Category: Writers on Writing

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?

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Virginia Postrel has forged one of the more intriguing careers in journalism and letters. Once the editor of Reason magazine, she gave the ideals of libertarianism an inventive, modern twist in her book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (1998).

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.

Postrel could have spent her whole career elaborating on the dynamism/stasism theme … but that would not be very dynamist, would it? So she has, dynamically, explored other topics. In The Substance of Style: : How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness (2003), Postrel argues that style is about superficial surface appearances; it is integral to the social, cultural, and economic value of things. Likewise, in The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion (2013), Postrel argues that glamour reveals something essential about the ways people present themselves to the world. Talk about the weaving together of form and function: Her latest book is called The Fabric of the World: How Textiles Made Civilization.

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 . . .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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     • 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.
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Writing needs its own Mount Rushmore–a single place where you can get the very best advice on storytelling, mechanics, and more. Toward that end, consider these fine guides:

Marie Arena, editor, The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work (New York: Public Affairs, 2003). Five- to ten-page essays on all aspects of writing—routines, research, creativity, and style. Authors in this anthology include Francine DuPlessix Gray, Joyce Carol Oates, Scott Turow, John Edgar Wideman, Ray Bradbury, Edmund Morris, Umberto Eco, Cynthia Ozick, Carl Sagan and Kay Redfield Jamison.

Will Blythe, editor, Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998): Selections from a New York Times essay series by some of the most important authors in the world.

Robert Boynton, editor, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers On Their Craft (New York: Vintage, 2005: Interviews on every aspect on nonfiction writing — research, interviewing, writing, rewriting, and style — from the best practitioners working today.

Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (New York: Little, Brown, 2006): A terrific store of tips on the mechanics of writing, tricks to give writing greater meaning and life, strategies of storytelling, and the habits of good writers.

Malcolm Cowley, editor, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (New York: The Viking Press, 1958). Tricks and wisdom from the great men and women of American letters, including William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Truman Capote, and Thornton Wilder.

Stephen Denning, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005): Inspired by Robert McKee, a guide to business writing that helps lift writing beyond dreary memos and PowerPoint.

Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in Creative Interpretation of Human Motives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942): A classic of playwriting, with a focus on characters and conflict.

Angus Fletcher, Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence (Columbia University Press, 2023): A neuroscientist, college professor, and Hollywood story guru explains why the brain insists on breaking the rules, creating conflict, and shifting scenes. See my interview here.

Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks: Literary Invention and the Science of Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021): A survey of 25 key moments when storytellers broke the rules and invented new ways of telling and understanding stories. Don’t bother bringing a highlighter. Everything in this book is golden. See my interview here.

Jon Franklin, Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction By a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner (New York: Plume, 1994). Mechanics and art from an award-winning newspaper reporter.

Elizabeth George, Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life (London: Hodder, 2004). A practical guide, from research to writing and rewriting, from a British master of suspense.

Diana Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual (Boston: Bedford, 2004): A quick reference book for all aspects grammar and style.

Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose (New York: Broadway Books, 1999): A lively book that shows how to make writing zippier and more telling at the same time.

Ted Kooser and Steve Cox, Writing Brave and Free: Encouraging Words For People Who Want To Start Writing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). The former U.S. Poet Laureate and his editor provide a concise guide to every aspect of writing, from composing sentences to publishing books and articles.

Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, editors, Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (New York: Doubleday, 1994) : A collection of talks and commentary from the Nieman Foundation’s annual conferences.

Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing And Life (New York: Doubleday, 1994) : An intimate story showing how you, too, can use the best of your right and left brains.

Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing (New York: Random House, 2003). Everything that the late know-it-all knew about writing.

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (Washington: DC Comics, 1999): A comic book explaining how storytelling can merge words and images to tell a more compelling story. Amazing insights about how the mind works, how stories unfold, and how meaning shifts with different formats and perspectives.

Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (New York: ReganBooks, 1997): A classic work by Hollywood’s most famous “script doctor.” McKee understands the eternal principles of storytelling. Written for film scriptwriters, the book has inspired countless of novelists, nonfiction writers, business people, and more.

Louis T. Milic, editor, Stylists on Style: A Handbook With Selections and Analysis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969) : Great passages from great writers, with very useful commentary.

Larry W. Phillips, Ernest Hemingway on Writing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). Passages about writing from the late novelist’s books, interviews, and letters.

Steve Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (New York: Warner Books, 2002): A Zen guide to dealing with the emotional trials of writing.

Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures (New York: Portfolio, 2008): Using simple graphics to tell a story that communicates complex ideas.

Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, editors, Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995): An anthology of great narrative nonfiction, with strong commentary.

Sol Stein, Stein on Writing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995): The basic of storytelling.

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, with illustrations by Maira Kalman, The Elements of Style (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005) : The classic guide, updated with whimsical art.

Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Princeton, 1994): A detailed explanation of classic prose—briefly, writing that engages the writer and reader in a one-on-one conversation—with a “museum” of classic examples of the classic style.

John Truby, The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works (New York: Picador, 2023): A work of genius. A comprehensive guide to the 14 genres for storytelling, with detailed breakdowns of the “beats” in each. See my interview with Truby here.

John Truby, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller (Ferrar Staus and Giroux, 2008): A landmark analysis of the essential elements of top-level stories. Essential for any storyteller’s library. See my interview with Truby here.

Joseph M. Williams, with Gregory G. Colomb, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990): The comprehensive guide to “practical” writing.

William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (Collins, 2006). The North Star for generations of writers. If nothing else, read the chapter on clutter. If you have not read it yet, your writing will improve dramatically, right away.

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 do high achievers think? That’s the question Carl Beuke asks in Psychology Today. His take:

Positive affirmations are a staple of the self-help industry, but there is a problem with standing in front of the mirror every morning and saying something like: “I prosper wherever I turn and I know that I deserve prosperity of all kinds.” “I am my own unique self—special, creative and wonderful.” Or “I will be king of the world in just five days, I just know it.” It makes you feel kinda silly (and sometimes worse). What does research show about how high achievers really think? High achievers are often marked, unsurprisingly, by a strong motive to achieve. Less accomplished individuals are often more motivated to avoid failure.

Beuke offers six keys to achievement:

1. Success is your personal responsibility
2. Demanding tasks are opportunities
3. Achievement striving is enjoyable
4. Achievement striving is valuable
5. Skills can be improved
6. Persistence works

In essence, the gist is this: Take responsibility and strive, strive, strive. Beuke’s approach reminds me of Witold Rybczynski’s central argument in Flow — namely, that we need to set a series of goals that just elude our easy grasp and then care enough to reach out to grab those goals.

In my work offering seminars to people in all groups (from high school dropouts to Fortune 500 executives) I find another powerful strategy for high achievers. You need to script your success. Some people talk about vision and affirmation and afformation. But scripting is different. Not only do you envision an ideal but achievable outcome, but you begin to write a story that shows how you reach that outcome.

HR folks, for example, might ask new hires and longtime employees alike: What would you like your story to be at our organization over the next year? The next five years? Then you start to think about all of the challenges that you might encounter along the way and how you might deal with those challenges.

In fact, an article in the December 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review, by Gary Hamel, shows how the Morning Star Company does just that. Morning Star, a producer of tomato goods, runs without managers, positions, or salary structures. Instead, the company’s far-flung work groups — in manufacturing, marketing, distribution, accounting, maintenance, etc. — meet as groups every year and agree on a plan. All year, they hold each other accountable for meeting their individual and group goals.

Once they agree on their script for the year, they enjoy wide latitude. If you need a $5,000 piece of equipment, you buy it. Because you have a stake in the operation — and know you’ll be held accountable — you don’t make frivolous purchases.

In a way, the people at Morning Star write their own stories. And since their invested in those stories, they feel an emotional connection to their work.

To tell good stories, it’s best to be guided by an understanding of storytelling skills — developing a complete cast of characters, understanding the wide range of motivations of different character types, putting those characters on a narrative arc, understanding the obstacles on the way, etc. As everyone from Aristotle to today’s brain researchers will tell you, the classic story structure fits the way we all think about the world. When you understand this structure, you can make sense of even the most complex problems all around you.

When you combine this storytelling process with writing skills — which, these days, all professionals and many others need to get through the day — you have a powerful way to script high achievement.

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.
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This originally appeared at the Technology Communications Center:

Charles Euchner, the author or editor of nine books, is the owner and operator of The Elements of Writing. Euchner’s latest book The Elements of Writing builds on his experience in colleges and universities — at institutions such as Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Holy Cross, and Northeastern — and offers a sure-fire system to improve writing for high school and college students, journalists and academics, and corporate and nonprofit professionals.

(1) What is the top culprit in your judgment that holds people back from writing at their best?

Because of an outdated approach to writing — both in school and at work — too many of us have lost our greatest asset as writers. I am referring to our love of storytelling and our natural ability to engage others with stories. We humans are a storytelling species. It’s what sets us apart from other species. Other species eat, drink, find shelter, reproduce, even use language and tools.

We humans alone tell stories. And we do it our whole lives. But formal educational processes don’t take advantage of this. Kids’ activities in school revolve around storytelling in the early grades. But by middle school, teachers adopt a more “serious” attitude. They demand more abstract thinking, with categories and evidence and five-paragraph essays. Even our social studies books lose sight of the basic fact that history is a series of engagements of people, with all the action and mystery of a great detective novel.

Kids get turned off to reading and writing and seek out stories elsewhere — in movies, TV, video games, music, and gossip and flirting. To write well, you need to engage in storytelling. Of course, it’s also important to develop explanations and arguments, to look for patterns and test theories. But when you tell stories, everything becomes easier.

(2) Do you think creative and technical prose writing require different skill sets?

Yes and no. The core skills of writing are the same in all fields. You need to say who or what acts, and how, and to what effect. That basic template applies for all writing. It applies in a Hemingway story or a great movie like “Casablanca” or an opera like “Don Giovanni.” It also applies to an analysis of sales and marketing strategies, a study of safety systems at a nuclear plant, or an argument about what causes economic cycles.

The biggest difference is that the characters in creative works tend to be people and the characters in scientific works tend to be categories, and stories are about one-and-only events while technical writing is about patterns of behavior involving many samples. But the basic core is the same. We need to understand what causes what. What caused Michael Corleone to embrace the family’s business in organized crime? What caused the increase in cases of autism over the last couple of decades? What causes a computer to be buggy? What causes the booms and busts of an economy.

Lots of times, people mistake the surface appearance of a thing for its essence. That happens with writing. We see scientists used technical vocabulary and we assume that the core skills differ for technical and creative writing. But really, the technical terminology is just that — terminology. Understanding the lightening-speed transmission of chemical signals in the brain is no different, really, than understanding how a character’s behavior in a story. It’s just that the terms we use are different.

(3) What is the “The Elements of Writing”? Is it a formula to write well or something else?

The Elements of Writing is a systematic way of thinking about how people write and read — really, how people communicate. And it begins with our brain, which is the software system for everything we do.

When we understand how the brain works — what the brain “wants” and what it doesn’t “want” — we can understand the challenges of writing. We understand how to manage the process of writing — how to gather information, sort it, organize it, and express it, line by line. We understand what words get a rise out of people and what lines bore people. We understand when people get bored and when they get engaged and when they get confused. We also understand our own frailties. For example, brain research shows that we can only do one thing at a time. But all too often, writers try to do five or ten things at a time. Naturally, they crash, like an overloaded computer.

So we show how to break down tasks, one by one, and do things in a good sequence. It’s all very natural. But you have to be shown first.

(4) Writing for an increasingly international audience means writing in a simpler style with simpler words. Wouldn’t that hamper artistic creativity? What’s your advice?

Absolutely not. Simple is good. I like to quote Einstein: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Even some of the most creative and emotional pieces of writing, when you break them down, are quite simple. I sometimes show a video of Martin Luther King‘s famous “Mountaintop” speech, which is as soaring and emotional and complex as most writing. Then we look at the text line by line and discover that King uses nothing but simple words and short sentences. The power comes from the ideas and images he conjures up, his audience’s engagement in the speech, how the simple words evoke larger ideas and experiences, and so on.

We also look at a passage from John McPhee‘s work The Curve of Binding Energy, about nuclear proliferation. McPhee is describing a highly technical process, with all manner of technical terms. But he does it by using simple ideas, not overwhelming the reader with an avalanche of insider’s jargon. When he uses technical terms, he doesn’t throw too much at you too soon. And he defines the terms in simple ways, with reference to things you can understand. To describe the density of uranium, he tells us that 132 pounds would be the size of a football.

(5) What do you offer in your in-class writing seminars that a student cannot get from another source?

The most important thing we do is start with storytelling. Even if you’re a hard-nosed business person or a technical writer for a pharmaceutical company, we need to understand storytelling before we do anything else. I started doing this for pragmatic reasons. I was working with a room of more than 100 corporate people and the computer projector would;t work and people were getting antsy. I had to get their attention right away or I would lose them for good. So I started talking about stories. Instantly, I had everyone with me. I thought, “Wow, talk about a party trick.”

Only later did I discover that the basic structure of a story is the same as the basic structure of even the most abstract idea. So storytelling packs a powerful 1-2 punch. First you get people’s attention and enthusiasm. Then you show them the structure of all communication. And so learning everything — even the most dry, abstract concepts of grammar and punctuation and analysis — becomes easier.

(6) What is the best book you’ve ever read on writing well?

Hard to say. No book offers a complete guide to writing in all fields. That’s what I try to do in The Elements of Writing (available on Amazon). I used to worship at the altar of Strunk and White and The Elements of Style, but it’s not a really guide to writing. It’s a checklist of potential problems. It’s also outdated, written for a time when writers were a breed apart.

These days, we’re all writers. When I was in college I wrote an awful paper and my professor had me read William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and the first half of that is quite good. Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools is good, but doesn’t offer a complete strategy, and many of his tools are about the writer’s like rather than practical techniques. I once read a collection of passages from Hemingway. And I love reading the Paris Review interviews with the master writers of the last several generations, which are all now available online.

(7) What are the three authors that shaped you as a writer and why?

Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood is a virtual clinic in storytelling, analysis, sentence and paragraph construction, if you break it apart and ask a lot of questions about what he does. Most people love that book because it shows Capote’s mastery as a researcher. He reconstructed this awful murder of a Kansas family by a couple of drifters and makes it read like a novel. How he got all that information, how he built the story, is a marvel. But to me In Cold Blood is a true work of art not just because of the content but also because of Capote’s near-perfect technical mastery. So as far as understanding the architecture of writing, it’s hard to top that.

I also really like the narrative nonfiction of John McPhee. Because he writes for The New Yorker, McPhee has the opportunity to take one thing at a time. You never get the sense that he’s in a rush. Too many writers try to pack too much information into small spaces. But McPhee just takes one thing at a time. And that’s the only way to write.

The world is really just a collection of different things — people, events, processes of nature, ideas — and you can’t understand any complex concept unless you get a handle on the smaller ideas that are part of the complex concept. He understands also that readers need vivid scenes, but they also need a break from action. So he is a master of what I call yo-yoing — moving back and forth from scene to summary.

Let’s keep this list contemporary. I also like Elizabeth Gilbert. She understands sentences and paragraphs and scenes and summaries as well as anyone. I love using her story “Lucky Jim” to teach the structure of storytelling. Her book The Last American Man is also very good. She won her fame and fortune with Eat Pray Love, which is good, but she honed her craft long before that came out. Some day I’d like to talk shop with her. She clearly relishes the careful construction of a story, sentence by sentence, paragraphs by paragraph, section by section.

(8) What’s the most important thing happening in the world of letters these days?

Technology has completely transformed the literary landscape. Never before in history have so many people written. Partly it’s because we have to write. Bureaucracy in government and corporations means that we’re always writing memos and reports and emails. But something bigger is happening. With social media, ebooks, and DIY publishing, anyone who wants can write, get published, and find and audience. And that’s very powerful.

At the end of the day, people want other people to notice them. Until now, only a small elite could hope to find an audience. Editors and publishers were strict gatekeepers. They decided who could get their ideas published. Now anyone can do it. It makes writing exciting again. I am amazed at how much people write on Facebook and in emails. I have friends who see a movie and then send out an email and then all their friends and family are debating that movie all kinds of related ideas. The same thing happens with posts on Facebook and comments on web sites from nytimes.com to scientificamerican.com.

Lots of people who would have never have considered writing a book are doing so now. I’m coaching a technical guy at Microsoft who wants to write a family story. A generation ago, he might have collected family papers and scrapbooks but not have considered writing a book. But he knows he can write a book and sell it as an ebook and then, who knows, it might make it big. But he knows he can share it, so it’s worth making the effort. Multiply that case by millions and you have a writing revolution that is changing everything. It’s very exciting — scary for old-timers, but exciting for most of us.

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.