what you bring to the public discussion. My strengths don’t lie in quick takes. And although I do reporting, I’m also not first and foremost a reporter. Other people are better at these things. I’m good at big-picture thinking, providing historical context, and noticing what’s being overlooked. In my short-term column writing I try to concentrate on those things.
Consciously and unconsciously, I’ve also arranged my life to accommodate what you could flatteringly call my integrity and unflatteringly call my diva qualities. I’m pretty stubborn about what I will and won’t do, and I won’t take a journalism job I can’t quit. Having no kids and a husband who’s much the same way makes that easier.
While I understand the market forces that push writers to feed outrage in order to get traffic, I also feel a civic responsibility to keep my cool, not to attribute motives to people that they wouldn’t themselves recognize, and to think about what might actually persuade people who disagree with me. I don’t always live up to those standards—we all get outraged sometimes—but the older I get and the more history I read, the easier it is to do.
It also helps that, unlike many, perhaps most, female writers, I have never felt either market pressure nor a personal desire to write about my personal experiences and emotions. What interests me is learning and writing about the world.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Dan Coyle is a master of three realms in writing–nonfiction narrative, memoir, and analysis.
A contributing editor at Outside magazine, Coyle has tracked the long-running doping scandal in bicycle racing–with both an investigative work (Lance Armstrong’s War) and a ghosted narrative with Tyler Hamilton (The Secret Race), winner of the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prize. Coyle has also written about the journey of a Little League team in the Chicago projects (Hardball).
In recent years he has become an expert on expertise. His book The Talent Code uses case studies from around the world–Curacao, Brazil, Dallas, and more–to identify how people become experts in fields as diverse as baseball, soccer, classical music, and singing. Based on his expertise of talent development, Coyle serves as a consultant to the Cleveland Indians.
If that book focuses on the best ways for individuals to develop their talent, The Culture Code (released in January), shows how communities like the San Antonio Spurs and the Navy SEAL Team create the shared norms and practices that enable all to thrive.
Coyle and his family live in Cleveland during the school year and Alaska in the summer.
Charlie Euchner: How did you start as a writer? Who were some of your influences?
Daniel Coyle: This will sound unpoetic, but the truth is, it all started with Sports Illustrated. I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and I used to devour the magazine when it showed up each week in our mailbox. I was drawn by the glamor of sports, but it was the stories by Frank Deford, Gary Smith, and John Underwood that hooked me. Their ability to capture these events and these people on the page struck me as pure magic. A gateway drug, you might say.
From there it as on to the heavier stuff. The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, took the top of my head off, particularly in the way he made you see the world in a completely new way. This seemed to me a kind of transformative superpower, and it still seems that way.
CE: Your two “code” books — The Talent Code and The Culture Code — investigate the process by which people master skills and build vibrant cultures. The Talent Code turns on the process of “deliberate practice,” which can be used to master the core skills of any activity. The Culture Code focuses on the habits and mindsets that foster open, supportive, and creative communities. Did these books cause you to work differently as a researcher and writer?
DC: Overall, I’d say that they helped me lose a self-consciousness that is part and parcel of being a young writer. For example: early on, I was absolutely allergic to appearing in my work. I sought to operate purely as a narrative camera, never injecting myself or my point of view into the story. But the more you understand the skill and the relationships at the heart of this profession, the more you realize that our job — our true skill — is to serve the reader, not to go into contortions for the sake of seeming smart. In other words, they helped me realize that this writing game is not all about me.
CE: I have noticed that great writing “yo-yos,” or moves back and forth, between scenes and summaries. You describe scenes to show us real flesh-and-blood people struggling with difficult challenges. Then you shift to background information, to give the reader context and to explain complex ideas. The scenes provide energy and intrigue; the summaries provide essential information to make sense of things. Your two “code” books are models of yo-yoing. How conscious are you about this? And what tips can you offer for the rest of us to do it better?
DC: That’s exactly how I think of it. You show the surface in the form of a scene, and then you show the inner workings, the principles, the web of deeper connections. In looking for a scene, you are essentially looking for a great mystery. Great mysteries have a set of qualities: they often good characters who want something. So you look for that — especially the wanting.
For the summary, you need to do a deeper dive — sometimes into history, sometimes into science — to illuminate the systems and connections beneath the story in a new way. The key there is not mystery, but surprise. A good summary section flips your world a little bit — and thus makes you see the original story in a new way.
CE: Twice you have written Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France champion who was sanctioned for doping in 2012 after years of denying it. Armstrong was suspected of doping — more than suspected, really — for many years. In your books Lance Armstrong’s War and The Secret Race (written with Armstrong’s onetime teammate Tyler Hamilton), you take many routes to the truth. You gather lots of facts, many related and many not related, and accumulate a detailed dossier. When you are dealing with such a secretive and combative subject, how do you discover the essential facts of the story?
DC: It’s interesting to see the two books as a combination. In the first book, because of legal reasons (basically, Armstrong threatening to sue) I had to work around those barriers, even though I had a strong sense that something was going on. In the second book, with Tyler, we could go fully into the secret world, and show everything. On my first journey into that world, I had a lot of off-the-record conversations that I couldn’t use in the book, but which contributed to my POV that this was a really dirty sport. Perhaps as a result, many readers read it and presumed that Armstrong was doping (even though, as was stipulated, nothing had ever been proven).
The second book was like a CIA project. At the time, the federal investigation was unfolding, and there were still threats to Tyler, both legal and otherwise. So Tyler and I went to elaborate lengths to conceal our meetings and conversations. But because of that, we were able to communicate freely and safely, and it led to the book’s unparalleled truthfulness.
CE: Can you identify two or three simple tricks that help you research, interview, or write better?
DC: Build yourself a system for taking and organizing notes. Being able to locate what you’ve written is massively important, especially in nonfiction. It doesn’t matter what the system is, but you should have one.
Interview your key subjects last. I recall someone telling me to interview like a shark: first you circle them for a long time, then you go in. That sounds a little carnivorous for my taste, but it’s true: by talking to everyone around them first, you will increase the leverage, impact, and awareness of each interaction you have with your key subjects.
Practice the craft of outlining. There are times when you should just start writing on a blank page — but there are far more times when it’s useful to spend time going through your material and organizing the story of it all.
End your day by stopping in the middle of a good sentence. That way it’s easier to pick up the following day.
Strive to write the headline/title/subtitle first and invest a lot of time until it’s exactly right. It’s a north star that will guide all your efforts.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Laura Zigman paid her dues before hitting the literary jackpot. Early in her career, she was a publicist for a number of major presses, including Times Books, Vintage Books, and Alfred A. Knopf. As she did her day job, she labored on her first novel, Animal Husbandry (1998), a comedy of errors about the mating habits of thirtysomethings. The book became the hit movie Someone Like You (2001).
Her 2006 novel Piece of Work tells the story of a young mother forced to return to her job as a publicist for a celebrity when her husband loses his job. Her (2007) explores the challenges of having a mate who’s still friends with an ex. Dating Big Bird (2012) takes on the struggles of a wannabe breeder who’s mate is a brooder.
Since then Zigman had ghosted books for Texas feminist and gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis (Forgetting to Be Afraid) and pop icon Eddie Izzard (Believe Me). In an interview with The New York Times, Bill Gates freccomended the Izzard book. Laura, meet Bill …
Charlie Euchner: You started, professionally, as a publicist and editor at some major publishing houses, including Times Books, Vintage Books, Knopf. What “tricks of the trade” did you learn, for storytelling and the mechanics of writing, during this period?
Laura Zigman: I learned a lot during that time. Mostly how much time and effort goes into writing a book — even one that doesn’t end up getting good reviews or selling well — and how committed and passionate you must, therefore, be to what you are writing. Publishing then, and especially now, can be a deeply heartbreaking process, and you just have to do it anyway. Writing, revising, metabolizing criticism from readers along the way and keeping the faith that your story will resonate with readers — those are essentials. As is the idea that even when surrounded by masters (which I was when I worked at Knopf), there’s always room for you, and for another story. There is always room for more.
CE: One of the greatest challenges for writers with a “day job” is getting the discipline to work on your project whenever you can. When did you start Animal Husbandry? How did you discipline yourself to write it? How developed was the idea when you started writing?
LZ: That’s always a huge challenge, isn’t it? — finding time to sit and write, and finding the time and space to think. I have always had trouble with both but somehow finding time to clear my head enough to think is that hardest part lately. Back then, because my job was so demanding, I never seemed able to do that writing-before-or-after-work thing — I was exhausted and my mind was too cluttered with all the noise and stress of the day — so I ended up writing once or twice a year, in spurts. I’d take my vacation time and go somewhere to write, or take a staycation in my apartment and write. Writing once or twice a year probably wasn’t the best way to write a novel since every time I sat down to it, so much time has passed that often times my thoughts had changed, too — but it was the only way I could do it so that’s how I did it.
People always want rules for writing and one of my rules is that there are no rules and you just have to make up your own as you go along to get it done. Years later, when I was writing my second novel, and my third, and then my fourth, I had quit my day job and was therefore more able to work on a regular schedule: in between my young son’s naps, or his preschool and elementary school schedule. Fear of not making mortgage payments was also a great motivator….
CE: How do you think about structuring a story — whether it’s a novel or a memoir or even just an essay? Do you start with Aristotle’s narrative arc — or is that something that’s automatic? John McPhee has a process where he writes down all his scenes on 3×5 cards and puts them on a wall and starts moving them around to create a structure. How do you arrange the pieces of your stories?
LZ: As someone who’s always written semi-autobiographical fiction, I often have a sense of the story’s structure because the story I’m telling has, in some way, already happened. It changes when I start to transform it into a new fictional story, of course, and that’s when I think roughly in terms of a three-act structure: What situation the character is in at the beginning of the story; what propels her forward and into more of an abyss; what ultimately allows her to find her way out of it.
That said, I haven’t written a novel since 2006 and the one I’m working on now — well, I have zero structure and no idea what is happening. It’s like writing completely blindly and I can’t say I’m enjoying it!
But I’m trying to have faith in what E.L. Doctorow once said: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I’m trying to have faith that I can find my way all the way to the end without being able to see more than a word or a line or a paragraph ahead of me.
CE: When Animal Husbandry was adapted to the movie Something About You…, what did you learn about the craft and structure of storytelling? The hardest lesson for many writers is seeing their story turned into something else by screenwriters and directors. That’s life, right? I’m just wondering if seeing this adaptation taught you some storytelling secrets that you were able to use in subsequent writing projects.
LZ: Honestly, I didn’t care what they did to the film adaption of Animal Husbandry because I was so generously compensated! And because I believe that the two products — a novel and a film — are two very different things and that sometimes a film adaptation is better if it deviates somewhat from the novel it’s based on. I was very open to the fact that they were going to make changes to the third act (something about the third act caused them a great deal of trouble but I never quite understood what that was!) and other things along the way. That said, there were certain things I thought they did really well, and other changes they made that I didn’t like at all.
CE: In recent years you have ghosted memoirs for Wendy Davis (who gained national attention with her battle for abortion rights in Texas and later ran for governor) and Eddie Izzard (comedian, actor, writer, and trans activist). What approach do you take to embodying someone else’s voice? When do you realize you know them enough to tell their story in their words?
LZ: I got into ghostwriting almost by accident — I was trying to find a way to earn a living during a decade that had sucked the life out of me emotionally and physically (lots of sickness and death of loved ones and stress). After a few self-help books, I was given the opportunity to work with Wendy Davis, and then Eddie Izzard, and both times I was incredibly moved by who they were as people and what they’d accomplished despite very difficult childhoods. It felt like a privilege to help them tell their stories.
When someone hires you to do this, they put an enormous amount of trust in your ability to be sensitive to what they’ve been through and to accurately translate it onto the page. This takes hours and hours of asking questions and really listening to their answers, of finding the thread of their story, recurring images and symbols that you can carry all the way through. At some point, you start to absorb the cadences and rhythms of their language, as well as the details of their experience, but the challenge remains: to tell their story as if they themselves are telling it. Ghostwriting isn’t writing about someone.
It isn’t telling someone’s story the way you think it should be told. It’s telling someone’s story the way they want it told, the way they’d tell it if they could write it themselves.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
More than a decade ago, University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham decided he needed to translate the technical, specialized academic work into a form that teachers and parents could understand–and use. So he gathered his work on learning and teaching and wrote Why Don’t Students Like School? The book has become a classic in education.
More recently, in The Reading Mind, Willingham explains what happens when our eyes cast down on a text. How can all of these odd letter shapes combine to produce ideas, memories, and questions? The key, says Willingham, is that readers use the symbols to recall and imitate the sounds that happen in oral communication. Writing, in a sense, piggybacks spoken language.
In a recent article in The New York Times, Willingham argues that broad knowledge of a wide range of subjects — literature, the arts, history, philosophy, science and technology, and more — is essential to good reading. Reading, then, is only partly a skill. It is also a conversation that requires cultural literacy.
Educated at Duke and Harvard, Willingham is a leading voice on education with his technical research, popular books, and speaking.
Charlie Euchner: When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer? Obviously, writing is a form of teaching. Were your writing interests always tied to your work as a cognitive psychologist and teacher? Or have you also written about other topics? And what were your influence and inspirations as a writer?
Daniel Willingham: I don’t really think of myself as a writer. I’m a research psychologist who happens to be doing a lot of writing now. I expect that my career will tilt back to a greater proportion of empirical research and that writing will be limited to technical writing. But I’m not sure when that will happen.
I started writing popular-press books because I saw a need. There is a lot of excellent research that teachers ought to know about, yet they don’t. So I started trying to communicate those findings I thought teachers would find useful. That started about 10 years post-Ph.D. Until that time the only writing I had done was for technical journals in my field.
Writing was a strong interest of mine in college, but that was prose fiction. A year or two after college I worked out that I didn’t have much talent in that area, so I turned to scientific research, and that has been a much better fit.
CE: The simple takeaway from Why Don’t Students Like School? is that the most popular teachers meet two basic requirements. First, they have to be friendly and approachable. Second, they have to be organized. Is that right? Couldn’t we set the same basic standard for writers? And are there some simple tricks to make that possible?
DW: That’s a fair summary regarding teachers, but would that apply to writers? I don’t know. It seems to me that either principle could be stretched. “Organized” is important for expository prose, but I think fiction leaves so much room for different versions of “organization.” And I’m not sure that “friendly and approachable” always applies in fiction either. Holden Caufield and Humbert Humbert come to mind.
CE: As a writer and teacher who thinks constantly about the mind, what do you think that all communicators should understand about how the brain works?
DW: We are dependent on shared knowledge. Communication–written or spoken–leaves an enormous amount of information unsaid. We estimate what our audience already knows, and that we can safely omit from our communication. So when we talk to a young child we are very explicit about nearly everything. when we speak to a close friend, our communication is telegraphic.
CE: Over the years, I’m sure you’ve collected a number of simple tricks and techniques to write with clarity and energy. Can you share a couple?
DW: Very few people can pay attention to two things at once, namely, the overall organization of a piece and good prose at the sentence and paragraph level. I don’t know of a solution other than to outline the hell out of a piece so that when you’re to the point of writing prose, you don’t have to think about what you want to say. You already know. So you can focus all your attention on how to say it best.
I’ve read some of the literature on writing good prose. It’s a small literature because writing is much harder to study than reading, but what it says seems quite similar to what my writing instructors in college told me 35 years ago: there are no substitute for doing a great deal of reading, and practicing your own writing.
CE: In The Reading Mind, you explore how the human brain uses a number of different capacities to be able to decipher “lines and circles” (the wonderful phrase from 10,000 Maniacs) on the page. You argue that reading (and therefore writing?) piggybacks on our skills in oral communication. What lessons should writers take from this insight?
DW: Right, once you’ve identified words from the lines and circles, the mental processes of stringing them together into comprehensible sentences and paragraphs have a lot of overlap with the processes that support oral language.
But I think it would be a mistake to suggest that that fact indicates that prose ought to be more similar to spoken language. Prose tends to be much more formal, and information rich. When we speak, we use a much smaller range of words, we often speak ungrammatically, we often don’t finish sentences.
That’s partly because listeners have other sources of information–they speaker will gesture and use facial expression, the words spoken have prosody (i.e., the “melody” of speech). And when you read you can go as fast or slow as you like and you can reread as much as you need to. So the overlap between reading comprehension and oral language comprehension may be of more interest to psychologists seeking to explain these functions than it is to writers.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Katie Hafner has spent most of her career in journalism, writing about tech and health care for The New York Times; she has also written extensively for Newsweek and BusinessWeek, among other publications. She is also the author of books on a wide range of subjects.
Most recently, Hafner published Mother Daughter Me, a memoir of three generations of women living together under one roof. At the beginning, Hafner hoped the time together would help resolve old family conflicts like her mother’s divorce, neglect, drinking, and frequent moves. The book is honest and raw and testament to the idea that what doesn’t break, develops a new kind of resilience.
Hafner’s other books explore the origins of the Internet (Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, with Matthew Lyon), computer hackers (Cyberpunk, with John Markoff), German reunification (The House at the Bridge), and the pianist Glenn Gould (A Romance on Three Legs).
Charlie Euchner: Over your career, you have spent a lot of time covering tech. But you have also explored some intimate topics, like your relationships with your mother and daughter and the death of your husband.
Katie Hafner: The vast majority of my writing has been journalistic – not in the least personal — with the exception of my memoir, Mother Daughter Me, and my open letter to Sheryl Sandberg, following the death of her husband. While working on the memoir, I was still doing my straight-ahead journalism, and I’m actually currently working on a novel while also doing stories for The New York Times. I’m not sure that one really helps the other, except that it’s nice to get a break from each. The journalism I do these days — writing about healthcare, with a focus on the elderly — can get get very intense, so it’s nice to go to a different place on a regular basis. Then again, writing memoirs and fiction gets very lonely, so it’s nice to crawl out of that little isolation chamber on a regular basis.
CE: When you delve into a long work like A Romance on Three Legs, or your other books, how do you do it? What’s the process? Besides writing something comprehensive about a topic, how do you spot the details and moments that give your writing something special?
KF: Well, when you’re writing a book of non-fiction, you really have to let the topic become your Magnificent Obsession. When I worked on The House at the Bridge, my book about Germany, I lived, ate, and breathed post-reunification Germany. I drove a Trabant, one of those two-stroke-engine cars people in the former East Germany waited 20 years to get. With A Romance on Three Legs, I immersed myself in everything Glenn Gould/Steinway for several years, spending a great deal of time at the Gould archives in Ottawa. I really love doing that. Nothing gives me more pleasure than feeling like I know a topic inside and out. And, since journalists get to move from topic to topic, I always get deeply curious about the next new thing. The trick is finding just the right subject in which to immerse yourself. It must be a terrible thing to be bored by the topic you’re writing about.
CE: The hardest and most important thing for all writers is to find a way to be honest and unsparing. That, I think, you achieved in Mother Daughter Me. You dive into the difficulties of your relationships with rare candor, allowing yourself to be exposed as you explore the complexities of family relationships. How do you think about that?
KF: Unless a writer is honest – particularly about herself – the reader will lose patience, and trust, and eventually interest. Readers aren’t stupid, and they can smell a dodgy narrator from fifty paces. There were moments, when my mother was living with my daughter and me, when I was just terrible to her. And I tried to own up to that as much as possible.
Then there are the more distant memories, some of which are, unfortunately, etched permanently in my mind. Then again, don’t forget that this memoir reflects my recollection of how things happened, and memories can be tricky things. So I consulted with my sister quite a bit when it came to memories of our mother and her periods of drinking too heavily. My sister was extremely detailed in her descriptions. Her memory was razor-sharp.
This brings me to the topic of honesty and “essential truth” versus accuracy. There’s one scene in the beginning of Mother Daughter Me where my mother is the only person in the car with me during a long drive, from San Diego to San Francisco. In reality, someone else who shows up later in the book was in the car as well. In the first draft, I had him in the car, but my editor at Random House thought that was too much in the way of characters to introduce for the beginning of the book. I said to her, “But he was there, and did most of the driving.” To which she said something interesting. She said that if it did not violate the essential truth of the scene (i.e. picking up my mother in San Diego and bringing her to San Francisco to live with my daughter and me), it wasn’t absolutely necessary to have him be in the car.
But here’s the bottom line: My mother disagreed strongly with much of my account, which in some places is quite raw. After the book came out, she rejected me and took actions that inflicted the maximum possible pain on me. Not a happy ending.
CE: In addition to writing at all levels–newspapers, magazines, books–you also have taught writing at Cal-Berkeley. What are the common challenges of writing and teaching? And how are they radically different? In what ways has teaching taught you about the writing process? Did it expose any of your own challenges–and give you ideas to address them?
KF: I’ve taught both journalism and memoir writing, and they are very different beasts. Journalism is a two-limbed discipline: there is the reporting of a story, then the writing. Students tend to be better at one than the other (much as professional reporters are). So I try to help nurture the weaker limb.
I also teach an annual week-long memoir writing workshop at The Esalen Institute in Big Sur. It’s one of the most enjoyable weeks of my year, and also one of the most exhausting. People come to you with their heart (in the form of an extremely personal, often painful life story) in their hands, and you have to be very respectful of that. At the same time, I make it clear that I am not a therapist, I am a writing instructor. Once they understand that, we get down to the business of giving shape and voice to their stories.
I am not one for whom writing has ever come easily, and when I tell students this, it seems to help them a lot with their own writing struggles.
At the same time, I tell students that in order to write, you must read and read, and then read some more. Read fiction, memoirs, non-fiction, biographies, and – above all – poetry. I’m not saying read tough stuff. There’s a lot of Dickens I’ll never be able to get through, and definitely not James Joyce’s Ulysses, or any Proust for that matter. But I adore Angle of Repose and To Kill a Mockingbird and I Capture the Castle, pretty much anything by Anne Tyler, much of Ann Patchett, and all of Joan Didion’s nonfiction. In short, there is no way to become a writer without exposure to the masters. Surgeons don’t just start cutting people open. They watch and watch, see how it’s done, and then they do it themselves. To wit: I live just three hours north of Esalen, so I drive there, and pile about 50 books and a sheaf of poems into my car, and set up a lending library for the week in the workshop room.
CE: Writing, I am sure you agree, is a craft. It’s about building skills and combining them to create a durable and pleasing product. What specific advice have you gotten to hone your specific skills? Can you offer one or two “tricks of the trade” that helps you to carry off projects?
KF: When writing my first nonfiction book, I made myself write nonstop, without getting up from my chair, for a certain amount of time, even if it was just 20 minutes. I pretended I was on a journalism deadline (when, in fact, the deadline was a year away). Then, after those 20 minutes had passed, I gave myself a five-minute break in which I could do anything I wanted, as long as I got up from my chair: I could go to the bathroom; eat a bologna sandwich; water the plants; dance a jig.
I’m writing fiction now, which terrifies me. So I feel like I have to write in a very confined space. I take 4-by-6 index cards and roll them into – yes — a typewriter, and fill up the cards, one by one. If I don’t have my typewriter with me, I fill virtual index cards in the notes app on my iPhone. I might come away with just 50 words but feel like I’ve just written War and Peace. That’s how hard fiction is for me.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Avery Chenoweth has had a remarkable career as a writer and entrepreneur. Growing up in Princeton, he wrote for the local newspaper and also worked on a congressional campaign. At Vassar College, he penned an anonymous newspaper column–his nom de plume was Susan Avery–that caused controversy for its non-PC attitudes perspectives on campus affairs.
After working as a journalist and essayist–writing memorable pieces on Phil Donahue and the billionaire Kluge family–Chenoweth honed a unique style that might be considered a cross between John Barth and John McPhee. In fact, over the years, Chenoweth has admired the work of fellow Princetonian McPhee and he studied with Barth at the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University.
Chenoweth has shifted back and forth between fact and fiction, using the techniques of one to develop his chops in the other. His fiction include the story collection Wingtips and the novel Radical Doubt. He has also authored imaginative historic works Albemarle and Empires in the Forest.
In recent years Chenoweth has also become a tech entrepreneur. He is the founder of Here’s My Story, an educational app program designed to bring history to life. The app connects visitors of historic sites to the people and backgrounds of those sites. Avery’s work has been featured in The New York Times and other media.
Charlie Euchner: You grew up among storytellers, as you noted in the recent Atlantic Monthly event. So when you talk about a topic, you have the unusual ability to frame issues in terms of stories, with vivid characters and scenes. Others, like me, I think have to construct stories more consciously. So I am wondering: How do you let ideas flow and, at the same time, consciously structure your thoughts?
Avery Chenoweth: A lot of ideas surface from almost everywhere, and they fall into different areas, almost at once. There are those that come to mind–sometimes as a joke–and stay in the area of being a conceit–a great idea for someone for a story, show, or product, but they ultimately do not hold my interest for long; and I might even put them into a story as a detail.
The ideas that become possessive of my mind and imagination and dreams arrive from some intuition. And the difference might be between being asleep or awake. Over the years, I’ve found that the ideas that arrive when I’m awake rarely hold my interest, like the conceits described above. But stories that flash out from intuition can hold my interest–for years, even for decades. They can begin as dreams, and arrive complete.
One story in my story collection began as a dream. I saw “Powerman” start to end, holding onto it in a lucid manner, trying not to interrupt the flow until I saw how it ended. So, I’m half awake, yet dreaming, waiting to see what happens. I woke up, like, wow. After that, I put in structure later to build the shape, so it stands up as a dimensional creation, not a dream, and works for others. I recently finished the first draft of a novel, at 75,000 words, that started as a dream, and continued opening every night in my dreams until it was done. Though I had an idea of the plot, a new one arrived every night, scenes, dialogue, plot, all of it, with edits, and now that it’s done the dreams are gone.
I love the intuitive story; it feels elusive, like a mood or element in which something normal has gone awry, is broken, or resolving itself, and I cannot figure out what it is. It’s just out of focus as the start of each chapter, and I write it to find out where it’s leading me. It’s lucid dreaming–gently pursuing the mood unsure where it will go yet with conscious structure in mind to make sure it isn’t merely dithering or wandering. I’ve spent years writing stuff that wanders and dissipates. So, if the story idea is a gimmick, it’s DOA, but if it starts flowing and going, I can chase it for a long time.
CE: However comfortable you are as a storyteller, writing great narrative still requires hard work. How did you go about constructing stories in your story collection Wingtips and/or your novel Radical Doubt? In what ways did the stories come easily–and in what ways were they hard work? Can you explain one or two technique you use to solve story problems?
AC: The stories in Wingtips were about siblings finding their way, keeping skeletons in the closet, and themed with landscapes and comic reversals, so each one aimed to get into the next phase of life. Although one of the stories, about the mother was not done by deadline, it was complete.
Radical Doubt was different and a great deal harder. It is a long story, with strong principals, and side characters, and the plot changed after I learned to West Coast Swing. Oddly enough, that was an exercise in physically spinning my partner around, catching her in all new ways, and then resolving the move as smoothly and naturally as possible. Sure, it sound nuts, but I would swear that those neurons, all new, came into play when I began re-writing the novel and giving it a fluency that felt like swinging a partner around on the page.
On another level, RD was hard because a lot of the story sprang from one crazy-scary summer that I spent working at a Poconos resort, which turned out to be a dangerous place in spite of its posh rooms and lovely landscaping. The autobiographical part did not have a story, though; it was just bits and pieces, crazed and confessional monologues, and violent fights that I had witnessed. And I mean violence bad enough to make a sane person quit, as I did, eventually. The hard part was tearing myself out of the main character, and allowing a new, imagined main character to take my place; then let him make all the bad choices that trigger the creepy and deranged falling actions of the story.
While I wrote that part of the story, I imagined what the Theseus and Minotaur story might look like if we rendered it in our day. It sounds pompous, but it was a way to continue visualizing the labyrinth the main characters have to get through to find each other at the end–so that our hero can face the ungodly behemoth behind the terrors in the valley.
When my wife was reading the script, she kept telling me that no hotel, or restaurant could stay in business with that kind of violence going on around the property. A professional in the hotel industry, she found it over the top. Curious, I Googled the actual place, and found out, to my surprise, that it was, in fact, out of business. The subject of an MTV Haunted Places special, the reports all said that it was the extreme violence that went on there, (when I was there and later), that drove customers away–and so I worked all of that into the story, as well. In the end, the autobiographical part was small, and the characters invented from everywhere, to make it all come together. That was writing a social novel with 35 name characters, and it taught me by contrast what it is to write short stories.
CE: I think you will agree that writing is a craft, like carpentry or teaching or cooking–something that you need to hone and develop over a lifetime, with distinct skills that you have to “try out” and master over time. So what are some of the techniques of craft that have proved most useful over your career?
AC: When I was at Johns Hopkins, I was fortunate to study with John Barth and Stephen Dixon. They were masters of craft, and exponents of the freedom of using story structures that appear first in Aristotle’s Poetics. Jack gave us his own cheat sheet, which had Freytag’s pyramid and elements he had observed in the literature he’d been reading his whole life; and it was like some wonderful new addition to the works of Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell. That taught me to read, really, for the first time in my life.
CE: Not everyone believes that you can master a skill with practice.
In English classes at Vassar, what we did, frankly, was talk about the characters as if we were watching soap operas. How did we like this one, or that one, who were we cheering for?
I remember asking my creative writing professor what tricks a writer used to re-write a scene, and his honest-to-God answer was, “We don’t know. That’s why writing is a mystery.” That baffled me, frankly, because across the campus in Art History, the professors showed us slides of drawings, compositions and failed attempts, and final masterworks, all to show us that art was plastic, not a fixed perfect thing, but created with revisions all aiming at an aesthetic. And the artists worked the material to get the results that they wanted. Emphasis here on the word “worked.”
Not so in English, where it was all magic, and the teachers had only personal experience to go by, so they only spoke from their solipsistic experience. That was true at Virginia Creative Writing Program, where I went to finish the collection I started at Hopkins–personal subjective feeling about what makes a story work, but no craft discussion. So, Hopkins freed me to carry on, while UVA left me feeling like I couldn’t know unless a professor reassured me.
Sure, you cannot teach talent, but you can teach craft, and free students to work on their own without having to rely on a mentor, though it’s great to have a few trusted readers. I didn’t buy the idea of the mystery, but I believed it to an extent–because it is hard to see in that morass of abstract words what the structures are, how they were stack up into arcs, reversals–much less the real mystery of how words come to life. I’ve read plenty of dead novels by famous writers whose books read like instruction manuals for installing a stereo system.
CE: The best way to learn, sometimes, is by reading–and rereading–the masters.
If Jack taught me anything, he taught me to read, which not only made my life better, but also opened whole libraries, and let me carry on teaching myself. To be sure, knowing those elements doesn’t mean you can use them right away. They can be heavy and unnatural at the start, but they get lighter over time, and then they’re intuitive. And it is liberating. It doesn’t mean the story is a standard type; it’s individual and is shaped differently every time by the story and characters.
The only trick that I aim for, if I’m stuck, is to work with my character’s hands–fixing a light bulb, changing a tire, anything sweaty and detailed that will get me into his or her skin. Being in that intensely focused problem transports me out of my chair and into the page.
CE: You have taken on some complex historic subjects in your books Albemarle and Empires of the Forest. How do you research such topics so that you can give new life to well-trod topics? How do you frame and reframe familiar stories, like John Smith and Pocahontas? What kinds of details shed new light on familiar topics? Are there any special tricks here, about character portraits, scene-making, action, and other elements of storytelling?
AC: Reading landscapes was fascinating to me when I started doing the research for Albemarle; and the story of how we shape the land, and the land shapes us, has been compelling enough to carry over into a lot of areas over the years. The first piece of business with Albemarle, was to find out what it was like 10,000 years ago, and who was here. That alone separated the book out from others, which tend to romanticize Jefferson and the loveliness of the county. Everything was new, in that respect.
Empires was different. The story of Smith and Pocahontas is corrupted by cartoons and politics, both. You can’t tell that story without seeing a sneer of condescension from a listener, and they can often interrupt with a snarky crack about Disney. It’s odd because her name is famous yet her story remains almost virtually known, and even the Malick movie, The New World, fell into so many of the cliches and bullshit around the Jamestown colony, that I met a lot of folks with an axe to grind, literally, and called me out on Malick’s alleged racism, and the white-hero worship that typically covers Smith like insect bites.
After I’d read a few books, and found them all disdainful and correct, or, worse, heroic and swash-buckling, I decided to read the journals. These were the events as the Jamestown men wrote about them in sometimes inchoate English. That changed everything. Their vivid and sometimes electrifying accounts astonished me, and presented a real and moving portrait of a native girl who is caught between the men from a brave new world (a contemporaneous play, not coincidentally), and her father’s imperative and dicey political gambit sending her to spy on them as a precocious child, and report back on those poor idiots dying in one of his nasty old swamps. And they were the losers, to be sure: no women, no weapons with skill, speed, or accuracy, though they made a sound like thunder; and no ongoing organization, dying in numbers, unable to grow corn and feed themselves. And in their midst this one loon in charge, driven by his experiences in war, who is now beset by his men, who want to frag him, in case he beds the king’s daughter, and comes back to the fort with his warriors and kills them all. So, they decide to kill him, first.
Well, you may imagine that this research was a breeze and fascinating: and for good reason. It’s too much drama for the historians I was reading, who dismiss it as mere melodrama, and whose focus returned instead to the facts that they could prove–the bones and shards of history, which left the psychology and internecine social relationships for me to write about. I could go on, but you get the idea: if the academics have gone there before you, it doesn’t mean that they got the story, just that they got what they could prove to a dissertation committee, god help them.
The backstory of how we made the book, by the way, was just as bizarre–politics in fundraising, at powwows, and in the Indian community, with so help from Governor Mark Warner, Senator John Warner, and the Chickahominy people who embraced the book and played starring roles in its pages–many of whom Malick had pissed off by firing from the film for not looking “Indian” enough! Thankfully, we got a lot of that story into the Afterword.
CE: In recent years you have used your storytelling chops to develop a business. HeresMyStory.com engages students and others who use historic sites, but getting them to interact with Augmented Reality characters who come into view on their phone at these sites. To pursue this business project, you participated in a special business-development program at U.Va.’s Darden School of Business, the i-Lab How has learning about business informed your life as a writer and storyteller? What do you now know that makes you a better writer and storyteller?
AC: What I came away with was complicated–but it seemed to me that in business we were all talking past one another, and using English differently enough that it was a dialect, or pidgin, that we were speaking.
As an older entrepreneur, I had a hard time being heard by younger people. The business people would listen to me as if I had slipped into Mandarin (what, again?), and I found myself at times listening carefully to professional jingo and admiring how well it telescoped ideas into verbs, like some verbal vortex opening over a conference table. It was also interesting how everyone had a story, and that everyone spoke in a story, or in a case, which acted like parables–encoding a message in the action so that, even if the interpretation eluded you, the fall out of bad decisions did not.
CE: How do you train for that?
In the i-Lab at Darden, we were called on to pitch routinely and unpredictably, as a way of finding ourselves doing an elevator pitch in a heartbeat without prep. So it was a magical story, with a mysterious and compelling opening, and not unlike a Wall Street Journal story with an anecdotal opening, followed by a nut graph. If you were lucky, you’d get a card and invitation to follow up. And if something was wrong with your pitch, everyone would coach you to start on another point, or at a better selling point.
Pitching depends, of course, on who’s catching. Some don’t and others won’t. That’s good: they’re honest. The worst are those who spend all your time window shopping because they like the attention, feel powerful as they dangle a check out of reach, or merely enjoy the sadism of passive aggression, the one cultural monument here in Virginia that cannot be moved.
Standup comics can be harassed, berated, or torn up by furious drunks, and singers can get booed, writers and directors can get diced by vicious critics, and worse yet by nasty trolls posing as critics. But when you’re pitching investors, it’s all interactive. If I ever thought a creative writing workshop was tough, I had zero idea of business pitching. Investors can lean in; lean back; chill you with silence; badger you with irrelevant details to show you that they’re the smartest guy in the room; and then lead you on with meetings, suggestions, name dropping, money dangling, all just messing around because it alleviates their soulless boredom.
Quick example: I used to start my pitch this way: imagine you come up to a huge battlefield. You get out. The kids mill around. All you see is a field, well mowed into stripes like a ball field. A cannon. And a plaque. There is “nothing” there. The kids are bored and want to leave. Then your phone pings. There on your phone is a civil war soldier, standing right before you. And he says, “They shot me over here. Come on, I’ll show you…” He walks into the distance, and as you scan your phone, the field disappears, and you see on your phone see a Matthew Brady landscape all around you, as you follow him into American history. That possibility would light up people–in the beginning, in the i-Lab, back when this was still an idea. As for story-telling: I am telling them a story. It is not the one in their heads. They are looking for a denouement; I am managing their expectations. As we got closer to making a product, the illusion faded, and rather than look at the meadow, they gazed into the weeds. They ask, who is the market for this? Is this an App? Are you using AR, or VR? Is it triggered by GPS, or beacon? Is the site you mention nearby? What person is stopping there? How much do they spend a year on vacations, how long do they go? If they have 350k people visiting every year, how are you going to market to them and monetize the app, by subscription, rev share with the park, sponsorships, or advertising? Cause I don’t see advertising working here. Who’s your law firm, who’s doing your contracts? Do you have employees or are they all consultants; are they getting paid, working for equity, or a cash-equity split? What kind of network support will you need to launch this? Are you going to build your own platform, because you will need at least $400 thousand, and what kind of revenues are you projecting over the next five years, and when do I see my ROI?
What happens with dilution? You’re offering a convertible note at a 30% discount, but can I really protect my position in future rounds at that discount? Are you now planning to go to institutional investors, philanthropists, and how much have your raised, and how much of the company do you own, and is this your series A? And, of course, are you paying yourself? You need to be putting in sweat equity–this from the millionaires, that the impoverished entrepreneur had better damn well be working slavishly so that they can become still richer on your ingenuity.
CE: A pitch is just a story, with a different purpose.
Interestingly, the pitch parallels Freytag’s pyramid: they like the hook, they invest and cross the dramaturgical climax, they cannot go back, and look ahead to their own denouement, with a return on their investment (ROI). If all goes to plan, they will find the pot of gold, and return home wearing a golden fleece, with chests full of gold and jewels; if badly, they will reap the wind, or, a tax write off.
Storytellers can tell the same story to different audiences, though, and get different results that arise from the regions where they try to cast their spell. A successful entrepreneur once explained it to me in terms of coastal cultures: People on the West Coast fall in love with the vision. They love the story, see the possibilities–and want it to happen for their children and in their lifetime. Meanwhile, the East Coast gang are strictly ROI, and don’t care whether you are selling marshmallows or machine-guns. They just want their return–fast, or else. As it turns out, startups are falling into this sophomore slump after their first product launch–if kids don’t start weeping and screaming “Ringo!” “Paul!”, the investors freeze them out, and figure it’s all over.
Charlottesville has many lovely festivals in film, photography, books, and entrepreneurship and music–which that puts most people into the audience, and that’s where they love to remain, among the informed cognoscente of the coffee shop–well-read, insightful, and full of discernment. We analyze politics for its art, and art for its politics. They are my people. My tribe. My peeps. And when I leave their steaming midst, and come to the business community, I find others from the festival audience from the business world. Yet, in spite of our hip rectitude, there is still a whiff of Zenith, Ohio, in the air. I’ve met with some country club brothers of George Babbitt. They play us for weeks, months about investing, then switch away from investing to making introductions, and then merely fade away to the first tee, and are not heard from again–but for the faint sound of their slapping someone else’s back for a change.
A few years ago, something like $29 million came into local startups, making us town the best town for startups in the US that year, according to the media. Our local media gushed. The locals knew what the writer didn’t: every dime came from out of town, and went to two companies. Call it an absurd generalization, but that is a story, too, one that Charlottesville sells every day, and that journalists repeat in national magazines–while we laugh. To be sure, our investors were NOT as I’ve described above, but staunch and helpful, all the way–many great people helped us. And still with us, I’m sure.
With their backing, we were able to bring history to life at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, hosting 2,500 4th and 5th graders, adults, families, and college students. We might have changed the lives of who knows how many kids by sparking a new interest in history, and by changing how and where they see and encounter history. That’s great. That’s what we wanted to do. We launched our app in the Apple Store in May/June 2017. We got glowing local print and TV coverage, and a terrific piece in the New York Times. As I write this, the last field trips are going through our app games there in the park this fall.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Howard Bryant is a writer’s writer. Passionate about his subjects and the craft, he has used the platform of sports to explore a wide range of issues–race, cheating, political activism, and heroism in an age of cynicism. His forthcoming book, The Heritage, addresses the rise of activism among athletes in the wake of police brutality and the Trump election.
A native of Boston and a graduate of San Francisco State University, Bryant has written for the Bergen County Record, Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Boston Herald, and Washington Post. He is now a senior writer for ESPN the Magazine and a regular contributor on ESPN.
Bryant has written four acclaimed books on sports and society. Bryant’s first book, Shut Out, explores Boston’s long history of racism in sports. Juicing the Game provides a riveting narrative ofthe steroids crisis in baseball. The Last Hero explores the life and legacy of Henry Aaron. The Heritage, which will be published on May 8, 2018, explores the arc of activism from Paul Robeson and Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali to the post-Ferguson wave.
To learn more about Bryant’s work, visit his website, howardbryant.net.
Charles Euchner: Can you describe some of your influences as a writer, when you were growing up?
Howard Bryant: Recognize that you can do this comes from reading people you admire and who are saying something to you; they’re saying something to everybody, but it feels like they’re speaking to you directly.
Growing up in Boston, I devoured the Boston Globe. I remember Derrick Jackson, Ellen Goodman, Bella English, Mike Barnicle. Then obviously, in sports, Peter Gammons, Dan Shaughnessy, Ian Thompson, Steve Fainaru …
The book that changed my life was J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground. That was the type of book where you’re reading about you. I grew up with the busing crisis in Boston. That book told you that there were stories that had national reach that were about you–that your experience had value. So would you rather see someone else writing about your community or do you have a responsibility to do it yourself? That’s what Common Ground gave me.
In the summer of 1989, James Baldwin got inside my head and he has never left. It wasn’t The Fire Next Time or No Name in the Street, it was actually Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, it was his fiction that hit me first. I had a friend at Temple who was reading Sonny’s Blues. A few months later I was in The Brattle and I bought a paperback and took my lunch and I sat outside and I read almost half of it sitting there. Then I moved to Just About My Head and Another Country … then The Fire Next Time and No Name in the Street and Nobody Knows My Name and that was it. That was as romantic a relationship you can have with a writer: He’s talking to me! There hasn’t been another writer where I thought what they were saying was tailor-made for where my brain was. That connection was so powerful.
CE: The great thing about Baldwin, to me, is the combination of simplicity plus passion. The simplicity allowed the passion to come out, because what he trying to do is be direct about a topic that nobody wants to be direct about.
HB: This was not theory for him. Baldwin was in the middle of it. He wasn’t a dispassionate reporter; he was in the movement, meeting with all these figures. But not only that. I watched [the documentary] I Am Not Your Negro and you see in those interviews that Baldwin was one of those guys who in basketball they would call a triple threat. Very few writers–Hemingway, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison–are equally adept at fiction and nonfiction. Baldwin had the third part of it too. He was a great speaker. Those interviews are just as powerful as what he puts on the page. And that’s the passion you’re talking about.
He’s our godfather, if you’re a black writer today. He said everything that spoke to us. You look at the influence he had on Ta-Nehisi Coates. Look at what Toni Morrison said about him. He was able to speak for you in that fearless way. You talked about being direct on a subject that others were indirect about. He and Malcolm X were able to speak about your experience, without asking permission and without asking for your acceptance. Baldwin wanted love, probably more than most writers. He was pleading as a writer, but he was unflinching. You don’t believe how many conflicts he has in the work, in the characters, whether it was gay, straight, white black, all of it. He was searching for that level of humanity. At the same time, he was able to say, “You, white America, I’m putting you on trial and I’m not asking forgiveness.” He was saying, “This is who you are and don’t ask me to make excuses for you.” That’s an incredible balancing act.
CE: And David Halberstam?
HB: From 1987 to early 1990s, there was the huge baseball craze in publishing: Roger Angell, The Brothers K [by David James Duncan], and Halberstam’s Summer of ’49. I devoured them. I remember reading these cruel reviews about Halberstam and one of the themes was that he couldn’t write. David Halberstam couldn’t write! I guess the point is that he wasn’t a prose stylist, he was not the guy who was going to turn a phrase the way Toni Morrison could or the way Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote could.
But Halberstam could explain to you a moment in time and why it was important, and say, “Here’s why this moment changed history.” When I was working on Juicing the Game, I asked him: “I have this idea but I don’t know how to get it,” and he told me about his concept of intersection. You pick a moment–you can’t pick too many, because then none of them matter–but you pick one or two or three moments where history could have gone this way but it went that way, and you report the hell out of those moments.
CE: I get that point about style. But my favorite Halberstam book is The Breaks of the Game. The style in that book is exhilarating. It was the same level of excitement–like jumping out of your chair–as the John McPhee book on Bill Bradley, A Sense of Where You Are.
HB: The two Halberstam books that really took off for me–one was October ’64, the book on the Yankees and the Cardinals, the other was The Fifties. That book is so dog-eared right now. He signed it. I try not to keep reading it because it’s signed and I don’t want to ruin it, but I do because, again, he was able to take these moments of this decade and explain why this decade was so significant. I also love The Children, about the civil rights movement.
Those three–Lukas, Baldwin, and Halberstam–taught me that there’s more than one way to write well. You can write well by being explanatory, by turning phrases, and by having amazing depth of information. Baldwin taught me to have your style, to say it the way you want to say it, and be fearless about it.
CE: What other writers have influenced your style … especially when you’re writing?
HB: When I’m on a book project, I never read nonfiction, and I certainly never read anything similar to the subject that I’m working on. I always read the most fiction when I’m writing a book. Very rarely do I read fiction when I’m not writing a book. This reason is, so I don’t, through osmosis, duplicate anybody. You want to sound like yourself.
I am a gigantic Larry McMurtry fan. I love westerns. Cormac McCarthy, although he’s a violent man, you want to talk about a stylist! If you read No Country or the trilogy with All the Pretty Horses, he has this style that is incredible in terms of his ability put you in a situation that is completely his–it’s his universe. I really love that. Talk about turning phrases. At the [killing] scene at the end he says, “Call it heads or tails.” You can write this long, flowery, heartbreaking death scene or you can do what Cormac McCarthy did, was was like: He called heads. It was tails, and he shot her. Could you write a more descriptive paragraph in two sentences?
CE: That’s Hemingway’s iceberg theory–keep most of the stuff unstated, below the surface. Once you’ve said enough, the reader can fill in the rest.
HB: That’s right. I repeat that sentence so often because people think that there’s one way to write and there’s really not. Sometimes the best way to say it is to say it. Find your way to get there and then don’t get in the way of yourself.
CE: What essential skills did you learn as a newspaper reporter, especially covering a beat like baseball?
HB: The big issue is access–direct access to information and the people you’re writing about. It’s been one of the greatest things that’s been lost as our business shrinks. We live in a time when people conflate opinion and fact. It seems to be enough to have an opinion. That is the most dangerous thing–devaluing personal experience in favor of my opinion.
One of the differences between being on the sports beat and another beat is that when I was a beat writer at the San Jose Mercury News and covering tech for the Oakland Tribune, 95 percent of it was phone work. When you cover a baseball beat, its 175 days talking to people face to face and you’re in their work environment every day and if you write something that they don’t like, you’re standing there the next day and you have to deal with it. You have to defend what you do, which forces you to be accurate and accountable and even face some of your own demons–are you timid and don’t want confrontation, are you fearless, do you know how to talk to people.
You know, in journalism we teach the inverted pyramid, we teach who, what, when, where, why, we teach how to cover fires. The one thing we never teach people how to ask questions. How do you extract information from someone who doesn’t want to talk to you? How are you doing to talk to someone you’re going see them from early February to the World Series, knowing full well they don’t want you there. It’s an adversarial relationship.
CE: So what’s your best advice on asking questions? Especially someone who’s prickly and wants to get out and get back to the hotel or a restaurant?
HB: It’s all relationships. If you’re the guy who only talks to a player when he fucks up in the third inning, then you’re going to be the person they all hate, you’re that hatchet man so we’re never going to have a relationship. You have to take an interest in this player, as a person, at all times. You talk to them about as many things outside of baseball as possible. You learn their families, you learn their interests. One of the reasons Johnny Damon and I had such a good relationship is we used to talk fantasy football. Robin Ventura and I used to talk about music all the time. David Justice was a big movies guy. C.C. Sabathia and I argue about Marvel Comics. If C.C. has a bad game and sees me coming up, his back doesn’t get up.
If you do have to [write a negative story] a guy, give him the last word. There have been many situations when guys I liked had bad games, got busted for steroids–whatever, they were in the news for the wrong reasons. You had to do your job, but also from a human standpoint, you come to them and you say, “OK, here’s what I’m writing about, here’s the story, here’s what people are saying,” and you let them have the last word so there are no surprises. The worst thing that can happen to anybody in the news is you’re talking one way and the story that runs looks very different. And suddenly you betrayed somebody.
If you have an Albert Bell or a Mark McGwire who wants nothing to do with you and doesn’t want to talk movies with you, then you get the information you need and simply ask questions directly. You go to Roger Clemons and say, “It seems like you were cruising till the fourth and then it went wrong–what do you remember about that?”
When I first covered the Yankees as a beat writer, George King of the New York Post gave me this piece of advice: When you walk into their environment, always talk to a players. The players hate reporters standing in the middle of the room because they think you’re there to watch them walk around in their underwear, that you’re a fan like everyone else. But if you talk to people and do your job, they’ll respect you.
CE: When I first started reading Juicing the Game, was was struck by the great leap forward you achieved as a writer. You took your game to a completely different level. Am I right?
HB: One of the things about Shut Out is I love that book. It started my career as an author. But I wish it had been a second or third book because I didn’t have the feel–that’s what we talk about, finding your voice, finding out how you want to sound. I would love to do that book all over in so many ways. It was my first longform attempt. I was a newspaper guy so I was writing 800 words. Usually when you’re going to take on books, you go newspaper, 800 words; longform, 2,000 to 3,000 words; magazine articles, 4,500 to 6,000 words; and then books, 80,000 words. I went from 800-word newspaper articles to a 116,000-word book. There were times, writing Shut Out, where I was like, “Am I drowning here? Can I swim?”
Then when I got to do Juicing the Game, I got to talk with David Halberstam. He was incredibly gracious with his time and with his teaching.
Ideas don’t make books, characters make books. If you want to write a really good book, you’ve got to find someone to carry that idea through. Every story, you have to ask: Who embodies this idea? Then you have to make these people real. It will come off bland and disjointed if you don’t have a vehicle. You’ve got to find the people who exemplify the ideas. So people become metaphors. In Juicing, that was the first time I recognized that was essential. In Shut Out, I said, “OK, this happened, this happened, this happened.” It was all very informational. By the time I got to Juicing and The Last Hero, it was: idea/anecdote, idea/anecdote. It was: Who’s the person you can run this idea through? Tell me a story.
The universes I live in is so colorful. Baseball is hilarious. Your challenge is not to have information, but to present it in a way readers can learn about the world and also learn about things they didn’t know they were going to learn about. Like in October ’64, Halberstam talks about when Bob Gibson had a sore shoulder, he rehabbed it by washing his car. These are great details that you have to find to make it come alive.
CE: When you write about sports, you write about social issues–race, class, sexism, homophobism, labor, media, celebrity. Sports gives you a great platform to talk about all these things. But at the same time, you can’t get on a soapbox or too too far away the games. How do you do that balancing act, between sports a a game and sports as a place to explore all kinds of social issues?
HB: I never got into this because I was a sports fan. I got into this because I wanted to write Shut Out and that was going to be a serious book. The reason why i love sports. I’ve never met anybody in my life who loves sports more than Bob Ryan [of The Boston Globe]. He loves the games. He’s been doing this since before I was born and he still loves the games. You could call Bob Ryan right now and he’ll tell you about Reggie Cleveland’s 18-hit complete game. He still has the box score. He’s that guy. I got into this because I am an owner-versus-players labor guy. I love that sports is one of the few industries where the worker has leverage because of their talent. There’s only one LeBron James, there’s only one Kobe Bryant, there’s only one Tom Brady, and their talent creates a business model unlike anything other than entertainment. Their talent changes the business model. Thats what’s always made sports interesting to me.
It is a balance because the fan is not into it for that. The fan is not looking at a baseball game for the labor implications. This is their fun and games. If you want someone to talk about the wonders of Game 5 of the World Series, you should probably read Jayson Stark or someone else, not me. But if you want to talk other issues–like now, if you’re a manager, your job security has taken a major hit if you don’t win it all–that’s what I do.
It’s all about knowing yourself, knowing what your strengths are. Don’t be afraid to bring what you bring to the table. I’m not Bob Ryan. It’s not going to do me any good to write like Bob Ryan. It’s going to do a lot of good to write like me. If you want the inside stuff on the game, feel free to read someone else.
CE: When I turned in my book about the 2001 World Series [The Last Nine Innings], my editor, Hillel Black, who was not a sports guy, said, “I had no idea athletes were so smart.” Do you think the kinds of intelligence that athletes have–mastering incredibly complex skills and understanding complex processes–can translate to other fields?
HB: In 2001 I’m covering the Yankees and A’s and we have the flip game, when Derek Jeter makes that incredible play and gets Jeremy Giambi at the plate–one of the most iconic moments in baseball history. We go downstairs and there’s Derek. He does not like the press anyway. He’s incredulous when you’re talking about this iconic play. Then it hit me: We are thinkers, they are doers. We’re asking Derek to explain something that is instinctual to him, from thousands and thousands of repetitions. We want him to do something else, outside his skill set, which is to explain his brilliance. Sometimes he’ll say, “Well, I just saw the play unfold and that’s the right play to make.” It’s our job to create the universe for his actions. Sometimes you can see resentment from writers when the player doesn’t play along. He couldn’t explain what he was thinking in the moment because he was in the moment.
That same year, when the towers fell, was the one moment when I felt not just inadequate but also angry. Why am I in the New York Yankees clubhouse asking about geopolitics? Why am I talking with Mike Stanton about al-Queda? Why are we doing this to them? You are are not an expert about this. But their fame makes fans care about what they think. It can give the player the false assumption that they’re more important than they are. It’s up to the reporter to decide what should be published and look out for them when someone says something ridiculous because they’re put on the spot. Otherwise you end up with these gotcha moments that make everyone look bad.
CE: Can you share some of your “tricks of the trade”–the skills and techniques that you use as a writer?
HB: The first thing is learning how to ask questions, how to approach people because in our business everything you’re doing is face-to-face and on the fly and you can’t take it back. So much is done during a scrum [interviews in which a player meets several dozen reporters at the same time]. If i have a sensitive questions, I don’t want to ask in front of 40 people because then the guy looks like a deer in the headlights. You take them aside and ask away, so he doesn’t feel embarrassed and you don’t look like you’re grandstanding..
I outline a lot. I outline columns. All my books are heavily outlined–even the sections, not just the chapters–to make sure the dots are connected. One of the beauties of books is it’s almost like jazz. You have your main line but also have these solos and tributaries, you can on on these riffs and tell these little stories, as long as you can get back to the main line. If you can’t get back to the main line, you have chaos. That’s what the outline is for. It reminds you to get back to that main line.
For every book I work on, I write a theme. There’s a theme to every book. If you can’t tell me what the book’s about in one sentence, you don’t have a book. In Shut Out, the book was about giving people a chance to speak who hadn’t had it before. When you talked about the race issue and Boston, it’s always been written about from the perspective of the Red Sox and was Tom Yawkey [the longtime owner of the team] a racist. I didn’t really care about that. I wanted the black players to tell me what it was like to play in Boston. Juicing the Game was very different. That was about integrity in a time of cynicism. Every time you got into the question of steroids, someone would say, “Well, you would do the same thing for $10 million.” But maybe I wouldn’t–and, besides, there were lots of players who didn’t and it cost them a lot of money. In The Last Hero, I viewed Henry Aaron as a locomotive with a coal engine. I wanted to know: What is that coal made of?
The new book, The Heritage, is all about the Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali lineage–the legacy–on athletes today. The book is about post- 9/11 patriotism colliding with the post-Ferguson black athletes. After almost 50 years of athletes not getting involved, suddenly you’ve got athletes reviving their political positions, at a time when sports has become one of the most politicized places in America.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
To understand a subject, we need to understand not just how to do things well, but also how to fix what’s wrong. And so, by popular demand, I have gathered a baker’s dozen of flawed sentences and paragraphs.
(Bakers in Medieval England used to give an extra loaf of bread to avoid charges that they were skimping on their deliveries. Hotten’s Slang Dictionary, published in 1864, explains: “This consists of thirteen or fourteen; the surplus number, called the inbread, being thrown in for fear of incurring the penalty for short weight.”)
Each passage presents a unique challenge to the writer and editor. Usually, you can fix these passages by breaking them down, shortening the sentences, emphasizing the subject and verb, and clearing out the digressions.
Who did what?
One of the more thoughtful essayists today is David Brooks of The New York Times, who covers politics, technology, brain research, economics, and social issues with a deft touch. But here he stumbles:
Hotels, sneakers, iced tea and even ice cream is now marketed to people on the basis of psychographic profiles and the result is a profusion of unusual products and distinctive experiences.
What’s wrong? Two things. First, he fails to get his first subjects and verb to agree (“Hotels, sneakers, iced tea and even ice cream” is plural), creating a small (but important) moment of confusion. Second, he fails to develop two separate thoughts before connecting them.
To fix this minor kludge, break the sentence into two. To connect the thoughts, use a simple transition (“as a result”). In each sentence, make sure to say exactly who does what. Like this:
Markets now use psychological profiles to hawk hotels, sneakers, iced tea, and even ice cream. With more information about what consumers want, corporate America offers a profusion of unusual products and distinctive experiences.
Brooks has legions of fans (like me) because he does such a good job explaining abstract, cutting-edge research to nonspecialists. But in this passage, he let himself wander. Take your time, David; even when you want to connect ideas from different worlds, just state one thought at a time.
Huh? Who? Where?
To make a point clear, be sure to connect the subject with the verb. When you deal with two distinct points in time, be sure you know what’s doing what and when. Consider this confusing passage from an article about a former baseball player named Ryan Freel who committed suicide:
This passage makes it seem like Freel was suffering from CTE at the mass. In fact, the mass under discussion was his funeral.
To avoid confusion, put actors, actions, places, and times together. One actor was Freel; other actors were members of his family. Talk about each in turn, like this:
Freel suffered from CTE, family members said at a private mass on Sunday.
Notice that I deleted the attribution. I think you could include the attribution in a later sentence, as you explain the issue in more detail. My goal here is to avoid veering off in different directions.
Who’s doing what?
Lots of writers lose the reader right away. Rather than telling the reader what’s happening, they meander along. Take this sentence from Sports Illustrated‘s website:
Even last Thursday, when Yankees manager Joe Girardi’s strategy of sacrificing an AL East title—in order to set up a first-round matchup with the Twins—his club’s traditional whipping boys—instead of with Cliff Lee and the Rangers was close to paying dividends (New York then had a 2-0 series lead on Minnesota), Girardi refused to admit that this had ever been his strategy at all.
The writer uses 47 words to get to his point: Joe Girardi denied blowing the division. The meandering gets in the way of the point of the sentence. Meandering also creates confusion. The phrase “instead of with Cliff Lee and the Rangers was close to paying dividends” takes the reader in two separate directions. Punctuation would help. But what would help more is starting and finishing strongly. Like this:
Manager Joe Girardi still denies that the Yankees purposely lost the AL East title. When the Tampa Bay Rays won the title, the Yankees got a first-round matchup with the Minnesota Twins. The Yankees såwept the Twins in three previous playoff series. By losing the division, the Yankees avoided the Texas Rangers and their ace, Cliff Lee.
The new version cuts twelve words and gives the reader four simple sentences.
The revised passage also offers more information—that the Rays won the title and the Twins lost their last three series to the Yankees. Rambling has a way of making writers forget to tell the readers facts like that. Short, declarative sentences demand clear information.
The long and winding road
Sports writer Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News has a tendency to write long and meandering sentences, as if he’s arguing in a bar and dare not pause lest someone else enter the conversation.
In this 2012 passage, Lupica explores the misfit between the Boston Red Sox and their manager, Bobby Valentine. Amid rumors that the Red Sox plan to fire Valentine, Sox President Larry Lucchino offers a lukewarm endorsement of the manager. Lucchino does not embrace Valentine; he only says that his job is safe for the final month and a half of the season. Then Lupica says:
That is exactly where we are with the Red Sox and with Valentine, who will eventually take the fall for everything that has gone wrong since the Red Sox were still ahead of the Yankees a year ago, right before they played the absolute worst September ever played by a team that had nearly gotten to 40 games over .500 before that. …
These stream-of-consciousness sentences meander over time:
The present: That is exactly where we are with the Red Sox and with Valentine
The future: who will eventually take the fall for everything that has gone wrong
The past: since the Red Sox were still ahead of the Yankees a year ago
More detail on the past: right before they played the absolute worst September ever played by a team
Modification of that detail: that had nearly gotten to 40 games over .500 before that.
How do we revise this 62-word monstrosity? Break it up! Take a look at this sentence-by-sentence revision:
So it goes with the Red Sox and Valentine’s uneasy relationship. Eventually, Valentine will take the fall for everything that has gone wrong with the team. He’ll suffer not just for his team’s failures, but also for team’s funk since September 2012. After going almost 40 games over .500—and leading the Yankees in the standings—the Red Sox played historically badly to blow their playoff hopes.
Lupica might not like my rewrite. He and his imitators at the Daily News love the breathless string of ideas. Maybe they think it sounds like an old-timey coach rambling on about the good old days. But clarity and accuracy should be the primary goals of all writing.
Color takes away focus
Since most readers get their daily news online, as it happens, writers for magazines need to give readers behind-the-scenes glimpses of the newsmakers. In this passage, Newsweek describes an event involving the company that built the website for the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. The company, CGI Federal, gathered his workers to celebrate landing the contract for the job:
Most attendees stayed in the resort’s Chateau Lafayette hotel, a replica of the Ritz-Carlton in Paris, and at a formal dinner under the elaborate chandelier in the ballroom, George D. Schindler, the president of CGI Federal, spoke of the company’s big profits that year and its bright future.
This sentence describes two different facts: (1) where people stayed and (2) what the company’s president said. The reporter is trying to make a connection between the company’s luxury accommodations and its hubris. But the facts about the luxury, a celebration, and the company president’s remarks.
To make the point better, the author could have broken the sentence in two and offered a more direct connection between the luxury and overconfidence. Like this:
CGI workers stayed in the resort’s Chateau Lafayette hotel, a replica of the Ritz-Carlton in Paris. To celebrate the Obamacare contract, they gathered for a formal dinner under the elaborate chandelier in the ballroom. George D. Schindler, the president of CGI Federal, spoke of the company’s big profits that year and its bright future.
Even readers who followed the rocky rollout of Obamacare don’t know much about CGI Federal. If you want to peek behind the curtains at CGI’s culture, you need to take one glimpse at a time.
Block that metaphor!
No one covers sports better than Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post. But even the great Boswell falters. Here, he mixes four metaphors. Most football fans won’t care. But he sounds like a hack here, and he’s not. Take a look:
Yes, it’s happened again. Now it’s the Shanahan era, once trumpeted, now down in flames, that takes its place in the line — for bitterness, for ugly endings and for the endless blame game that always accompanies Snyder’s flops — with the departures of Norv Turner, Marty Schottenheimer, Steve Spurrier, and Jim Zorn.
Let’s review the metaphors:
once trumpeted
down in flames
takes its place in the line
endless blame game
flops
Let’s just say Boswell had a bad day. And let’s add that the Post’s desk editor failed to save Boz from his flaws. Now, let’s fix his cliché prose:
Yes, it’s happened again. The Shanahan era, once a cause for hope, has failed. Shanahan has become part of the Redskin’s sorry recent history — marked by bitterness, ugly endings, and blame. That’s how it works with Snyder’s failure — with the previous departures of Norv Turner, Marty Schottenheimer, Steve Spurrier, Jim Zorn, and, soon enough, with Shanahan
To be sure, most of Boswell’s readers would follow his logic easily. But the best writers not only speak to knowledgeable readers, but to people with a casual interest in the subject.
More meandering confuses who did what and when
This Boston Globe article explores a familiar topic—conflict of interest among state officials. In this case, the head of the state’s gambling commission failed to disclose that one of his friends had a stake in a project that he was responsible for managing. But this sentence, while short, manages to wander off the subject
After Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn toured the former industrial site in Everett where he was thinking of building a casino in November 2012, state gambling commission chairman Stephen Crosby didn’t mention that one of the landowners was his former business partner.
Because this sentence meanders, it makes a key fact unclear. What happened in November 2012? Was that when Steve Wynn visited? Or was it the time to build a casino?
Fixing this little mess is simple. Just separate the separate thoughts into separate sentences. Like this:
Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn toured the former industrial site in Everett, where he was considering building a casino, in November 2012. But Steve Crosby, the state gambling commission chairman Stephen Crosby, failed to mention that one of his friends owned a key parcel of land at the site.
Separating these thoughts not only makes the passage clearer; it also makes it fairer. The passage describes two events—the casino mogul’s visit and the gambling regulator’s relationships. Together, they suggest something fishy is going on. But separating these ideas gives readers the room to make their own conclusions.
So what do you really think?
We write to persuade. Even when we just want to describe something, matter-of-factly, we aim to get someone else to believe something we believe. Problems arise when we push our opinions so hard that we confuse what we’re saying.
For an example, consider Peggy Noonan, a conservative opinion writer for The Wall Street Journal. Noonan, who write speeches for President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, seems to have three passions: loving Reagan, loving Pope John Paul II, and not loving Barack Obama. In her almost-weekly pieces against President Obama, she piles insult upon insult, as if you say: Have I told you that I really, really dislike this guy and people who like him?
Take a look at this 51-word sentence from May 2013:
The president, detached and defeatist when he isn’t in your face and triumphalist, let David Remnick, in the New Yorker interview people keep going back to as the second term’s Rosetta stone, know that he himself does not expect any major legislation, with the possible exception of immigration, to get done.
In one swing, she bashes Obama for being detached, defeatist, in your face, triumphalist. For extra measure, she slights New Yorker editor David Remnick for his interview with Obama, as well as “people” who found the interview revealing. That’s six raps on Obama and his sympathizers. Finally, she gets to her point: Obama has a limited legislative agenda for the rest of his second term.
Noonan, of course, gets paid to express her opinions. My purpose here is not to disagree—personally, I have mixed feelings about the president—but to help her write better sentences.
So let’s fix her mess by breaking it into more digestible pieces:
When the president does not attack Republicans and celebrate himself, he retreats to a detached and defeatist posture. Obama told David Remnick of the New Yorker—in an interview that liberals consider the second term’s Rosetta Stone—he has low expectations for the rest of his term. With the possible exception of immigration, Obama sees little hope for action on any major issue.
I kept all of Noonan’s insults, even sharpening the swipe at people who liked the New Yorker interview.
I cut the average sentence length from 51 to 21 words but increased the length of the whole passage by 12 words. As a general rule, of course, shorter is better than longer. But the primary goal of all writing is readability. To make all of Noonan’s points clearly, we need to use more words.
The dangers of corporate-speak
Writers in large organizations—like government and corporations—tend to avoid direct speech. Why? Here are four reasons:
(1) People in organizations want to avoid saying anything that might offend their constituents.
(2) They tend to speak an “insider’s language” that is abstract and unfamiliar to outsiders.
(3) To make sure they make their point, they often repeat themselves.
(4) They try to pack too much information into a sentence or paragraph.
All four tendencies are visible in this paragraph, taken from the website of a major financial rating service:
Altogether, a total of 950 natural catastrophes were recorded last year, nine-tenths of which were weather-related events like storms and floods. This total makes 2010 the year with the second-highest number of natural catastrophes since 1980, markedly exceeding the annual average for the last ten years (785 events per year). The overall losses amounted to around US$ 130bn, of which approximately US$ 37bn was insured. This puts 2010 among the six most loss-intensive years for the insurance industry since 1980. The level of overall losses was slightly above the high average of the past ten years.
How to fix this monstrosity? Start by identifying the major ideas in the passage. I see two—recent disasters and their costs and the new “norm” of disastrous weather events. So I broke the paragraph into two, then trimmed the details and repetition that turns off readers. Here’s my rewrite:
Natural disasters made 2010 one of the six worst years for losses since 1980. Some 950 natural disasters caused financial losses of $130 billion, of which only $37 billion was insured.
Risk from environmental catastrophe has become the norm. The world experienced an average of 785 catastrophic events in the first decade of the 2000s.
This rewrite cuts the passage from 96 to 55 words and the average sentence length from 24 to 13.75 words. More important, it eliminates needless hedges and emphatics and focuses on hard facts.
Too many modifiers
Now we shift our attention to academic writing. Scholars have earned a reputation for tedious, vague, and abstract writing. Look at this passage, from an academic journal article about the civil rights movement:
After the Second World War, the general drift of American public opinion toward a more liberal racial attitude that had begun during the New Deal became accentuated as a result of the revolution against Western Imperialism in Asia and Africa that engendered a new respect for the nonwhite peoples of the world, and as a result of the subsequent competition for the support of the uncommitted nations connected with the Cold War.
Get it? I didn’t, at least the first few times I read it. Only by hunting for the subject and verb—and then breaking it down into shorter pieces—did I fully comprehend what the writer was trying to say.
So why does this passage go awry? In a seventy-two-word sentence, the author uses sixteen prepositions—after, of, toward, during, as, of, against, in, that, for, of, as, of, for, of, and with. So many prepositions demand too much from the reader. It’s disorienting, like asking a driver to turn sixteen times to travel a short distance.
What do prepositions do? They create modifiers—details that offer new information about nouns and verbs. But do we need so many modifiers? I don’t think so.
To rewrite that passage, I removed all but a handful of prepositional phrases. Then I broke the passage into digestible pieces. Look at this new version:
After World War II, Americans adopted more liberal attitudes about race. The New Deal began this process. Revolutions against imperial powers in Asia and Africa created new respect for the nonwhite populations. The Cold War also prompted the U.S. to consider how racial strife damaged America’s image in the Cold War.
The new version breaks one monster sentence into three ordinary sentences. It uses fifty-one words, twenty-two fewer. And it uses only five prepositions—about, against, in, for, and in—instead of sixteen.
Academese: Judith Butler
Writing in Diacritics, the feminist scholar Judith Butler wrote an essay titled “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” which includes this passage:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
The biggest problem, of course, is the use of too many abstract words in too little space. It’s fine to use specialized terminology. If you cannot think of a better way to say “coming from the same source,” go ahead and say homologous. If you cannot think of a better way to say complete intellectual dominance, say hegemony. If you need to refer to the work of Louis Althusser, fine, go ahead. Use all the fancy vocabulary you want. But just don’t pile it up. Remember that even the most knowledgable specialist can better understand ideas in chunks. Use specialized terms only when you need ‘em, then define ‘em and spread ‘em out.
Another problem is the sentence length. Long sentences, of course, are not necessarily bad. Sometimes you need a long sentence to create a mood or to connect several ideas. But sentences ought not overwhelm the reader. Butler uses 94 words in this passage. How does this happen? As Deep Throat would have told Woodward and Bernstein if they were investigating this scandal of a sentence: Follow the prepositions.
Like the previous passage, this one is a long string of modifiers connected by prepositions. This passage contains 21 prepositions: from, in, in, to, of, in, of, into, of, from, of, as, to, in, into, of, of, as, with, of, and of.
Prepositions help to show the relations of words and phrases. So when you use 21 prepositions in one sentence, you show 21 different relations of words within that sentence.
Here’s one way to translate Butler:
Structuralists say capitalism operates as a powerful “top-down” system, making businesses, schools, and other institutions look and operate the same way. We now think of power as a series of smaller, decentralized interactions. Power does not come from some big force, but from countless interactions throughout society.
I understand that we may lose some ideas with this simple passage. But we don’t lose the reader. And if we keep the reader with us, we can develop the more complex concepts, one at a time.
Academese: Fredric Jameson
In his book Signatures of the Visible, Fredric Jameson writes:
The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer).
This 63-word sentence also goes on too long for most readers. So he and Butler have that in common. But Butler’s major problem stemmed from too many modifiers, which we see with all those prepositional phrases. But Jameson uses only four prepositional phrases here: in, about, from, and from. So why is this passage so bad.
That’s easy. It’s nonsense. The visual is essentially pornographic? The visual “has its end” (someone should call the teleology cops on Jameson, an avowed skeptic of teleological thinking) in mindless fascination. Really? Does that mean that gazing at the works by Leonardo or Brueghel is pornographic? Or Chagal or Rodin? Does Jameson really mean, as he says later, that anything embedded in mass culture is porn? Really? So great photography and modern art and everything in newspapers and magazines and the web … it’s all just porn?
I like the point about austere films drawing their energy by “repress[ing] their own excess.” It’s an interesting idea. You create excess (like the scenes involving the horse head and car explosion in “The Godfather”) and then you draw it back with some kind of contrary idea (“A la famiglia!“). But is that really just modern? Sure, the modern era has multiplied images and ideas, and then broadcast them globally. But are visuals really new? Interesting idea, but debatable.
Anyway, let’s try to simplify Jameson’s passage:
When mass media focus on an object, they inevitably take away its basic integrity. Like pornography, media encourage rapt, mindless fascination. The most artful films, though, generate energy by pushing the subject to extremes and then pulling back.
If I lost or distorted any ideas here, sorry. Sometimes when you pull out deep weeds you also pull out benign plants.
Academese: Roy Bhaskar
Let’s take one last look at academic writing gone wrong. In Plato Etc., the British philosopher Roy Bhaskar writes:
Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal — of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.
Indeed.
First of all, we need to break down this 134-word monstrosity, with its 23 prepositional phrases, into pieces. We learned how to do that with Butler. So let’s move on to some special problems of Bhaskar.
The sentence has two main parts. In part 1 (from “Indeed” to the em-dash), he introduces the idea of the Foucauldian reversal. In part 2 (from “of the unholy” to the end), he says what gets reversed. You can state this idea with the simple SVO sentence:
Ah, simplicity! But hold on. Stated that way, the whole passage looks absurd. Roy, you really think all those characters you lump together — Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Comte, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel, Baudrillard — would take the same side in a debate? While you’re at it, why not throw in the Marx Brothers too? (Note to self: Send movie idea to the makers of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”)
Look, I understand you want to say Michel Foucault did something consequential. Great. I agree. You also want to say that even competing traditions shared some underlying assumptions. Again, great.
I know I’m oversimplifying here, Roy, but you forced my hand. Your way out — the way you can make your stuff intelligible — is to slow down. Breathe in, breathe out. Now, step by step, tell us what you mean.
You suffer the “Whoa, Nellie!” problem. You think of so many related ideas, and you want to talk about all of them. So you start and it’s like you get taken over by a runaway horse.
Start by getting rid of the compound modifiers: Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean; Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian; and Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean. Just explain how these ideas relate to each other. Don’t try to do too much too soon. Avoid sardine writing, packing ideas densely into the tin.
Let’s look at all the philosophical traditions that Foucault et al. “reversed”:
The Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean “unholy trinity.”
The Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm.
Foundationalisms.
Irrationalisms.
“The primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual.”
Plato’s “problematic,” which “Hegel served only to replicate,” blah blah blah.
Other stuff.
Whew. Did I get that right?
Whatever. Here’s what you do. Find the core idea and lay it out, piece by piece. Embellish only when necessary, only after you’ve laid a foundation. And for God’s sake, keep it simple. Something like this:
Foucault’s approach undercut the ancient debates about idealism and materialism. Foucault also challenged the extensions of those debates– including Kant’s demand for rationality, Descartes’ separation of mind and body, and Nietzsche’s appeal to primal urges.
We might miss some nuance here. But we’ve established a strong foundation for real communication. Remember, we have a whole article to explain the argument. Remember this simple rule of thumb: Take one idea at a time.
And that’s not a bad place to end. Keep it simple. Take one thing at a time. Don’t try to impress people. Just say what you mean, as simply as possible.
No one in our time has contributed more to nonfiction narrative–stories that are true–than John McPhee. And he has lessons to teach.
McPhee is the writer for The New Yorker and creative writing professor at Princeton University. His books include the Pulitzer-Prize winning Annals of the Former World (a trilogy on geology and geologists), A Sense of Where You Are (about Bill Bradley as a basketball star at Princeton), Levels of the Game (about a classic tennis match between Arthur Ash and Clark Graebler), The Pine Barrens (about the forests of central New Jersey), Encounters with the Archdruid (about three wilderness areas), The Survival of the Bark Canoe (about a New Hampshire craftsman), The Control of Nature (three stories about man’s battle with the natural world), Uncommon Carriers (about water freight), and many more.
His students include David Remnick (Pulitzer Prize-winning author and editor of The New Yorker), Richard Stengel (managing editor of Time), Robert Wright (author of The Moral Animal and other works), Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation and other books), Richard Preston (author of The Hot Zone), Tim Ferriss (best-selling author and self-hacking guru), Jennifer Weiner (author of Good In Bed and other novels), and many more.
So McPhee knows writing. And, lucky for us, he lays out his techniques in Draft No. 4, part memoir and part writing manual. here are some of the highlights:
1. Selecting and Framing Topics
At the beginning of Draft No. 4, McPhee describes his random way of selecting topics. After years of writing straight profiles for Time and The New Yorker, McPhee decided to profile two people. “Then who?” he asked himself. “What two people?” He considered various pairs who had to work together to achieve their own aims–the actor and director, the architect and client, the dancer and choreographer, the pitcher and manager. Then, randomly, he watched a 1968 semifinal match of the U.S. Open. Something about the players–Arthur Ashe and Clark Grabner–intrigued him. So he pursued it. The result was Levels of the Game, which became the model for analytic sportswriting.
With a dual portrait in the bag, McPhee decided to create a portrait of four people. But how do you organize a fourplex portrait? McPhee decided to identify one main character and show how that character interacts with three others. The lead character, first among equals, would give the piece a unity; the three other characters would reveal a wider range of perspectives and personalities. McPhee pictured his scheme like this:
ABC
D
McPhee decided to write something about the emerging environmental movement. Before finding Characters A, B, and C, he had to find Character D. After casting around for an Aldo Leopold type, he discovered David Brower of the Sierra Club. Now, who could be Dominy’s antagonist? Soon enough he found Floyd Dominy, the U.S. commissioner of reclamation, who had clashed repeatedly with Brower. “I can’t talk to Brower because he’s so goddamned ridiculous,” Dominy told McPhee. So, McPhee said, would you be willing to get on a rubber raft going down the Colorado River with him? “Hell, yes!” Dominy said. With those two characters lined up, McPhee went in search of two more.
Once McPhee finished that piece, which became Encounters With the Archdruid, he continued his quest for more complex portrait structures. “So, at the risk of getting into an exponential pathology,” McPhee writes, “I started to think of a sequence of six profiles in which a seventh party would appear in a minor way in the first, appear in a greater way in the second,” and so on.
McPhee has lots of interests–the environment, sports, politics, technology, the labor process–but they followed his desire to master various structures of writing. He decided how to write before he decided what to write about. Which, of course, is completely backward.
Or is it? As McPhee notes, “The Raven” originated not in Edgar Alan Poe’s fascination with a man’s suffering over lost love but, rather, Poe’s desire to use a one-word refrain with a long “o” sound. So the origin of the poem was the famous refrain: “Nevermore.” With that word in place, Poe had to figure out who would say “Nevermore,” over and over. For that role he selected a raven, speaking to the distraught man.
Alfred Hitchcock did something similar. When brainstorming a film, he identified places he wanted to shoot. So he decided to shoot a scene at the face of Mount Rushmore. After that location, he decided to use a vast farm as a scene. With those and other scenes in his lineup, he had to decide what would happen there. The result, eventually, was the film North By Northwest. Another time, he decided he wanted to shoot scenes at a London chapel and at the Royal Albert Hall. Those scenes eventually played leading roles, if you will, in The Man Who Knew Too Much. “Of course, this is quite the wrong thing to do,” Hitchcock said. Maybe, maybe not. But he did it and it worked.
Whatever the process, the writer starts with a blank slate. The possibilities are as broad as the writer’s imagination and ability to explore. But once he makes a fateful decision–once he picks this structure instead of that structure, this scene instead of that scene, this character instead of that character–the possibilities narrow. Every decision not only excludes certain possibilities, it also increases the likelihood of others.
2. Narrowing Ideas
That’s when things get interesting. Once McPhee picked Floyd Dominy for his four-person portrait, he had to seek out the ideas, events, characters, and conflicts that would make it work. Every decision narrowed his scope. Every decision drove McPhee toward more and more specific topics. Before long he was on that Colorado River with his four main characters, discovering what their time together, on the river, revealed about their character and their causes.
Now we are in the heart of the writing process, which mostly happens before the author has written a single word–research. The author must go out and gather as much information as possible. Inevitably, he will gather far more than he can ever consider using–ten times more, at least. Out of all that information, the author will begin to understand his subject. He will begin to convey impressions about who, what, when, where, and why. Paraphrasing Cary Grant, McPhee tells his students that “a thousand details add up to one impression.”
The author makes countless decisions about what to consider and what to ignore. More-or-less random decisions (focusing on one character or two or four or six characters) give way to decisions about specific people, things, places, events, and ideas. The author is always asking himself: This or that? And: Then what? The materials start to fill notebooks, audio files, picture files. The process develops momentum. Faulkner once said:
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
Faulkner was working from his imagination. Nonfiction writers like McPhee draw from their piles of notes. Once they have enough material, they start, like Faulkner, to chase their characters and putting them into actual scenes, summaries, descriptions, and analyses.
3. Research and Interviewing
Before you write a word, you need to gather information, from books and websites, observation and interviewing, daydreaming and structured brainstorming. Then you sort and select.
Research involves not only library/Internet research, but also getting out into the field to observe the real world. That process raises the anthropologist’s dilemma. When you show up to observe people, your presence can affect people’s behavior:
As you scribble away, the interviewee is, of course, watching you. Now, unaccountably, you slow down, and even stop writing, while the interviewee goes on talking. The interviewee becomes nervous, tries harder, and spells out the secrets of the secret life, or maybe just a clearer and more quotable version of what was said before. Conversely, if the interviewee is saying nothing of interest, you can pretend to be writing, just to keep the enterprise moving forward.
Never worry about looking smart to the interviewee. What matters is getting information, not looking good. “Who is going to care if you seem dumber than a cardboard box?” McPhee asks.
4. Getting Words on Paper
Everyone, at one time or another, faces the dread of an empty screen with no ideas. McPhee offers a familiar solution: Forget you’re a writer and pretend you’re just an ordinary person trying to explain a topic to a friend or loved one.
For six, seven, 10 hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere. … What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about that block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you were not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine, you whimper, you outline your problem, and you mentioned that the bear has 55-inch waist and a neck more than 30 inches around but could run nose to nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rest 14 hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining and just keep the bear.
Start, then, by venting. Forget about what you want to say. You explain what you would write about if you could. In that process, the words start to flow. The words are not perfect, mind you. But you manage to get words on paper. “Just stay at it,” McPhee says. “Perseverance will change things.”
The trick is to melt the frozen mind. If you have done the research, you have surely something to say. If you’re scared, for whatever reason, your knowledge and insights are out of reach — but they’re never too far below the surface. You can coax them to the surface, sooner or later.
“The mind is working all the time,” McPhee says. “You may actually be writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it 24 hours a day – yes, while you sleep – but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until this exists, writing has not really begun.”
To write even a short piece — say, 1,200 to 1,500 words, the length of a typical college paper — requires hundreds of choices, as McPhee notes:
Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than 1 million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: if something interests you, it goes – if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you got.
Whatever you do, get something down on paper. Don’t even think of judging whether it’s good or not.
How could anyone ever know that something is good before it exists? And unless you can identify what is not succeeding– unless you can see those dark hunky spots that are giving you such a low opinion of your pros as it develops– how are you going to be able to tone it up and make it work?
So spill whatever you know onto a sheet of paper. Once you have words on paper, then you can sort it and decide what deserves to stay.
So: Research, blurt, sort, delete, shift. Rinse, repeat.
5. Start Strong, Finish Strong
Once you begin composing your piece, the most important pieces are the start (known in journalism as “the lead” or “lede”) and the finish.
“The lead, like the title, should be a flashlight that shines down into the story,” McPhee says. “A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don’t use the lead.”
The right lead hints at everything, directly or indirectly–not just substance, but style too. Reading the lead is like meeting your tour guide for the first time. She tells you about the trip ahead–what sites you’ll visit, how much information she will offer, what kinds of stories she’ll tell, and, in general, what kind of company she will provide along the way.
The finish might be even more important. It’s your destination. Ideally, it should respond to the question or issue that the lead raises. The finish should feel like the end of a trip. You’ve arrived and you now know much more that you knew at the beginning. Issues that once puzzled you now make sense. Characters who once seemed incomplete are now complete.
In a sense, the lead and the conclusion are always talking to each other as the story or essay proceeds. This dialogue helps you to make decisions for the middle pieces. You can’t talk about just anything and everything anymore. You talk only about what it takes to get from the beginning to the end.
6. Making Comparisons
All communication involves comparing one thing with another, different thing. To learn about a new topic — a simple fact, a concept, a feeling — we need to relate it to something else.
John McPhee’s mastery of the metaphor and simile might seem a stylistic flourish. To be sure, his greatest talents involve his ravenous gathering of facts and insights and his ability to find just the right form to lay out these facts and insights.
But McPhee’s ability to create fresh metaphors and similes reveals–and enables–his sparkling mind. If he spoke in flat and familiar cliches, his thinking would be dull and orthodox. This drabness would be an undertow, pulling down even his best findings.
One of the great joys of Draft No. 4 is the richness of McPhee’s metaphors and similes. A few examples:
• In describing his fascination with oranges, how they’re grown and marketed and the kinds of cultures they support, McPhee describes a habit he picked up whenever his travels took him to Penn Station: “There was a machine in Pennsylvania Station that cut and squeezed them. I stopped there as routinely as an animal at a salt lick.”
• Describing his desire to find the right word, he writes: “At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary.”
• On the organizing information into the right structure for a piece: It’s “like returning from a grocery store with materials you intend to cook for dinner. You set them out on the kitchen counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with.”
• To describe a coal train, McPhee guessed at an analogy: “The releasing of the air brakes began at the two ends, and moved toward the middle. The train’s very long integral air tube was like the air sack of American eel.” Once McPhee was satisfied with the metaphor’s aptness, he and his fact checkers had to figure out whether it was accurate. It was.
Metaphors and similes require broad knowledge. Who but McPhee, with his broad understanding of nature, could have come up with the simile of an eel’s air sack? Good comparisons require hard work. They do not just burst into your consciousness, like Kramer at Seinfeld’s door. Which reminds me …
Because they speak to what the reader already knows, metaphors and similes can date themselves quickly. When we use pop culture to evoke an idea, the insight lasts only as long as the pop-cult idea’s currency. A reference to the Jay Z or Kelly Clarkson or Rosie O’Donnell will be meaningless in a year or even a month. Still, if a pop culture reference captures an idea perfectly, use it. Just be sure to explain the image–quickly–so unknowing readers get the reference. (That, of course, can be like explaining a joke. As E.B. White noted: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”)
To get this right, adapt Mark Twain’s dictum–“When you catch an adjective, kill it”–to your comparisons. When you catch a fleeting pop-cult reference, kill it.
Still, McPhee lauds his New Yorker colleague Robert Wright for his use of an old cultural reference — the image on the Quaker Oats box — to describe the scientist Robert Boulding:
As it turns out, there is a certain resemblance. Both men have shoulder-length, snow white hair, blue eyes, and ruddy cheeks, and both have fundamentally sunny disposition, smiling much or all of the time, respectively. There are differences, to be sure. Boulding’s hair is not as cottony as the Oats Quaker’s, and it falls less down and more back, skirting the tops of his ears along the way.
Should Wright have used the Quaker Oats man? You could make a good case both ways. Anyway, if you use a time- or place-specific comparison, add a quick explanation, as Wright does with the Quaker Oats example.
7. Checking Facts
John McPhee is lucky in ways that most writers can never imagine. Like other New Yorker writers, he benefits from an army of fact-checkers. They sift his drafts, like gold panners, to find errors in his work. Often, McPhee will leave it to the fact checkers to find the facts. He uses notations like these to alert fact checkers of gaps in the draft:
WHAT CITY, $000,000, name TK, number TK, Koming.
In this case, Koming for what’s “coming” or TK for what’s “to come.” These notations, as McPhee explains, “are forms of a promissory note and a checker is expected to pay.”
The imperative to catch errors, McPhee argues, is existential. “An error is everlasting,” McPhee says. “Once an error gets into print it will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogues, scrupulously indexed … silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata.”
Errors can get embedded into the most innocent of constructions. McPhee writes: “The commas … were not just commas; they were facts, neither more nor less factual than the kegs of Bud or the color of Santa’s suit.”
Errors are like rats. Even the most aggressive efforts to exterminate them fall short. Errors elude even The New Yorker‘s vaunted fact-checking operation. Translators of McPhee’s article about the Swiss army identified 140 new errors. Error-busting, then, is a Sisyphean task. Even when you fail, trying is imperative.
8. Finding Voice
Everyone wants to stand out, to develop a “voice”–a distinct way of phrasing, scene-setting, describing, explaining–that sets him apart from other writers.
How do you do it?
To start, ironically, you imitate others. You find writers whose work you admire, and you study the structure and pacing of their work. You notice the way they introduce a topic, build sentences and paragraphs, describe a face or a moment, deploy quotations or metaphors, break down a complex idea into pieces, or transition from one idea to another. You isolate one of those tricks and you imitate it. Then you do it again and again.
Then the magic happens. “Rapidly, the components of imitation fade,” McPhee writes. “What remains is a new element in your own voice, which is not in any way an imitation. Your manner as a writer takes form in this way, a fragment at a time.”
Which is like life, more broadly experienced. We find something to admire and align ourselves with it. We practice, practice, practice until it’s fresh and belongs, wholly, to us. In this way connection with others allows us to become who we are.
9. Finishing Touches
Here’s where the writer’s fun begins. After a lot of grinding–hard labor to gather the pieces and figure out how they might relate to each other–you can develop the ideas and characters and scenes with some depth and care. You can find the details that express “the people and the places and how the weather was,” to quote Hemingway. You can find the words that express the ideas just right–les mots juste.
As it happens, McPhee’s daughters have followed in his footsteps as creatives. Two are novelists, one is an art historian, and another is a photographer. When they get stuck, they sometimes seek advice from each other and their father. McPhee shares this piece of advice he once offered his daughter Jenny:
The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy, I just fling words as if they were I were flinging mud on the wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft. With that, you’ve achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the eye and ear. Edit it again—top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time.
And when do you know you’re done? You just know. You run out of questions to ask. When you ask questions, you know the answer before your interviewee can respond. The scenes play vividly in your mind, in the right sequence, almost like a movie.
Nothing is random anymore.
At that point, you’re probably already thinking about the next story.
Postscript: A Personal Note
Many years ago, I got the time wrong for a meeting at Boston University. To pass time, I wandered over to the campus bookstore and found Levels of the Game. In describing a U.S. Open semifinal match, McPhee offers a glimpse not just of tennis and sports and strategy, but of the two Americas. Arthur Ashe was a black who grew up in segregated Richmond; Clark Graebner was a privileged country club kid from suburban Milwaukee. Subtly, McPhee reveals some of the underlying truths of race and class that don’t fit the usual ideological and partisan debates.
I sat on the floor and read until, in a jolt, I realized I had to hustle to my meeting. As I lifted myself off the floor, I knew what I wanted to do for my next project. With just a moment of thought, I decided to give the McPhee treatment to Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, when the Arizona Diamondbacks rallied in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 to beat the three-time defending champion New York Yankees. The game had everything—the sport’s best players and personalities, the convergence of trends that were changing the game, and an emotional undercurrent owing to the 9/11 attacks that happened six weeks before.
While writing that book, The Last Nine Innings, I occasionally returned to McPhee’s work. I read his book on Bill Bradley and long New Yorker pieces on nuclear proliferation, oranges, and geology. I picked apart his work, looking for tricks of the trade that I could use myself. I did not want to be McPhee; only one person can do that. But he is a master of longform narrative, worthy of study and emulation. He is, I suspect, as immersed in both the substance and form of storytelling as anyone alive. I have long envied the hundreds of students who have learned his approach in his creative nonfiction classes at Princeton.
Now, with Draft No. 4, he has invited writers everywhere into his seminar room.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
If you want to write a book, you need to establish clear discipline and be ready for everything that could happen. But you can do it.
During November–National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo–400,000 people dedicate themselves to writing 50,000 words toward a novel. Participants get together in bookstores, church basements, coffee shops, classrooms to feed off each others’ energy and write an average of 1,666 words a day. Of course, people also write alone, at kitchen tables, on sofas, in candle-lit garrets, and more.
If they can do it, you can do it.
The important thing is that they write. Every day. On schedule. And at the end of the process, they have 50,000 words.
Here are seven simple tips for getting your manuscript done.
Go Inside the Character
Getting into characters’ heads means embracing all of them, including their misunderstandings, says Gay Talese, author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, The Kingdom and the Power, and other nonfiction narrative works. Leave it to the story–and the reader—to judge the characters. “I try to see people as they see themselves,” Talese says. “Bill Bonanno was a murderer, as was his father, as were those bodyguards I used to hang out with in restaurants along First Avenue in lower Manhattan. But I didn’t think they were so different from soldiers who are praised by their government as patriotic for committing murder. Protecting your buddies, that’s all it’s about.”
Listen for the Sounds You Create
John McPhee says the ultimate test for a piece of writing comes when you read it aloud: “Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. Sentence B may work out well, but then its effect on sentence A may spoil the rhythm of the two together. One of the long-term things about knitting a piece of writing together is making all this stuff fit. I always read the second draft aloud, as a way of moving forward. I read primarily to my wife, Yolanda, and I also have a friend whom I read to. I read aloud so I can hear if it’s fitting together or not. It’s just as much a part of the composition as going out and buying a ream of paper.”
Gossip!
Be a snoop and take notes voraciously, says Jane Smiley, author of A Thousand Acres. “Eavesdrop and write it down from memory–gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop! Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works. Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later. Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.”
Give yourself tolove
All good writing begins with the heart, says Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Last American Man and Eat, Pray, Love (pictured). Of course, the heart is hard to figure out, but at least try. “I love this work. I have always loved this work. My suggestion is that you start with the love and then work very hard and try to let go of the results. Cast out your will, and then cut the line. Please try, also, not to go totally freaking insane in the process. Insanity is a very tempting path for artists, but we don’t need any more of that in the world at the moment, so please resist your call to insanity. We need more creation, not more destruction. We need our artists more than ever, and we need them to be stable, steadfast, honorable and brave – they are our soldiers, our hope. If you decide to write, then you must do it, as Balzac said, “like a miner buried under a fallen roof.” Become a knight, a force of diligence and faith.”
Don’t Just Summarize
Too often, writers rush to summarize rather than paying close attention to what actually happens, said Ernest Hemingway. “The greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action–what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.” Daily journalism is easy because it’s so disposable. “In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.”
Explore different worlds
Ultimately, writing is about translating someone else’s life and work to an audience with no real knowledge of either, said John Updike, author of Rabbit, Run and other books. “A man whose life is spent in biochemistry or in building houses, his brain is tipped in a certain way,” he said. “There is a thinness in contemporary fiction about the way the world operates, except the academic world. I do try, especially in this novel, to give characters professions. Shaw’s plays have a wonderful wealth of professional types. Shaw’s sense of economic process, I guess, helped him (a) to care and (b) to convey, to plunge into the mystery of being a chimney sweep or a minister. One of the minimal obligations a book has to a reader is to be factually right, as to be typographically pleasant and more or less correctly proofread. Elementary author ethics dictate that you do at least attempt to imagine technical detail as well as emotions and dialogue.”
Get physical
If a story does not affect you physically, something’s missing, said Susan Sontag, author of As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh. “The story must strike a nerve — in me,” she says. “My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.”
Richard Ben Cramer, author of What It Takes, agrees. “I want my books or articles to have the same impact a novel has on a reader,” he said. “Something has to happen to the character during which an emotional truth is revealed.”
Give it to ’em
Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, advised against holding back information. No need to be too cute withholding information, he said. “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
“Music,” Herbie Hancock says, “is truly the universal language.” Music captures not just the sounds and rhythms of life, but also the emotions and ideas that create order. Music speaks across languages. Wherever you go, people move when the music starts. Music has that amazing capacity to tell a story. Gregorian chants, folk music, symphonies, jazz, rock and roll, and of course opera all tell tales. But, at the same time, they all rise above the story.
The same applies to style in writing.
Above all else, writing needs to communicate—to tell stories, convey ideas, paint pictures, and evoke emotions. The “classic style” of writing—whose exemplars are William Strunk and E.B. White, Joseph Williams, and William Zinsser—seeks to clear away clutter, sharpen ideas and images, and show the reader something—clearly. And what an amazing world this would be if we could all learn to master the skills of clarity!
But there’s more to writing than that. There’s this thing called style. Style is everything that matters beyond clarity. Style is the part of good writing exists for reasons beyond utility. We need clear writing to communicate, as Hemingway said, “the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.”
Hemingway, in fact, explicitly argued against attaching all kinds of symbolism and higher meanings to works. “The sea is the sea,” he said. “The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse.”
And yet …
When you get the writing right—when you find the exact right words, which show readers things they would be able to see otherwise—some kind of artistic magic happens. When you find the rhythm and cadence, sounds and smells and sights and touches, the words that send readers’ imaginations into more profound explorations—then writing does more than simply communicate. It takes readers off into that same place that music does.
So pay attention to all the things that go beyond simple communication—rhythm, beats, sounds, shapes, textures, and images. Consider, for the sake of illustration, these familiar expressions:
Don’t tread on me. Four score and seven years ago. Lock and load. Make the world safe for democracy. You have nothing to fear but fear itself. Take me out to the ballgame. I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do; they’re really saying I love you. Peace in our time. Tax and spend. Go back to Mississippi. Tear down this wall. Coke is it. Just do it. We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Read them aloud. Follow the cadence. Get a sense of meaning from the sound. Some make a simple declaration (“Just do it”), others offer a reverie (“Four score and…”), others depict a scene (“I see friends shaking hands…”), and others make an argument (“You have nothing to fear…”). But they all hop along like brook water over stones.
Ancient literature, like Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, took the form of verse. In an oral tradition, without written records, storytellers used a distinctive meter, melody, wordplay, and imagery to remember the lines of the epic tales.
To test your pacing—too fast? too slow? too wordy? too simple?—read your drafts aloud. If the words sound good moving from the left to the right side of the page, you’re probably on the right track. When you hear awkward phrases and confusing transitions, figure out what blocks the flow.
For a change of pace, read as fast as you can. Concentrate hard and spit the words out, one after another, without pausing. Speed editing often reveals writing better than normal reading. When you read fast, problem passages trip you up. And you engage your whole brain, awakening yourself to the flow and meaning of the words.
Style—that ineffable pizzazz that engages the reader—comes only with mastery of the basics. When you develop all the skills of writing, practice them, and listen to the sounds of your writing, you will find your style.
So how do you find your own style?
Back when he was a struggling printer’s apprentice, Benjamin Franklin decided he wanted to be a writer. He wanted to write like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the eighteenth-century essayists whose work appeared in the British Spectator. And so he imitated them. He put his words in their sentence structures. He imitated their alternation of short and long sentences, mimicked their humor, and mirrored their world-wise perspective.
By imitating Addison and Steele, Franklin found his own style. Addison and Steele gave him a template, so that he could master enough skills to find himself.
Go ahead and imitate your favorite writers. If you do it faithfully, you’ll find yourself consciously shaping your sentences and paragraphs. You will master useful techniques, and then burn them into your brain. That’s when your own style will emerge.
How do you know when you’ve got style—your own style, not just affectations and imitations of others? Again, let’s turn to Hemingway for an answer. When he was rejecting the idea of symbolism, he wasn’t rejecting the idea of some greater meaning and insight. In fact, he offered a simple test for style that goes beyond literal meaning.
“What goes beyond is what you see when you know,” Hemingway said.
When you get the writing right—when you develop your own powerful style—you give the reader an opportunity to see something beyond the immediate subject. You offer words that somehow take readers to their deepest levels of understanding.
The Elements of Writing provides a unique system for building stories and arguments. Charles Euchner developed the system while teaching writing at Yale University and working on his own writing projects. He sat down for a Q and A last summer.
Explain the approach of The Elements of Writing.
I have taught writing at a number of colleges and universities, and I have also worked hard at my own writing. I have published a bunch of books and also written for a number of magazines and newspapers, including The American, Commonwealth, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times. As a teacher and writer, I have always tried to master the “tricks of the trade.”
In every profession—carpentry, plumbing, auto repair, sales, cooking—the real pros use these insider tips to do their job. Over a lifetime, they accumulate these bits of wisdom. The best ones do what they can to pass these tips along to apprentices. That’s what The Elements of Writing is to me—a chance to pass along the big and little tips that I have learned as a writer and teacher.
Give me an example of the “tricks of the trade” of writing.
Here’s one of my favorites: Start strong, finish strong. That’s what I call the Golden Rule of Writing. If you start everything strongly, and finish strongly, you will always engage the reader. Some people call it the 2-3-1 rule. You should start with the second-most important idea or image, finish with the most important, and stuff all the rest into the middle.
So never start a sentence with a long phrase like “Contrary to the argument that…” Try to start with the subject, so the reader always knows what you’re talking about; finish with the most important idea or outcome. If you need to provide background information—“according to a new report by the Comgressional Budget Office,” for example—stuff it in the middle.
The same goes for paragraphs, chapters, whole essays, even books. Start and finish with the strongest material. You’ll make a great first impression and leave a great lasting impression.
If you’re trying to organize a piece—however long—remember the adage to start strong, finish strong. If you know where to start and where yo end, all the middle pieces just fall into place. It’s better than any outline.
That’s my favorite “trick of the trade.”
Do you identify specific, simple skills covering every challenge of writing?
That’s right. You know, all the experts on learning say you need to boil skills down to their simplest components. When you do that, anyone can understand it. Then you combine all these pieces.
You call The Elements of Writing a “brain-based system.” What does that mean?
It’s simple, really. The brain is this fantastic organ, as complex as anything. It has amazing power. The best computer can do just a few things that a brain can do. So it’s very protean. But it’s also the result of ages of evolution. It developed the way you add onto a house, where you just add on new functions rather than building the whole thing from scratch. So it has all these separate parts, and sometimes they work together and sometimes they don’t. And some of the parts are more dynamic, more powerful, than others.
So the brain is this big collection of instincts and desires and capacities.
Now, to write well — or do anything well — you need to understand what the brain “wants.” Well, we know that the brain wants regularity — routine, predictability, a regular way of doing things. But the brain evolved to get excited by surprises, so sometimes it wants a departure from regularity. The brain is also, in the words of one neuroscientist, a “prediction machine.” We can’t help but make predictions when we see something, even if it’s for tyne first time. And the brain is, above all, a storytelling machine. If you can tell a great story, you can do anything as a writer. In fact, once you understand the basic structure of a story, learning all other skills is almost automatic.
Can we talk about how short- and long-term memory work?
OK. Start with shortterm memory. As the name suggests, shortterm memory works with what’s going on right now. You are hearing these words right now. Contrary to all hosannas for “multitasking,” we can only focus on one subject at a time. If you were trying to read this while singing an aria or scrambling eggs, you would fail. You would not be able to really take in the words.
Longterm memory is best understood as a storehouse of facts, ideas, and models. The longterm memory gives us tools for understanding things right in front of us. In the previous sentence, when I used the word “models,” you probably thought of different concepts that simplify the world. you had that concept stored in your longterm memory, so you could understand what you were reading. If you didn’t know what a model was—or you misunderstood the term to mean fashion models or model airplanes—you would have gotten stuck.
How do these two kinds of memories relate to each other?
Working on any project requires both the attention of the shortterm memory and the store of information in the longterm memory.
To master any craft—writing, cooking, carpentry, motorcycle repair—we need to develop skills, or models of doing things and the physical ability to act on them. once we have mastered those skills, we store them in our longterm memory for use when we need them. At first, learning requires conscious attention. When you first learn how to drive, you need to pay close attention to how you scan the road, turn the wheel, press down on the accelerator and brakes, and so on. Once you master these skills, they become “second nature.” You don’t have to think about them anymore. You do them automatically.
Certain skills become part of the longterm memory?
Once you have mastered a skill, it goes into the longterm memory. Those skills wait to be used by the shortterm memory for specific chores.
How do people develop “automatic” skills?
To develop new skills, you need to build on existing knowledge—which, of course, is stored in the longterm memory. Usually, you apply concrete situations to models that you already understand. You use existing models to these situations. You play with every you have, like a child playing with blocks.
Give me an example—from writing, if possible—of the concept of beats.
Sure. Suppose you want to learn about “beats,” a concept in cinema that refers to the interaction of characters in a scene.
You’re better off starting with some concrete examples—scenes from classic movies like “Casablanca” or “Chinatown,” for example—and then applying them to concepts you already know. One of favorite scenes occurs in “Casablanca,” when the Nazi officers decide to humiliate the expats in Rick’s bar by singing the German national anthem. Victor, the leader of the resistance, goes over to the bandleader and tells him to pl;ay the Marseilleise. The band leader looks to Rick, who nods OK. So the band starts playing. Then the expats start singing. Then the German officers try to play louder to drown them out.
But the expats sing even louder, so the Germans give up and sit down. In victory, the expats whoop and cheer. “Vive la France!” one woman shouts. Then the german officer orders an underling to shut down the bar. Looking at that scene, we can talk about how every great scene shows a rat-a-tat-tat exchange among people. Every action moves the story forward. Once we see the “Casablanca” scene—or any scene in cinema or theater, fiction or nonfiction—we can develop a more abstract concept.
But first we have to tap into ideas we already have stored in our longterm memory. Most people understand beats in biology—we know about heartbeats. We also know about other rhythms in natural life—the circadian rhythms of the day, the ides coming in and out, the shifts from season to season as the earth circles the sun. We also understand the idea of beats in music. We know that beats give music its pace. Beats often involve exchanges of musical ideas in music.
So we take the concrete example from “Casablanca” and apply it to the models that already reside in our longterm memory. Voila, we now understand an important new concept for storytelling.
Here’s a definition which we can now add to our longterm memory for later use in writing projects: Beats, an essential building block of any dramatic scene, depict an exchange of words, actions, or gestures. This exchange necessarily moves the story forward—advancing the plot, exploring the issues and conflicts, showing the characters of the people involved, or showing something important about the setting. Every beat should advance the whole drama; extraneous actions only detract from the story and should be removed.
Talk more about The Elements of Writing—its content and approach.
The Elements of Writing has identified 96 specific skills you need to master to become a proficient writer, then organized them by the letters of the alphabet for easy recall. Each of these skills is simple to understand and simple to apply. By using lots of examples from great fiction and nonfiction writing, and applying them to simple concepts that most people already understand, you can develop a complete repertoire of writing skills.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
How does creativity happen? Is it, as some would say, a mystical process somehow connected to muses and gods? Or is it a process of grinding, getting up every day and working on the pieces so you can eventually put those pieces into a meaningful whole?
This is, of course, a false dichotomy. It’s not a matter of either/or. It’s both. So we need to understand how the mystical and the grinding come together.
One hint comes from something Linda Ronstadt said long ago: “In committing to artistic growth, you have to refine your skills to support your instincts.”
Or, to quote Louis Pasteur, “chance favors the prepared mind.”
1. Decide on a Plan
To build anything — a bridge, a treehouse, a casserole, a story — you need the right materials and the right skills. It takes a long time to develop the skills. The noted psychologist Anders Ericsson calculates that it takes 10,000 hours of focused, intent work to achieve mastery over a skill. It’s not just practice, practice, practice. It’s practice intently, practice open-heartedly, practice curiously.
I once met a banker named Stanley Lowe who was active in inner-city neighborhood revitalization and historic preservation. For Lowe, good intentions were never enough. Whenever do-gooders offered an idea for a project, he would challenge them: “What’s the plan?”
Without a plan, you don’t have much.
Writing well requires a vast trove of skills. Writers need to master the basic elements of the craft — sentences and paragraphs, grammar, punctuation, quoting, asking good questions, breaking down evidence, finding the right words, observing, sequencing ideas and images, zig-zagging back and forth from scene to summary, and much more.
Anyone can write reasonably well if they can write a great sentence. Nothing matters more than the sentence, as Ernest Hemingway explains in A Moveable Feast:
Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, … I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.
Contrary to mystics who say that writing is a gift from the gods, bestowed on a lucky few, writing can be taught. I can spend an hour with anyone and show them how to write better and faster, right away. I can show anyone how to write “one true sentence” … and then another and another. After that, it’s up to you.
For you to master this and other skills, you must practice intently, as Ericsson says. You must practice in all kinds of contexts, with all kinds of subjects. You must practice with an open mind. You must realize that everything you write needs revision and editing. You must not be discouraged, but instead more determined, by that basic reality.
So burn all the necessary writing skills into your brain. I have identified 81 specific “elements” of writing. That’s my list. Yours might be 97 or 42. Whatever. You can master a whole raft of techniques and apply them to all kinds of challenges.
You can and must, as Ronstadt says, refine your skills. Or, as Pasteur says, prepare your mind.
Then what?
This is when it gets interesting.
2. Let Go
Now it’s play time. Now it’s time to let your imagination, your subconscious, direct you. In this process, mind and soul blend together. Here’s how William Faulkner’s mindsoul worked:
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
Passages like this encourage the mystic’s point of view, that writing is a gift of the gods proffered to a lucky few. But if you know anything about Faulkner or any other great writers (or even just good writers), you know that they work hard. They get up every morning and grind. When they want to quit, they don’t. When they experience writer’s block, they step away, like Hemingway, and reframe their problem.
But when you’ve done the hard work and struggled, mystical stuff does happen. And there’s even a process for that. Here’s how George Saunders describes the process:
A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices he’s arranged his hobo into a certain posture – the hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why is he looking over there? At that little blue Victorian house? Stan notes a plastic woman in the window, then turns her a little, so she’s gazing out. Over at the railroad bridge, actually. Huh. Suddenly, Stan has made a love story. Oh, why can’t they be together? If only “Little Jack” would just go home. To his wife. To Linda.
What did Stan (the artist) just do? Well, first, surveying his little domain, he noticed which way his hobo was looking. Then he chose to change that little universe, by turning the plastic woman. Now, Stan didn’t exactly decide to turn her. It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to him to do so; in a split-second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal “Yes.”
He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them.
Once the process of creation begins, it exerts its own power. The deeper you get into a story, the more detailed you must be. Every detail does two things. First, it makes everything more real and compelling. No one (except ideologues) gets excited about generalities. But everyone can get intrigued by real, flesh-and-blood characters. The more specific a situation, the greater its universal appeal.
Second, detail closes down some avenues while opening others. As we learn new details about the hobo, we open ourselves to new possibilities. Maybe the hobo had a relationship with the object of his eye, or someone like her. Maybe he once occupied a comfortable house, too. Maybe he has a whole world, far from the bridge, that he longs to recover. Every detail opens new possibilities. But it also closes possibilities. If the hobo remembers an old flame when he eyes the woman, other story lines fade away. He that woman is the image of an old love, then she is not the image of an old nemesis or landlady or teacher or boss or prosecutor.
Creation, as Faulkner says, begins to move of its own accord. The creator cannot plan everything at the beginning of the process. The creator can set the parameters of the story — it will take place at a certain time and place, with a certain set of characters, with a certain destination — but then allow the process of discovery to play a big role in moving the narrative forward.
3. Make Tweaks and Adjustments
Once the story takes off, it’s tweaking time. Hemingway said to “write with your heart, edit with your head.” Get stuff down on the page, then fiddle with it.
Again, George Saunders explains:
What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we’re adjusting that which is already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs. I write, “Jane came into the room and sat down on the blue couch,” read that, wince, cross out “came into the room” and “down” and “blue” (Why does she have to come into the room? Can someone sit UP on a couch? Why do we care if it’s blue?) and the sentence becomes “Jane sat on the couch – ” and suddenly, it’s better (Hemingwayesque, even!), although … why is it meaningful for Jane to sit on a couch? Do we really need that? And soon we have arrived, simply, at “Jane”, which at least doesn’t suck, and has the virtue of brevity.
But why did I make those changes? On what basis?
On the basis that, if it’s better this new way for me, over here, now, it will be better for you, later, over there, when you read it. When I pull on this rope here, you lurch forward over there.
It’s not just intuition, of course. A good writer has a process for tweaking and editing. I call my method “Search and Destroy.” Deliberately, I search for certain kinds of problems — weak starts or finishes, too many bully words (adjectives and adverbs), unclear images, muddled explanations, and so on — and then try to fix them.
As I look for problems in this way, new ideas occur to me. I need a different detail. What if I juxtaposed these characters/ideas? How can I fix this phrasing? Sometimes, addressing these issues opens the whole process up again. Sometimes I scrap whole sections or revamp them, with whole new approaches.
4. Bear Down and Let Go: One Strategy
In my seminars on storytelling, students learn how to both plan and let go. One of my favorite exercises is the Character Dossier. I give students a list of questions about the character. Step by step, we create a character from whole cloth. Every answer defines the character a little more. Every answer provides more detail, opening some possibilities and closing others. If you say a character was born in Moline, Illinois, in 1963, she cannot be a hipster millennial in Brooklyn in 2017. If she lost her parents in a plane crash when she was 12, she can’t deepen her relationship with them when she’s 40.
When we fill in the Character Dossier, we write much of the story. When we know enough about characters to set them into motion, they take over the story. That’s what Faulkner was talking about. Before the characters can lead us, we have to prepare them.
When we have a complete command of all the skills of writing — and when we have set up the model town, as Saunders describes it — we can let go. After we let our characters loose, we need to intervene again to give some kind of order to all the character sketches and scenes and details.
So, you see, creativity is a process of bearing down, then letting go … then bearing down again. Bear down, then let go, again and again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Before developing The Elements of Writing, I used to talk about the ABCs of Writing.
I thought the ABCs offered a good device for people to remember all the essential skills of writing. So for each letter of the alphabet, I created a cluster of skills around a major theme. A stood for Action, B for beats, C for characters, D for details, and so on . . . all the way to X for eXplaining (lame, I know), Y for yo-yoing, and Z for “zip it up.”
As I was developing the ABCs, I realized that some kind of moral lurked behind each of the skills. Maybe understanding these values — which go beyond the writing process — would help people understand and remember the writing skills. So I gathered this list:
Action—Move! Do something! Seize the moment!
Beats—Understand how both sides of everything work, together, to produce each other and something new.
Characters—Know how people matter.
Details—Specifics matter more than abstractions.
Editing—Get rid of noise and clutter. Help people navigate through complexity without undue difficulty. Don’t make readers look for the pony, unless the shit’s part of the benefit of reading.
Form—Get everything in the right shape
Grammar—Show respect.
Hanging (cliffhangers)—Keep people involved. Make them crazy with anticipation.
Into the World of the Story—Respect people’s places. Understand Churchill’s dictum that first people make places, then places make people.
Jazz Riffing—Play, but follow rules when taking part in even the wildest activities.
Kinesthetic, Visual, and Auditory Senses—Engage people’s whole bodies.
Leads—Invite someone in.
Metaphors and Similes—Show people new things with reference to familiar things.
Narrative—Bring people along for a journey.
Order and Numbers—Put first things first.
Paragraphs—Do everything with singular purpose.
Questions—Understand that questions often matter more than answers.
Research and Reporting—Go wherever you can find information.
Sentences—respect your reader enough to tell what you want her to know, directly: Who does what to whom?
Thesis—Explain what you want to explain.
Unexpected—Tell me something I don’t know.
Verbs—Be active.
Words—Be as simple as possible, but no simpler. (Thanks to A. Einstein for that one.)
eXplaining—Break things down into manageable pieces, and present them in the right sequence.
Yo-Yo—Shift back and forth from scene to summary, from sensory details to abstract ideas.
Zip It Up—Don’t tarry too long. When the journey is over, say so long.
Writing well takes some thought. It requires patience and practice. Clear, crisp communication isn’t just something for the storytellers of the world, but it’s for everyone and anyone who has a thought that they want to share.
Charles Euchner’s latest book Keep it Short: A Practical Guide to Writing in the 21st Century is a primer for everyday writers of emails and professional wordsmiths alike. His expertise on the craft of writing is immeasurable. Thus, I’m thrilled to share the following interview with him that presents tangible steps we can all take to better our writing. Pull out your pens and digital highlighters. It’s time to take some notes!
KS: What is your best advice for writers who know that they should “keep it short” but aren’t quite sure how?CE: I ask: On what journey do you want to take your readers? Do you know where you and your readers are at the beginning–what you know, what you’re curious about, what problem you have to solve? Great. A starting place is a great starting place. Then I ask: Where do you want to go? You can’t get anywhere if you don’t know the destination. So what do you want the readers to know and feel at the end of your journey? Do you want them to understand a new argument, get insight from the travails of your story’s hero, or just know more facts and ideas? Once you know where you want to start and finish, figuring out the middle steps gets easier. You can ask yourself: Does this scene/detail/fact/whatever help get me from one place to another different place? If something does not advance that journey, you probably have to get rid of it.
Kris: How can a writer be sure that their intention is clear in a communication?
CE: People know an honest writer in lots of different ways. One of the most important is how clear and direct you are. Simply eliminating all adverbs and most adjectives takes you a long way. These modifiers are really bully words: they tell the reader what to think. Most people would rather figure things out for themselves, with reliable information that you supply. So don’t tell me that someone was brilliant or the house was spooky or the plan was devious. Show me. I know, I know: “show, don’t tell” is the most cliché piece of advice that writers get. But it’s still essential to creating a good relationship between the writer and reader.
KS: Absolutely. Understanding why “show don’t tell” is great writing advice is a big hurdle sometimes. We all hear it, but do we truly understand it? Great point.
CE: You gain credibility in all kinds of other ways too. Define terms simply, so readers have the equipment they need, when they need it. Consider honest objections to your approach. Never talk down to your reader. You want to know what bugs me? The way adults talk to kids. Sometimes they talk to them like they’re pets rather than the amazing brain-sponges they are. That can carry over to writing when you know more than the audience. By the way, you should always know something more than the audience. That doesn’t make you superior. It just means that you decided to explore a topic that readers have not yet explored. So speak directly, without jargon or an attitude.KS: Is there a difference in writing and exploring topics for the business world as opposed to writing for other audiences? Should a writer keep this in mind while they revise themselves?
CE: I disagree with the very idea of “business writing” as opposed to other kinds of writing. Good writing is good writing. Sure, writing for business involves a different purpose and vocabulary than, say, writing a longform narrative piece for Esquire or The New Yorker. I get that. But the essentials are the same. Understand what journey you want to give your reader. Map the steps in the journey. Test what belongs and what doesn’t. Avoid vagueness and jargon.
The key to writing in different fields is knowing what vocabulary the reader brings to the piece. When you need to introduce a new idea, define it clearly. So if you’re writing a business article for a website, you might need to define business terms like ROI, debts and liabilities, or compound interest. So define each term in its own paragraph. Tag the new term, if necessary, with a shorthand term. And then just use that tag in the same way you would with a more expert audience.
Kris: Do you recommend writers edit their work in phases or in one fell swoop?
Charles: Editing cannot happen in “one fell swoop.” Why? Because the brain get drained of energy when you try to perform too many tasks at the same time. In switching tasks–from one aspect of writing to another as you move from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph–you lose sharpness. Your brain is like an SUV. It’s an energy-hungry machine. The brain comprises 2 percent of total body weight but uses more than 20 percent of the body’s fuel. Manage your brain’s resources. Don’t stress them.
KS: Then, not stressing your brain’s resources, what does this step-by-step revision process look like for you?
CE: So I use what I call the “search and destroy” method. Focus, one by one, on different aspects of a piece. First check the overall structure–whether the fragments are well-defined and put in the right sequence. Label them, using “slugs” like tabloid headlines, to capture the essence of these fragments. Then check to see if everything in those fragments speaks to that slug. If it does, keep it; if it doesn’t, toss it. Then start to assess the paragraphs, the same way. Check to see whether your sentences and paragraphs start and end strongly (remember the journey discussion above). When you’ve done all this, you will have checked most of the content. Now focus more on structure, diction, and so on.
KS: That’s a fantastic guide to the editing process, no matter what someone is writing. And when you take a break from your own communications work, what is your favorite bookstore to pick up something perfect?
CE: I’m a New Yorker. Could I possibly say anything besides Strand? I mean, seriously. I go there without any idea what I’m interested in, and I walk out with a few books and lots of notes of books and topics I’ll explore later. Like other cities, New York has lost most of its independent stores, but some are still here. Shakespeare still has a store on the Upper East Side. I pop into Westsider Rare and Used Books, on Broadway between 80th and 81st, whenever I can. I always discover books that slipped through the usual vetting systems–megastores like B&N, book reviews, chatters on radio.
KS: Yes, a good indie bookstore is a fabulous place to take a break from the joys and stresses of the writing life. I couldn’t agree more. What a fabulous note to end on. Thank you so much, Charles Euchner, for your thoughts on revision, and happy writing everyone!
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
The Hackmaster General of the U.S., all will agree, is Tim Ferriss.
For almost a decade, Ferriss has been using his own body and life as a lab to figure out what forks to be healthy, wealthy, and wise. Like any good scientist, even one with an n of 1, Ferriss does his literature research before embarking on experiments. He has interviewed hundreds of masters of their domain, from lit’ry blogger Maria Popova to General Stanley McCrystal, to find out what works for them. Then he tests it all out.
In Tools of Titans, Ferriss asked the super achievers–athletes, actors, investors, entrepreneurs, writers, and more–for the secrets of their success. I decided to scoop out all the best ideas for writers.
The ideas can be grouped into ten categories: (1) Commitment, (2) Focus, (3) Planning, (4) Journaling and Note Taking, (5) Divergent Thinking, (6) Gathering Material, (7) Questions, (8) Storytelling, (9) Details and Style, and (10) Integrity.
It all starts with routines—developing the habits of work and imagination that can help you create something fresh. The most notable fact of the Ferriss Way is that he thinks he can learn anything—or at least enough of anything to make a difference. He is a deep generalist, someone who believes that the answer to any question can be found in an intelligent, often counterintuitive mashup of approaches taken from different fields. He tests and tests, gathering volumes of his notebooks as his lab books. He creates strategies for himself that usually work for other people.
Who Is Tim Ferriss?
Ferriss, you recall, won fame and fortune with The Four-Hour Workweek, published in 2007. The premise was simple: By following a set of life hacks, we can massively improve our productivity. That book is built on three pillars: innovating (on what you offer and how you do it), outsourcing (getting others to do the routine stuff so you can focus on high-value propositions), and building a core (constantly improving your own body, mind, and soul, so you’re alert to life’s possibilities).
The next two books built on this foundation. The Four-Hour Body showed how simple attention to nutrition and a few intensive exercises (kettle bells) can help you shed unnecessary weight, build a little muscle, and, most important, improve your focus and energy for the stuff that matters in life. The Four-Hour Chef uses the theme of cooking—and some useful hacks in the kitchen—to make broader points about creating recipes for life.
Last week, Ferriss released Tools for Titans, which collects the wisdom and hacks of hundreds of successful people, offered in their own word with Ferriss’ commentary. As I expected, there are lots of hacks for writers—routines, mind management tricks, tips for focusing the mind and letting ideas blast through the fog.
Ferriss claims to find writing an arduous process, for which he is seeking the four-hour solution.
Note to Tim: I’ve got it right here. The premise of The Elements of Writing dovetails with your approach to everything else—that most problems have solutions that someone else has invented, and the trick is to track down those tricks and use them in the right order.
Now, on to some of the most useful tools from the Titans.
1. Commitment
When he was first training to be a boxing champion, Evander Holyfield’s coach asked him: “Is that a dream or a goal?”
Christopher Sommer, the former U.S. National Team gymnastics coach, says you need to adopt one big hairy audacious goal—and then just do the work necessary to make it happen. So you want to write a book? Say it! Then build everything around that project.
The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. … If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made in and here too. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift away from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.
Tony Robbins, the modern master of self-mastery, pushes for action over mere knowledge: “Mastery doesn’t come from an infographic. What you know doesn’t mean s—. What do you do consistently?”
Robert Rodriguez, a screenwriter, producer, and musician, developed his just-do-it approach when drawing a comic strip for his college paper at the University of Texas. He found that inspiration visited only infrequently. So he made a habit of just sitting down to work:
I realized the only way to do it was by drawing. You’d have to draw and draw and draw. Then one drawing would be kind of funny or cool. That one’s kind of neat. This one kind of goes with that. Then you draw a couple of filler ops and that’s how it would be created. You had to actually move.
The approach works for writing too. Just sit down and start putting down the lines.
For a lot of people, … they think, well, I don’t have an idea, so I can’t start. I know you’ll only get the idea once you start. It’s this total reverse thing. You have to act first before the inspiration will head. You don’t wait for inspiration and then that, or you’re never going to act, because you’re never going to have the inspiration, not consistently.
Justin Boreta, a founding member of The Glitch Mob, adds:
There’s a lot of bad advice thrown around about getting inspired and searching for a revelation. Like Chuck Close says, “Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work.” And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will– through work– bump into other possibilities and kick open the other doors that you would never have dreamt if you were just sitting around looking for great “art idea.”
The best-selling author Kevin Kelly adds: “I write in order to think. I’d say, ‘I think I have an idea,’ but I realize, when I begin to write it, ‘I have no idea,’ and I don’t actually know what to think until I try and write it. … That was the revelation.”
Some people just don’t want to work, plain and simple. But there’s even a hack for them. It requires a slight mind shift offered by Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “I don’t like the work, but I like what’s in the work.”
2. Focus
About four of five Titans use meditation to develop disciplined—and calm, grateful—minds. Meditation is hard, and you shouldn’t push it too hard. Chade-Meng Tan, the former programmer at Google, says all you need to do is take one breath a day: “Breathe in and breathe out mindfully, and your commitment for the day is fulfilled. Everything else is a bonus.”
Don’t try to be too ambitious. The mind is a stubborn beast. If you push it too hard, it will rebel.
The point of meditation is not to reach a state of nirvana. It’s to pay attention to what matters in your life—and screen out all the noise. “The muscle you’re working is bringing your attention back to something,” Ferriss says. “My sessions are 99 percent monkey mind but it’s the other 1 percent that matters.”
Most of us, when first introduced to meditation, try to go into a state of complete oneness with the world. Like Tan, Ferriss says to set your sights low: “The goal is to observe your thoughts. If you’re replaying some bullshit in your head and notice it, just say, ‘Thinking, thinking’ to yourself to return to your focus.”
Observe your thoughts—that’s the ticket. Nothing matters more to a writer than sorting thoughts, cutting through the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of the world.
Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Thiel Capital, has a more aggressive approach to achieving focus. He goes all Tourette, with a mood-altering series of rants.
You know the strings of obscenities of Tourette’s patients involuntarily utter? [The medical term is coprolalia.] So, I find that when we use words that are prohibited to us, it tells our brain we are inhabiting unsafe space. It’s a bit of a sign that you’re going into a different mode. … When I’m going to do deep work, very often, it has a very powerful, aggressive energy to it. It’s not easy to be around. It’s very exacting, and I think I would probably look very autistic to people who know me to be social, were they ever to see me in the work mode.
In a way, the end result is the same as meditation: To break away from the unthinking, automatic normality of life.
3. Planning
You can’t build anything without a plan. Even simple projects require a sequence. First … Second … Third …
Every plan begins with the category. Every writer needs to ask: What’s the genre? The audience? The style? The level of intellect? The attitude? Real success come from owning a particular category.
Consider Bill Simmons (one of my former students, at Holy Cross College), who broke all the rules of inside-dopester sportswriting when he started a blog called The Sports Guy. Rather than hanging out in press boxes and locker rooms, Simmons covered sports from the viewpoint of a passionate and knowledgeable fan. He blended all kinds of pop culture — movies, music, politics, fashion, TV, you name it — into his long posts about the Celtics or the DH rule. If Simmons had taken the usual sports scribe track, he would have been invisible. Instead, he stood out. He owned the category of crazy fan commentator.
There are lots of other examples. Who owns the category of theory-fueled stories with a theme? Malcolm Gladwell. Who owns the world of wizardry? J.K. Rowling. How about economics turned on its head? Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. Histories involving murders or attempted murders? Bill O’Reilly. Love and romance amid luxury? Danielle Steel. One more. Who owns legal thrillers? John Grisham. Other authors make a nice living as No. 2 or 3 or 4 or more. But to own a category is to be set for life. More important, it’s to have a real purpose.
Kaskade, one of the founders of Progressive House music, uses the metaphor of putting stones in the bucket. If you put sand before stones, you might not get everything into the bucket. Make sure to put in the big stones first, then smaller stones that can fill the gaps between those bigger stones, and then finally the sand, which fills in the open spaces between the stones.
The legendary chess wizard Josh Waitzkin, the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher, adapts advice from the ancient Greeks: Start with the end in mind. To master any challenge, don’t start with the simple fundamentals. Instead, jump to the end game. The challenge is to understand the dynamics of the game. Waitzkin’s chess teacher taught him by showing the endgames—say, a king and a pawn against a king. What do you do with that?
At every level of your writing—sentence, paragraph, section, and whole piece—know how you are starting and finishing. It’s like taking a journey. You’re most likely to know the journey’s route and steps if you know the starting and ending point. If you don’t, you’re likely to wander all over the place.
You need to start somewhere, right? So Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild, offers a set of prompts. She suggests using them to write two pages, without interruption by your inner perfectionist, to draw the creativity out of your repressed self. Here are a few of them:
Write about a time that you realized you were mistaken.
Write about a lesson you learned the hard way.
Write about something you lost that you’ll never get back.
Write about a memory of a physical injury.
Write about why you could not do it.
That should get you going. Now you’re about to encounter the greatest challenge of all creative—keeping your eye on the ball.
4. Journaling and note-taking
Lots of titans keep journals—first to pause and focus their thoughts, second to capture the countless thoughts that occur throughout the day.
Mike Bibiglia, a comedian, says: “Write everything down because it’s all very fleeting.” Capturing ideas during the day is the difference between good and great. “What I find, the older I get, is that a lot of people are good, and a lot of people are smart, and a lot of people are clever. But not a lot of people give you their soul when they perform.” Your soul emerges all day, in your thought and feelings; you give it form when you take the pieces and sort the wheat from the chaff.
Brian Koppelman, a screenwriter, novelist, and creator of the hit show Billions, follows the routine that Julie Cameron suggests in The Artist’s Way. “It’s three longhand pages where you just keep the pen moving for three pages, no matter what. No censoring, no rereading. It’s the closest thing to magic I’ve come across. If you really do it every day and a real disciplined practice, something happens to your subconscious that allows you to get to your most creative place.”
He says he’s given the book to 200 people. Of those, maybe 10 of them have done the exercises. “Of those 10, seven have had books, movies, TV shows, and made out successful. It’s incredible. That book changed my life, even though it’s very spiritual and I’m an atheist.”
Tim Ferriss keeps a five-minute journal to center his mind. The journal is really just filling in the blanks:
I am grateful for 1. –––––––––. 2. –––––––––. 3. –––––––––.
What would make today great? 1. –––––––––. 2. –––––––––. 3. –––––––––.
Daily affirmations. I am 1. –––––––––. 2. –––––––––. 3. –––––––––.
He concludes at night with:
Three amazing things that happened today: 1. –––––––––. 2. –––––––––. 3. –––––––––.
How could I have made today better? 1. –––––––––. 2. –––––––––. 3. –––––––––.
B.J. Novak uses a Moleskine Cahier notebook for jotting notes during the day. Because it’s thinner than the standard Moleskine, it’s easy to carry.
What to do once you’ve filled a notebook?
Every midnight, Robert Rodriguez types notes about the day into a Word document. Any time he wants to recover a forgotten insight—or just review his thoughts over time—he can search his Word files. (I do something similar: I outline books that I consider challenging. Surprisingly, it doesn’t take long. I can take notes on a 300-page book in about an hour. The process helps me understand the book for the first time—to make it my own—and then leaves a trail of great ideas to use later.)
James Altucher, a serial entrepreneur and bestselling author, creates lists for everything that might spawn a creative project. A few examples:
10 old ideas I can make new
10 books I can write
10 business ideas for Google/Amazon/Twitter/etc.
10 industries where I can remove the middleman
10 things I disagree with that everyone else assumes is religion
What if you can’t meet these goals? I mean, 10 ideas? Really?
“Here’s the magic trick,” Altucher says. “If you can’t come up with 10 ideas, come up with 20 ideas. … You’re putting too much pressure on yourself. Perfectionism is the enemy of the idea muscle. … It’s your brain trying to protect you from harm, from coming up with an idea that is embarrassing and stupid and could cause you to suffer pain. The way you shut this off is by forcing the brain to come up with bad ideas.
“Suppose you have written down five ideas for books and they are all pretty good. And now you’re stuck… Well, let’s come up with some bad ideas. Here’s one: Dorothy and the Wizard of Wall Street. Dorothy is in a hurricane in Kansas and she lands right at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street and she has to find the Wizard of Wall Street. To get home to Kansas, he offers her a job to be a high-frequency trader.”
That’s bad, all right.
Once he comes up with his 10 (or 20) good and bad ideas, Altucher lists the first steps he would take to realize each one. “Remember,” he says, “only the first step. Because you have no idea where that first step will take you.”
Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn writes things down to prime his subconscious.
“What are the kinds of key things that might be constraints on the solution, or might be the attributes of the solution, and what are the tools or assets I might have?” he says. “I actually think that most of our thinking is subconscious. Part of what I’m trying to do is allow the fact that we have this kind of relaxation, rejuvenation period in sleeping, to essentially possibly bubble up the thoughts and solutions to it.”
5. Divergent thinking
Ideas are great; divergent ideas are better.
To give real value to the reader, you need to offer something they cannot predict
You have to be prepared to fail. That’s how you’re going to expand yourself and grow. As you work through that process of failure and learning, you will really deepen into the human being you were capable of being.
I had a grad school professor who pushed me to do research on why Baltimore was the last major American city to build a modern sewer system. Why did everyone else—New York, Boston, Chicago, Charleston—build systems decades before Baltimore? Why did Baltimore take so long? It was, he said, a “deviant case analysis.” You can often learn more from the outliers than from the norms.
Neil Strauss, a former writer and editor for The New York Times and Rolling Stone and the author of The Game and The Truth, is always looking for deviant cases.
He once asked a billionaire about “the way your mind works.” What separates a billionaire from everyone else? “The biggest mistake you can make is to accept the norms of your time,” he responded. “Not accepting norms is where you innovate, whether it’s with technology, with books, with anything. So, not accepting the norm is the secret to really big success in changing the world.”
The biggest mental trap, says Stephen Dubner, the coauthor of Freakanomics, is to allow your moral values to guide your inquiry. Moral values, after all, are conclusions about the world—and you need to go in with an open mind.
“If you try to approach every problem with your moral compass, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. You’re going to exclude a lot of possible good solutions. You’re going to assume you know a lot of things, when in fact you don’t, and you’re not going to be a good partner in reaching a solution. With other people who don’t happen to see the world the way you do.”
Chris Sacca, an investor in companies like Twitter, Instagram, Uber, and Kickstarter, says to embrace your inner weirdo. That does not necessarily mean acting out, like the class clown. It means taking away the filters of your “polite company” self.
“Weirdness is why we adore our friends,” he says. “Weirdness is what bonds to our colleagues. Weirdness is what sets us apart, it gets as hired. Be your unapologetically weird self. In fact, being weird may even find you the ultimate happiness.
6. Gathering Material
Every good project begins with brainstorming. The goal should not be to keep ideas. The goal should be to kill off as many as possible. “Let’s come up with as many ideas as possible, and then … try to kill them off,” says Stephen Dubner. “If they were unkillable, keep going with them.”
When you research a topic or interview someone, take approach subjects from odd angles. By the time most people are worthy of an interview, they have their story down pat. They have given their spiel a hundred times. Cal Fussman remembers interviewing Mikhail Gorbachev, wanting to avoid the usual Q&A about the Cold War blah blah blah, Ronald Reagan blah blah blah, end of the Soviet Union blah blah blah. Finally, the big day came.
I looked at him and I said: “What’s the best lesson your father ever taught you?” He is surprised, pleasantly surprised. He looks up and he doesn’t answer. He’s thinking about this. It’s as if, after a while, he’s seeing a movie of his past on the ceiling, and he starts to tell me the story…
The oldest piece of advice for writers is to “write about what you know.” Partly, that’s lousy advice because it subtly assumes you know everything you need to know—and, in fact, good writing always requires intense research. Still, it’s a good idea to start with something you know—and build on that.
“If you’re going to talk about the neighborhood, talk about the neighborhood you grew up in,” says Joe Favreau, an actor and writer with credits like Rudy and Swingers. “Talk about the neighborhood you know. Even if it’s not you [that you’re writing about], you’re going to have a more consistent world that you’re developing then if you’re putting them on Mars, and you don’t understand Mars.”
Creativity starts with the materials at hand. You can, of course, build on your stock of knowledge and experiences. That’s what research is for. But you can also create something out of the objects nearby. Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez describes making his first movie:
I just took stock of what I had. My friend Carlos, he’s got a ranch in Mexico. Okay, that’ll be where the bad guy is. His cousin owns a bar. The bar is where there’s going to be the first, initial shootout. It’s where all the bad guys hang out. His other cousin owns a bus line. Okay, there will be an action scene with the boss at some point, just a big action scene in the middle of the movie with a bus. He’s got a pit bull. Okay, he’s in the movie. His other friend had a turtle he found. Okay, the turtles in the movie because people will think we had an animal wrangler, and that we’ll suddenly raise production value. I wrote everything around what we had, So you never had to go search, and you never have to spend anything on the movie.(629)
Mark Twain used to do something similar. He would gather his daughters in the parlor and tell stories based on the items lined up on the mantel of the fireplace.
Getting emotional, deep responses requires skill. You can’t ask a series of bland yes-or-no questions, or toss out generalities, and expect a heartfelt response. Alex Blumberg asks questions as quasi-commands.
Tell me about a time when…
Tell me about the day [or moment or time] when…
Tell me about the story of…
How did you meet …
Tell me about the day you realized …
What were the steps that got you into…
Describe the conversation when…
Don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions. As long as you have made some effort to prepare for a conversation, don’t hesitate to ask for clarification. Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author, models his interviewing style on his father, a university mathematician.
My father has zero intellectual insecurities. It has never crossed his mind to be concerned that the world thinks he’s an idiot. He’s not in that game. So if he doesn’t understand something, he just asks you. He doesn’t care if he sounds foolish. He will ask the most obvious question without any sort of concern about it. … So he asks lots of ‘dumb,’ in the best sense of that word, questions. He’ll say to someone, ‘I don’t understand. Explain that to me.’ He’ll just keep asking questions until he gets it right, and I grew up listening to him do this in every conceivable setting. [If my father had met Bernie Madoff, he] never would’ve invested money with him because he would’ve said, ‘I don’t understand’ 100 times. ‘I don’t understand how this works,’ in this kind of dumb, slow voice. ‘I don’t understand, sir. What is going on?’”
The only dumb question is the one you don’t ask. As an old editor once told me, if you’re interviewing some named Smith, ask them to spell it. “Is that S-m-i-t-h?” Or do you spell it S-m-y-t-h-e?”
7. Asking Questions
Asking questions—whether you’re a writer or a researcher, a ballplayer or an actor, an office boss or a programmer—opens the mind.
Here’s a simple conversational trick. Don’t try to persuade people of anything. When you tell someone what to think, something in their brain automatically resists. The second they hear your proposition, their brain looks for reasons to disagree. But when you ask a question, the brain goes into search mode.
“We always need to ask: Is this true?” says Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal and the author of the seminal Zero to One. “And this is always what I get at with this indirect question: Tell me something that’s true that very few people agree with you on.”
As Thiel’s suggests, questions should always seek to expand people’s horizons. Before he answers questions, Thiel reframes them. That framing process forces you to think–not just about the immediate question, but also about the broader context. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, likes to quote Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Luis van Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, remembers a mentor who taught him the power of persistent questions:
My Ph.D. adviser was a guy named Manuel Bloom. … I would start explaining something, and in the first sentence he would say, “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” and then I would try to find another way of saying it and a whole hour would pass and I couldn’t get past the first sentence. He would say, “Well, the hour’s over. Let’s meet next week.” This must’ve happened for months, and at some point I started thinking, “I don’t know why people think this guy so smart.” Later, [I understood what he was doing.] This is basically just an act. Essentially, I was being unclear about what I was saying, and I did not fully understand what I was trying to explain to him. He was just drilling deeper and deeper and deeper until I realized, every time, that there was actually something I didn’t have clear in my mind. He really taught me to think deeply about things.
Lots of titans are list-makers, citing inspiration from Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. Wherever they go, they jot down thoughts and observations. So get a notebook, small enough to fit in a pocket or purse. Any time something provokes you, write it down. Does that sound excessive? Actually, by capturing thoughts that matter, you drive the trivial clutter out of your brain.
None of us can resist the Nostradamus Temptation—the built-in tendency to make predictions about the future. Kevin Kelly regularly makes lists of ideas that lots of people think are true and asks: “What if that weren’t true?”
8. Storytelling
At the center of all great thinking is narrative. A great story gives every enterprise a spine, a vehicle for understanding and focus, energy and creativity.
What Scott Adams says about humor probably applies to other forms of expression. Adams is the creator of the cartoon “Dilbert” and a self-taught “master” of the science of communications. All great humor, Adams says, comes from combining at least two of the following six elements: naughty, clever, cute, bizarre, mean, and recognizable.
Stories have a downside. When we tell ourselves distorted stories, filled with grievances and suspicion and resentment and prejudice, we toxify our relationships. We make excuses for ourselves. We get stuck when we cling to old slights and failings. We believe the BS that others pound into us. If we get stuck in the past–especially in negative histories–we cannot take charge of our work.
In our lives as well as in our writing, we have the power to get the story right. Tony Robbins, takes a three-step approach to getting things right. Start with “state,” his term for your emotional frame of mind. You can change your state in seconds if you want to. Simply changing body language can help you shift from sad-sack gloominess to energy and confidence.
Once you’ve got your state right, get your story right. Figure out what tale you’re going to tell by the way you live your life that day. Finally, develop a strategy—identifying options, resources, and paths to follow.
Despite his success, Ferriss acknowledges the way his own stories have blocked his progress. “The stories we tell ourselves can be self-defeating,” he says. “One of the refrains that I’ve adopted for myself, which I wrote in my journal after some deep ‘plant medicine’ work, is: ‘Don’t retreat into story.’”
9. Details and Style
Attention to detail spells the difference between mediocre, good, and great. In college, skeptical of his ability to earn a living as an artist, Pixar CEO Ed Catmull majored in physics. “Most people to this day think of [art and science] as so radically different from each other,” he says. “But I want to posit a different way to look at it. It comes from what I think is a fundamental misunderstanding. … In fact, what artists do is they learn to see.”
So, Rule 1 for writers and other creatives: Learn how to see.
Nothing lends credibility more than precision. Andrew Zimmern, an award-winning chef and host of the TV show Bizarre Foods, looks for people who describe things with detail. “If you go on the Internet, there are 20 recipes for pound cake,” he says. “I go with the one that describes to a quarter of an inch the size of the pan. Because if someone is describing that level of detail, you know that they have gone through it. The person who writes the recipe says, ‘Grease the cake pan’? You know they haven’t made it. It’s a tipoff right away that something is wrong.”
Lots of would-be writers complain about writer’s block. But there really is no such thing, as Sebastian Junger, the author of The Perfect Storm, notes:
It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about the topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words, but rather that I don’t have the ammunition.
Everyone needs to develop a unique style. But before developing style, master the basics. If you’re an artist, you need to understand the body and movement, perspective and harmony. If you’re a writer, you need to write great sentences and arrange them into compelling, dramatic sequences.
The greatest creators should be your guides. Rick Rubin, a music producer for artists as varied as Johnny Cash and Metallica, says full immersion is the only way to go.
“The only way to use the inspiration of other artists is if you submerge yourself in the greatest works of all time,” he says. “If you listen to the greatest songs ever made, that would be a better way to work through [finding] your own voice today, rather than listening to what’s on the radio now and thinking, ‘I want to compete with this.’”
When you experience masters in any field, pay attention to their turns of phrase that lend special beauty and insight. Maria Popova, whose blog Brain Droppings has become a literary sensation, says she writes “BL” in the margin when she encounters beautiful language. Find a way to mark moments of special clarity or beauty, then go back and deconstruct them.
Matt Mullenweg, the original lead developer of WordPress, puts syntax at the center of all creativity. He loves “code poets,” the programmers whose every line performs the job impeccably, without making it hard to make revisions or enhancements. How do we get the syntax right? “Slow down,” he says. “I think a lot of the mistakes of my youth were mistakes of ambition, not mistakes of sloth. So just slowing down, whether that’s meditating, whether it’s taking time for yourself away from screens, whether that’s really focusing on who you’re talking to or who you’re with.”
Derek Silvers, the founder of CD Baby, an online store for independent artists, says to iterate, iterate, iterate—not just with writing or other projects, but also with life. “Do little tests,” he says. “Try a few months of living the life you think you want, but leave yourself a next the plan, being open to the big chance that you might not like it after actually trying it.”
Ernest Hemingway famously noted that all first drafts are s—. Taking that truism to heart has helped Pixar revolutionize animated feature films. Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar and now its president, says the studio ripped apart early versions of films like Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille and started over from scratch.
“All our films, to begin with, suck,” he says. “This is the big misconception that people have, that [in the beginning] a new film is the baby version of the final film, when in fact the final film bears no relationship to what you started off with. What we found is that the first version always sucks. I don’t mean that because I’m self-effacing or that we’re modest about it. I mean it in the sense that they really do suck.”
10. Integrity
And now a few closing words on integrity.
Above all, as the pompous Polonius counsels Hamlet, to thine own self be true.
Or, as Riann Wilson quotes Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”
We live in a mad, distracting, self-referential age. It’s easy to get pulled away from your core values. So you have to be vigilant against getting too big for your britches—or the opposite, thinking too little of yourself to take charge of your life.
We are not good judges of ourselves. The vast majority of us, in fact, think of ourselves as above average, in intelligence, looks, humor, and compassion. Naval Ravikant quotes Richard Feynman: “You must never, ever fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
As artists—and, pretentious as it may sound, all writers are artists of a sort—we need to avoid getting distracted by all that glitters. Seth Godin, the serial bestselling author, puts things into perspective: “Once you have enough for beans and rice and taking care of your family and a few other things, money is a story. You can tell yourself any story you want about money, and it’s better to tell yourself the story about money that you can happily live with.”
Care not what the other kids on the bus say or do. If you believe in something, do it. Seek out constructive criticism, but do your thing.
“When I articulated that I didn’t care anymore about what anybody thought about what I did except me,” actor Kevin Costner says, “all the weight of the world came off my shoulders, and everything became possible. It shifted to everybody else being worried. Now they’re worried. But everything for me, it shifted to a place where itself free.”
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
How can we see–really see, and not just project–what’s in front of us?
That’s the writer’s ultimate job. The best writer is an observer. The best writer sees what others do not see. This writer pays attention, carefully and with an open mind, to what’s going on. Rather than falling into lazy habits and assumptions, the best writer looks to see what is not instantly apparent.
Which reminds me of a morning encounter on Election Day 2016.
The Encounter: A Story
I was walking down Wall Street. As I crossed Water Street, I saw a car stopped at a red light.
I was intrigued enough to stand in the intersection to take a picture. I saw a Honda covered in pro-Donald Trump signs. The signs weren’t printed professionally. It looked like an amateur job.
Then I wondered about who would drive such a car. I imagined a “typical” Trump voter — a blue-collar worker, white, probably stocky, maybe tattooed. There’s no way to read someone’s heart from a distance, but I imagined someone thrilling to Donald Trump’s nativist rhetoric, his disdain for immigrants and minorities. I thought of Trump’s depiction of cities as dens of crime and disorder. I thought of Trump’s claims about illegal immigrants and how a wall along the Mexican border would keep them out — even the people who overstayed a visa or came to the U.S. from places beyond the Americas.
So who was this Trump supporter? Maybe he was a veteran, but more likely he was a middle-aged guy from … who knows? Queens? Jersey? Out of town?
Automatically, I imagined a picture of something that I did not see.
Then I crossed the street. I took a few steps before deciding to go back to see who this Trump supporter was. I clicked another picture before the light changed.
I was surprised. I was not expecting to see a black man behind the wheel. This was not the prototypical Trump supporter. Sure, I knew that Trump got some black support. Nationwide, we would soon know, Trump won 8 percent of the black vote. He also got 29 percent of the Hispanic vote. Both totals, for what it’s worth, were better than Mitt Romney’s numbers in 2012. Romney got 6 percent of the black vote and 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.
My guess about the Trump support was not unreasonable. Statistically, it was correct.
The Built-In Imperative to Predict
The brain, says the business consultant David Rock, is a “prediction machine.” Before we’re even aware of what we’re doing, we guess what’s going on.
“Your brain receives patterns from the outside world, stores them as memories, and makes predictions by combining what it has seen before and what is happening now,” Rock writes. “Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neocortex, and the foundation of intelligence.”
When you experience something, your mind begins to search through your memories. Rather than paying close attention to the scene in front of you, your brain looks for something familiar. If there’s a “match,” the brain makes a prediction. If X happened before, something like X will probably happen again.
Biologically, we have a craving for certainty. That makes sense when you think of man’s evolution. For most of human history, people’s lives were “nasty, brutish, and short,” to use Thomas Hobbes’s famous phrase. People faced danger daily–from predatory animals, starvation, attacks by rival tribes, and disease. When we achieve a measure of certainty, we feel a rush of dopamine.
Robert Burton, a neurologist at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, explains: “At bottom, we are pattern recognizers who seek escape from ambiguity and indecision. If a major brain function is to maintain mental homeostasis, it is understandable how stances of certainty can counteract anxiety and apprehension. Even though I know better, I find myself somewhat reassured (albeit temporarily) by absolute comments such as, “the stock market always recovers,” even when I realize that this may be only wishful thinking.”
The Writer’s Need to Resist
But here’s the thing: As writers, we have to work hard to avoid making conclusions before discovering the facts. A statistical is not a story. A probability does not provide the complex, nuanced information we need to understand the world.
In law, it’s a truism that eyewitnesses are notoriously bad witnesses. Eyewitnesses don’t see. Like the rest of us, they view something–often without paying close attention to the details that matter–and then construct a picture based on their existing knowledge and biases. That’s why circumstantial evidence (like fingerprints, items left at the scene of a crime, phone records, and the like) is usually more valuable in legal cases than eyewitness accounts.
The only way to discover something new — whether you’re witnessing an event, sifting documents, asking questions, or interpreting data — is to avoid predicting what you’re seeing.
The Beginner’s Mind
It takes work to avoid jumping to conclusions. The Buddhists have a term for this. It’s called the “beginner’s mind.”
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few,” says Shunryu Suzuki in his classic work Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. The more we know something, the less conscious and thinking we are about it. We take it for granted. We lose the sense of mystery and puzzlement when we know something as an expert. Too often, we cannot see something in front of us.
About the beginner’s mind, Abraham Maslow writes this: “They are variously described as being naked in the situation, guileless … without ‘shoulds’ or ‘oughts,’ without fashions, fads, dogmas, habits, or other pictures-in-the-head of what is proper, normal, ‘right,’ as being ready to receive whatever happens to be the case without surprise, shock, indignation, or denial.”
In conceding the election to Trump, Hillary Clinton said: “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” An open mind does not mean acquiescence or a compromise of values. It does not mean forgiving the ugly or dishonest things he said in the campaign. It means only paying attention, carefully, to what you see. Only then can you really know what’s going on and respond appropriately.
Ten Steps to Cultivating the Beginner’s Mind
(1) Scanning: whenever you encounter something–new or old–make a point of scanning for surprises
Start by looking where you usually look. When you enter a park or a building or a mall, you have a tendency to lean in a particular direction, especially if you’ve been there before. As you look, stop. Pause for a few moments. And then look, deliberately, in different directions. If you veer to your right, toward the Starbucks, stop and start scanning to the left. Look up. Look into the distance. Look into a corner. Zoom in and look at the details.
(2) Note your predictions, then un-do them. Every time you assume something is going to happen–every time you make a prediction–stop and take note.
Just pausing will dramatically improve your beginner’s mind. Researchers say we have from 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day. They come in a rush, unbidden. They come along, like tourists bustling through Times Square, in bunches. Often they veer off into new bunches of thoughts.
Just hitting the “Pause” button will improve your awareness of this constant sc=tream of thoughts and predictions.
Now take it a step further. Label your thoughts and predictions. Like: “Oh, I just assumed…” Or: “Without pausing, I just thought that…”
Once you label your predictions, they fall apart on their own. You come into a park and see kids racing around. If you’re a grumpy old man, you might assume–you might predict–that they’re aimless youth, irresponsible, reckless, etc. When you stop and label that assumption, it falls apart. You start to notice more about them. Rather than projecting your own assumptions, you’re now paying attention.
(3) Be patient. We have a tendency–all day, every day–to jump to conclusions. Research shows that people’s first impressions, in a job interview or a social setting, make a greater impact than anything else. When we see, hear, or read something, we make snap judgments.
To control this tendency, we need to consciously slow things down. We need to say to ourselves: “OK, what just happened? What was that sequence of events that just happened?”
Let your ideas unfold, deliberately. If you find a salesman’s gambit persuasive, break down the experience into pieces. How did he greet you? What did he say? How did he appeal to your ego? To your insecurity? What kinds of promises did he make? How well did he answer questions? When did you get carried away, daydreaming about the wonders of that new purchase?
(4) Be childlike … and play dumb. It’s a cliche that children are full of wonder, with a desire to explore the world around them. They ask questions constantly. Unlike adults, they are not afraid of not knowing. “Why?” is the constant refrain of the curious child. All too often, parents mask their ignorance of a subject, when it would be far better to say, “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
We’ll never get that childlike wonder back. But we can try. We can pretend we don’t know as much as we do. That actually shouldn’t be too hard, as long as we remember to try. Most of our knowledge, after all, is superficial.
When you encounter a scene, turn everything you think you know into a question. Rather than assuming, open up the possibilities. If you’re sure that the checkout clerk was dumb or the driver who cut you off was aggressive, open yourself to doubt. If you assume that the student was lazy or the athlete a great guy, open yourself to doubt.
(5) Avoid judgment: Avoid the words “should” and “ought.” Catch your assumptions and judgments–about everything–and deliberately un-do those assumptions and judgments.
When someone asks you something, start with, “I’m not sure.” When someone asserts an opinion with which you want to agree or disagree, pause for a moment. Ask yourself how you might conclude the opposite.
Notice when you label things as smart or dumb, creative or dull, cheap or expensive, beautiful or ugly, etc. Then, un-label them. Become agnostic on the question. Imagine not knowing or thinking or even caring, at least for the moment.
Every time you catch yourself thinking that something’s right or wrong, normal or abnormal, beautiful or ugly, smart or dumb–in fact, any time you find yourself thinking in dualities–stop!
(6) Be like Picasso. I’m talking about the late Picasso, who embraced a more abstract vision of the world.
Pay close attention to the shapes, colors, lights, textures, and sounds of things–not their meaning. Look for the circles and curves. Then look for squares and rectangles, and then the triangles. Observe how the pieces fit together. Notice the colors and how the colors define the shapes and play off each other.
Then listen. First, notice what you usually notice. Then pause and cock your ear for distant sounds. Listen to those sounds intently. Then listen to how the sounds collide against each other. If you’re in a cafe, listen to the sounds of the baristas and the customers making orders, then the sounds of people conversing at tables and the clack-clack-clack of laptops. Tune into whatever music is playing.
Do the same thing on the street and at a ballgame, in a college quad or cafeteria, in an office lobby or conference room.
Do. Not. Try. To. Make. Sense. Of. It. Just. Listen. And. Notice.
(7) Beware of bewitching stories. The human race is a storytelling race. We make sense of the world by making everything a story. When we encounter a great storyteller, we listen with rapt attention. Stories entertain and instruct. They give meaning to the world. That’s all good.
But stories, inevitably, leave lots out. Storytellers want you to pay attention to some things, but not others. They’re like magicians: “Behold as I distract your attention with this flashy trick, while I slip my hand into your pocket and take your wallet.”
Don’t trust stories. They are told to deceive as much as to inform. The simpler the story, the more you need to question it. Distrust, especially, the stories that depict whole groups as having the same qualities. Bigots assume that people from certain groups–race, religion, class, age, profession, education, etc.–behave certain ways. Maybe they do, usually, as I note in my Election Day story. But just because most people behave a certain way, don’t assume that everyone in the group does so.
Observe people, one by one, to see what they actually do. Look for ways that they contradict your assumptions.
(8) Let things unfold. A good writer acts like a tour guide. The tour guide does not point out everything on the tour. By focusing on a few telling details, she helps us to ignore irrelevant details.
Too often, writers attempt to explain every aspect of an issue at once. We pack lots of background information into a paragraph or two, tight as a tin of sardines. But too much information, too soon, overwhelms readers.
The more complicated your topic, the simpler you need to explain. Express one simple idea at a time, so that the reader follows every step of the process. Unpack the many complex aspects of an issue and explain them, one by one. Use simple, familiar terms.
Recipes offer another useful model for explaining. Cooks must perform their tasks one at a time, in the right order. To make a dish, you must move deliberately, step by step. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Then gather the eggs, flour, vanilla extract, sugar, chocolate chips, and so on. Then sift the flour. Then beat the eggs. Then mix the ingredients. Then grease the sheet. Then …
I once convened a writing class in a kitchen, where we made a pie. Each student participated. As students sifted and whipped and rolled, they spoke into a recorder. The student who organized the event narrated the process, offering comments the way about ingredients and her grandmother’s baking tips. Other students talked about family cooking traditions, special kitchen tricks, and likes and dislikes. Afterward, I transcribed the conversation. The result was a good first draft of an essay on cooking. From that point, the students knew how to explain anything well.
Writing requires the same process as cooking: take your time, do one thing at a time, in the right order, and explain as you go.
Here’s a good way to master this skill. Get a video of anything that interests you. It could be a great sports game, like the Super Bown or NBA Finals or an Olympic event. It could be a movie or live coverage of a news event. It could be a documentary by Frederick Wiseman. Play a scene a few times. Then go back and play it in slow motion. Write down every micro-event in the scene. You’ll be amazed at how much happens in just a few seconds. You can train yourself to notice.
(9) Reject causality–or look at things backward–at least for the time being. To understand anything, we need to get a sense for what causes what. We need to identify the “variables” that contribute to an outcome. But even when we gather lots of evidence for a proposition–like the idea that higher levels of education create economic opportunity–we have to be careful.
On its face, it makes sense. College graduates earn an average of $1 million more than non-college grads, according to research at Georgetown University. Annually, college grads earn $17,500 more than non-grads, according to Pew Research Center. The more skills you have, the more you can offer employers–and the higher wages you can earn.
But as Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes, the causal arrows often point in the opposite direction. The more money you earn, the more you use it to get an education. You don’t make the money because of the education; you get the education because of the money.
In fact, Taleb argues, education is often a barrier to economic achievement. “It’s good to have a class of people who are educated,” he says. “But education is the enemy of entrepreneurship.” Scrappy, dedicated, focused people, who think differently than educated people, are the ones who invent new products and services. Education can mess that up. “If you start having a high level of education, you start hiring people based on school success,” he said. “School success is predictive of future school success. You hire an A student if you want them to take an exam, but you want other things like street smarts. This gets repressed if you emphasize too much education.”
So think backward. Like Taleb, whenever you hear some “truism,” ask when that truism does not hold. Or ask whether the opposite might be true.
(10) Imagine something different. Sometimes the best way to think differently is to take in a scene and then subtract specific things from that scene. Imagine what the scene would look like if one object was missing or broken. Now imagine something else being missing or broken.
Imagine what a classroom would be like without the latest technology. Imagine what a city street would be like without sidewalks or benches or street signals.
On that last point, a number of European cities have removed stop lights in the hope of reducing the number of accidents at intersections. How can that be? Don’t red lights help to monitor street movement; don’t we need to make some cars stop so that other cars can go? In fact, with no street signals, drivers pay greater attention and learn how to cooperate better. Traffic management sifts from a command-and-control system to a cooperative system. Steven Johnson an experiment of a Dutch traffic engineer named Hans Monderman:
“As an experiment, he replaced the busiest traffic-light intersection [that handled] 22,000 cars a day, with a traffic circle, an extended cycle path, and a pedestrian area. In the two years following . . . the number of accidents plummeted to only two, compared with 36 crashes in the four years prior. Traffic moves more briskly through the intersection when all drivers know they must be alert and use their common sense, while backups and the road rage associated with them have virtually disappeared.”
Hans Monderman could create a real-world experiment to test his theory that less control produces more order. But you can create whatever mind experiments you want, to open your mind to new possibilities. The point is to get your mind to consider–and pay attention–to more possibilities.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
The first piece of advice that all writers get is to “write what you know.”
By the time we have decided to write for an audience—to share thoughts, voluntarily, with anyone who will listen—we have developed a whole storehouse of experiences and memories, thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, and insights and ideas.
The trick is to use this storehouse to inspire and drive your writing—without creating unnecessary barriers.
National Novel Writing Month, a k a NaNoWriMo, offers an ideal opportunity to plumb your conscious and subconscious minds. Day by day, you can make deliberate efforts to understand yourself—and use that understanding to create something new.
But you don’t need to wait till November. Set yourself a goal to get a complete a draft of a novel–or memoir or how-to book or any other major piece of writing–in a month.
Without further ado, here’s your 30-day plan for connecting what’s deepest inside you to the novel you want to write—the novel you will write—this November.
1. “Writing is a code.” That’s what Margaret Atwood says, anyway. We all communicate all whole lives. But to become masters, we need to master specific skills and “tricks of the trade.”
Tasks: (1) Spend 15 minutes brainstorming the codes you’re going to have to crack as a writer. (2) Write 2,000 words describing what challenge your hero faces, how he’s going to crack the code
2. The journey. The ancient Greeks said: “Look to the end.” Every story takes the characters—and the reader—on a journey to some powerful ending. The novelist John Irving actually writes the last paragraph of his books first. He keeps that last paragraph as a North Star for his writing process. So ask yourself: Where do you want your characters to end up? How d you want them to differ b y the time they have experienced their adventure?
Tasks: (1) Imagine finishing your novel—how it all comes out. (2) Write your last paragraph and your last 2,000 words or the first and last paragraphs of many scenes of summaries.
3. The Arc. Aristotle said that great drama resembles an arc, which begins by introducing the characters and their world, then confronts the hero and others with increasingly intense challenges, and finally resolves with a new understanding and significant change in the character’s lives.
Tasks: (1) Sketch out an arc for your life—first, as if your life were to end today; second, as if you would live till 90. (2) Write full action passages for one or two of the following points along the arc: Opening scene … The challenge … Crisis 1 … Crisis 2 … Crisis 3 … Recognition … Reversal … Denouement.
4. Scenes and summaries. All stories move back and forth between scenes and summaries. Scenes engage the reader physically; summaries allow a moment of respite and an opportunity to explain ideas and background. Scenes show particular people doing particular things at particular times and places, with particular motions and emotions. Scenes zoom in to capture the details of people’s lives, with a moment-by-moment description of action. Summaries offer sweeping assessments of the bigger picture, with an emphasis on what it all means, in order to set up scenes.
Tasks: (1) write does tabloid headlines for as many scenes and summaries as possible. (2) Write one scene and one summary, each 1000 words long. With the scene, just show the characters doing one thing after another—no exposition!
5. The hero. Who’s your hero? What’s his dilemma? All great stories offer the reader a character to root for—often superior in many ways, but still human with a need to deal with flaws and difficult situations. Is the hero young or old, virtuous or troubled, sociable or hermetic, tall or short, dark or light, fit or flaccid, rich or poor, happy or dissatisfied, knowing or clueless, young or old, male or female?
Tasks: (1) Brainstorm the various challenges you’ll face as an author. Make a list. Tack it over your computer. (2) Write one scene and one summary describing the hero’s deepest challenge.
6. World of the Story. The setting not only offers a “container” for a story, but also reveals much about the characters and their community. The setting is rich with clues about the characters, their struggles, their ideals, and their capacity to act.
Tasks: Describe your situation, your setting, a “day in the life,” and how it affects your work. (2) Describe one or two settings, in a total of 2000 words, by showing the characters moving around. Have each one of these as the openings of a chapter or scene. Example: Herb Clutter’s promenade.
7. The Crisis or Call. Every hero needs to face a crisis or call to action. In the midst of living a settled life, something happens to challenge the hero. Something internal (unresolved feelings and relationships, goals and ambitions, memories from the past) or external (an economic, romantic, social, professional, or other upheaval) takes the hero out of her comfort zone. Or some event issues a challenge. At first, she refuses to answer the challenge. But over time, she realizes she has no choice to do so.
Tasks: (1) Write down three times when you have faced a new, unexpected challenge in your life—and how you responded. Note how you felt physically amidst these challenges. (2) Describe the moment when your hero was first introduced to the challenge that he must face—and how he responded. Include denial and selfmisunderstanding. 2000 words.
8. The hero’s dossier. To tell a satisfying story, you need to know your hero—and other characters—inside and out. Who are these people? What do they look like? Where do they come from? What do they want? What have they done? Who do they spend time with? What do their mannerisms and habits betray about them?
Tasks: (1) Brainstorm intensely on your life and values. (2) Fill out a “character dossier” and write one scene and one summary to show that character to the reader. 2000 words, 1000 words for each fragment. 5. 6. 7. 8.
9. The wheel of character types, Part 1. The best stories use action to reveal something about the hero and other characters—especially what those characters repress. Every character has an opposite. These opposites resist each other, but they’re also drawn to each other. What’s different in the opposite character is something that exists in all of us, but repressed. Start by considering the most consequential of character types—the hero and villain.
Tasks: (1) Think of your biggest rival at one or two specific moments in your life. (2) Show the first interaction with the hero and villain (1000 words). Show a later interaction that reveals something totally surprising—but not, in retrospect since the hero and villain contains parts of each other.
10. The wheel of character types, Part 2. Other characters help to draw push the story forward. The pairs of opposites include the mentor and tempter … the sidekick and skeptic … and the mind and heart. Each one of these three pairs of types represents something in all of us.
Tasks: (1) Brainstorm for 15 minutes, feverishly, about two character types in your life. (2) Create scenes two characters—besides the hero and villain—acting or speaking with reference to the hero. Could be mentor, tempter, sidekick, skeptic, heart, or mind.
11. The wheel of character types, Part 3. Things get really interesting when three characters are part of a scene. Whenever two characters develop a relationship—of alliance or opposition—a third party lurks to scramble that relationship. Two lovers, for example, encounter a past lover. Two business partners encounter a revolt among workers. Parents encounter the demanding desires of a child. And so on.
Tasks: (1) Brainstorm about the dynamics of the triangles in your life—what make them stable, what made them volatile and changing. (2) Create scenes with interactions of TWO triangles. By now, make sure you cover all of the character types in the last three days. 9. 10. 11.
12. Act by Act. Give your story three distinct acts, using the narrative arc: The World of the Story, rising action, and resolution. In the World of the Story, show the people and places in a state of calm and order. Think of this as a settled status quo. Then show the hero confronted with something difficult—something so difficult, in fact, that hero cannot bear to face it head-on. Show that hero slowly, painfully, dealing with different aspects of that challenge, one by one. Show the character change with these encounters. Finally, give the hero an “aha”: moment, when he begins to understand the true nature of his life and world—and the need to change for his own survival and wellbeing.
Tasks: (1) Think about your life as a three-act play. How satisfying is the “conclusion”? Sketch your story on a sheet of paper. Ask what you need to reach your own “resolution.” (2) Review your story to date. Write opening and closing paragraphs for each part, making sure that you start and end strongly. Write a total of 200 new words, however distributed.
13. Dialogue. People’s language—their choice of words, their use of slang, how quickly they speak, their conversational tics— reveal much about their character. How they interact with others—whether they listen, interrupt, stay on the subject, show respect—reveals even more. And of course people speak differently in different places with different people.
Tasks: (1) List three important conversations you’ve had in your life. Show how you connected—or failed to connect—with the other persons. Try to understand what made the conversation work or fail. (2) Write three scenes, 750 words apiece, with only dialogue.
14. Parallel arcs. The best stories are really two or three stories rolled into one. Besides the main plot, which involves the hero’s journey, there are two or three subplots involving other characters or ideas. These plots and subplots intersect at critical moments in the story.
Tasks: (1) Write down the essence of the “plotline” of your life. Then write down the various subplots, involving friends and family and others, that intersect with your story at critical times for both. (2) Sketch out two subplots of your story. For each, describe the main character, the journey, barriers along the way, moments of intersection with the main plot, and how the journey ends.
15. Denial. Most stories are about one thing: How the hero and other characters deny some essential reality, and then struggle because of the denial. When the hero is first presented with his challenge, he does everything in his power to avoid confronting the truth. And for good reason: Change is painful, emotionally overwhelming. But a series of events force the hero to deal with pieces of the challenge.
Tasks: (1) Honestly, with no self-editing, make a list of the problems in your life that you avoid and try to deny. (2) Write a scene in which another character confronts the hero about a problem that he has been denying. Then write the background summary that shows the origin of this denial, with reference to past events—and try to build scenes into that summary as much as possible.
16. The Time Element. “Nothing concentrates the mind like a pending execution,” Samuel Johnson once said. Time pressures force characters to think, act, respond energetically—making more mistakes, but also discovering more things. Suspense begins with a ticking clock. TV shows like “Mission: Impossible” and “24” explicitly race against time. Even stories that suspend time, like Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, create tension about the question: Will the hero reenter the real world in time for a decent life? =
Tasks: (1) summarize all the tasks still ahead to finish your novel draft. (2) Write TWO scenes, 1000 or so words apiece, describing the hero or other character racing against the clock.
17. Taking Risks. The “Hail Mary” is one of the most exciting plays in football. With the game at stake, the quarterback launches a long pass with the hope of scoring big. But it’s also a risk—the other team could intercept the ball. Life is like that too. Sometimes we have to risk losing a lot to gain a lot.
Tasks: (1) Make a list of the riskiest things you have done, either on purpose or by neglect or recklessness. (2) Write a scene in which the character takes a big risk, then write a scene where his villain takes a big risk.
18. Beats. Every scene is a series of actions, one after another. Characters constantly thrust and parry, sometimes dramatically and sometimes subtly. To give your scene pacing and meaning, you need to make sure that every moment advances the story.
Tasks: (1) For ten minutes, write down everything that you said with a friend in a recent conversation. Show a constant move back and forth from positive to negative values and back again. (2) Write two scenes of about 1000 words apiece. Make sure that every moment produces some reaction and/or advances the story. Take out all details and actions that do not move the scene toward a memorable conclusion.
19. Suspense. Engage the reader best by creating a sense of uncertainty, which gets the reader guessing, and then solve that uncertainty. Cliffhangers bring the story to a point when something important is about to happen—and then break off the action.
Tasks: (1) For ten minutes, write down the moments in your life when you know something big was about to happen—but you didn’t know what. (2) Write two 1000-word scenes that do just this. Move the scene forward, beat by beat, and then end with an almost-dramatic conclusion. Save that conclusion—the answer to an important dilemma for the character—for the next section.
20. Senses. People— even reader—are physical creatures. So you need to make your story crackle with physical details. Make sure you use specific, precise words to evoke sights, sounds, and feelings.
Tasks: (1) write down as many sensory words as possible. Make as many observations as possible about the sights, sounds, and tactile qualities of people and things in your vicinity. (2) Go over all your fragments so far and replace all general descriptions with something visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.
21. Sentences. If you can write a good sentence, you can write anything. All too often, we get lost in long and meandering sentences. It’s only natural when you are engaged in such a creative process: one idea prompts another idea, then another and another.
Tasks: (1) Write down, one sentence at a time, all of the writing tasks you need to finish to complete your novel this month. Use full sentences. (2) Go through your drafts so far, sentence by sentence, and make sure that each one takes the characters—and the reader—from one place to another, different place.
22. Shapes. Writing uses three basic shapes—a straight line, a circle, and a triangle.
Tasks: (1) Sketch out your life, so far, using a line, circle, and triangle. (2) Write three separate passages of about 750 words apiece, either scenes or summaries. In one passage, take a straight, linear path. Don’t double back, don’t skip off to provide background; just show one thing after another. In the second passage, show a character or idea begin one place, develop, and end up where you started. In the third, depict the interaction of three characters and/or three ideas. Show how, when two interact with each other, the third has the potential to change their interactions.
23. Numbers. All good ideas can be expressed as ones, twos, threes, or longer lists of things. Ones put a person or place, hope or fear, thought or idea, front and center. You look at that one thing from different angles, as if inspecting a diamond. Twos present complements and oppositions—sidekicks and enemies, reinforcing or opposing ideas, consonant or conflicting feelings. Threes present the opportunity for real complexity. Think of the lover’s triangle. Whenever two sides bond, the third party lurks nearby, ready to upset everything.
Tasks: (1) Write down the most important idea in your life, something about your relationship with one important person in your life, then the most dynamic triangle in your life, and finally the five most important people, events, or values in your life. (2) Write four fragments of 500 to 750 words. In one fragment, focus on one person, thing, or idea. Make everything else revolve around that one person, thing, or idea. In another fragment, show two people, things or ideas competing with each other— and, below the surface, reinforcing each other. In the third passage, show a triangle of people, things, or ideas. Show how any two corners of the triangle can get stabilized or destabilized by the third. Finally, create a passage that explains or shows the complexity of things by listing a whole bunch of things—people, events, things, tasks, debts, fears, etc.
24. Discovery/exploration of sketchy places. Steven King says he writes scenes by imagining places and events that would scare him. Scary places are all around us—roads and highways where we can crash or get hit by a car … pools where children can fall and drown … parking garages or alleys where we can be mugged … hospitals where we can be mistreated or even tortured … taxis where drivers can take us to dangerous places … even offices where nightmare bosses and colleagues torture us emotionally.
Tasks: (1) Describe the freakiest place you’ve ever been in your life, with as many precise details as possible. (2) Create one sketchy place—a place that’s weird, gross, dangerous, sickly, otherworldly, creepy, Disneyesque, or otherwise alienating—and make something consequential happen to your character there.
25. Love. What captures the heart—the emotions, longing, deep and abiding interest or even obsession—of the hero or other characters? How the hero encounters and responds to love defines that character like nothing else.
Tasks: (1) Make a list of the loves of your life, with specific details about what was good and what was bad— and what were most moments in these relationships was most revealing about your character. (2) Write two scenes. In the first scene, show the moment when the hero meets his or her love interest for the first time. Show the character surprised by his or her interest—and holding back for some reason. In the second scene, show a major conflict between the two lovers. Don’t explain the conflict—show the conflict, so the reader can make sense of it on her own.
26. Failure and Frustration. Nothing matters more to a story than failure and frustration. How a character fails—coming up short in an honest effort or neglecting or denying something important—reveals something about his self-mastery. And how he responds—whether he learns and grows or rigidly rejects opportunities for growth—reveals his character.
Tasks: (1) Write down three moments of failure in your life— with as many details as possible about how you responded. (2) Write two short scenes—anywhere from 250 to 500 words—describing the moments when a character experiences failure. Try to show how their expressions and body language change at the moment when they realize they have failed.
27. Not What It Seems. The best stories operate on at least two levels—the level of the obvious and the level of the meaningful. Characters carry out different tasks, interact with others, make mistakes and grow—but underneath, they are really struggling with deeper challenges.
Tasks: (1) Think of three times in your life when you worked or played hard to achieve something (e.g., success in school, sports, work, love)—when something larger was really at stake (e.g., pride, dignity, revenge, honor, vindication). (2) Create two scenes of 1,000 words apiece in which your character strives for one thing, obvious for all to see—but gets his or her motivation from a deeper psychological yearning.
28. Powers. What are the hero’s greatest powers— and how does he deploy them? Does the hero possess extraordinary physical might? Intellectual powers? Emotional insight? Social wherewithal? Or does he possess some supernatural connections to other beings?
Tasks: (1) Make a list of people you know with the greatest physical power, intellectual power, social power, financial power, and moral power. (2) Write two scenes, each 1000 words, describing clashes of characters with different powers. Show how these characters attempt to use these powers, and how they respond to each other. For example, show someone of great wealth interacting with someone with social charisma or someone with a strong moral compass.
29. Surprises. What surprises can you sprinkle throughout the story? Above all, good stories show us things we cannot imagine without some prodding. If everything is predictable, after all, why bother reading? Storytelling is a two-way process. The writer offers a series of moments, with just enough details for the reader to add her own memory and imagination. Think of storytelling as a relay race, where the writer offers something surprising, then the reader adds her own thoughts.
Tasks: (1) List the ten most surprising things to happen in your life. Looking back, identify the missed signals that would have made these events less surprising. (2) Create two scenes in which important surprises happen to the hero and one other character, either together or separately. Then write scenes or summaries that provide the backstories, setting up those surprises.
30. Recognition and Reversal. Great stories end with a new level of understanding—for the story’s leading character’s and for the readers.
Tasks: (1) Make a list of three times in your life when you came to a brand new understanding of yourself, your values, and how the world works. Write down what caused you to gain this new wisdom. (2) Write the climactic scene of your novel. Show the character saying and doing something that he would not have been able to say or do before. Show how this new wisdom changes everyone around him.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Every four years, the American people make history-bending choices when they elect a president. The choice amounts to a bet on character. Who will have the right character–the right knowledge, experience, values, and fortitude–to tend to the nation’s needs?
Back in 2016, I was eager to get some answers from Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. As a longtime developer and TV celebrity, Trump had not been involved in any of the major issues of the day. He spoke out occasionally but never had to work through the complexities of war and peace, the economy, the budget, crime, immigration and labor, and more.
To develop a great character for a story, I often advise writers to use a “Character Dossier.” The dossier poses 33 questions about the character’s background, upbringing, desires and passions, conflicts and problems, and more. When you answer these questions, you not only create a great character. You also go a long way to plotting the story.
I realized, after posing 50 questions for the GOP candidate, that the exercise offered a good model for questioning all your story’s characters. It offers a way to go beyond the Character Dossier. After getting the basic information from the Character Dossier, fashion a set of follow-up questions. Go deep. Explore the questions that the character would rather avoid.
In that spirit, here are 50 questions for Donald Trump.
Personal life
1. Can you say something about your relationship with your father and mother? Were they caring and attentive? How did they discipline you? What worked — and what didn’t? In what ways do you model yourself after them — and in what ways do you depart from their examples?
2. What events played the greatest role in your moral development — at military school, Fordham College, Penn, your early years in business, your early years as a celebrity?
3. Why did your first two marriages fail? Did you grow apart? What kinds of mistakes did you make? How have you learned from them?
4. What role have you played in raising your children? What “values” did you seek to instill in them?
5. What attracts you to Melania? What do you talk about with Melania?
6. What is the biggest personal mistake you have made? How have you learned from that mistake? How did you change your behavior as a result?
7. Explain, in your own words, any of the following concepts or parables of Christ:
• Turn the other cheek.
• Love thy neighbor as thyself.
• Jesus turning out the moneychangers at the temple.
• Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.
• Jesus washing the feet of the prostitute.
• Jesus caring for the leper.
• Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
• Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
8. What book most influenced you growing up? Have you read any books in the last year? If so, what was it? How about the last five years? Ten years? Besides The Bible and The Art of the Deal, what are your favorite books?
9. You have bragged for decades of sleeping with as many beautiful women as you can, whether you are they are married or not. Has this behavior ceased? If so, when and why?
10. You characterize the Billy Bush video as “locker room talk.” In the second debate you said that you have not done any of the actions you boasted about with Bush? So you were lying to Bush? What kinds of other topics do men talk about in the locker rooms you have visited? Without naming names, can you talk about how athletes boast about assaulting women? How do the others respond, typically?
11. Just curious: How do you think beauty pageant contestants feel when a lecherous old man enters their dressing rooms when they are changing and sometimes wearing little or nothing? Is it OK for the pageant owner to do this? Why or why not?
12. In one of your attacks on Fox news reporter Megyn Kelly, you said that she had “blood coming out of her wherever.” You have dismissed the idea that you were talking about menstruation. But how can it be decent to conjure images of blood and gore, coming out of wherever, from someone who was simply doing her job?
Psychology
13. Most accomplished people feel no need to brag about their success. You seem to need to affirm your own greatness in every conversation. Why is that, do you suppose?
14. Why do you lie so repeatedly and brazenly? I’m thinking of whoppers (like your five-year birtherism campaign, your claim to see thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey, and that you opposed the Iraq war from the beginning) and less consequential lies as well (like your statement that Hillary Clinton was not at Ground Zero).
15. You have criticized a number of women, like presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, for their looks, face, weight, and so on. What exactly do looks reveal about character? What do your looks reveal about you? What does your hair reveal? Your gut?
16. Psychologists say you are a psychopath or a narcissist. Do you see where they’re coming from? Can you define these terms and explain why your behavior does or does not fit these descriptions?
17. You talk a lot about “winners” and “losers.” Can you define these terms, perhaps with examples from history? How do you get to be a winner or a loser?
18. When challenged to state what sacrifices you have made in your life, you mentioned that you started and ran businesses that make you billions of dollars. Hmmm. Back up. Can you define sacrifice? Then can you respond to the question again?
19. Is there anything innate about blacks, Jews, Muslims, Hispanics, Mexicans, Chinese, Russians, and other groups that makes them “good” or “bad”? Or “winners” or “losers”?
20. Do you think America has become too enamored of celebrities and not adequately respectful of quiet, modest people who work hard and care for others? What qualities do celebrities have that we should emulate or avoid?
21. Why did you attack Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, George Pataki — actually, everyone — in such personal terms during the GOP nomination contest? Did you really mean it when you called Carson a child molester and Cruz’s father a conspirator in the Kennedy assassination? Did you sincerely believe everything — or anything — you said? Or did these insults simply offer a blunt way to eliminate rivals?
22. Some psychologists say your harshest criticisms of others are really forms of “projection” — that is, that your criticisms actually reflect your own fears about yourself. So for example you called Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” as a way of diverting attention from your cascade of lies and distortions? Do you believe that people sometimes project like that?
23. You have railed against “political correctness,” saying that people need to toughen up and deal with the everyday knocks of life. Yet you have displayed thin skin when other people disagree or criticize you. What gives?
24. Can you see why people might be concerned about your penchant for violence — saying at rallies that “I’d like to punch him [a protester] in the face,” “knock the crap out of him,” and “in the old days [protesters] would be carried out on a stretcher,” and offering to pay legal fees for Trump supporters accused of assault? Do you not believe that people cannot disagree civilly?
Business practices
25. You have acknowledged not paying contractors who do work for your companies. In a debate, you said you didn’t pay them because you didn’t like their work. Did you specify what aspects of their work dissatisfied you?
26. Over the years you have sued people — or threatened to sue — hundreds or perhaps thousands of times. To what extent is that a tactic of intimidation rather than a sincere desire for redress of wrongs?
27. Have you ever worked with the mob on construction projects in New York, Atlantic City, Florida, or other locations?
28. What lessons did you learn from your many bankruptcies? How did you apply those lessons to later ventures?
29. What’s the toughest business problem you have ever faced? How did you deal with it?
Policy
30. Pick any policy issue. Tell us about five variables that make the issue complex and difficult to manage or solve.
31. You say you “know more than the generals” about ISIS and other foreign policy challenges. Name one fact or insight you can offer that “the generals” do not know or appreciate.
32. How would a wall along the Mexican border prevent people from coming into the U.S. from other entry points? Also, are you aware that there is now a net migration of Mexicans out of the U.S.? Will your wall keep those Mexicans in the U.S.?
33. In your campaign announcement, you called Mexican immigrants rapists and killers but acknowledged that “some of them” might be good. Can you talk about the “good ones.”
34. You have stated repeatedly that you want to create a “deportation force” to locate and remove 11 million illegal immigrants from the U.S. You have also said you would not. Which is the case these days? How would the deportation force work? How much would it cost? What criteria would you use to set priorities?
35. In one of the GOP debates, you said the Trans-Pacific Partnership is stacked in favor of China, which you have identified as the biggest trade threat to the U.S. Now you know (right?) that China is not part of the TPP. So what countries does the TPP involve and what provisions of the pact undermine U.S. interests?
36. Can you explain how currency manipulation works — and how the markets may or may not “correct” for it with changes in exports and imports?
37. You say you will “bring back” manufacturing jobs from overseas. Just how might that work? Given companies’ investment in billions of dollars worth of factories, would you expect them to shut those facilities down and build new ones in the U.S.?
38. Do you really believe that NATO — which won the Cold War and has kept the peace in Europe for decades — is a waste of money?
39. Do you really believe that adding more nuclear powers — Japan, South Korea, even Saudi Arabia — would make the world safer?
40. You say that American companies planning to move their operations overseas would face a major tariff on goods they sell to the U.S. Could you do that unilaterally? Would that possibly provoke other countries to slap tariffs on U.S. products?
41. About the nuclear triad: As Marco Rubio explained, when you looked doe-eyed at the mention of the concept, this refers to the readiness of nuclear weapons on land, sea, and air. Can you say something — anything — about some of the complexities of nuclear policy?
42. Given your stated expertise about tax policy, what specific provisions would you alter to prevent billionaires (?) like you avoiding taxes despite being on a “budget” of $450,000 a month?
43. You have said that your tax dodging and lobbying practices — using government to your advantage, to the detriment of others — is just smart business. Where should a business person draw the line? Do you support any limits on special-interest lobbying?
44. Do you favor — or not — the intervention of Russia or other foreign powers in U.S. elections? What would you do to respond to such interference in the democratic process?
45. Just to be straight, you oppose abortion but now (after stating otherwise) would not prosecute and jail women who received abortions. Is that correct? When does life begin? How would you enforce the law?
46. In your outreach to “the blacks,” you have portrayed African American life as a depraved world of crime, violence, joblessness, and fear? Are you ware that the black middle class is bigger then ever before in history?
47. Likewise you have said that crime has raged back to record highs. Are you aware that crime rates are the lowest in decades, even after small upturns in some crime categories in recent years?
48. Your stance on the minimum wage varies. Should it be raised, right now and in coming years? How much and when? Should the minimum wage be indexed to the cost of living?
49. Unions: Pro or con? Name three things that make unions “good.” Name three things that make unions “bad.”
50. Do your business dealings give you insight about how to deal with organized crime, both domestic and foreign? If so, what?
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Page for page, Robert Boynton’s The New New Journalism offers the best practical advice for writers anywhere. Rather than insisting on one true approach, Boynton gives room for a wide range of writers to say what works for them.
Boynton asks his subjects the same questions, so you get a useful sense of different approaches to all aspects of nonfiction narrative.
I have broken down the interviewing tips into 10 categories: (1) Approaching the Subject, (2) Getting the Story Before Getting Quotes, (3) Where to Conduct the Interview, (4) Should You Get Smart of Act Dumb? (5) Scripting Interviews, (6) Establishing Rapport, (7) Using Letters and Phone Calls, (8) Strategies for Getting the Subject to Talk, (9) Should You Record the Interview? (10) Taking Notes.
Now, without further ado, the advice of the masters:
(1) Approaching the Subject
Most authors have to develop a strong persona before they approach subjects. While respecting the people they want to interview (Jon Krakauer writes old-fashioned letters and sends along copies of his books), others focus on their own needs (Lawrence Weschler insists that “I see myself as an equal. I am not in the supplicant mode. I have the chutzpah to imagine that I am a fellow human being. And I have experiences that are potentially as interesting as theirs”).
Calvin Trillin offers the best advice for dealing with big-shot subjects. “I save the most important people for last,” he says. “I like to have talked to a lot of people, and learned more about the central characters, before I talk to them.” Why blow the most important conversation when you don’t know enough? Work around the edges—talking to all the secondary characters—before zooming in on the main target.
That’s also Ron Rosenbaum’s approach: “I often begin on the outside and move in. I start with the heretics. They are usually angrier, more outspoken, less inhibited. They are more willing to talk about the competing agendas, hostilities, and crosscurrents of any given debate. The freedom comes from being marginal. That doesn’t mean they don’t have as much, or more, of the truth as those who are in the mainstream.”
(2) Getting the Story Before Getting Quotes
To get the best quotes, you need to know the story. Gay Talese didn’t even really want to interview Frank Sinatra for his famous Esquire piece. He just wanted to practice the art of hanging around. “I got more from watching him, and the reaction of others to him, that I would have had we talked.”
Eric Schlosser strives to build a relationship before getting down to the official interview. “I want to have as natural a conversation as I can with people,” he says. Surprisingly, Schlosser doesn’t care that much about quotes. “The vast majority of my interviews are off the record and done so I can find out what’s going on,” he says.
(3) Where To Conduct the Interview
Where you interview often matters, but not always.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc likes to interview people where they are happiest, on the theory that they’ll be less defensive and open up. “Interviewing people in a car is great because it is quiet,” she says. “Kitchen tables are warm, an easy place to talk with someone.” Susan Orlean likes to start in the home, where “I’m essentially running a lint brush over their life. I’m able to pick up a thousand little threads of who they are and how they lead their life.”
Jonathan Harr also scans the personal habitat for clues: “I notice what books are on the shelves, what paintings are on the walls, how they keep their house, what kind of car they
drive.”
Richard Preston wants to see people where they do what makes them interesting. “I want to see the person in the lab, out in the field doing research. That way I get to tag along and be introduced to everyone in that person’s world.”
Tagging along helps Michael Lewis break down the interview-subject barriers. “The first question I ask is whether they have plans to go anywhere, and whether I can come with them,” he says. “I learned this technique in college [when interviewing for a job]. He said he was in the middle of moving his furniture from one office to another and asked if I could help… The way he interviewed people was to make them do something with
him.”
Noise causes problems. “I hate interviewing people in restaurants,” Krakauer says. “The background clatter makes it hard to transcribe tapes, an the public setting can inhibit the
subject.. … I prefer to interview people in their homes, or at a place with a strong connection to the story, or while driving.”
Jonathan Harr disagrees. “I’ve had good experiences interviewing people in restaurants. They sometime reveal amazing things when they are eating and drinking. Especially drinking.”
Think of interview locations as scenes for the story, William Finnegan says. “When I was writing about Moctar, the former slave, we drove to Washington to see some friends of his. On the way down we stopped at Gettysburg, which he actually wanted to see, but which I
also wanted to see him in.”
(4) Should You Get Smart Or Act Dumb?
When it comes to showing your own cards, authors take divergent approaches—what we might call the Bum Phillips and Truman Capote approaches. Phillips was an NFL coach who hid his smarts behind a dumb-ass persona; Capote got his best material for In Cold Blood by telling his story before asking questions.
“I pose the dumbest questions in the world,” says Richard Ben Cramer. “When I go into an interview, I don’t prepare any questions. … I just look at him and say, ‘Look, here’s my situation. And I explain my problem. … And he can’t brush me off with a prepared statement, because he’s never rehearsed an answer to this kind of question.”
Talese usually doesn’t ask questions until he’s developed a working relationship with his subjects and their coteries. “In the beginning, the interview is all but meaningless,” he
says. “All I’m trying to do is see people in their setting.”
Richard Preston takes a modified Capote approach. “I tell them about my struggles as a writer,” he says. “I’ll say, ‘This book is driving me crazy. I’m having all sorts of problems.’ It
turns the interview into a participatory experience. Some of the scientists see
it as another ‘problem’ they can solve.”
Ron Rosenbaum feels the need to show his own knowledge of the subject. “People want to feel that you respect them enough to have done your homework, rather than having been scattershot and casual. The worst thing you can do is come in and pretend that you are more sophisticated, or know more than they do.”
(5) Scripting Interviews
Even when you don’t know a subject very well, you know the realms of people’s lives. That’s where Leon Dash starts. “I divide the initial interviews into four sections—home life, school, church life, and social life.” Looking at their different roles in life opens many subjects’ eyes, Dash says: “This is the first time in their lives that they understand that they themselves are the products of multiple influences by many people and experiences over a long period of time.”
Jonathan Harr goes from general to specific, like he’s zooming in on a scene in a movie. That approach allows him to test the subjects.
“I begin by asking some general questions, the answers to which I already know. … Just to get the motor turning over. Plus, they serve to triangulate the answers against the answers I’ve been getting hearing from other people.
“I always prepare about a dozen questions, which I type up in advance. I never want to be at a loss for where to go next. But that doesn’t mean it’s a script that I stick to. I usually list them in order of importance and I always try to keep it to a single page.”
(6) Establishing Rapport
Sir Laurence Olivier once said that he goal as a performer was to seduce every woman in the theater. Janet Malcolm wrotes that she woos her subject with friendship and understanding, then turns around and uses them for her own purposes. Most writers try to find a middle ground.
“Being someone’s companion, that is my ultimate goal,” says Gay Talese.
“One of my gifts as a journalist is that, for some reason, people see me as innocuous and harmless,” says Krakauer. “So people tell me all kinds of stuff that isn’t in their best interest. A lot of people I write about have been marginalized in some way.”
Disagreeing shows respect, Krakauer says. “I’ll sometimes engage in good-natured debate. I’ll say, ‘Oh, really? Do you really believe that?’ I won’t outright argue with someone. In my experience, people don’t generally need to be provoked.”
(7) Using Letters and Phone Calls
When you can get people to write about their experiences, you can get especially rich material. First of all, the writing process is so creative that subjects discover things that they did not know themselves—or forgot. Jon Krakauer: “Letters are a great way to conduct interviews. After I interviewed him in prison, Dan Lafferty and I had an extensive correspondence.” Plus, you don’t have to transcribe recordings.
Writing is also just practical. Lawrence Wright says: “ I do a lot of my corresponding with sources via email. It’s an easy way to fire off queries to factual questions.”
Some avoid the telephone as lacking intimacy, but Ron Rosenbaum disagrees. He says the phone helps break down barriers. “People are actually more forthcoming over the phone because they are not distracted by looking at you and seeing how you are reacting to what they say.”
William Langewiseche: “Never by letter or email. Sometimes by phone, but that works only if I already know the person.”
(8) Strategies for Getting the Subject to Talk
Just shut up, says Willam Langewiesche.
Too often researchers are so eager to establish their own bona fides that they don’t stop talking long enough for the subject to get in a groove.
“The secret is: Let the guy talk,” Langewiesche says. “You never know where they’re going, and it really gets interesting when you let people run on. Every once in a while they say something that makes me want to stop them, but I resist the impulse, because I might lose the jewels that are about to fall from their lips.”
When you let people talk, you can start to connect the scattered dots in their lives. Their lives often have an order that no one else—the subjects included—do not realize.
“The interview is an organic process. I let the interviewee take over the interview and decide, essentially, what questions will be asked,” says Richard Preston. “This is extremely time consuming. … It’s a little bit like fishing. I’m there with a line in the water, pulling something out once in a while.”
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc sometimes did not even attend her own interviews. She gave her subjects tape recorders and told them to talk whenever they wanted. She caught her subjects in more real situations than standard interviews allow.
(9) Should You Record the Interview?
Writers also disagree, sometimes violently, about recording interviews. “I like to tape as much as possible,” Gay Talese says. Eric Shlosser agrees. “I like to tape as much as possible. If I’m only taking notes, I’ll always get back in touch with someone to make sure the quite I’ve written down matches with what they said.”
Transcribing recordings can consume months for a book. Willam Langewiesche tries to cut down on transciption time by simply noting the times when people address different topics. Lawrence Weschler also looks for ways to avoid transcription: “If I use a tape recorder, I also take notes. I don’t want to have to transcribe interviews. If I take notes while I tape, I can consult my notes to learn where a quote is on the tape. Then I can look it up and get the exact quote.”
Jon Krakauer takes notes while recording conversation. That way he can soak up the whole scene while the interviewee holds forth.
“When I take and take notes, the person I’m interviewing usually thinks I’m using the tape as backup,” he says. “In fact, most of what I’m writing down are observations: what they guy is wearing, the way his eyes dart, the nervous way he pulls his earlobes. … I grew up admiring writers who could render landscape well, so I full my notebooks with observations of the weather, the scent of the wind, what plants are growing in the vicinity.”
(10) Taking Notes
Some reporters still rely on scribbles on pads. “So much of the time I spend with people is just blabbing,” Susan Orlean says. “Do I really want to transcribe hours and hours of tape of that?”
Notetaking is its own art form. William Langewiesche uses the right side of his notebook for notetaking, and the left side for notes about the notes.
Jonathan Harr types up his notes right away, so he can remember words, expressions, mood. Typed notes also help him stay organized. “I always print a copy of the typed notes and put them into a physical file. … The hard copy is important to me. I annotate it, cover it with marginalia.”
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Some wisdom from Russell Banks, the author of novels and the recent travel/memoir Voyager:
Asked at a recent book signing how his writing process has evolved over the years, Banks took the Zen stance.
When I was in my 20s and even 30s and even 40s, but most especially in those earlier years, I really had no idea what I was doing and that frightened me and intimidated me. Yet I kept going. It wasn’t until much later, in my 50s and 60s and now 70s, that I began to realize that that’s the whole idea–not knowing what you’re doing. And as I’ve gotten older it’s gotten more and more difficult not to know what I’m doing. And so I have to find ways to induce that condition where I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing. It came so natural to me when I was young. It’s something that I’ve become increasingly aware of. I can see myself coming and going and I have to find ways to trap myself into that state of mind [of unknowing].
Only by becoming unknowing, Banks said, can we really create something new. When you know anything–even technique–your sense of curiosity and wonder may atrophy. You can lose your attachment with the moment. You can lose your ability to see and feel and think with openness.
The “will to knowledge,” Nietzsche taught, is one of the great diseases of modernity. Living in the age of science and psychology and rationality, we moderns somehow believe that we have to have all the answers. We get anxious when we don’t have the answers. Too often, we force answers on ourselves and others, rather than dwelling in a more aware state of unknowing and curiosity.
When we know something–or think we know something–we hold fast to that knowledge. We cling to it.
What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with being confident in our knowledge? Nothing really, as long as we’re loose with that confidence.
Attachment, the Buddha taught, is suffering. When we get attached to relationships, things, ideas, resentments, dreams, stories, rationalizations, myths, that’s when the suffering begins. And of course suffering narrows our minds.
That’s what Banks was talking about, I think. To create something, we need to have a sense of openness and curiosity, a sense of striving. Mastery is worthwhile. It’s great to have a toolbox and to know how to use the tools. But somehow, as Banks says, we have to find ways of being unknowing and unattached as well.
Like most people, I find myself weary and bloated from the end-of-year and end-of-decade awards and appraisals. But I also find myself longing for one of the great awards that ceased operations more than a decade ago.
The Bad Writing Contest ran for only four years, from 1994 to 1998, but it seemed like a venerable tradition. I miss it, like, really bad.
Just as I used to look forward to Ellen Goodman’s hathotic annual musings on the slow summer days in Casco Bay, Maine, I loved the tortured and pretentious passages that Denis Dutton “honored” to highlight the professorial penchant for obfuscation. It’s all about Schadenfreude.
But rather than just smirk, I’d like to break these passages down — “deconstruct” them, to use the voguish term — to see why they fail. More important, I’d like to translate them into plain English. My point is simple. You don’t need to write tortured language to explain complex ideas. Even the simplest ideas can, and must, be explained with plain words.
If Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking can use plain language to express complex thoughts, a po-mo prof — even when writing about the ontological or teleological status of this or that — should be able to do the same.
Let’s look at the last three winners of the Bad Writing Contest to analyze how they went so wrong and see if we can make them a little bit right.
Judith Butler (1998)
Writing in Diacritics, the feminist scholar Judith Butler wrote an essay titled “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” which includes this passage:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
The biggest problem, of course, is the use of too many abstract words in too little space. It’s fine to use specialized terminology. If you cannot think of a better way to say “coming from the same source,” go ahead and say homologous. If you cannot think of a better way to say complete intellectual dominance, say hegemony. If you need to refer to the work of Louis Althusser, fine, go ahead. Use all the fancy vocabulary you want. But just don’t pile it up. Remember that even the most knowledgable specialist can better understand ideas in chunks. Use specialized terms only when you need ’em, then define ’em and spread ’em out.
Another problem is the sentence length. Long sentences, of course, are not necessarily bad. Sometimes you need a long sentence to create a mood or to connect several ideas. But sentences ought not overwhelm the reader. Butler uses 94 words in this passage. How does this happen? As Deep Throat would have told Woodward and Bernstein if they were investigating this scandal of a sentence: Follow the prepositions.
This passage contains 21 prepositions: from, in, in, to, of, in, of, into, of, from, of, as, to, in, into, of, of, as, with, and of.
Prepositions help to show the relations of words and phrases. So when you use 21 prepositions in one sentence, you show 21 different relations of words within that sentence.
Here’s one way to translate Butler:
Structuralists say capitalism operates as a powerful “top-down” system, making businesses, schools, and other institutions look and operate the same way. We now think of power as a series of smaller, decentralized interactions. Power does not come from some big force, but from countless interactions throughout society.
I understand that we may lose some ideas with this simple passage. But we don’t lose the reader. And if we keep the reader with us, we can develop the more complex concepts, one at a time.
Here’s the irony of the whole mess: Judith Butler is not only smart, but she can write well when she makes the effort. When she “won” the Bad Writing Award, she protested with an op-ed in The New York Times. She explained, cogently, why she needed to be so incoherent in her academic writing. By writing so well, she disproved her own point.
Fredric Jameson (1997)
Fredric Jameson, the only two-time winner of the Bad Writing Context, makes outrageous statements that need to be questioned (“interrogated,” in the academic argot) one by one.
In his book Signatures of the Visible, Fredric Jameson writes:
The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer).
This 63-word sentence also goes on too long for most readers. So he and Butler have that in common. But Butler’s major problem stemmed from too many modifiers, which we see with all those prepositional phrases. But Jameson uses only four prepositional phrases here: in, about, from, and from. So why is this passage so bad.
That’s easy. It’s nonsense. The visual is essentially pornographic? The visual “has its end” (someone should call the teleology cops on Jameson, an avowed skeptic of teleological thinking) in mindless fascination. Really? Does that mean that gazing at the works by Leonardo or Brueghel is pornographic? Or Chagal or Rodin? Does Jameson really mean, as he says later, that anything embedded in mass culture is porn? Really? So great photography and modern art and everything in newspapers and magazines and the web … it’s all just porn?
I like the point about austere films drawing their energy by “repress[ing] their own excess.” It’s an interesting idea. You create excess (like the scenes involving the horse head and car explosion in “The Godfather”) and then you draw it back with some kind of contrary idea (“A la famiglia!“). But is that really just modern? Sure, the modern era has multiplied images and ideas, and then broadcast them globally. But are visuals really new? Interesting idea, but debatable.
Anyway, let’s try to simplify Jameson’s passage:
When mass media focus on an object, they inevitably take away its basic integrity. Like pornography, media encourage rapt, mindless fascination. The most artful films, though, generate energy by pushing the subject to extremes and then pulling back.
If I lost or distorted any ideas here, sorry. Sometimes when you pull out deep weeds you also pull out benign plants.
Roy Bhaskar (1996)
The British philosopher Roy Bhaskar’s passage is easy to solve once you understand how he structures his sentence (X challenges a, b, c, d, e, f, g . . .). In Plato Etc., he writes:
Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal — of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.
OMG, I’m speechless. But let’s get to work.
First of all, we need to break down this 134-word monstrosity, with its 23 prepositional phrases, into pieces. We learned how to do that with Butler. So let’s move on to some special problems of Bhaskar.
The sentence has two main parts. In part 1 (from “Indeed” to the em-dash), he introduces the idea of the Foucauldian reversal. In part 2 (from “of the unholy” to the end), he says what gets reversed. You can state this idea with the simple SVO sentence:
Ah, simplicity! But hold on. Stated that way, the whole passage looks absurd. Roy, you really think all those characters you lump together — Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Comte, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel, Baudrillard — would take the same side in a debate? While you’re at it, why not throw in the Marx Brothers too? (Note to self: Send movie idea to the makers of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”)
Look, I understand you want to say Michel Foucault did something consequential. Great. I agree. You also want to say that even competing traditions shared some underlying assumptions. Again, great.
I know I’m oversimplifying here, Roy, but you forced my hand. Your way out — the way you can make your stuff intelligible — is to slow down. Breathe in, breathe out. Now, step by step, tell us what you mean.
You suffer the “Whoa, Nellie!” problem. You think of so many related ideas, and you want to talk about all of them. So you start and it’s like you get taken over by a runaway horse.
Start by getting rid of the compound modifiers: Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean; Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian; and Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean. Just explain how these ideas relate to each other. Don’t try to do too much too soon. Avoid sardine writing, packing ideas densely into the tin.
Let’s look at all the philosophical traditions that Foucault et al. “reversed”:
• The Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean “unholy trinity.”
• The Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm.
• Foundationalisms.
• Irrationalisms.
• “The primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual.”
• Plato’s “problematic,” which “Hegel served only to replicate,” blah blah blah.
• Other stuff.
Whew. Did I get that right?
Whatever. Here’s what you do. Explain one of them in plain English, like this. Start like this:
Foucault’s approach undercut the ancient debates about idealism and materialism. Foucault also challenged the extensions of those debates– including Kant’s demand for rationality, Descartes’ separation of mind and body, and Nietzsche’s appeal to primal urges.
Or something like that. I’m sure I’m not precise enough here. Which is the point. You need to say what you mean rather than packing all so many sardines into such a small tin. Remember, you have a whole article to explain yourself. The rule: One at a time.
In summary . . .
Nobody said writing about complex matters — like the vast sweep of philosophy — would come easily. It’s hard enough to accumulate information about all these thinkers. To explain them, and then analyze them, poses a daunting challenge.
So what? You write not for yourself or your elite colleagues, but for a broader audience. You owe your readers clear prose. You must break it down, make relationships clear, define terms, and use simple words and sentences whenever possible. It reminds me of something a grad-school housemate once told me.
Tomas was a German literature student. When I was reading Marx’s Capital, he told me that German students read Hegel and Marx in the English translation. Why? Because the translators broke down the meter-long words and interminable sentences into manageable pieces.
Whenever you write about something complex or technical, put yourself in the position of a translator. Talk with the reader plainly. Sure, some discussions will hover beyond the reader’s reach. That’s OK. Sometimes understanding a text requires having some background. But when you read about complex subjects, you shouldn’t have to fight the writer along the way.
Someone asked me to explain why learning how to write–the process and discipline–matters for people who have no intention to write.
Some thoughts:
Writing is a process of discovery and questioning, breakdown and assembly, imagination and logic.
When you can write, you have the template for exploring just about any question imaginable.
What happens when we set out to write? First, we take inventory, sort possibilities, test those possibilities, and make (tentative) conclusions about our subject. Then we imagine ourselves in another’s shoes: What do they know already? What don’t they know? Then we figure out how we might understand something, if we knew only what our reader understood. Finally, we try to gather and arrange the ideas we explored in our inventory, to suit our reader.
But that’s just the beginning. When we write, we need to see how well our words do their job. Sometimes we score and sometimes we don’t. So we fix what’s broken and work to improve what’s already good. We listen–intently–not just to our own curious mind but to others’ minds as well.
Funny, this is also what we do when we conduct scientific experiments, create a business plan, teach a class, build a cabinet, or whip up a meal.
But writing has another quality that makes it even more transformative.
When you write, you find that sweet spot between your own needs and those of others. To write is to share, but to share requires awareness; that awareness requires focused attention. When we write, then, we need to get “within ourselves” first. And as we focus, our minds travel to places we never could imagine in the beginning. And as we travel, we bring others along for the ride.
Everyone knows about the Type A personality — the driven, impatient, narrowly focused, executive with a bad temper and high blood pressure.
How this personality type was discovered in the 1950s offers a good lesson for writers about paying attention to details. More about that in a few moments.
In Elements of Writing seminars, we talk about the importance of the setting for the story. The setting — what I call “the world of the story” — doesn’t just hold the story. It doesn’t just provide a place for characters to pursue their passions and goals. It plays a kind of character as well. The world of the story establishes possibilities and constraints, just like all the other characters. It establishes values. It shapes what matters to the characters.
To understand the world of the story, I think of Fenway Park in Boston. Say what you will about other great ballparks and stadiums. Rave, if you will, about the newer venues like Camden Yards and CitiField and Turner Field and Miller Park. They’re all terrific. But Fenway Park changes things. It expresses values. When I lived in Boston, I went to a dozen games a season, in good years and bad. My favorite moments came when the Sox were down by three runs in the ninth inning in a game that didn’t matter. The place came alive. Everyone stood and chanted. If the Sox got a baserunner, forget it. The place rocked. It was like seventh game of the World Series in a meaningless game in June.
But all that’s obvious, right? After all Fenway has sold out for 712 straight games, going back to May 15, 2003, when Pedro Martinez faced the Texas Rangers. That’s more than 250 games better than the next best streak in baseball history. Fenway’s appeal is common knowledge. Just read John Updike’s paean from 1960.
To earn your chops as a writer, notice the things that no one else does.
Now, back to the story of the discovery of the Type A personality.
In this account, it was a chair upholsterer who first noticed that a cardiologist’s patients were killing themselves with anxiety. Watch how Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, explains the discovery:
When you create the world of your story, find the chair that reveals an important idea. Find the piece of furniture — of the book, piece of art, toy, tshotshke, piece of clothing, window dressing, dish or glass, or other artifact — that helps the reader understand the world of the story.
When I taught essay writing at Yale, students write a different type of essay every other week — profile, action, memoir, idea, parody, review. One of the essays was a complete story about an artifact. It produced some of the best work. Students worked hard to find meaning in objects that could easily be ignored.
Find that artifact that matters. Find the chair roughed up by Type A personalities.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
Every new system for transmitting text leads to innovations in formatting and style.
We forget sometimes, but Gutenberg’s press helped to invent the clever little unit of writing called the paragraph. Before the printing press, most text continued without interruption, page after page. Which was OK at the time, since monks and scholars had few distractions and plenty of time to focus. No chirping iPhones or noisy neighbors for them.
The Internet has introduced three major innovations in style — the space between paragraphs, the hyperlink, and now the in-text footnote. Each innovation makes reading easier for the attention-challenged citizen of the 21st century. Let’s look at them in turn.
Double-spacing between paragraphs: For centuries, paragraphs have been marked off with an indentation. If you want to start a new stream of thought, you indent by three to five spaces. You could just hit the space bar three to five times. For you could set the tab key to move in as many spaces with just one whack of a key. Computers allow us to set the indentation for a whole manuscript at the top of the file.
But people using the Internet tend to be more rushed. Reading on a computer screen causes some eye strain, to say nothing of the hunched-over feeling while reading on a laptop of desktop machine. Internet readers are constantly tempted to click away from the text, not only by hyperlinks and ads and embedded video, but also by the cacaphony that is modern life.
Double spacing between paragraphs creates enough white space for the reader to find her place after getting pulled away for a moment. White space is also visually pleasing.
People in business and government had already started to double-space between paragraphs before the Internet. They understood that their text was often bland and clunky and that the reader was usually distracted. So they printed reports and memos with the white space between grafs.
White space has a tendency to reinforce the telegraphic pace of writing. Sure, we often write long paragraphs with white space. But seeing paragraphs as separated units reinforces our tendency to skim rather than dive in for a deep read.
Hyperlinks: Before the Internet, of course, the very idea of hyperlinks was just a fantasy. Who could have imagined being about to jump from what you’re reading to a completely different document or video in an instant? Maybe Alvin Toffler and a few other futurists, but the idea never occurred to me until it started happening. And, in fact, the early web used few hyperlinks. Now they’re everywhere.
Hyperlinking was actually first imagined by Vannever Bush, way back in 1945. Writing in The Atlantic, he mused: “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.” But it took computers and the World Wide Web to make hyperlinks part of everyday literary reality.
Hyperlinking, like most innovations, can produce either positive or negative effects. On the one hand, it’s nice to get instant answers to questions as you move through a text. When did Bobby Thompson hit that home run? How long was Shackleton marooned in Antarctica? Who discovered the dendrite? It’s also nice to get instant definitions for words, as today’s ereaders provide as a matter of course.
On the other hand, these hyperlinks can make us distracted. Sometimes, the best way to explore a new subject is to make sense of ideas through context. When we click off to another text, we lose the sense of immersion. That’s a huge loss. Not only do we lose the ability to plunge into a great text, but we also lose the ability to figure things out for ourselves. All meaning, as Wittgenstein taught us, is contingent. We lose that sense of context when we move away from a text, again and again.
The in-text footnote: If you read Joe Posnanski, the entertaining writer for Sports Illustrated, you know what I’m talking about. JoePo — not to be confused with JoePa, about whom JoePo is writing a biography — regularly skips off the subject for historic or philosophical asides. Sometimes you want to read these asides, and sometimes you don’t. The effect, as I imagine JoePo hopes, is a conversational style.
Conversation is a funny thing. Sometimes you want to follow every stray thought your partner pursues; sometimes, you wish he’d just get to the point. This is an example of the in-text footnote.
Of course, Posnanski could hyperlink to an aside. But then you’d get pulled away from the main text. You could also use a sidebar. But then the aside would not feel like part of the story. So JoePo uses the in-text footnote. I like it, especially for more informal writing. I also think it would work great for “serious” news, on topics ranging from Iraq to Newt.
These innovations democratize writing and reading. They make it easier for ordinary folk — as opposed to use serious, professional writers — to express themselves. I support anything that democratizes such an important activity. But it’s easy to get sloppy. Using white space between paragraphs, for example, doesn’t do anything to improve the quality of the paragraph. It just creates a visible moment to pause. And hyperlinks and in-text footnotes can create needless distractions.
Let’s give Aristotle, who lived two and a half millennia ago, the final word on this 21st-century conundrum. Do everything in moderation, he said. Avoid the extremes. Fit the practice to the challenge at hand.
Ask anyone about style, and they’ll nominate their own icons of pizzazz. Oldtimers talk about Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, John Kennedy, Louis Armstrong, and Grace Kelly. Contemporaries name Meryl Streep, Michael Jordan, Scarlett Johansson, and Denzel Washington. Writers talk about the styles of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Isak Dennison, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Laura Hillenbrand.
And so on. Style here concerns rhythm and tempo, glitter and surprise, shine and ease.
Style taps our desire for mastery, creativity, and originality. We want to stand apart from the ordinary, to be better than the rest. Even when we best the rest, we want some distinctive marker that we can call our own. Lacking that, we want to identify with someone or something else with great style.
But what is style? How do you define it? The dictionary offers a useful start: “a manner of doing something … a distinctive appearance, typically determined by the principles according to which something is designed.” Fine, but we follow all kinds of “manners of doing things”; we do not call all of them “stylish.” So consider this definition:
Style is a distinctive way of doing things, seemingly without effort. Style begins with a mastery of basic principles and then advances to some original and delightful form of expression.
As a writer, what does that mean? Let’s explore two varieties of style.
Classic Stylists
Classic style treats writing as a conversation. The writer wants to show the reader things, as if leading a tour of a subject. Rather than entertaining the reader with verbal pyrotechnics, the classical stylist wants to make the subject of writing the focus of attention. The classic stylist seeks to make writing simple, clear, logical, and delightful—and wants to make it look easy. Anything else is a distraction.
The classic stylist treats the reader as an equal. The reader knows the subject better, but the reader is equally intelligent. The two converse, on the page, as friends. Neither is superior. The writer just happens to be leading the conversation.
The classic stylists of our time run from Ernest Hemingway to John McPhee to Laura Hillenbrand. Kay Redfield Jamison, the author of a memoir of suicide called Night Falls Fast, is another. See how she engages readers in this simple passage about the complexities of the brain:
Everywhere in the snarl of tissue that is the brain, chemicals whip down fibers, tear across cell divides, and continue pell-mell on their Gordian rounds. One hundred billion individual nerve cells—each reaching out in turn to as many as 200,000 others—diverse, reverberate and converge into a webwork of staggering complexity. This three-pound thicket of gray, with its thousands of distinct cell types and estimated 100 trillion synapses, somehow pulls out order from chaos, lays down the shivery tracks of memory, gives rise to desire or terror, arranges for sleep, propels movement, imagines a symphony, or shapes a plan to annihilate itself.
Jamison takes the brain’s unfathomable billions of operations and makes them simple to comprehend. Rather than lording her superior knowledge over us, she explains how we, too, can learn what she has learned.
The Stylistics
If classical style means simplicity, clarity, and equality, its opposite means complexity, opacity, and superiority. For want of a better umbrella term for this approach, let’s call its adherents the stylistics.
Stylistics, reveling in wordplay and razzle-dazzle and discovery, go beyond mere description. They flaunt their knowledge and command of language; they challenge and unsettle and wow the reader. Stylistics make words get up and strut, dance, tease, trick, and otherwise play with the reader. Stylistics use language to express—to embody, imitate, and dramatize—the infinite oddities of life. As for the writer and reader having some sort of equality? Nonsense! Writers spend ungodly blocks of time mastering their subjects and their medium. Why should ignorant readers get treated as equals? Their job is to revel in the stylistics’ verbal pyrotechnics.
The ranks of stylistics include James Joyce, Henry Roth, Robert Penn Warren, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace. Take a look at this passage from David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest:
We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.
Like many stylistics, Wallace often meanders, juxtaposes seemingly unrelated ideas, pokes us from our expectations in order to reveal something fresh.
The Vast Middle Ground
Most writers work in the vast region between the classical and stylistic approaches. We try to lay down tracks that keep our ideas clear and true. Still, sometimes, we jazz it up—creating unexpected detours, pointing out odd details, even imitating the sounds and sights along the way … and not always caring so much about the destination.
Always, though, we need to know how to lay down those tracks. We need to master the core skills of writing before we can dazzle.That way, when we take a detour or ogle the sights, we do not crash or leave the readers behind.
How To Develop Your Own Style
Years ago, I met one of the seminal figures in modern baseball–Jim Bouton, who rocked the sport in 1970 when he published Ball Four, an expose of the outrageous and puerile exploits of big-leaguers. But as he aged, Bouton embraced the game’s traditions. Over his life, his style shifted from breaking the rules to honoring the game.
I introduced Bouton to my charges. They wanted to know: What’s the best way to develop the best pitching motion?
“Long-tossing,” he said.
Long-tossing is just what it sounds like—throwing the baseball over long distances, as much as 200 or 250 feet. To throw long, you can’t worry about what you look like. You have to lean back and then rock forward, slinging your arm forward like a slow-moving whip. Most people long-toss the same way, with just small variations for their size and strength. But long-tossing offers nothing fancy.
After tossing from the longest distances, you move closer and closer to your partner. When you get to the standard pitching distance—60 feet, 6 inches—you are pitching with your natural style.
And so it goes with writing.
Style in writing comes only after years of long-tossing. Without being too conscious of style, you learn to write great sentences, paragraphs, and longer passages. You don’t worry about whether you want to be like Hemingway or Faulkner, Wolfe of Woolf, Didion or Capote. You just create clear, lean sentences and paragraphs and passages. When you do all the little things right, your style slowly emerges. You develop tendencies—toward shorter or longer sentences, greater or lesser use of commas and semicolons, formal or vernacular speech, more or less use of quotations and statistics and other forms of explaining.
Everyone does it that way. Read early Faulkner. You see hints of his later serpentine sentences, but mostly he offers simple, clear, basic writing. Only when he mastered these basics–only when he completed his training with literary long-tossing–did he develop his own distinctive styling.
As you master the basics, pay attention to the maneuvers of different stylists. When I was first writing for publication—in a small weekly newspaper on Long Island—I idolized Red Smith, a columnist for The New York Times. I also admired Hemingway and Fitzgerald, read biographies, and pushed myself to understand some philosophy. I noted the maneuvers of these writers and occasionally copied them. Which is fine.
Mostly, though, you will discover that your truest style comes from the voice you find mastering the simple tricks and maneuvers of language.
The renaissance author Baldasar Castiglione, who in the “Book of the Courtier” (1528) introduced the concept of sprezzatura, advising his reader “to steer away from affectation at all costs, as if it were a dangerous reef, and to preach in all things a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura] which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless.”
But the word sprezzatura conveys more than mere thoughtless spontaneity, notes Mr. Boyer: it is “a matter of reaching for perfection, while cultivating the impression of never having given it thought.” By holding back, it “implies greatness unseen, . . . a strength held in reserve.” Thus the general mistake of the nouveaux riches is that they tend to put it all on display. The impulse, Mr. Boyer suggests, is akin to the owners of the French formal garden that was designed, in the supposed words of the playwright George S. Kaufman,“to show what God could have done if He’d have had money.”
That idea is close to the classic ideal of writing style. Show some pizzazz–use words cleverly, plant a surprise, add a dash of color–so long as you don’t distract the reader in the process.
The Appearance of Effortlessness
True style looks effortless. In sports, you think of style with players like Joe DiMaggio and Derek Jeter, Magic Johnson and Tom Brady, Arnold Palmer and Tiger Woods. In movies, think of Paul Newman and Meryl Streep, or even Gene Hackman. In music consider Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra.
Trying to look stylish is like putting on too much cologne or makeup, Again, Bering:
The problem with the dandy, a figure whom Max Beerbohm defined as “a painter whose canvas was himself,” is that not everybody possesses Brummell’s restraint: One can easily end up looking like an overdressed Easter egg or a rare and extremely poisonous tropical flower. “Your clothes should not in themselves be more memorable than you are,” notes Mr. Boyer. “Individuality should be in evidence quietly.” This is what marks the difference between the gentleman and the poseur. Mr. Boyer’s own preference is for a slightly faded elegance, “the mildly rumpled” rather than “the new and shiny.”
True writing style can be found in diverse figures–Papa Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver and John Updike, Joan Didion and Laura Hillenbrand. Read ’em, imitate ’em, and develop your own style without pretense.
Art uses different kinds of space. Visual art uses the area of a canvas, paper, or screen. Music uses the “space” of time. Cinema combines the moment-by-moment experience of music with the visual experience of art. Sculpture and dance use full three-dimensional space, one still and the other moving.
The concept of density shows how writers fill their space. In architecture, density refers how many buildings and people fill a given space. Old cities like Rome pack together people and buildings. Towns like Amherst, Massachusetts, have an open look and feel.
Denser communities pack more people and activities into a given space. They are, therefore, harder to understand, at least right away. You have to work harder to get to know, say, a block in Rome than a block in Amherst
Writing also has different degrees of density. Sparse writing presents ideas simply, without making too many demands on the reader’s attention. Dense writing, on the other hand, packs lots of different ideas into a small space. Unless you know your way around the subject, like an urbanite knows her way around the city, dense writing can be too hard to understand.
Dense writing uses more “content” words, that is, specific, specialized terms. In their study Writing Science, M.A.K. Halliday and J.R. Martin detail the density of five sentences. Look at these sentences below (content words are italicized, and density scores follow the sentences):
But we never did anything very much in science in our school. [2]
My father used to tell me about a singer in his village. [4]
A parallelogram is a four-sided figure with its opposite sides parallel. [6]
The atomic nucleus absorbs and emits energy in quanta, or discrete units. [8]
Griffith’s energy balance approach to strength and fracture also suggested the importance of surface chemistry in the mechanical behavior of brittle materials. [13]
We read the first few sentences easily. But the later sentences come hard. If we know only six of the eight content words in the fourth sentence, we might not understand the point. Even when we know all eight terms, we might still struggle. It’s just too much to process. Packing so many technical words so close together makes it hard to relate the ideas.
Distracted by bunches of complex words, readers struggle to process passages. So always look for the simplest word. When you need to use a technical word, define it. If you define it well, it becomes simple for your reader. Take the term atomic nucleus. Until we reached high school physics, that was a complex, abstract term for most of us; afterward, it became simple.
The master: John McPhee
My favorite model of simple (but not simplistic) writing on technical topics comes from John McPhee. Take a look at this passage from The Curve of Binding Energy, McPhee’s book about nuclear proliferation:
The material that destroyed Hiroshima was uranium-235. Some 60 kilograms of it were in the bomb. The uranium was in metallic form. Sixty kilograms, a hundred and 32 pounds, of uranium would be about the size of a football, for the metal is compact—almost twice as dense as lead. As a cube, 60 kilograms would be slightly less than six inches on a side. U-235 is radioactive, but not intensely so. You could hold some in your lap for a month and not suffer any effects. Like any heavy metal, it is poisonous if you eat enough of it. Its critical mass—the point at which it will start a chain reaction until a great deal of energy has been released—varies widely, depending on what surrounds it.
On and on McPhee goes, describing the most complex topics with simple little words.
McPhee he shows us what we don’t know by referencing what we do know. To explain density, he makes references to lead and footballs. To describe radioactivity, he reassures us that we can hold on our laps, without any danger, the same amount of U-235 that comprised the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Here, McPhee’s In Suspect Terrain explains the geologic foundations of New York’s skyscraping buildings:
The towers of midtown, as one might imagine, were emplaced in substantial rock, … that once had been heated near the point of melting, had recrystallized, had been heated again, had recrystallized, and, while not particularly competent, was more than adequate to hold up those buildings. Most important, it was right at the surface. You could see it, in all its micaceous glitter, shining like silver in the outcrops of Central Park. Four hundred and 50 million years in age, it was called Manhattan schist. All through midtown, it was at or near the surface, but in the region south of Thirtieth Street it began to fall away, and at Washington Square it descended abruptly. The whole saddle between midtown and Wall Street would be underwater, were it not filled with many tens of fathoms of glacial till.
McPhee sprinkles technical terms in this passage, but not so many that you need to scramble to a dictionary. Anyone with a high school education can understand this erudite, rich writing.
McPhee uses contrast to show New York’s in its deep hard geologic foundation:
New York grew high on the advantage of its hard rock, and, New York being what it is, cities all over the world have attempted to resemble it. The skyline of nuclear Houston, for example, is a simulacrum of Manhattan’s. Houston rests on 12,000 feet of montmorillonitic clay, a substance that, when moist, turns into mobile jelly. After taking so much money out of the ground, the oil companies of Houston have put hundreds of millions back in. Houston is the world’s foremost city in fat basements. Its tall buildings are magnified duckpins, bobbing in their own mire.
Because his words are mostly simple, McPhee can offer unfamiliar terms (like montmorillonitic) when he wants to offer precision. Like all great writers, McPhee offers value to both specialists and lay readers. Commonplace reference points, offered one by one, help us to understand less familiar ideas.
Above all else, McPhee shows patience, so he can introduce complex ideas without overwhelming the reader. McPhee is happy to take as long as he needs to expand our vocabulary as much as we need to follow his story.
Make It Physical
Picture a child curled up on a window bench reading a book. Or a commuter as she grabs a strap on a subway while reading a newspaper. Or a college student peering into a computer screen to read a blog or document.
Reading looks passive, but really it’s physical. Our job, as writers, is to provide enough energy—and enough emotion—to keep the reader physically engaged.
Specific, precise words help us to get the reader physically involved. Abstract words create a distance between the subject and the reader. If I read about the “collateral damage” of war, I will approach the subject with detachment; if I read about guerrillas or drones killing innocent people, I get a sense of the violence and feel empathy for the victims. If I hear abstract arguments about global warming, I feel detached; if I see the human tragedies of Hurricane Katrina, I respond emotionally.
But emotions don’t just prompt us to care. They also prompt us to think.
Consider debates about diet. When we think of “meat” or “poultry” abstractly—as just another commodity in the grocer’s refrigerator—we think shallowly. But when we think about how chicken farms operate—when we see the animals confined in small spaces without light, pumped with hormones, made so fat they cannot even stand—we develop a deeper understanding of the issue.
When possible, then avoid abstractions. Use words that touch people physically and emotionally. Use words that connect the reader with the subject, vividly and intimately. Then you’ll be able to combine the best of both heart and mind.
The brain loves simple, clear tasks. When you only search for one problem at a time, you stay sharp. You spot problems better and don’t run out of energy.
Therefore, follow this simple approach to editing: Start big, working your way to smaller issues, one challenge at a time. Let’s see how to do it.
Start by blocking sections. Most writing—even pieces as short as a two-page memo or a newspaper op-ed article—consists of a number of chunks. Each chunk presents distinct ideas.
Put a label on each major section. It’s easier to manage a handful of well-marked sections, each with well-marked parts, than a piece with 75 unmarked parts.
For each section, express a clear “umbrella” concept. Everything in that section should fall under the umbrella concept. If any ideas veer off topic, cut it or move it.
Make sure your whole piece starts and end strongly. Make sure all its sections do as well. Consider writing the first and last paragraphs before anything else. If you know the beginnings and endings of your journeys, the pieces in the middle sort themselves out easily.
Label ideas in paragraphs. Every paragraph should take the reader on a simple journey, starting and finishing strongly. Make every paragraph a mini-journey, following Aristotle’s narrative arc. Make sure you can explain this mini-journey with a simple tabloid headline. Make sure just glancing at your paragraph labels reminds you, instantly, about what journey it takes the reader. (More on this point in a moment.)
Check sentences for the Golden Rule. Make sure every sentence takes a journey, starting and finishing strongly.
Find the modifiers that make sentences run on and on. Sometimes it seems that crafting a simple sentence is the toughest chore of writing. As our minds whir with ideas, we get tempted to veer off track. Then we fail to make simple points.
Often, we get off track with prepositional phrases. Prepositions, remember, express relationships between things. The most common prepositions—of, to, in, for, on, with, out, from, by, and out—are among the 37 most commonly used words in the English language.
Prepositional phrases offer details about the subject. Notice how the prepositions work:
• Franklin Roosevelt was the son of a wealthy family from Hyde Park.
• Jimmy Carter came from a town in southern Georgia.
• I once lived in a house by the side of the Mississippi River.
These prepositional phrases provide useful information. But when you put too many of these ideas into a sentence, you lose sight of the main action—who’s doing what to whom. The reader struggles to keep up with the twists and turns.
Let’s look at an example from an academic history journal:
After the Second World War, the general drift of American public opinion toward a more liberal racial attitude that had begun during the New Deal became accentuated as a result of the revolution against Western Imperialism in Asia and Africa that engendered a new respect for the nonwhite peoples of the world, and as a result of the subsequent competition for the support of the uncommitted nations connected with the Cold War.
In this 72-word sentence, the author uses 16 prepositions—after, of, toward, during, as, of, against, in, that, for, of, as, of, for, of, and with. Each one adds a new thought, but pulls the passage off course. It’s overwhelming, like asking a driver to turn 16 times to travel a short distance. To rewrite that passage, I broke it up. Look at this new version:
After World War II, Americans adopted more liberal attitudes about race. The New Deal began this process. Revolutions against imperial powers in Asia and Africa created new respect for the nonwhite populations. The Cold War also prompted the U.S. to consider how racial strife damaged America’s image.
The revision breaks one monster sentence into three ordinary sentences. It uses 47 words, 25 fewer than the original. And it uses only five prepositions—about, against, in, for, and in—instead of 16. That’s fewer than two prepositions per sentence—a more manageable number of twists and turns for the reader.
Root out repetition and needless words. Most drafts contain meandering, repetitious, and clumsy phrasing.
Too often, writers repeat ideas by using just slightly different words for the same thing. Politicians say they will care for “each and every” voter. Business executives tell us that “first and foremost,” we have to cut costs. Advertisements offer a “free gift” for opening a bank account. We also hear people talk about future plans, end results, armed gunmen, unconfirmed rumors, living survivors, past history, actual experience, advanced planning, and natural instincts. Each of those expressions repeats a simple idea. So cut ’em!
Eliminate hedges and emphatics. Too often, when we want to emphasize a point, we use vague language.
A hedge limits or qualifies statements. By expressing conditions or exceptions, the hedge tells the reader, in effect, “I’m not completely sure what I’m going to tell you.” Hedges include words like almost, virtually, perhaps, maybe, and somewhat. Such words pretend to modify a point, but give the reader little real information. Writers use them to avoid taking a clear, distinct stand.
An emphatic shows strength of conviction but lacks adequate evidence or certainty. Emphatics assert something without showing it. As everyone knows is a classic emphatic. So are of course, naturally, understandably, usually, almost always, interestingly, and surprisingly. Consider this passage from a portrait of Andrew Carnegie:
The Carnegies were poor—very poor—but not quite destitute. Their home was a hovel, but not quite a hellhole. Allegheny, Pittsburgh, and the environs were ugly and just plain awful. But there were worse places in the world then, and there are now.
The passage tells us little. The author wants to emphasize points with locutions like very poor and just plain awful; he backs off his points when he refers to a hovel, but not quite a hellhole. The author would do better note the food the Carnegies ate, the clothes they wore, the size and furnishings of their home, and whether they had heat and water. Details, not emphatics and hedges, offer a clear picture.
Address details, one by one. Now address all the other problems: spelling and punctuation, noun-verb and non-pronoun agreements, adjectives and adverbs, dangling modifiers, passive verbs and imprecise nouns.
As you move from big to small problems, you’ll see something amazing. By fixing the big problems, many smaller problems disappear. Why? When we structure a piece poorly—with the wrong chapters or sections, arranged poorly—we lose clarity about the smaller points. Because we’re fuzzy on the big stuff, we’re fuzzy on the little stuff.
If you get the big pieces right, the smaller pieces take care of themselves.
Read to Others
Until modern times, most people experienced great literature—or even news reports—by listening to others read. This oral tradition, in fact, produced the greatest works of literature. Storytellers would recount, from memory, great myths, histories, comedies and tragedies, philosophical works, and religious works. The constant retelling polished these works over the centuries. Audiences acted like focus groups. When a phrase worked with audiences, it stayed; when it didn’t, it got cut.
The best way to edit is to read drafts to other people. If a passage sounds unclear or clunky, we see it in the restlessness or confusion of our audiences. Unfortunately, most writers these days labor in isolation. We read our drafts, silently. And so we lose the opportunity for feedback.
Read Aloud
Reading aloud helps you find clumsy or ungrammatical passages. Any time the reader stumbles over a phrase or repeat ideas, you know something’s wrong. It’s like putting on glasses and noticing the blemishes on someone’s face. Something easy to overlook becomes all too visible.
When the words flow easily, we know that we have done our job. So read everything aloud. Or transmit drafts to your Kindle and listen to a synthesized voice read it back. Ask yourself: Does one idea lead to the next? Can you follow the story or argument? Does the piece stay on track? Also pay attention to the technical issues, like typos and clumsy, wordy, or vague passages.
Pick up a great book—a classic—right now. Read something by Truman Capote or John McPhee or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Find the poetry of Wordsworth or Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings. Or find a well-edited magazine, like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. Read a passage aloud. Notice how the words glide.
Power Editing
Reading aloud has its own problems. It takes an awful lot of time. If you’re editing a book or a long article, it’s impossible to read without getting tired or distracted. After a while, you lose your focus. You’re just mouthing the words, without really paying attention to word choice, syntax, and so on. At some point, you start reading silently — which defeats the whole purpose. Soon, you’re moving as slowly as Heinz ketchup coming out of a bottle.
That’s what has happened with my new manuscript. I sit down to read it aloud, I get five or ten pages into it, and I drift off. Or the phone rings or email pings.
Frustrated, I asked myself when I got to work this morning: How can I do this faster and better? The answer: Do it faster and you’ll do it better. In other words, read the manuscript as fast as possible. Race through the text, as if you’re hopped up on caffeine or you’re double-parked. Let’s call it power editing.
Reading a text fast actually reveals the clunky passages better than reading at a normal pace. You can read good writing fast, but flawed writing causes you to mess up. So you not only get through a text faster, but spot problems better. Every pothole on the road shakes you up. So you mark the problematic passage or edit it on the spot. And then you continue.
You take the brain out of its comfort zone. When you read fast, you have to activate your whole brain. You have to concentrate. Your whole body gets into it.
P.S. This is exhausting. Maybe you can only do 2,000 to 5,000 words at a time. Most people, of course, don’t have to edit much more than that. If you’re editing a book or long report, you might have to do it in spurts. But you’ll get better results, faster, than with the slow Heinz-ketchup approach.
Sdrawkcab krow
To combat familiarity, read backwards. Read the last paragraph first, then the penultimate paragraph, then the ultra-penultimate paragraph, and so on. You will be surprised at how easily you can spot—and kill—bad and repetitive writing.
By reading backwards, you also see the piece’s outline clearly. Does paragraph 17 follow paragraph 16 logically? Does paragraph 7 develop the ideas of paragraph 6?
Athletes work backwards all the time. They imagine the result they want—say, a tennis ball landing in the corner of the court, just beyond the reach of the opponent—and then think backwards to imagine the sequence of events leading to that result. After imagining the ball landing in the ideal spot, a tennis player can imagine the ball flying across the net … then hitting the ball … then bringing the racket back to hit the ball … then getting into position, planting feet … then seeing the opponent hit the ball over the net … and so on.
Think of writing that way. Think of how you want to complete a passage, and then what came before, and then what came before that, and so on.
Everyone these days complains about students’ poor quality of writing. We need more classes, they say, to force students to master the craft.
But maybe the problem isn’t a lack of training. Maybe the problem is that writing instructors don’t always know how to write themselves.
Consider the description of a writing program at a top-tier university, in the left column. It’s full of jargon and academic nonsense. Then check out our rewrite in the right column.
Gobbledygook Version
The program in Writing and Critical Inquiry (WCI) is intended to introduce new students to intellectual inquiry at the university with a focus on academic writing. The seminar U UNI 110, required for students matriculating Fall 2013 and thereafter, is devoted to rigorous practice in writing as a discipline itself and as an essential form of inquiry in postsecondary education. It reflects the importance of writing as a vehicle for learning and a means of expression. It also emphasizes the essential role of writing in students’ lives as citizens, workers, and productive members of their communities.
Based on established principles of rhetorical theory, Writing and Critical Inquiry provides students opportunities for sustained practice in writing so that students gain a deeper understanding of writing as a mode of inquiry and develop their ability to negotiate varied writing and reading tasks in different academic and non-academic contexts. Through rigorous assignments that emphasize analysis and argument, students learn to engage in writing as an integral part of critical inquiry in college-level study, become familiar with the conventions of academic discourse, and sharpen their skills as researchers, while improving their command of the mechanics of prose composition. Writing and Critical Inquiry also helps students develop competence in the uses of digital technologies as an essential 21st century skill for inquiry and communication.
Writing and Critical Inquiry seminars are limited to 25 students, which enables students and their instructors to work together closely as they explore the nature, uses, and practice of writing. The small size of the seminars also provides opportunities for students to explore the rich diversity of thought and the varied perspectives that are an integral part of the university experience. Through shared experiences as writers, students will learn to think critically and carefully about the complex questions that are the focus of inquiry across the many different academic disciplines that make up the university curriculum.
Writing and Critical Inquiry provides a foundation for students to continue to develop their abilities to think critically about the world around them, to communicate effectively in written and oral discourse in a variety of settings, and to engage in sophisticated inquiry as a way to address the questions they will confront in their classes and in their lives outside the university.
Simple Version
Writing and Critical Inquiry (WCI) introduces students to the challenges of academic writing. The seminar teaches writing as a discipline and as a means of exploring a range of academic subjects. In our classes, we explore how writing sparks learning. We also see the power of writing in professional and creative life.
In the program, students write constantly. That way, they can understand writing as a process of inquiry in all fields. As they master analysis and argument, students make writing central to their learning. They sharpen their skills as researchers, master the mechanics of writing, and learn the conventions of academic discourse. Classes also teach skills in digital technologies, which are essential for writing in the 21st century.
Classes are limited to 25 students. In these seminars, students and teachers work closely together on a wide range of topics. Students learn to think critically about complex questions in academic disciplines.
Writing and Critical Inquiry guides students to think critically about the world around them–to explore complex topics and to communicate clearly in many fields.
Maybe we need a new approach to teaching writing. For decades, high school and college teachers have treated students as future academics rather than as future citizens and workers. Rather than focusing on thesis statements, academic terminology, literature reviews, and other elements of academic work, we need to make writing ]simple, clear sentences and paragraphs the top priority.
Of course, that requires finding teachers who write well themselves.
Let us stipulate, as the lawyers say, that the primary goal of everyday writing is to communicate clearly.
How, then, would you grade this brochure produced by Maryland’s BayStat initiative?
BayStat, the brainstorm of former governor and current presidential candidate Martin O’Malley, aims to use data to guide the restoration of the Chesapeake Bay.
The bay’s degradation has been severe. Sealife of all kinds–from many species of fish to the grasses which once made the estuary an underwater savannah–has been threatened for generations. Runoff of nitrogen and phosphorus and sediment has seriously degraded 250-mile long bay and its rivers and streams. So has overfishing. The natural elements that once sifted these pollutants–forests and fields, swamps and bending riverways–have themselves been decimated and degraded.
For a generation, people like O’Malley have been working to restore the bay to health.
This simple checklist of “10 simple steps” advises Sam and Suzy Citizen what they can do.
The problem is that the list is a grab-bag of unlike things. It’s as if I sent you shopping with this list: toothpaste, organic spinach, socks, milk, pencils, corn, coffee, a baseball hat, cat food, and this morning’s New York Times.
To understand ideas, people need similar ideas to be chunked together. Maryland’s list for Sam and Suzy is valid. But they’re not going to understand or remember their civic duty unless similar ideas are “chunked” together.
Like this:
At home
Recycle
Use less water
Conserve energy
Plant a tree
Shopping
Eat foods grown locally
Be picky about paper
Out and about
Drive less
Pick up after your pet
Dispose of chemicals properly
Chunking is easy but it makes a huge difference.
Whatever you write–memos, emails, flyers, articles, papers, and so on–make sure you chunk ideas so the reader can absorb and use those ideas easily.
How frustrated do you get when interviewers talk so much that the interviewee has a hard time answering? How often do you turn off the TV or radio because the interviewer thinks his insights matter more than his guest’s?
One interviewer who has never put himself above his subjects is Brian Lamb, the founder of C-SPAN and the host of Book Notes.
In his interviews, Lamb asks a series of simple questions and lets the subject answer. Lamb does his homework on his subjects. And he does not hesitate to repeat questions or ask followup questions. But he lets people talk.
To see how simply Lamb approaches his subjects, look at this compilation of questions from an interview of the late Christopher Hitchens.
Notice how almost every question is a W question – who, what, when, where, or why.
Now, for the full intellectual delight of this conversation, watch the whole interview.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
When I heard that Mayor Martin J. Walsh had announced the city’s first comprehensive plan process since 1965, I was surprised. After all, 18 years ago I was hired to coordinate the city’s first citywide planning process since 1965.
I don’t blame Walsh for slighting Boston 400, the process Mayor Thomas Menino launched in 1997. The initiative’s 250-page report never got released.
Despite his interest in downtown development and neighborhood projects like Main Streets, Menino was not a planner at heart. The Boston Redevelopment Authority’s planning director, Linda Haar, suggested the comprehensive plan as a way to demonstrate Menino’s “vision” for the city as he prepared to run for reelection. He took a flier on the idea. If it caught fire, he would embrace and promote it. If not, it would die a quiet death.
I worked full time, with one other planner, for two and a half years. We made community input the center of the process. We held more than 100 neighborhood meetings, in addition to seeking input from professionals on urban design, open space, transportation, and economic development. We also worked with planners at the BRA and at other city agencies.
Over time we compiled a detailed portrait of the city, with a modest set of proposals for improving neighborhood business districts, connecting green spaces, and promoting affordable housing. Our centerpiece proposal — to promote “transit-oriented development” — moved forward. So did a few other ideas.
But the mayor never showed much interest in Boston 400. He focused instead on separate projects for the South Boston Waterfront, Roxbury and East Boston, Harborwalk, and Downtown Crossing. One of his top aides pulled me aside one day to explain why.
The mayor will embrace the effort, he said, when community activists pepper him with praise for Boston 400. “Until then,” he said, “you’re on your own.”
That was, of course, a Catch-22. Neighborhood residents were skeptical until they knew Menino was committed. Well over a thousand residents showed up at meetings to share their ideas to improve their neighborhoods. But they doubted that the BRA would ever do anything with the plan. They were right.
When Menino ran unopposed in 1997, the whole vision thing became unnecessary. Menino’s strategy as a politician was simple. First, he stayed visible in the neighborhoods, where people loved his “urban mechanic” persona. Second, he brokered big deals in development all over the city. For Menino, every parcel and project presented an opportunity for a transaction. To his credit, he appointed strong managers to run the schools, police, and parks departments. Along the way he raised campaign donations that scared away any plausible candidates for his job.
A successful citywide plan has three basic prerequisites:
Strong support from the mayor. The boss needs to make the plan central to all its planning processes. Everyone in City Hall needs to cooperate or else risk the mayor’s ire.
Clear definition of the plan. What is the desired result? Is it a set of principles? Passage of clear, binding rules for planning and development? The launch of major projects on the scale of the Big Dig or the “high spine” of skyscrapers from the waterfront to the Back Bay?
A rigorous process. Above all else, planning requires broad engagement and clear deadlines. What isn’t urgent doesn’t get done. Planning also requires extensive input from activists, ordinary residents, and professionals. Today that means not only meetings and committees, but also social media to keep conversations alive.
Lacking these essentials, Boston 400 became a BRA orphan. Toward the end, we drafted a report that offered a detailed portrait of the city’s planning issues with principles to guide planning. The BRA director and his chief of staff, Tom O’Brien and Matt O’Neil, gave us the go-ahead to publish our report. Then the mayor fired them.
We tried. I hope Walsh and his team fare better.
Charles Euchner is a case writer and editor at the Yale School of Management.
To write, you must first generate ideas. You can’t sit down at a laptop and just start spilling out coherent prose. Just as a builder needs construction materials, a writer needs ideas. And you need to figure out how to organize ideas–what’s most important and what’s less important, how to cluster the ideas, and how to identify the ideas that will arouse the reader.
Yes, we’re talking about brainstorming. It’s a process of searching your whole mind, with few preconceived ideas about what you want to say. It’s a way of digging deep. It’s a process of discovery.
So how does brainstorming work? Actually, brainstorming takes a number of forms. It doesn’t begin when you’re ready to write. It takes place when you’re sleeping and when you’re daydreaming.
So let’s look at the major dimensions of brainstorming.
Why Brainstorming?
To explore any topic, you must start with lots of research. But also get your subconscious involved. Allow your lifetime of knowledge and insight to contribute to your analysis.
When you tell yourself to do something, the brain rebels. Think of our failed New Year’s resolutions. We vow to stay on a diet, exercise regularly, pay bills on time, or control our temper. Despite our sincere efforts to make change, we fail.
The problem is twofold—narrow minds and resistance.
Making resolutions narrows the mind. Rather taking in the full range of possibilities, the mind focuses on the command’s subject. If I tell you not to eat ice cream, what are you going to think about? Ice cream.
Whatever you decide to do, your subconscious mind resists change. Our subconscious is a complex web of memories, associations, fears, and desires. Many of these thoughts we repress, so they feel illicit. But they remain, under the surface. And when they are challenged, they assert themselves.
Start With Research
Before brainstorming, do as much research as possible. When you read a book or article, write down a label for each idea in the margins. That way, when you go back to brainstorm, you can review all the key concepts in a few minutes.
Now, how do you arrange these ideas? Some writers cluster similar ideas together; others show connections between opposites. Some writers list data in one part of the sheet and general ideas or principles in another. Others cluster major concepts with specific data. One thing you must always do: draw diagrams and lines making connections among the ideas and data.
Whenever possible, draw charts and pictures. Show how ideas relate to each other. When you scribble, you excite your mind. You move away from linear thinking—first one thing, then another, then another … —when you draw pictures. You can see a whole bunch of ideas, and how they relate to each other, at a glance.
Simple stick figures work fine. Use them to illustrate the relations among characters (who), their passions and activities (what), the timing of actions (when), the location of activities (where), the reasoning behind activities (why), and their methods (how).
When you write, you need to arrange your ideas logically. But don’t rush this process. To brainstorm well, you need to create a free flow of ideas, without too much order.
Dreaming
A study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, reported in the journal Current Biology, reminds me of my early days as a college teacher.
Back in 1988 and 1989, I was teaching fulltime at St. Mary’s College of Maryland while completing work on my dissertation. I taught three classes every week. Every lecture was brand new. I knew a lot about these classes but also had to learn as I went.
Every night, I was able to do all the prep work for two of the three classes. But I was too exhausted to prep for the third class. So, before turning in, I quickly reviewed materials for the third class. I made no effort to write a lecture.
When I woke up the next morning, I knew exactly what to do with the third lecture. I turned on my computer and completed the lecture in short order. That third lecture, as it turned out, was usually better than the other two.
The reason is simple. I primed my mind to do all the hard work while I was sleeping. My dreams took the raw materials — the review of class notes — and organized the material for me.
Ever since then, I have tried to go to bed with an agenda. Whatever problem was vexing me — as a writer, teacher, friend, family member — I try to figure out while sleeping. And it usually works.
I am fond of saying that writing is, more than anything else, a series of problems that need solutions. How am I going to organize this book? How am I going to open this chapter? What evidence do I need for this argument? What’s the best way to introduce a character?
Of course, you cannot solve problems without useful information. So you need to gather and consider as much information as possible before hitting the pillow.
The key to getting the brain to work while dreaming, I have found, is letting go. When I push too hard to solve a problem, I tend to freeze my brain. Not only that, but it’s also harder to fall asleep. You can’t dream if you don’t sleep.
So here’s the formula for solving writing problems:
1. Review all the information and the possible solutions.
2. Get away from the issue by getting ready for bed — brushing teeth, having a glass of water, and so on. Don’t eat or drink alcohol before going to bed. If I have even a glass of wine after 7 or 8, I have a hard time sleeping through the night.
3. If your mind is too active, take a melatonin pill so you can settle down and sleep.
4. Dream away.
5. When you get up, take up the problem you were trying to solve. Chances are, if you had enough information before sleeping, you will come up with at least one or two possible solutions.
Daydreaming and Doodling
When his friends and associates thought about Bayard Rustin, they pictured a restless man, moving kinetically at rallies and demonstrations, exhorting and advising Martin Luther King, speaking in his high-pitched faux British accent, and exposing himself to the worst kind of abuse because of his commitment of nonviolent action.
I had the pleasure of exploring Rustin’s life while researching Nobody Turn Me Around, my account of the 1963 March on Washington. And what a life it was. Rustin was probably the greatest polymath of the civil rights movement. He was a great speaker, strategist, theorist, writer, and organizer. He did more than anyone else to etch nonviolence into the movement’s DNA. And, for extra measure, he was a first-rate singer, a lover of art, and an inspiration to generations of activists in the labor, antiwar, civil rights, and gay rights movements.
Even though I can picture him speaking and singing and leading marches, my indelible image is of Rustin doodling.
When I worked my way through the archives of Rustin and the March on Washington, I found a number of his doodles. They were usually Escher-like images, with layers of squares that curved toward some destination. When I saw the doodles, I guessed that they helped him visualize the complexities of the movement in the tumultuous summer of 1963.
Then I found one of the interns at the March on Washington headquarters. Peter Orris was then a high school student in New York; in the intervening years he has become a doctor but remained active in social causes. He’s a smart and decent man. Did he remember Rustin’s doodles? Yes, he said. He was so impressed that he asked Rustin to autograph one of the doodles.
All this came to mind when I discovered a recent TED talk by Sunni Brown about the power of doodling. Contrary to doodling’s reputation — at best, it’s considered a lazy diversion; at worst, it’s considered a sign of moral laziness and inattention — Brown sees doodling as an essential part of learning and creativity.
She points out that doodlers remember 29 percent more of verbal content than non-doodlers. Even more impressive, doodling excites the senses. We perceive the world through four “modalities” — verbal, auditory, kinesthetic, and symbolic. If you can engage two of those modalities, you will work more efficiently and creatively. Doodling engages all four!
And so her proposed definition of doodling: “to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think.”
So, writers of the world: Doodle! Don’t press yourself when blocked. Don’t just make lists (so linear). Don’t refine definitions. Don’t just read more or interview more. Doodle! Awaken the doodler within!
Brainstorming: From Wildness to Order
When we ask ourselves questions, the brain responds positively. The brain loves scavenger hunts. When you state a goal in the form of a question—like “How can I avoid having a high-calorie lunch today?”—the brain shifts into search mode. It comes up with all kinds of possibilities, rather than resistance.
That’s why brainstorming is so powerful. It sends our brains into search mode. And when it searches, it opens up your whole mind—even ideas that have been buried for years.
So what’s the best approach to brainstorming? Start by writing down everything you know about your topic—on a single piece of paper. Look at all your ideas, all at once. Grab a big sheet of paper—you can buy an 11-by-17 sheet at a copy center—to hold all your ideas.
Get wild. Let your thoughts run free. Use the “divergence” strategy to generate as many creative ideas as possible.
What’s the divergence strategy? Businesses use “divergence tests” in hiring to find the most creative candidates. Here’s how these tests work. Interviewers ask job candidates to list all the ways to understand a word or phrase. Narrow, literal-minded candidates list only obvious ideas; creative candidates list a number of surprising ideas.
Here’s an example: Name all the possible uses of a book. You could say books offer reading materials, cutouts for posters, doorstops, and goods to barter and sell. You might use a book as kindling, weapons, writing surfaces, cutting boards, straight edges, fans, noisemakers, blotters, coasters, Rorschach tests, and symbols. How many more uses could you find for a book?
Divergence tests offer a good way to approach brainstorming too. The more ideas you scribble on your page, the more creatively you can explore a topic.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.
If you can turn an analysis into a suspense story, you’ll own the reader. And you’ll be able to offer a balanced and powerful critique.
When you pose a question but delay the answer, you create a state of anxiety in the reader. Just the right measure of anxiety keeps the reader involved. “Think of the brain as a prediction machine,” says David Rock, a business consultant and lecturer on cognition. “Massive neuronal resources are devoted to predicting what will happen each moment.”
To keep any reader involved—whether you’re penning a murder mystery, a biography, a sports story, or a technical or political analysis—create cliffhangers. Create situations where the reader frantically tries to predict the outcome.
Think of arguments as intellectual stripteases. Reveal only enough to pique the audience’s interest … and then, only when your readers get bored, reveal some more. Raise a question, then tease them with possible answers. When you conclude one point, tease your readers on another point.
One last point: When you use suspense to make an argument, you not only keep the reader engaged. You also have a chance to explore all sides of an issue. By lining up a number of “suspects,” you make it easy to give each possibility its due. If you treat each suspect fairly—showing how much it contributes to the outcome—you will earn the reader’s respect.
Consider this example from the field of economics. In his study of deindustrialization—the decline of manufacturing in the U.S. economy, with the severing of the “social contract” between workers and companies—Barry Bluestone wonders: Whodunit? Who or what caused this economic transformation? Why did manufacturers lose their competitive edge? Why did they pick up stakes and leave their communities?
One by one, Bluestone explores the possibilities as if they are suspects in a murder mystery. Is it technology? The service economy? Deregulation? The decline of unions? Downsizing? Winner-take-all labor markets? Trade? Capital mobility? Immigration? Trade deficits? Bluestone reviews the literature on economic and social policy. He finds a conclusion that avoids easy answers.
“What do these results suggest?” Bluestone asks. “[T]he answer to our mystery is the same denouement as Agatha Christie’s in Murder on the Orient Express. They all did it.”
That might not be the most satisfying response—you always want to point a finger at one villain—but Bluestone’s writing creates some suspense while educating us about a complex issue.
To make an argument successful, dole out details and evidence slowly. Don’t reveal your whole argument at once. Trick the reader sometimes. Make a strong case for an argument, then reveal its flaws. Do the same for other arguments, until you have sorted all ideas and come to a convincing conclusion.
This hide-and-reveal strategy has two great virtues. First, you will break down questions into manageable pieces. Rather than explore the factors behind deindustrialization all at once, Barry Bluestone explored those factors one at a time. Because he explored only one factor at a time, Bluestone was able to corral the evidence systematically. And so he was able to show just how important each factor was.
This post is adapted from The Elements of Writing, the only comprehensive, brain-based system for mastering writing in all fields.
Before you go . . . • Like this content? For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing. • For a monthly newsletter, chock full of hacks, interviews, and writing opportunities, sign up here. • To transform writing in your organization, with in-person or online seminars, email us here for a free consultation.