Tag: Writing

Paco Underhill on Shopping, Observing, and Writing

Paco Underhill, the son of a diplomat, turned his liabilities as a boy into his greatest assets.

Underhill grew up on the move as his father took new postings with the State Department. Living in Poland and Malaysia, he did not experience the retail riches of Western life. Partly because of his itinerant life and partly because of a childhood stutter, he learned to observe his surroundings carefully.

He developed those powers of observation even more acutely as a city planner, working for the Project for Public Spaces under the direction of the legendary William (“Holly”) Whyte. Underhill then created a consulting firm called Envirosell that analyzes how people use stores, museums, and other public and private places. Using direct observation, time-lapse photography, interviews, and data, Underhill and his team identify ways to make the shopping experience more engaging to users and more lucrative to retailers.

Since its founding in 1986, Envirosell has worked in 50 countries and with more than one-third of all Fortune 100 companies. He has worked in all sectors, in virtual as well as brick-and-mortar environments.

Underhill’s new book How We Eat offers a friendly guide not just to the shopping experience, but also to the larger issues of food, e.g., organic versus mass farming, small versus supermarket buying, home cooking versus prepared foods, and varieties of diets and eating traditions. Like his previous books—Why We Buy, Call of the Mall, and What Women Want—How We Eat offers insights into the everyday design decisions that shape human behavior.

Winston Churchill once remarked: “First we make the buildings, then the buildings make us.” Underhill offers a methodology for remaking the spaces of our lives. The $1 trillion food industry makes us, for sure; but with the right insights, we can also redesign the systems that produce and sell food

Underhill, a graduate of Vassar College, lives in New York City and Madison, Connecticut.

You started your career as a city planner and analyst—using time-lapse photography to track how people behave in public spaces. How did that come about?

I went to Columbia for a summer and in one of my classes heard a lecture by Holly Whyte. As I walked out, I thought, “Man, this is so cool.” It was a way to observe people and understand how the built environment worked. It made complete sense.

After I heard him lecture for 45 minutes, I knew what I wanted to do. And then I ran my own study. I looked at a pedestrian mall in Poughkeepsie and how the street furniture and signs worked. Then I knocked on his door: “Hello, you don’t know me, but I just did this…” That’s how I got my first job. That’s when the Project for Public Spaces was just launching. I became the first staff member. One of my first jobs was working at Rockefeller Center.

Holly Whyte was a magical guy. He had a gift of gab. I saw him entrance people at least 100 times after that first lecture. I learned about how he wrote and presented himself.

How did you make the transition from city planning to retail analysis?

I was a junior member of a crew that would go to different cities and look at traffic patterns and rewrite zoning ordinances. I was on the roof of the Seafirst Bank building in Seattle, 60 stories up, and there was a stiff wind blowing. My job was to install cameras and I could feel the building rocking. I did what I had to do, but I would rather have a job where I don’t have to go into the roofs of buildings.

A week later I was in a bank and getting madder by the moment and realized that the same tools I used to explore cities, I could use to understand a bank or a store or an airport or a museum or a hospital and deconstruct how they worked. I had never worked in banking or retail or even took a business course. But I knew something about how to measure how people move. It also helped that I came to it with a certain degree of freshness.

A lot of observations seem obvious after the fact—but they are fresh insights at first.

One of my jobs was analyzing a Burger King and its new salad bar. It was in the early 1980s in Miami. Yes, my job was to look at the salad bar, I was going to look at the entire pad. There were so many things that were painfully obvious, but to the marketing research team, were just completely new and different. When a man walks into a Burger King, the way he chooses a table is different than the way a woman does it. We tracked who parks in the lot and who goes through the drive-through. If you drove a Cadillac, you would use the drive-through. That’s obvious but no one had noted it before.

There are implications in terms of design and management. I started with restaurants, then worked on hardware stores, music stores, fashion, then food. I was able to come up with [store design changes] that someone could do in a week or two or even overnight. Business in those days was focused on strategy—McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group. I was able to say, “Here are five things you can adjust and make a difference.”

Some of it was comic. The first hardware store, I said the brochures are in the wrong place. They let me move them but at the end of the first day the manager yelled at me: “You’ve gotten rid of a week’s work of circulars in one day!” One of the first drugstores, I asked, “Why are the baskets only at the front door?” I showed them video clips with customers walking to the register with their arms full. What if we trained staff so that when they see someone with four things in their hands, the customer would get a basket? We did it and the average purchase went up 18 percent.

How did you learn how to observe carefully?

Growing up I had a terrible stutter. As we moved every 18 months or two years, I was more confident looking and trying to understand how things worked than asking questions. So I took a coping mechanism and turned it into a profession.

I also remember looking at Sears and Roebuck catalogues—toys and furniture and all these things. Nothing in Warsaw duplicated that catalogue. Going into Germany during a family trip, getting into the first PX, it was a world I had never seen before. I am not a material kind of guy, but I do have a passion about understanding how things work.

How can we train ourselves to make careful observations?

When I taught field work at City University, we were right across from Bryant Park. I would pick one person from the class and say, “I want you to go and walk around Bryant Park for 15 minutes and come back and tell us what you did. After he left I would pick out someone else and say, “I want you to go follow him and record what he did.” Then they would come back and we would contrast what the two reported. There were obvious differences. People didn’t lie but what they said and did was often completely different.

What kinds of habits—and what kinds of people—make for good observation?

Over the last 34 years I sent out crews of trackers all over the world. When I’m in an environment observing, I have to be very careful after doing it for an hour—I haven’t seen what I need to see. It’s often the second or third day when you really see and understand. So a lot of it is a Zen-like state of patience.

One man did 500 missions for me. He had a short career as a guitar player in a prominent early 90s band called Codeine. It had its own distinct beat. He became a kindergarten teacher. I found him doing substitute teaching and he was so patient and so observant and so rhythmic, with a slow steady beat, and he was so empathetic.

I also had an Endicott Prize-winning illustrator of children’s books. He would work for me for nine months and then he would come in and say, “Disney just optioned one of my books, I need to take some time off.” So he would go and then come back when he was ready. I would rather have someone great for 60 percent of the time than someone not as good 100 percent of the time.

How did you develop as a writer? How did you develop your informal, avuncular style?

In my early college years, I had a wall in my dorm filled with rejection letters. I wrote stories and even poems. I wrote fiction into my 20s. I took the skill set I learned writing fiction and used it in my nonfiction writing.

There are nonfiction writers who are trying to show how smart they are. I firmly believe in edutainment. If I can entertain you, I can educate you. I want to change readers’ prescriptions [lenses] in how they see the world.

How do you break down and manage major writing projects?

I have always been a writer of columns. The form I feel most comfortable is a 2,000- to 3000-word piece. People’s attention spans aren’t the same that they were when Charles Dickens wrote his books. Therefore, when I think of a book, it isn’t 12 chapters, it’s actually 50. I’ve broken it down so it’s easy for someone to pick up the book, read for a while and put it down and not feel as if they’re missing anything.

To write How We Eat, I had 40 columns, 50,000 words already written. It was a matter of piecing them all together. I learned from writing reports, it’s important to create a framework to start out. It isn’t as if you start at the beginning and go to the end. Get a frame and put pieces into that frame.

The modern book isn’t measured in pages; it’s measured in words. I was informed early in my career that to get read, a book needs to be 70,000 words.

Also, I also recognize that I need to keep vocabulary simple. As a column writer, I’ve been very careful about use of adjectives and adverbs. I should say careful, not very careful.

I have always been a storyteller. Being able to take business or nonfiction knowledge and do it as a story is very reader-friendly. There are a couple of sections where it goes from being a monologue to a dialogue. That’s part of what pleased me—the transition between one and the other. It makes it m more informal. It’s storytelling.

What writers have you admired and emulated?

I always loved the fiction writer James Lee Burk. He could describe smell better than anybody I knew. His books are formulaic, but he can go on for 1,000 words describing a smell.

Then there’s the foreign service man, Edward Hall, who write The Hidden Dimension and The Silent Language. Growing up in a third world country, even as a teenager I didn’t have TV. I consumed a prodigious amount of books—60 to 80 a year.

How did How We Eat develop?

When COVID hit, I had been working on the manuscript for over a year and had to take 60 percent and throw it out. A year ago, after having been battered by COVID, I gave Envirosell to my young employees and shifted to being a strategic advisor. That means my platform is a lot freer because I don’t have to worry about stepping on toes.

This book feels lighter—the style and flow and personality—than Why We Buy. Am I right about that?

That’s a very conscious effort. The purpose is to get to a healthier version of ourselves and our planet. I’m not going to tell you what to do but I can change the prescription [lens] by which you see the world. In changing that, you able to make better decisions. I was also aware I wanted to write for a popular audience. Everybody eats and drinks and buys food and beverages. Why We Buy targeted a certain audience and What Women Want targeted a specific audience. This one was targeting everyone.

Hollywood uses the “logline” to describe the essence of a film—a simple one-sentence line about the major character or mission. What’s your logline?

Mine would be: I want to change your prescription to get to a healthier version of yourself and create a healthier planet.

When COVID hit, we recognized that the world was going through a fundamental change. It wasn’t World War II breaking out, but it was global and there was a great deal of hurt. And it affected the structure of our own lives. I realized I don’t want to write a negative book. I don’t want to say, “Oh, man, are we screwed!” I wanted to write a positive and enlightening and challenging book.

The word I kept using is “post-pan.” I want to focus on the post-pandemic period. It will be over at some point. There are going to be some big changes and we need to be ready for them.

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How to Write a Thesis: A Definitive Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions

You are in grad school, working for your M.A. or a Ph.D.

To succeed, you need to write a dissertation or thesis. This is a major project–50 pages or so of dense writing in the hard sciences, hundreds of pages in the humanities and social sciences. Chances are, you’ve never written anything that long. What do you do? How do you start? How do you pick a topic? How do you set goals and organize ideas? How do you write? How do you edit your drafts?

Most programs don’t offer much good advice. Where I went, I heard “Don’t get it don’t right–get it done” and “Say what you’re going to say, say it, and say you said it.” Not terribly helpful.

In this post, I show you ten simple strategies that you can use–starting right now–to get the project done faster than all your peers. The trick is to break the project into manageable pieces, follow the right sequence, and do at least something every day.

(The post is most relevant for work in the humanities and social sciences. But many of these tricks will be helpful for work in the hard sciences as well.)

Start by treating the project as a management challenge. Good managers set a clear goal goal (the whole) and keep track of all the pieces (the parts). In some ways, writing a thesis is no different than running a grocery store or coordinating a lab experiment. To succeed, you need to break projects down, work in a smart sequence, get clear and useful feedback, keep track of all raw materials, and make good final decisions.

And so, without further ado, ten simple tricks for managing your dissertation process.

1. Find a topic that intrigues you–then constantly narrow and expand that topic.

You will live with your topic, 24/7. You better love spending time exploring it.

Yes, love.

Some graduate students select a “practical” topic–one that’s limited, with lots of data, with a clear research question that (might) yield a clear answer. Their “practical” thinking might include the prospect of getting a publication. If you do all that and still find a “practical” topic rich enough to intrigue every single day, that’s great. Practical + Intriguing = Winner.

But do not talk yourself into a topic because your advisor or someone else thinks it makes sense. Sure, explore all reasonable possibilities. But if you feel dread in the pit of your stomach, be careful.

For sure, you need to be able to do the research. You can only write about a topic if you can get access to the data, lab experiments, archives, interview subjects, and so on, depending on your field. If you can’t get the raw materials, you can produce the final product. depending on your discipline, you’d also benefit from colleagues with whom you can share ideas and critiques.

But if you don’t love your topic, you won’t have the zest to do the research and struggle to make sense of it.

So here’s what you do: Make a list of a bunch of different topics, then check them out for their passion and practicality. Look for the sweet spot — the topics that both fascinate you and promise lots of access to information. If you get lots of data, you’ll love the project more than if you can’t find any data. And if you love a topic, you’ll be better at digging for data.

2. Focus, maniacally, on finding The One Idea.

Most dissertations start out as a “topic.” But they need to finish as an “idea.” That idea has to serve as the North Star for everything you discuss. (For a detailed blog post on this challenge, go here.)

Let me explain the distinction. When I began my research, my topic could be stated like this:

Almost every major league city in the U.S. is now facing pressure to build new stadiums and arenas for its teams. When teams threaten to leave unless they get their new palace, mayors and civic leaders cave in to their pressure. And so cities (with state and regional governments and authorities) are spending hundreds of millions to benefit private franchise owners.

That was fine–to start. But eventually, I had to find my ONE Idea. Here’s how I concluded:

In the battle over team location, leagues and their teams hold two advantages: (1) They are part of a monopoly and (2) They can move. They use these advantages to “steer” public dialogue. If everyone in the community got together to decide stadium proposals, they would usually lose. Why? Because they do not improve local economic development. But the sports industry’s unique traits allow them to steer and control the dialogue and bargaining. So they usually win.

The “topic” said: Something happening. The “idea” said: Here’s the one factor that determines the result.

3. Carry (and use) a cheap notebook wherever you go.

Every day, you have 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts. Most of those thoughts are trivial and fleeting. You are happy to brush them aside as soon as they arrive. But you might have (I’m guessing) 100 thought that are worth keeping and developing. Those ideas arrive, unbidden, as we sleep and shower, walk and drive, doodle in a meeting and sit in a lecture.

Unless you capture your ideas when the arrive, you almost always lose them. Some variant of the diea might pop back later, but you can’t count on it.

Notebooking ideas also helps you process them. By transferring an ideas from a shower “aha” moment to ink on paper, you begin to transform those ideas. One idea leads to another. One concept reminds you of another concept.

I suggest getting a cheap and flexible notebook. Too many people spend $20 on a

4. Outlines for dissertations: Yay or nay?

Usually, the first thing your advisor asks you to do is write an outline. Don’t! Outlines can be awful straitjackets that limit your research and creativity and keep you from breakthrough ideas.

Instead of an outline, keep a running list of problems and ideas you want to explore. You might want to keep that running tab on Evernote, some other notes app on your phone, or your cheap notebook from Staples. Whatever works.

At first, don’t try too hard to organize the ideas. Once you have 20 or so topics, you’ll want to cluster them into different categories. Fine. But don’t think of it as an outline or blueprint. It’s really just an extended log of ideas.

Don’t worry too much about separating Big Ideas from small ideas. They’re all important. My nephew did a dissertation at Cal-Berkeley on robotics. His Big Idea was that nature offers powerful lessons for designing the way robots move and perform actions. But to explain that idea, he had to give lots of definitions, describe the literature on animal movements, explain ideas about miniaturization and batteries, describe distinct coding challenges, and more. You need all kinds of ideas, big and small, to help you explain The One Idea.

Another point: You can’t always know what ideas are Big and which ones are small until you develop them. The Big Idea of my dissertation, many years ago, concerned the structure of dialogue in cities.  That idea started out as a side note. As I got deeper into my research, I realized that it explained the whole issue. It started as a trivial aside and then became my Big Idea. Since you cannot know which ideas will bloom, gather them all. Don’t worry how important they might be until later in the process.

5. How do you organize your notes and research materials?

In many ways, an ambitious project is as much a management process as a creative process. Just as a supermarket manager manages the food deliveries, the departments and aisles, the equipment, the workers, and so on, you as a dissertation writer will manage your books and articles, notes and transcripts, lab results, spreadsheets and other data holders, videos, paper and electronic files, and, of course, fragments and drafts.

Your key tool is the folder, both paper and electronic. Into each folder, you can put all kinds of resources. To make it work, you need the right categories and sub-categories. In my work, I have two kinds of categories–topics and types of materials.

Take a look at the computer folders for my forthcoming book on Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 Western Tour for the League of Nations:

Click the image to get a careful look. The first column shows all of the major folders in the project. The second two columns show what’s in a couple of those folders.

It’s not always easy to figure out the best topics for the folders. They have to be as simple and intuitive as possible. You don;t really know what makes sense until you’ve gotten deep into the work. I renamed and reorganized the folders countless times. Every time, it gets easier to find what I want.

A good organization also makes it easy to get a gestalt view of the project. Any time I want to get a bird’s eye view of the project, I view my folders.

6. Understand the research challenge.

Some research will revolve around one kind of information. Research in biochemistry will revolve around lab work; research on literature will revolve around the text. But many research projects involve a wide range of research challenges. When I wrote Nobody Turn Me Around, a study of the civil rights movement, I used books, journals, and periodical; papers and oral histories in archives, museums, and libraries; videos and artifacts; interviews with both experts and participants in my story; and site visits.

My challenge was to blend together all this information to create a compelling story with a compelling point.

Whats the best way do do this? If you get into the habit of creating fragments, it will be easy. You’ll write about specific moments (scenes) and specific ideas (summaries). Different research materials will be useful for different fragments. Some of my favorite fragments for Nobody Turn Me Around came from videos; others from interviews; others from archives; others from a blend of sources.

Don’t decide to do a fragment based on a single piece of research material (like a great oral history or video). Instead, remember to figure out what One Idea you want to convey in the fragment. Use whatever speaks to that One Idea. It could be obe poece of evidence or it could be many.

7.  Write fragments first–and organize them into distinct categories.

The biggest mistake most writers make–besides using traditional outlines–to to try to write whole chapters from the beginning to the end. It cannot work. Any sophisticated piece of writing is really a collection of smaller fragments. Therefore, write fragments.

A fragment is a short piece about one aspect of a subject. It could be as short as a few hundred words or as long as 10 or 20 pages. It depends on the complexity of the subject, the audience’s knowledge of key concepts, the density of the writing, and more.

I first discovered the fragment idea while reverse-engineering Truman Capote’s true-crime classic In Cold Blood. Capote does not use traditional chapters. Instead, he collects and arranges short fragments into four sections. Each fragment takes the story one step forward–never more.

8. Don’t obsess about its overall structure … but do play around with the possibilities.

Every piece of writing is a journey, which takes the reader from one place to another different place. So when you organize your fragments and chapters, think of that journey. Where do you want to “meet” the reader at the beginning? What does the reader know at the beginning? Then, where do you want to take the reader? What do you want them to know at the end that they didn’t know before?

Once you know the beginning and end, figuring out the steps gets easy. It’s like taking a trip. When I took a cross-country trip, I could figure out all the middle steps once I knew I would start in Charlottesville, Virginia, and end in San Diego, California. I could break the trip into eight-hour legs, each of about 400 to 500 miles. At each stop I plotted my way to the day’s destination. I even decided when I wanted to take a detour, like my visit to my college pal randy or a few hours at the Grand Canyon.

That’s how writing a big project works. Don’t outline the piece in the traditional way. Instead, break it into mini-journeys. Go to just one destination in each mini-journey. Collect a bunch of mini journeys on different topics. Then when you have enough — it could be anywhere from 20  to 40 of them — see what order works best.

Great writers like John McPhee and Robert Caro create 3×5 cards or sheets of paper that note their books’ many pieces. They tape or tack them on a wall, stand back, and look at the overall shape … then move them around. They spend countless hours, at the end of their process, moving these pieces until they fight the perfect flow from beginning to end, in all the fragments, sections, chapters, and whole work.

9. Edit like a pro.

In every great creative work, the finishing touches can spell the difference between good and great. If you’ve done an amazing job researching and writing, congratulations. You are nine-tenths of the way home. But that last one-tenth can determine who reads it, what kind of respect you earn, and how it might evolve into a book or articles.

I have described a simple and fail-safe editing process in The Elements of Writing, but allow me to sketch out some simple procedures and techniques.

First, go from big to small. You would not begin a kitchen renovation with the detail work on window ledges and plates for light switches; you’d begin with the basic structure–the walls and flooring, electricity and plumbing systems, cabinets and appliances, etc.  After dealing with these big pieces, you’d move to smaller elements like furniture, woodwork, lighting, painting, and window and other details.

The same goes for big pieces of writing. Once you have gathered and organized your fragments into a whole work, start to examine all the elements. Start with the overall structure. Does your ONE Idea structure all the pieces? Do all the sections and chapters take us on a journey to that One Idea? Does each section and fragment explore one distinct piece of the whole? Does it start strong and finish strong?  Then focus on smaller details? Do all these pieces move, like a pendulum, from scenes to summaries? Do all the paragraphs state and explain one idea? Then focus on the granular details: clunky phrases and repetition, words and phrases, spelling and grammar, and of course style and flow.

Start big, go small.

10. Give yourself a productive (not overwhelming) routine. 

Writers give each other all kinds of advice on the writer’s life. Work in the morning. Work at night. Write at least two hours a day–no, four hours. Do research first, then write. No, write as you gather information. Stop in mid-thought. Set an agenda for the next day. Go where your information and imagination leads you.

Look, everyone’s different. You have to find your own routines. But I do have some ideas that everyone seems to accept.

First, write something every day. If you want to set a target, like 500 words a day, great. But write something. My experience is that you should almost always avoid big word targets. Why? Because you’ll usually fail. Better to say that you’ll write something every day than 500 words and miss your target. People tend to abandon goals when they fail to meet them. But you should be able to write something every single day. And here’s the magic: When you write something every day, you will often get into a groove where you accomplish more than  you would have ever imagined. If you can stay in that groove, great–keep going. The next day, just say you’ll write something. You might only write 250 words, but that’s OK. Your work will set you up for bigger days later on.

Second, read something every day. When I was in grad school, my friend Nathalie had to finish her thesis in a year because she was moving back to Paris. But she refused to deny herself fun exploring the U.S. So every day she photocopied and read five journal articles. She set aside time, between classes, to knock off 10 or 20 or 30 pages at a time. These articles accumulated and before long she had lots of information to explore her topic.

What you need to read will vary according to your discipline and topic. But set a reachable daily goal–and meet that goal every day.

Third, schedule your other work. Whether you need to interview subjects, travel to archives, or conduct experiments in a lab, keep some kind of calendar. We tend to do what we put on a schedule.  Again, don’t get too ambitious. But the more explicit you are, the more real these tasks become.

Fourth, avoid all distractions. This might be the most important tip of all. You cannot think if you get interrupted by texts, Netflix shows, noise in the apartment, friends who want to go get a beer, etc. You need total concentration. You will be at least twice as productive with total concentration than with fragmented work time. So when you work, just work. Focus on just one challenge at a time. Turn off your phone. Nobody needs you when you’re working. You’re not the president or CEO; you just a grad student.

Don’t just turn off your phone. Put it in another room. Studies show that a phone is distracting even if it’s off and face-down on the table. The phone’s mere presence is a siren song. Get rid of it. If you really love your phone and all its magical apps, think of it this way. If you remove it during your work time, you’ll have more time to immerse yourself in it later.

Do something to get into the flow. I often listen to New Age/acoustical music (my go-to site is Hearts of Space). Research shows that the rhythms and wavelengths of New Age music improves concentration. You get lost in time as you move deeper and deeper into your subject. When you need to puzzle out a problem, you can isolate the key ideas and think about their relationships. To me, the key to acoustic music is that I rarely tap my toes. If I listen to Springsteen or Rachmaninoff, I start paying attention to the music. My attention shifts from work to tunes. Somehow, this doesn’t happen with Libera or Andreas Vollenweider or Clannad or Enya.

By the Numbers: Distraction

The hardest thing to do these days is to concentrate. But that’s the single most important skill for writing. Here are some relevant numbers, from Deloitte Global Mobile Consumer Survey’s survey of 1,634 smartphone users in July 2017:

  • 47: Number of times smartphone users in the U.S. check their phones each day.
  • 85: Percentage of people who use the cellphone while talking to family and friends.
  • 80: Percentage of people who check their phone within an hour of going to bed or getting up.
  • 35: Percentage who do it within five minutes.
  • 47: Percentage who have tried to limit their cell use in the past.
  • 30: Percentage who have successfully limited their cell use.

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How He Does It: Robert Caro Explains His Research and Writing Process

So far, Robert A. Caro has published 4,816 pages of detailed, riveting history in five books–the first about New York’s master planner Robert Moses (The Power Broker), the next four about the life and times of President Lyndon Johnson (The Path to Power, The Means of Ascent, Master of the Senate, and The Passage of Power).

Those 4,816 pages do not include about 300 pages that Caro’s publisher forced him to cut from the first book. The problem was that that book’s 1,296 pages was the physical limit on what could be bound between covers.

Caro’s work provides some of the most revelatory and spellbinding writing in all of American history. The pages burst with new insights, not just about those two men bout about their times and how politics works.

It probably goes without saying that Caro researches the hell out of his subjects. The question is how.

Fans complain that Caro is taking too long with the fifth volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, covering L.B.J.’s five-plus years in the White House. After all, as he labored over that work into the fall of 2024, he was 88 years old. Not to be ghoulish, but can Caro even live long enough to finish? But as Caro explains, there is no other way:

While I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And finding facts–through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing–can’t be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time.

Researching the hell out of his subjects is just one of the many lessons for writers in Caro’s memoir Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing (Knopf). Caro’s brief work–and, by the way, this is the first and last time the words “Caro” and “brief” will ever appear in the same sentence–offers a master course in the art and craft of writing.

In this little book, Caro shows how and why he picked his subjects, how to find the throughline and plot the story’s arc, how to conduct archival research and interview subjects, how to write great scenes, explain complex processes, how to write with style, and much more. Here are a few highlights:

Subjects

The British historian Arnold Toynbee once said that history is just “one damn thing after another.” Clever line, but untrue. History is a way of revealing something about the human condition. A great work of history, then, aspires not just to tell a story–about a person or place, event or period–but reveal some truth about life. The purpose of Caro’s works is to understand power.

“From the very start I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the man I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times – particularly the force that is political power. Why? political power? Because political power shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about.”

To achieve this requires much more than writing one damn thing after another. For Caro, biography must serve as a “vessel for something even more significant: examination of the essential nature—the most fundamental realities—of political power.” And what should serve as the vessel? For Caro, it was a subject  “who had done something no one else had done before” and then figure out how he did it.

For another author, biography could be the vessel to explore art or love or psychology or sports. Whatever its purpose, it cannot be just a recounting of what happened.

Research

Discipline–exploring every possible angle, looking at every piece of evidence, chasing down every lead–is the key to all great nonfiction narrative. Caro learned that lesson early, as a reporter for Newsday. He once got a call about the corruption behind the disposition of an Air Force base on Long Island. Come see these documents, a source told him. And so he did. He spent all night reading the documents and taking copious notes.

His editor, who had previously ignored him, was impressed. From now on, he said, you will be an investigative reporter. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.”

He took that advice to heart, making it his mission to dig deeper than anyone ever dug before on his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson.But when he got to the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, he knew he had to be more selective. The library held 40,000 boxes containing 32 million pages.

No one of historical importance wants his career to be investigated without fear or favor. Historic figures spend their lifetimes creating a mythology. They do not want it dismantled.

Therefore, the biographer must start far away from the subject. When Caro started work on his Moses book, he refused interviews for years. So did his top aides. When Caro took on Johnson, most of LBJ’s aides were and friends and family were circumspect. So Caro draw a set of concentric rings on a piece of paper.

The innermost circle with his family, friends, and close associates, and I was prepared to believe that he could keep me from seeing them, and probably the persons in the next circle or two, also. But surely, I felt, there would be people in the outer circles – people who knew him but were not in regular contact with him – who would be willing to talk to me. And, in fact, there were, and, as I was later to be told, Commissioner Moses was more and more frequently encountering people who, unaware of his feelings, said that this young reporter had been to see them.

To know a subject, Caro suggests, you need to find a way to get the subject’s colleagues and family and neighbors talk. You can’t just show up and expect people to talk. You have to show a commitment to really know the subject. And so Johnson moved to Texas. It was then that people started to tell him more than the hackneyed old stories: “I began to hear the details they have not included in the anecdotes they had previously told me – and they told me other anecdotes and longer stories, anecdotes and stories that no one had even mentioned to me before–stories about a Lyndon Johnson very different from the young man who had previously been portrayed.”

Interviewing

Interviewers have to be persistent and reach their subjects on a deeper tlevel than they even understand themselves. But sometimes they also need to be manipulated. As a reporter for Newsday, he was working with a reporter named Bob Greene to expose a charitable organization that was using “the bulk of its money on a luxurious lifestyle for the director and his mistress.” They had the evidence but needed the organization’s director to acknowledge it. “When you talk to him, don’t sit too close together,” their editor, Alan Hathway, told them. “Caro, you sit over here. Greene, sit over there. You fire these questions fast—Caro, you ask one; Greene, you ask one—I want his head going back-and-forth like a ping-pong ball.” The ploy worked. the director got rattled and revealed more than he intended. They had their story.

After Caro worked on The Power Broker for years, Moses agreed to a series of long interviews. Caro had done so much work that Moses had to give him time now if he wanted his point of view in this definitive work. Now Caro’s task was to take in all that Moses had to offer.

Silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it–as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer. … When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break the silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write SU (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of SU’s there.

It’s just a dogged pursuit of facts. No good interview is possible without the research to back it up. You interview someone to learn more things–but before that, you need to have enough facts to push and prod the subject. When you know some significant part of the story, then listening becomes golden.

When interviewing people, Caro pushes them–to the point of annoyance–to describe what they saw and heard and felt. It’s not enough to say the limo ride from the Capitol was quiet; Caro wants to know what that quiet was like. It’s not enough to decry the viciousness of racism; Caro wants to know what it felt like for blacks to attempt, time and again, to register to vote and get rejected by cracker election officials.

If you talk to people long enough, if you talk to them enough times, you find out things from them that maybe they didn’t even realize they knew.… My interviewees sometimes get quite annoyed at me because I keep asking them “What did you see?” “If I was standing beside you at the time, what would I have seen?” I’ve had people get really angry at me. But if you ask it often enough, sometimes you make them see.

Caro prods interviewees to remember what it was like to sit in a particular place or walk along a particular road. Sometimes they tell him but it doesn’t make sense until he recreates the scene.

One scene is especially notable. When he first came to Washington as a congressional assistant, LBJ would arrive at the office out of breath. On the last part of his morning walk to the capitol, he broke into a run. Why? Caro retraced the steps, again and again, but didn’t notice anything. Then he realized that he should retrace LBJ’s trip early in the morning.

At 5:30 in the morning, the sun is just coming up over the horizon in the east. Its level rays are striking that eastern façade of the capital full force. It’s lit up like a movie set. That whole long facade—750 feet long—it’s white, of course, white marble, and that white marble just blazes out at you as the sun hits it.

With that extra effort, Caro was able to be there–in the same time and place as the  excited young congressional aide would would become president–and put the reader in the same place. That one moment captures the excitement better than anything else could.

Puzzles

All great stories present puzzles inside puzzles. The ultimate puzzle is about the characters and the vents of the story. Who is he? What makes him tick? Why does he do what he does? Why did X happen and not Y?

To understand complex topics, look for the moments when something big changes. Notice the turning points, even if no one has ever seen those moments that way before. While interviewing the LBJ story, poring though archives, Caro noticed a change in tone in letters written to LBJ early in his congressional career. In his earliest years in Congress, LBJ looked like every young legislator. He sought the favor of his seniors. Then the letters showed something different. “in which they were doing the beseeching, asking for a few minutes of his time. What was the reason for the change? Was there a particular time at which it had occurred?” Caro pursued the puzzle until he discovered the reason. Johnson got monied interests to funnel contributions to Congressmen though him. Suddenly LBJ was the money man on the hill.

One of the oldest puzzles concerned the 1948 Senate race. After Coke Stevenson was declared the winner, a recount in Precinct 13 found 200 extra votes for Johnson and two for Stevenson. That gave the election to LBJ. Most people treated the election as a “Texas size joke, with stealing by both sides.” But Caro needed to know. After searching bars and other old haunts, Caro finally found Luis Salas, the man behind the discovery of those extra votes.For years Salas lived in Mexico, but he had recently moved back to a trailer park in Texas. Salas not only agreed to talk, but also to share his memoir of the incident. He wrote the memoir because “I am running short of time, feel sick and tired… Before I go beyond this world, I had to tell the truth.” No one had ever gotten this first-hand account–this confession–before. And so the mystery was settled. LBJ did steal the election.

Exemplars

Caro’s books are known for their heft. He’s written thousands of pages on his two subjects. He offers detailed examination of complex topics and intimate portraits of the people and places and scenes. But in those books are smaller stories that serve as parables for the larger epics. They are intimate accounts of ordinary people and how their lives were affected by these two political giants.

The most excerpted section of The Power Broker, a chapter called “One Mile,” tells how Robert Moses built the Cross-Bronx Expressway right through the neighborhood of East Tremont. This route led to the demolition of 54 six- and seven-story apartment buildings. He could have shifted the highway just two blocks and only demolished only six buildings. Community people asked him to do just that but he refused. Caro’s story is a devastating story of the destructiveness of power–and the callousness of the man behind it.

In the LBJ books, Caro tells of how electrification transformed the lives of rural Texans … how civil rights laws overturned brutal systems of racism … how LBJ began to use his ruthless tactics to control campus politics as a college student … his his brief period teaching in rural Texas have him empathy for the poor and dispossessed. These stories ring with energy and power because they are about ordinary people and how their lives were shaped by the was power was deployed.

Being There

To understand LBJ, Caro learned, he had to understand his father Sam. As he learned Sam’s story, Johnson’s cousin Ava decided Caro needed a reality check. He needed to see how foolish Sam was to settle in the Hill Country. So she told Caro to drive her to the Johnson ranch. When they got there she told him: “Now kneel down.” He did. “Now stick your fingers into the ground.” He could not move the whole length of a finger into the ground. The land had almost no topsoil. It looked like a lush land with its endless expanse of grass. But it could not produce anything. Sam was snookered by the appearance. Lyndon vowed not to make the same mistake.

Most biographies depicted Johnson as a popular BMOC in college. But Caro heard lots of rumblings that this was a myth. One of Johnson’s old classmates, Ella So Relle, grew agitated when Caro kept asking questions. “I don’t know why you’re asking all these questions,” she said. “It’s all there in black-and-white.” Where? In the Pedagog, the college yearbook. Caro had read it and found nothing of interest on Johnson. He want back and looked his his copy and again found nothing there.

He called Ella and asked her to tell him what pages she was talking about. Those pages had been skillfully razored out of the book. When Caro went to a local used bookstore to see other copies, the pages in question were also cut. Finally he found a complete copy, filled with stories alluding to Johnson’s early days as a political manipulator.

Writing

Before writing the actual draft of a book, Caro tries to articulate the point he wants to make. He writes one to three paragraphs that summarize the driving idea of the book. The process can take weeks. So what might this summary say. Caro summarizes his first Johnson book, The Path to Power:

That first volume tries to show what the country was like that Johnson came out of, why he wanted so badly to get out of it, how he got out of it, and how he got his first national power in Washington through the use of money. That’s basically the first volume–at the end of it, he loses his first Senate seat, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to come back. When you distill the book down like that, a lot become so much easier.

With that North Star, he begins to write an outline of the book. He posts those pages on his wall so he can see the whole book at a glance. Then he writes detailed outlines of chapters, which is really the whole chapter without the details. A long chapter might get a seven-page brief. Then, each chapter gets its own notebook, filled with all the chapter’s stories and quotations and facts.

Caro writes his drafts longhand on white legal pads, three or four times. Then he types these drafts on an old electric typewriter, using legal paper and triple spacing to leave lots of room for editing. Some drafts have more pencil marks than type.

He starts each day by reading the previous day’s output. “More and more frequently when I reread the stuff I wrote in the late afternoon the day before, it was no good and I had to throw it out. So there was no sense in working late; I stop earlier now.”

Writing takes enormous concentration. “Any interruption is a shock, a real jolt,” he writes. Once, working at the Frederick Lewis Allen Room at the New York Public Library, someone tapped his shoulder to go to lunch. “I found myself on my feet with my fist drawn back to punch the guy,” Caro says.

Research and early drafts make art possible. It’s the Michaelangelo Principle: To produce art, you chip and carve a massive hunk of granite until you find, inside it, your own David. Caro’s original drafts of The Power Broker were more than a million words. He cut that down to 700,000 words.

Style

When writing the preface for The Power Broker, Caro struggled to describe just how totally Robert Moses had transformed New York with bridges, highways, tunnels, beaches, parks, housing, dams, and more. Then he remembered reading Homer’s Iliad in college. Homer listed all the nations and all the ships that went to fight in the Trojan War. The epic’s use of dactylic hexameter gave this list a sense of drama. And so Caro, in describing the long list of Moses projects, made them sail across the page, as if ships going to Troy.

“I thought I could have a rhythm that builds, and then change it abruptly in the last sentence,” Caro remembers. “Rhythm matters. Mood matters. Sense of place matters. All these things we talk about with novels, yet I feel that for history and biography to accomplish what they should accomplish, they should have to pay as much attention to these devices as novels do.”

Genius

Lyndon Johnson was one of America’s greatest tragic heroes, a Shakespearean figure who transformed a nation but got brought down by his own demons. Johnson, Caro says, had “a particular kind of vision, of imagination, that was unique and so intense that it amounted to a very rare form of genius – not the genius of a poet or the artist, which was the way I had always thought about genius, but the type of genius that was, in its own way just as creative: a leap of imagination that could look at a barren, empty landscape and conceive on it, in a flash of inspiration, a colossal public work, a permanent, enduring creation.”

Here’s my definition for genius in a nonfiction writer: Someone who is intensely curious about the world and how it works, someone who wants to show it whole but also reveal its contradictions. To achieve this ambition, the writer restlessly explores issues that others consider settled or uninteresting or beyond anyone’s ability to know. This restless exploration depends on a commitment to facts–gathering them, checking them, making sense of them. And then, when the facts are gathered and organized, they are used to construct a work that reveals something fresh about how the world works.

By this definition, I think we’d have to say that Robert Caro is a genius. His body of work is as great as that of any biographer–or maybe any nonfiction writer, or maybe even any writer–now alive.

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The Story of Bill Nack’s Classic Farewell to Secretariat

I wrote this brief tribute after Bill Nack died in 2018.

When I think of Bill Nack, I want to call him one of the great sportswriters of our time. But he was really one of the great writers, in any field, of our time.

The reason is threefold. First of all, he was a hell of a reporter–dogged, tireless, determined to keep working till he got all the details right. Second, he was a great stylist. He did things with words that I never saw anyone else do. He built every sentence on a strong foundation. On that foundation he worked magic, with revealing ideas and images and telling phrases made possible by his first-rate intellect and great reporting.

Third, he had a great heart. He cared about everything he did. In one of my favorite pieces, Bill was assigned to find the mad genius Bobby Fischer, the chess master who degenerated into a ranter of anti-Semitism and ugly conspiracy theories. Ahab sought his whale with gusto. He worked his networks and tracked rumors and sightings. At one point, Bill found himself at the Los Angeles Public Library, which Fischer was rumored to haunt. Then … there he was! Bobby Fischer! But when Bill found his whale, he let him go. Whatever Fischer’s news value and however crazy his behavior, Bill decided, he should be left alone. The search, it turns out, was the story. Bill not only knew how to go; he also knew how to stop.

America was wild for Secretariat during his Triple Crown run in 1973.

Secretariat: Bill’s Greatest Subject

Everything Bill did, he did with heart. He was most famous for his masterful book about the racehorse Secretariat. During that magical summer of 1973, when Secretariat electrified the Watergate-weary nation in his romp to the Triple Crown, Bill knew the horse better than anyone. In the weeks before the Belmont Stakes, he lived in the stables with the horse. He knew everyone in racing because he loved his subject and he wanted to share it with others.

I met Bill in 1978 when he was a columnist for Newsday and lived in Huntington, N.Y., my hometown. He called me after I won a scholarship to Vanderbilt (for which he had been a judge the year before) and we went to lunch at a Greek joint on New York Avenue and then to his house near Huntington Bay. We talked about books and writing. He gave me a collection of essays by Dwight McDonald. His daughter danced in and out of the room. Over the years we connected once in a while.

Years later, when I was teaching writing at Yale, I decided to use Bill’s brilliant piece “Pure Heart,” about the death of Secretariat. I wrote to him to learn how he came to write the story the way he did.

‘Pure Heart’: Brief Excerpts

To set the stage, Bill’s story begins like this:

Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion barn, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular. Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Ky., where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.

“We were all shocked,” Swerczek said. “I’ve seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did.”

Soon we understand that “the horse” is Secretariat and we get a glimpse into Bill’s passion. He writes:

Oh, I knew all the stories, knew them well, had crushed and rolled them in my hand until their quaint musk lay in the saddle of my palm. Knew them as I knew the stories of my children. Knew them as I knew the stories of my own life. Told them at dinner parties, swapped them with horseplayers as if they were trading cards, argued over them with old men and blind fools who had seen the show but missed the message. Dreamed them and turned them over like pillows in my rubbery sleep. Woke up with them, brushed my aging teeth with them, grinned at them in the mirror. Horses have a way of getting inside you, and so it was that Secretariat became like a fifth child in our house, the older boy who was off at school and never around but who was as loved and true a part of the family as Muffin, our shaggy, epileptic dog.

On a trip to Kentucky, Bill learns that Secretariat has a terminal illness. Over the years, he has visited Secretariat on a regular basis. He decides to visit the horse and his keepers, one last time. The story ends when Bill hears the news, on the phone in his hotel room, that Secretariat has died.

The last time I remember really crying was on St. Valentine’s Day 1982, when my wife called to tell me that my father had died. At the moment she called, I was sitting in a purple room in Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas, waiting for an interview with the heavyweight champion, Larry Holmes. Now here I was in a different hotel room in a different town, suddenly feeling like a very old and tired man of 48, leaning with my back against a wall and sobbing for a long time with my face in my hands.

I love “Pure Heart” because it is the perfect alchemy of mind, heart, and soul. It’s a personal story, told with emotion, but there’s not a manipulative word in the whole piece. There’s something deeply true in the story.

How Did Bill Write ‘Pure Heart’?

When I wrote to Bill asking for the story behind “Pure Heart,” I did not expect such a robust response. But Bill was a generous man with a love of writing. He liked to talk shop. Here’s what he said:

I didn’t even want to write “Pure Heart” after Secretariat’s death. I had been writing about him for so many years, in so many forms, that I felt I’d written enough. But my best friend, Time sports editor Tom Callahan, urged me on several occasions over the winter of 1989-90–the months after the horse died–to do a final piece for Sports Illustrated as a way of bringing the whole saga full circle.

I resisted, not wanting to revisit the feelings of loss, all the emotions it would engender, until I finally faced the idea that I had to write it, that I owed it to the story to finish it.

That early spring I broached the idea of a final, first-person memoir with SI‘s managing editor, Mark Mulvoy. He immediately told me to get started. I wrote it in one 24-hour day of Derby Week in Louisville, at the Galt House, beginning it at 9 a.m. on Wednesday morning and finishing it at 9 a.m. on Thursday morning.

The Story of the Ending

I had told a couple of the editors about the autopsy report revealing the massive heart, and they loved it. When I wrote the end of the story as it finally appeared, about me finding out the horse had died and my reaction to the news, I then spent three more exhausting hours trying to figure out a way to flash forward to the autopsy, but none of my ideas worked. The ending with me standing in that room sobbing with my back against the wall was the natural end of the story, but I was determined to get that anecdote in.

Around noon, the magazine’s executive editor, Peter Carry, called and said, “Bill, What are you doing? I heard you are trying to write a new ending to include that autopsy report.” I said I was. “Don’t. Stop. Leave the ending alone. We’re considering using the autopsy at the beginning of the story, as a precede.”

The Story of the Beginning

An hour later, editor David Bauer called and asked me to write a 200-word precede about the horse’s death and the autopsy that followed. “Where are you going to put it?” I asked. “At the beginning. As a precede that will run in large type before the actual story.”

“This is going to ruin the lead,” I said. “It’ll be like we had two leads and couldn’t decide which one to use, so we ran both of them.”

“No, it won’t,” David said. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see. And don’t mention the horse’s name. Just call him ‘The horse.’ The reader will figure it out. We want to use the autopsy story but it does not fit at the end. You couldn’t have written a better ending and any kind of postscript would ruin it. So just give me 200 words about the horse being put down and then the autopsy. Very simple and straightforward.”

And so, somewhat skeptically, I wrote those 200 or so words. That precede was a brilliant idea, I must confess, and the autopsy story became one of the most oft-told tales in the lore of thoroughbred racing. Secretariat became the horse who had the giant heart, the biggest motor, the engine that never stopped beating. And it was all true.

It was a perfect story about a perfect tribute to a perfect horse. Read “Pure Heart” and read Bill’s backstory and you get an idea of what real writers do.

Bill closed his note with an invitation I wish I had found a way to accept.

“We must have lunch someday … at a Greek restaurant. Ever in D.C.?”

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Daniel Coyle on the Talent Code, Shifting Between Story and Summary, and Chasing the Big Whale

Dan Coyle is a master of three realms in writing–nonfiction narrative, memoir, and analysis.

A contributing editor at Outside magazine, Coyle has tracked the long-running doping scandal in bicycle racing–with both an investigative work (Lance Armstrong’s War) and a ghosted narrative with Tyler Hamilton (The Secret Race), winner of the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prize. Coyle has also written about the journey of a Little League team in the Chicago projects (Hardball).

In recent years he has become an expert on expertise. His book The Talent Code uses case studies from around the world–Curacao, Brazil, Dallas, and more–to identify how people become experts in fields as diverse as baseball, soccer, classical music, and singing. Based on his expertise of talent development, Coyle serves as a consultant to the Cleveland Indians.

If that book focuses on the best ways for individuals to develop their talent, The Culture Code (released in January), shows how communities like the San Antonio Spurs and the Navy SEAL Team create the shared norms and practices that enable all to thrive.

Coyle and his family live in Cleveland during the school year and Alaska in the summer.

Charlie Euchner: How did you start as a writer? Who were some of your influences?

Daniel Coyle: This will sound unpoetic, but the truth is, it all started with Sports Illustrated. I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and I used to devour the magazine when it showed up each week in our mailbox. I was drawn by the glamor of sports, but it was the stories by Frank Deford, Gary Smith, and John Underwood that hooked me. Their ability to capture these events and these people on the page struck me as pure magic. A gateway drug, you might say.

From there it as on to the heavier stuff. The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, took the top of my head off, particularly in the way he made you see the world in a completely new way. This seemed to me a kind of transformative superpower, and it still seems that way.

CE: Your two “code” books — The Talent Code and The Culture Code — investigate the process by which people master skills and build vibrant cultures. The Talent Code turns on the process of “deliberate practice,” which can be used to master the core skills of any activity. The Culture Code focuses on the habits and mindsets that foster open, supportive, and creative communities. Did these books cause you to work differently as a researcher and writer?

DC: Overall, I’d say that they helped me lose a self-consciousness that is part and parcel of being a young writer. For example: early on, I was absolutely allergic to appearing in my work. I sought to operate purely as a narrative camera, never injecting myself or my point of view into the story. But the more you understand the skill and the relationships at the heart of this profession, the more you realize that our job — our true skill — is to serve the reader, not to go into contortions for the sake of seeming smart. In other words, they helped me realize that this writing game is not all about me.

CE: I have noticed that great writing “yo-yos,” or moves back and forth, between scenes and summaries. You describe scenes to show us real flesh-and-blood people struggling with difficult challenges. Then you shift to background information, to give the reader context and to explain complex ideas. The scenes provide energy and intrigue; the summaries provide essential information to make sense of things. Your two “code” books are models of yo-yoing. How conscious are you about this? And what tips can you offer for the rest of us to do it better?  

DC: That’s exactly how I think of it. You show the surface in the form of a scene, and then you show the inner workings, the principles, the web of deeper connections.  In looking for a scene, you are essentially looking for a great mystery. Great mysteries have a set of qualities: they often good characters who want something. So you look for that — especially the wanting.

For the summary, you need to do a deeper dive — sometimes into history, sometimes into science — to illuminate the systems and connections beneath the story in a new way. The key there is not mystery, but surprise. A good summary section flips your world a little bit — and thus makes you see the original story in a new way.

CE: Twice you have written Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France champion who was sanctioned for doping in 2012 after years of denying it. Armstrong was suspected of doping — more than suspected, really — for many years. In your books Lance Armstrong’s War and The Secret Race (written with Armstrong’s onetime teammate Tyler Hamilton), you take many routes to the truth. You gather lots of facts, many related and many not related, and accumulate a detailed dossier. When you are dealing with such a secretive and combative subject, how do you discover the essential facts of the story?

DC: It’s interesting to see the two books as a combination. In the first book, because of legal reasons (basically, Armstrong threatening to sue) I had to work around those barriers, even though I had a strong sense that something was going on. In the second book, with Tyler, we could go fully into the secret world, and show everything. On my first journey into that world, I had a lot of off-the-record conversations that I couldn’t use in the book, but which contributed to my POV that this was a really dirty sport. Perhaps as a result, many readers read it and presumed that Armstrong was doping (even though, as was stipulated, nothing had ever been proven).

The second book was like a CIA project. At the time, the federal investigation was unfolding, and there were still threats to Tyler, both legal and otherwise. So Tyler and I went to elaborate lengths to conceal our meetings and conversations. But because of that, we were able to communicate freely and safely, and it led to the book’s unparalleled truthfulness.

CE: Can you identify two or three simple tricks that help you research, interview, or write better?

DC: Build yourself a system for taking and organizing notes. Being able to locate what you’ve written is massively important, especially in nonfiction. It doesn’t matter what the system is, but you should have one.

Interview your key subjects last. I recall someone telling me to interview like a shark: first you circle them for a long time, then you go in. That sounds a little carnivorous for my taste, but it’s true: by talking to everyone around them first, you will increase the leverage, impact, and awareness of each interaction you have with your key subjects.

Practice the craft of outlining. There are times when you should just start writing on a blank page — but there are far more times when it’s useful to spend time going through your material and organizing the story of it all.

End your day by stopping in the middle of a good sentence. That way it’s easier to pick up the following day.

Strive to write the headline/title/subtitle first and invest a lot of time until it’s exactly right. It’s a north star that will guide all your efforts.

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Katie Hafner on Writing Technical Writing, Intimate Stories, and the Hard Work of Research

Katie Hafner has spent most of her career in journalism, writing about tech and health care for The New York Times; she has also written extensively for Newsweek and BusinessWeek, among other publications. She is also the author of books on a wide range of subjects.

Most recently, Hafner published Mother Daughter Me, a memoir of three generations of women living together under one roof. At the beginning, Hafner hoped the time together would help resolve old family conflicts like her mother’s divorce, neglect, drinking, and frequent moves. The book is honest and raw and testament to the idea that what doesn’t break, develops a new kind of resilience.

Hafner’s other books explore the origins of the Internet (Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, with Matthew Lyon), computer hackers (Cyberpunk, with John Markoff), German reunification (The House at the Bridge), and the pianist Glenn Gould (A Romance on Three Legs).

For more on her work, visit katiehafner.com.

Charlie Euchner: Over your career, you have spent a lot of time covering tech. But you have also explored some intimate topics, like your relationships with your mother and daughter and the death of your husband. 

Katie Hafner: The vast majority of my writing has been journalistic – not in the least personal — with the exception of my memoir, Mother Daughter Me, and my open letter to Sheryl Sandberg, following the death of her husband. While working on the memoir, I was still doing my straight-ahead journalism, and I’m actually currently working on a novel while also doing stories for The New York Times. I’m not sure that one really helps the other, except that it’s nice to get a break from each. The journalism I do these days — writing about healthcare, with a focus on the elderly — can get get very intense, so it’s nice to go to a different place on a regular basis. Then again, writing memoirs and fiction gets very lonely, so it’s nice to crawl out of that little isolation chamber on a regular basis.

CE: When you delve into a long work like A Romance on Three Legs, or your other books, how do you do it? What’s the process? Besides writing something comprehensive about a topic, how do you spot the details and moments that give your writing something special? 

KF: Well, when you’re writing a book of non-fiction, you really have to let the topic become your Magnificent Obsession. When I worked on The House at the Bridge, my book about Germany, I lived, ate, and breathed post-reunification Germany. I drove a Trabant, one of those two-stroke-engine cars people in the former East Germany waited 20 years to get. With A Romance on Three Legs, I immersed myself in everything Glenn Gould/Steinway for several years, spending a great deal of time at the Gould archives in Ottawa. I really love doing that. Nothing gives me more pleasure than feeling like I know a topic inside and out. And, since journalists get to move from topic to topic, I always get deeply curious about the next new thing. The trick is finding just the right subject in which to immerse yourself. It must be a terrible thing to be bored by the topic you’re writing about.

CE: The hardest and most important thing for all writers is to find a way to be honest and unsparing. That, I think, you achieved in Mother Daughter Me. You dive into the difficulties of your relationships with rare candor, allowing yourself to be exposed as you explore the complexities of family relationships. How do you think about that? 

KF: Unless a writer is honest – particularly about herself – the reader will lose patience, and trust, and eventually interest. Readers aren’t stupid, and they can smell a dodgy narrator from fifty paces. There were moments, when my mother was living with my daughter and me, when I was just terrible to her. And I tried to own up to that as much as possible.

Then there are the more distant memories, some of which are, unfortunately, etched permanently in my mind. Then again, don’t forget that this memoir reflects my recollection of how things happened, and memories can be tricky things. So I consulted with my sister quite a bit when it came to memories of our mother and her periods of drinking too heavily. My sister was extremely detailed in her descriptions. Her memory was razor-sharp.

This brings me to the topic of honesty and “essential truth” versus accuracy. There’s one scene in the beginning of Mother Daughter Me where my mother is the only person in the car with me during a long drive, from San Diego to San Francisco. In reality, someone else who shows up later in the book was in the car as well. In the first draft, I had him in the car, but my editor at Random House thought that was too much in the way of characters to introduce for the beginning of the book. I said to her, “But he was there, and did most of the driving.” To which she said something interesting. She said that if it did not violate the essential truth of the scene (i.e. picking up my mother in San Diego and bringing her to San Francisco to live with my daughter and me), it wasn’t absolutely necessary to have him be in the car.

But here’s the bottom line: My mother disagreed strongly with much of my account, which in some places is quite raw. After the book came out, she rejected me and took actions that inflicted the maximum possible pain on me. Not a happy ending.

CE: In addition to writing at all levels–newspapers, magazines, books–you also have taught writing at Cal-Berkeley. What are the common challenges of writing and teaching? And how are they radically different? In what ways has teaching taught you about the writing process? Did it expose any of your own challenges–and give you ideas to address them?

KF: I’ve taught both journalism and memoir writing, and they are very different beasts. Journalism is a two-limbed discipline: there is the reporting of a story, then the writing. Students tend to be better at one than the other (much as professional reporters are). So I try to help nurture the weaker limb.

I also teach an annual week-long memoir writing workshop at The Esalen Institute in Big Sur. It’s one of the most enjoyable weeks of my year, and also one of the most exhausting. People come to you with their heart (in the form of an extremely personal, often painful life story) in their hands, and you have to be very respectful of that. At the same time, I make it clear that I am not a therapist, I am a writing instructor. Once they understand that, we get down to the business of giving shape and voice to their stories.

I am not one for whom writing has ever come easily, and when I tell students this, it seems to help them a lot with their own writing struggles.

At the same time, I tell students that in order to write, you must read and read, and then read some more. Read fiction, memoirs, non-fiction, biographies, and – above all – poetry. I’m not saying read tough stuff. There’s a lot of Dickens I’ll never be able to get through, and definitely not James Joyce’s Ulysses, or any Proust for that matter. But I adore Angle of Repose and To Kill a Mockingbird and I Capture the Castle, pretty much anything by Anne Tyler, much of Ann Patchett, and all of Joan Didion’s nonfiction. In short, there is no way to become a writer without exposure to the masters. Surgeons don’t just start cutting people open. They watch and watch, see how it’s done, and then they do it themselves. To wit: I live just three hours north of Esalen, so I drive there, and pile about 50 books and a sheaf of poems into my car, and set up a lending library for the week in the workshop room.

CE: Writing, I am sure you agree, is a craft. It’s about building skills and combining them to create a durable and pleasing product. What specific advice have you gotten to hone your specific skills? Can you offer one or two “tricks of the trade” that helps you to carry off projects?  

KF: When writing my first nonfiction book, I made myself write nonstop, without getting up from my chair, for a certain amount of time, even if it was just 20 minutes. I pretended I was on a journalism deadline (when, in fact, the deadline was a year away). Then, after those 20 minutes had passed, I gave myself a five-minute break in which I could do anything I wanted, as long as I got up from my chair: I could go to the bathroom; eat a bologna sandwich; water the plants; dance a jig.

I’m writing fiction now, which terrifies me. So I feel like I have to write in a very confined space. I take 4-by-6 index cards and roll them into – yes — a typewriter, and fill up the cards, one by one. If I don’t have my typewriter with me, I fill virtual index cards in the notes app on my iPhone. I might come away with just 50 words but feel like I’ve just written War and Peace. That’s how hard fiction is for me.

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Avery Chenoweth on Fact Versus Fiction, Discovering Stories, Finding Telling Details, and Pitching

This is the first part of a two-part interview with Avery Chenoweth, a writer and Spanish language translator based in Charlottesville, Virginia. You can see Part 2 here.

Avery Chenoweth has had a remarkable career as a writer and entrepreneur. Growing up in Princeton, he wrote for the local newspaper and also worked on a congressional campaign. At Vassar College, he penned an anonymous newspaper column–his nom de plume was Susan Avery–that caused controversy for its non-PC attitudes and perspectives on campus affairs.

After working as a journalist and essayist–writing memorable pieces on Phil Donahue and the billionaire Kluge family–Chenoweth honed a unique style that might be considered a cross between John Barth and John McPhee. In fact, over the years, Chenoweth has admired the work of fellow Princetonian McPhee and he studied with Barth at the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University.

Chenoweth has shifted back and forth between fact and fiction, using the techniques of one to develop his chops in the other. His fiction include the story collection Wingtips and the novel Radical Doubt. He has also authored imaginative historic works Albemarle and Empires in the Forest.

In recent years Chenoweth has also become a tech entrepreneur. He is the founder of Here’s My Story, an educational app program designed to bring history to life. The app connects visitors of historic sites to the people and backgrounds of those sites. Avery’s work has been featured in The New York Times and other media.

You grew up among storytellers. So when you talk about a topic, you have the unusual ability to frame issues in terms of stories, with vivid characters and scenes. Others, like me, I think have to construct stories more consciously. So I am wondering: How do you let ideas flow and, at the same time, consciously structure your thoughts?

A lot of ideas surface from almost everywhere, and they fall into different areas, almost at once. There are those that come to mind–sometimes as a joke–and stay in the area of being a conceit–a great idea for someone for a story, show, or product, but they ultimately do not hold my interest for long; and I might even put them into a story as a detail.

The ideas that become possessive of my mind and imagination and dreams arrive from some intuition. And the difference might be between being asleep or awake. Over the years, I’ve found that the ideas that arrive when I’m awake rarely hold my interest, like the conceits described above. But stories that flash out from intuition can hold my interest–for years, even for decades. They can begin as dreams, and arrive complete.

One story in my story collection began as a dream. I saw “Powerman” start to end, holding onto it in a lucid manner, trying not to interrupt the flow until I saw how it ended. So, I’m half awake, yet dreaming, waiting to see what happens. I woke up, like, wow. After that, I put in structure later to build the shape, so it stands up as a dimensional creation, not a dream, and works for others. I recently finished the first draft of a novel, at 75,000 words, that started as a dream, and continued opening every night in my dreams until it was done. Though I had an idea of the plot, a new one arrived every night, scenes, dialogue, plot, all of it, with edits, and now that it’s done the dreams are gone.

I love the intuitive story; it feels elusive, like a mood or element in which something normal has gone awry, is broken, or resolving itself, and I cannot figure out what it is. It’s just out of focus as the start of each chapter, and I write it to find out where it’s leading me. It’s lucid dreaming–gently pursuing the mood unsure where it will go yet with conscious structure in mind to make sure it isn’t merely dithering or wandering. I’ve spent years writing stuff that wanders and dissipates. So, if the story idea is a gimmick, it’s DOA, but if it starts flowing and going, I can chase it for a long time.

However comfortable you are as a storyteller, writing great narrative still requires hard work. How did you go about constructing stories in your story collection Wingtips and/or your novel Radical Doubt? In what ways did the stories come easily–and in what ways were they hard work? Can you explain one or two technique you use to solve story problems?

The stories in Wingtips were about siblings finding their way, keeping skeletons in the closet, and themed with landscapes and comic reversals, so each one aimed to get into the next phase of life. Although one of the stories, about the mother was not done by deadline, it was complete.

Radical Doubt was different and a great deal harder. It is a long story, with strong principals, and side characters, and the plot changed after I learned to West Coast Swing. Oddly enough, that was an exercise in physically spinning my partner around, catching her in all new ways, and then resolving the move as smoothly and naturally as possible. Sure, it sound nuts, but I would swear that those neurons, all new, came into play when I began re-writing the novel and giving it a fluency that felt like swinging a partner around on the page.

On another level, RD was hard because a lot of the story sprang from one crazy-scary summer that I spent working at a Poconos resort, which turned out to be a dangerous place in spite of its posh rooms and lovely landscaping. The autobiographical part did not have a story, though; it was just bits and pieces, crazed and confessional monologues, and violent fights that I had witnessed. And I mean violence bad enough to make a sane person quit, as I did, eventually. The hard part was tearing myself out of the main character, and allowing a new, imagined main character to take my place; then let him make all the bad choices that trigger the creepy and deranged falling actions of the story.

While I wrote that part of the story, I imagined what the Theseus and Minotaur story might look like if we rendered it in our day. It sounds pompous, but it was a way to continue visualizing the labyrinth the main characters have to get through to find each other at the end–so that our hero can face the ungodly behemoth behind the terrors in the valley.

When my wife was reading the script, she kept telling me that no hotel, or restaurant could stay in business with that kind of violence going on around the property. A professional in the hotel industry, she found it over the top. Curious, I Googled the actual place, and found out, to my surprise, that it was, in fact, out of business. The subject of an MTV Haunted Places special, the reports all said that it was the extreme violence that went on there, (when I was there and later), that drove customers away–and so I worked all of that into the story, as well. In the end, the autobiographical part was small, and the characters invented from everywhere, to make it all come together. That was writing a social novel with 35 name characters, and it taught me by contrast what it is to write short stories.

I think you will agree that writing is a craft, like carpentry or teaching or cooking–something that you need to hone and develop over a lifetime, with distinct skills that you have to “try out” and master over time. So what are some of the techniques of craft that have proved most useful over your career?

When I was at Johns Hopkins, I was fortunate to study with John Barth and Stephen Dixon. They were masters of craft, and exponents of the freedom of using story structures that appear first in Aristotle’s Poetics. Jack gave us his own cheat sheet, which had Freytag’s pyramid and elements he had observed in the literature he’d been reading his whole life; and it was like some wonderful new addition to the works of Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell. That taught me to read, really, for the first time in my life.

Not everyone believes that you can master a skill with practice.

In English classes at Vassar, what we did, frankly, was talk about the characters as if we were watching soap operas. How did we like this one, or that one, who were we cheering for?

I remember asking my creative writing professor what tricks a writer used to re-write a scene, and his honest-to-God answer was, “We don’t know. That’s why writing is a mystery.” That baffled me, frankly, because across the campus in Art History, the professors showed us slides of drawings, compositions and failed attempts, and final masterworks, all to show us that art was plastic, not a fixed perfect thing, but created with revisions all aiming at an aesthetic. And the artists worked the material to get the results that they wanted. Emphasis here on the word “worked.”

Not so in English, where it was all magic, and the teachers had only personal experience to go by, so they only spoke from their solipsistic experience. That was true at Virginia Creative Writing Program, where I went to finish the collection I started at Hopkins–personal subjective feeling about what makes a story work, but no craft discussion. So, Hopkins freed me to carry on, while UVA left me feeling like I couldn’t know unless a professor reassured me.

Sure, you cannot teach talent, but you can teach craft, and free students to work on their own without having to rely on a mentor, though it’s great to have a few trusted readers. I didn’t buy the idea of the mystery, but I believed it to an extent–because it is hard to see in that morass of abstract words what the structures are, how they were stack up into arcs, reversals–much less the real mystery of how words come to life. I’ve read plenty of dead novels by famous writers whose books read like instruction manuals for installing a stereo system.

The best way to learn, sometimes, is by reading–and rereading–the masters.

If Jack taught me anything, he taught me to read, which not only made my life better, but also opened whole libraries, and let me carry on teaching myself. To be sure, knowing those elements doesn’t mean you can use them right away. They can be heavy and unnatural at the start, but they get lighter over time, and then they’re intuitive. And it is liberating. It doesn’t mean the story is a standard type; it’s individual and is shaped differently every time by the story and characters.

The only trick that I aim for, if I’m stuck, is to work with my character’s hands–fixing a light bulb, changing a tire, anything sweaty and detailed that will get me into his or her skin. Being in that intensely focused problem transports me out of my chair and into the page.

You have taken on some complex historic subjects in your books Albemarle and Empires of the Forest. How do you research such topics so that you can give new life to well-trod topics? How do you frame and reframe familiar stories, like John Smith and Pocahontas? What kinds of details shed new light on familiar topics? Are there any special tricks here, about character portraits, scene-making, action, and other elements of storytelling?

Reading landscapes was fascinating to me when I started doing the research for Albemarle; and the story of how we shape the land, and the land shapes us, has been compelling enough to carry over into a lot of areas over the years. The first piece of business with Albemarle, was to find out what it was like 10,000 years ago, and who was here. That alone separated the book out from others, which tend to romanticize Jefferson and the loveliness of the county. Everything was new, in that respect.

Empires was different. The story of Smith and Pocahontas is corrupted by cartoons and politics, both. You can’t tell that story without seeing a sneer of condescension from a listener, and they can often interrupt with a snarky crack about Disney. It’s odd because her name is famous yet her story remains almost virtually known, and even the Malick movie, The New World, fell into so many of the cliches and bullshit around the Jamestown colony, that I met a lot of folks with an axe to grind, literally, and called me out on Malick’s alleged racism, and the white-hero worship that typically covers Smith like insect bites.

After I’d read a few books, and found them all disdainful and correct, or, worse, heroic and swash-buckling, I decided to read the journals. These were the events as the Jamestown men wrote about them in sometimes inchoate English. That changed everything. Their vivid and sometimes electrifying accounts astonished me, and presented a real and moving portrait of a native girl who is caught between the men from a brave new world (a contemporaneous play, not coincidentally), and her father’s imperative and dicey political gambit sending her to spy on them as a precocious child, and report back on those poor idiots dying in one of his nasty old swamps. And they were the losers, to be sure: no women, no weapons with skill, speed, or accuracy, though they made a sound like thunder; and no ongoing organization, dying in numbers, unable to grow corn and feed themselves. And in their midst this one loon in charge, driven by his experiences in war, who is now beset by his men, who want to frag him, in case he beds the king’s daughter, and comes back to the fort with his warriors and kills them all. So, they decide to kill him, first.

Well, you may imagine that this research was a breeze and fascinating: and for good reason. It’s too much drama for the historians I was reading, who dismiss it as mere melodrama, and whose focus returned instead to the facts that they could prove–the bones and shards of history, which left the psychology and internecine social relationships for me to write about. I could go on, but you get the idea: if the academics have gone there before you, it doesn’t mean that they got the story, just that they got what they could prove to a dissertation committee, god help them.

The backstory of how we made the book, by the way, was just as bizarre–politics in fundraising, at powwows, and in the Indian community, with so help from Governor Mark Warner, Senator John Warner, and the Chickahominy people who embraced the book and played starring roles in its pages–many of whom Malick had pissed off by firing from the film for not looking “Indian” enough! Thankfully, we got a lot of that story into the Afterword.

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Howard Bryant on His Inspirations as a Writer

This is the first part of a two-part interview with Howard Bryant, the journalist and author of books about racism and the Boston Red Sox, the steroids crisis, and activism in sports and biographies of Henry Aaron and Rickey Henderson. You can read the second part here. 

Howard Bryant is a writer’s writer. Passionate about his subjects and the craft, he has used the platform of sports to explore a wide range of issues–race, cheating, political activism, and heroism in an age of cynicism. His forthcoming book, The Heritage,  addresses the rise of activism among athletes in the wake of police brutality and the Trump election.

A native of Boston and a graduate of San Francisco State University, Bryant has written for the Bergen County Record, Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Boston Herald, and Washington Post. He is now a senior writer for ESPN the Magazine and a regular contributor on ESPN.

Bryant has written four acclaimed books on sports and society. Bryant’s first book, Shut Out, explores Boston’s long history of racism in sports. Juicing the Game provides a riveting narrative of the steroids crisis in baseball. The Last Hero explores the life and legacy of Henry Aaron. The Heritage, which will be published on May 8, 2018, explores the arc of activism from Paul Robeson and Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali to the post-Ferguson wave.

To learn more about Bryant’s work, visit his website, howardbryant.net.

Charles Euchner: Can you describe some of your influences as a writer, when you were growing up?

Howard Bryant: Recognize that you can do this comes from reading people you admire and who are saying something to you; they’re saying something to everybody, but it feels like they’re speaking to you directly.

Growing up in Boston, I devoured the Boston Globe. I remember Derrick Jackson, Ellen Goodman, Bella English, Mike Barnicle. Then obviously, in sports, Peter Gammons, Dan Shaughnessy, Ian Thompson, Steve Fainaru …

The book that changed my life was J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground. That was the type of book where you’re reading about you. I grew up with the busing crisis in Boston. That book told you that there were stories that had national reach that were about you–that your experience had value. So would you rather see someone else writing about your community or do you have a responsibility to do it yourself? That’s what Common Ground gave me.

In the summer of 1989, James Baldwin got inside my head and he has never left. It wasn’t The Fire Next Time or No Name in the Street, it was actually Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, it was his fiction that hit me first. I had a friend at Temple who was reading Sonny’s Blues. A few months later I was in The Brattle and I bought a paperback and took my lunch and I sat outside and I read almost half of it sitting there. Then I moved to Just About My Head and Another Country … then The Fire Next Time and No Name in the Street and Nobody Knows My Name and that was it. That was as romantic a relationship you can have with a writer: He’s talking to me! There hasn’t been another writer where I thought what they were saying was tailor-made for where my brain was. That connection was so powerful.

CE: The great thing about Baldwin, to me, is the combination of simplicity plus passion. The simplicity allowed the passion to come out, because what he trying to do is be direct about a topic that nobody wants to be direct about.

HB: This was not theory for him. Baldwin was in the middle of it. He wasn’t a dispassionate reporter; he was in the movement, meeting with all these figures. But not only that. I watched [the documentary] I Am Not Your Negro and you see in those interviews that Baldwin was one of those guys who in basketball they would call a triple threat. Very few writers–Hemingway, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison–are equally adept at fiction and nonfiction. Baldwin had the third part of it too. He was a great speaker. Those interviews are just as powerful as what he puts on the page. And that’s the passion you’re talking about.

He’s our godfather, if you’re a black writer today. He said everything that spoke to us. You look at the influence he had on Ta-Nehisi Coates. Look at what Toni Morrison said about him. He was able to speak for you in that fearless way. You talked about being direct on a subject that others were indirect about. He and Malcolm X were able to speak about your experience, without asking permission and without asking for your acceptance. Baldwin wanted love, probably more than most writers. He was pleading as a writer, but he was unflinching. You don’t believe how many conflicts he has in the work, in the characters, whether it was gay, straight, white black, all of it. He was searching for that level of humanity. At the same time, he was able to say, “You, white America, I’m putting you on trial and I’m not asking forgiveness.” He was saying, “This is who you are and don’t ask me to make excuses for you.” That’s an incredible balancing act.

CE: And David Halberstam?

HB: From 1987 to early 1990s, there was the huge baseball craze in publishing: Roger Angell, The Brothers K [by David James Duncan], and Halberstam’s Summer of ’49. I devoured them. I remember reading these cruel reviews about Halberstam and one of the themes was that he couldn’t write. David Halberstam couldn’t write! I guess the point is that he wasn’t a prose stylist, he was not the guy who was going to turn a phrase the way Toni Morrison could or the way Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote could.

But  Halberstam could explain to you a moment in time and why it was important, and say, “Here’s why this moment changed history.” When I was working on Juicing the Game, I asked him: “I have this idea but I don’t know how to get it,” and he told me about his concept of intersection. You pick a moment–you can’t pick too many, because then none of them matter–but you pick one or two or three moments where history could have gone this way but it went that way, and you report the hell out of those moments.

CE: I get that point about style. But my favorite Halberstam book is The Breaks of the Game. The style in that book is exhilarating. It was the same level of excitement–like jumping out of your chair–as the John McPhee book on Bill Bradley, A Sense of Where You Are.

HB: The two Halberstam books that really took off for me–one was October ’64, the book on the Yankees and the Cardinals, the other was The Fifties. That book is so dog-eared right now. He signed it. I try not to keep reading it because it’s signed and I don’t want to ruin it, but I do because, again, he was able to take these moments of this decade and explain why this decade was so significant. I also love The Children, about the civil rights movement.

Those three–Lukas, Baldwin, and Halberstam–taught me that there’s more than one way to write well. You can write well by being explanatory, by turning phrases, and by having amazing depth of information. Baldwin taught me to have your style, to say it the way you want to say it, and be fearless about it.

CE: What other writers have influenced your style … especially when you’re writing?

HB: When I’m on a book project, I never read nonfiction, and I certainly never read anything similar to the  subject that I’m working on. I always read the most fiction when I’m writing a book.  Very rarely do I read fiction when I’m not writing a book. This reason is, so I don’t, through osmosis, duplicate anybody. You want to sound like yourself.

I am a gigantic Larry McMurtry fan. I love westerns. Cormac McCarthy, although he’s a violent man, you want to talk about a stylist! If you read No Country or the trilogy with All the Pretty Horses, he has this style that is incredible in terms of his ability put you in a situation that is completely his–it’s his universe. I really love that. Talk about turning phrases. At the [killing] scene at the end he says, “Call it heads or tails.” You can write this long, flowery, heartbreaking death scene or you can do what Cormac McCarthy did, was was like: He called heads. It was tails, and he shot her. Could you write a more descriptive paragraph in two sentences?

CE: That’s Hemingway’s iceberg theory–keep most of the stuff unstated, below the surface. Once you’ve said enough, the reader can fill in the rest.

HB: That’s right. I repeat that sentence so often because people think that there’s one way to write and there’s really not. Sometimes the best way to say it is to say it. Find your way to get there and then don’t get in the way of yourself.

CE: When I first started reading Juicing the Game, was was struck by the great leap forward you achieved as a writer. You took your game to a completely different level. Am I right?

HB: One of the things about Shut Out is I love that book. It started my career as an author. But I wish it had been a second or third book because I didn’t have the feel–that’s what we talk about, finding your voice, finding out how you want to sound. I would love to do that book all over in so many ways. It was my first longform attempt. I was a newspaper guy so I was writing 800 words. Usually when you’re going to take on books, you go newspaper, 800 words; longform, 2,000 to 3,000 words; magazine articles, 4,500 to 6,000 words; and then books, 80,000 words. I went from 800-word newspaper articles to a 116,000-word book. There were times, writing Shut Out, where I was like, “Am I drowning here? Can I swim?”

Then when I got to do Juicing the Game, I got to talk with David Halberstam. He was incredibly gracious with his time and with his teaching.

Ideas don’t make books, characters make books. If you want to write a really good book, you’ve got to find someone to carry that idea through. Every story, you have to ask: Who embodies this idea? Then you have to make these people real. It will come off bland and disjointed if you don’t have a vehicle. You’ve got to find the people who exemplify the ideas. So people become metaphors. In Juicing, that was the first time I recognized that was essential. In Shut Out, I said, “OK, this happened, this happened, this happened.” It was all very informational. By the time I got to Juicing and The Last Hero, it was: idea/anecdote, idea/anecdote. It was: Who’s the person  you can run this idea through? Tell me a story.

The universes I live in is so colorful. Baseball is hilarious. Your challenge is not to have information, but to present it in a way readers can learn about the world and also learn about things they didn’t know they were going to learn about. Like in October ’64, Halberstam talks about when Bob Gibson had a sore shoulder, he rehabbed it by washing his car. These are great details that you have to find to make it come alive.

CE: When you write about sports, you write about social issues–race, class, sexism, homophobism, labor, media, celebrity. Sports gives you a great platform to talk about all these things. But at the same time, you can’t get on a soapbox or too too far away the games. How do you do that balancing act, between sports a a game and sports as a place to explore all kinds of social issues?  

HB: I never got into this because I was a sports fan. I got into this because I wanted to write Shut Out and that was going to be a serious book. The reason why i love sports. I’ve never met anybody in my life who loves sports more than Bob Ryan [of The Boston Globe]. He loves the games. He’s been doing this since before I was born and he still loves the games. You could call Bob Ryan right now and he’ll tell you about Reggie Cleveland’s 18-hit complete game. He still has the box score. He’s that guy. I got into this because I am an owner-versus-players labor guy. I love that sports is one of the few industries where the worker has leverage because of their talent. There’s only one LeBron James, there’s only one Kobe Bryant, there’s only one Tom Brady, and their talent creates a business model unlike anything other than entertainment. Their talent changes the business model. Thats what’s always made sports interesting to me.

It is a balance because the fan is not into it for that. The fan is not looking at a baseball game for the labor implications. This is their fun and games. If you want someone to talk about the wonders of Game 5 of the World Series, you should probably read Jayson Stark or someone else, not me. But if you want to talk other issues–like now, if you’re a manager, your job security has taken a major hit if you don’t win it all–that’s what I do.

It’s all about knowing yourself, knowing what your strengths are. Don’t be afraid to bring what you bring to the table. I’m not Bob Ryan. It’s not going to do me any good to write like Bob Ryan. It’s going to do a lot of good to write like me. If you want the inside stuff on the game, feel free to read someone else.

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John McPhee’s Step-By-Step Approach to Narrative Nonfiction

No one in our time has contributed more to nonfiction narrative–stories that are true–than John McPhee. And he has lessons to teach.

McPhee is the writer for The New Yorker and creative writing professor at Princeton University. His books include the Pulitzer-Prize winning Annals of the Former World (a trilogy on geology and geologists), A Sense of Where You Are (about Bill Bradley as a basketball star at Princeton), Levels of the Game (about a classic tennis match between Arthur Ash and Clark Graebler), The Pine Barrens (about the forests of central New Jersey), Encounters with the Archdruid (about three wilderness areas), The Survival of the Bark Canoe (about a New Hampshire craftsman), The Control of Nature (three stories about man’s battle with the natural world), Uncommon Carriers (about water freight), and many more.

His students include David Remnick (Pulitzer Prize-winning author and editor of The New Yorker), Richard Stengel (managing editor of Time), Robert Wright (author of The Moral Animal and other works), Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation and other books), Richard Preston (author of The Hot Zone), Tim Ferriss (best-selling author and self-hacking guru), Jennifer Weiner (author of Good In Bed and other novels), and many more.

So McPhee knows writing. And, lucky for us, he lays out his techniques in Draft No. 4, part memoir and part writing manual. here are some of the highlights:

1. Selecting and Framing Topics

At the beginning of Draft No. 4, McPhee describes his random way of selecting topics. After years of writing straight profiles for Time and The New Yorker, McPhee decided to profile two people. “Then who?” he asked himself. “What two people?” He considered various pairs who had to work together to achieve their own aims–the actor and director, the architect and client, the dancer and choreographer, the pitcher and manager. Then, randomly, he watched a 1968 semifinal match of the U.S. Open. Something about the players–Arthur Ashe and Clark Grabner–intrigued him. So he pursued it. The result was Levels of the Game, which became the model for analytic sportswriting.

With a dual portrait in the bag, McPhee decided to create a portrait of four people. But how do you organize a fourplex portrait? McPhee decided to identify one main character and show how that character interacts with three others. The lead character, first among equals, would give the piece a unity; the three other characters would reveal a wider range of perspectives and personalities. McPhee pictured his scheme like this:

ABC
D

McPhee decided to write something about the emerging environmental movement. Before finding Characters A, B, and C, he had to find Character D. After casting around for an Aldo Leopold type, he discovered David Brower of the Sierra Club. Now, who could be Dominy’s antagonist? Soon enough he found Floyd Dominy, the U.S. commissioner of reclamation, who had clashed repeatedly with Brower. “I can’t talk to Brower because he’s so goddamned ridiculous,” Dominy told McPhee. So, McPhee said, would you be willing to get on a rubber raft going down the Colorado River with him? “Hell, yes!” Dominy said. With those two characters lined up, McPhee went in search of two more.

Once McPhee finished that piece, which became Encounters With the Archdruid, he continued his quest for more complex portrait structures. “So, at the risk of getting into an exponential pathology,” McPhee writes, “I started to think of a sequence of six profiles in which a seventh party would appear in a minor way in the first, appear in a greater way in the second,” and so on.

McPhee has lots of interests–the environment, sports, politics, technology, the labor process–but they followed his desire to master various structures of writing. He decided how to write before he decided what to write about. Which, of course, is completely backward.

Or is it? As McPhee notes, “The Raven” originated not in Edgar Alan Poe’s fascination with a man’s suffering over lost love but, rather, Poe’s desire to use a one-word refrain with a long “o” sound. So the origin of the poem was the famous refrain: “Nevermore.” With that word in place, Poe had to figure out who would say “Nevermore,” over and over. For that role he selected a raven, speaking to the distraught man.

Alfred Hitchcock did something similar. When brainstorming a film, he identified places he wanted to shoot. So he decided to shoot a scene at the face of Mount Rushmore. After that location, he decided to use a vast farm as a scene. With those and other scenes in his lineup, he had to decide what would happen there. The result, eventually, was the film North By Northwest.  Another time, he decided he wanted to shoot scenes at a London chapel and at the Royal Albert Hall. Those scenes eventually played leading roles, if you will, in The Man Who Knew Too Much. “Of course, this is quite the wrong thing to do,” Hitchcock said. Maybe, maybe not. But he did it and it worked.

Whatever the process, the writer starts with a blank slate. The possibilities are as broad as the writer’s imagination and ability to explore. But once he makes a fateful decision–once he picks this structure instead of that structure, this scene instead of that scene, this character instead of that character–the possibilities narrow. Every decision not only excludes certain possibilities, it also increases the likelihood of others.

2. Narrowing Ideas

That’s when things get interesting. Once McPhee picked Floyd Dominy for his four-person portrait, he had to seek out the ideas, events, characters, and conflicts that would make it work. Every decision narrowed his scope. Every decision drove McPhee toward more and more specific topics. Before long he was on that Colorado River with his four main characters, discovering what their time together, on the river, revealed about their character and their causes.

Now we are in the heart of the writing process, which mostly happens before the author has written a single word–research. The author must go out and gather as much information as possible. Inevitably, he will gather far more than he can ever consider using–ten times more, at least. Out of all that information, the author will begin to understand his subject. He will begin to convey impressions about who, what, when, where, and why. Paraphrasing Cary Grant, McPhee tells his students that “a thousand details add up to one impression.”

The author makes countless decisions about what to consider and what to ignore. More-or-less random decisions (focusing on one character or two or four or six characters) give way to decisions about specific people, things, places, events, and ideas. The author is always asking himself: This or that? And: Then what? The materials start to fill notebooks, audio files, picture files. The process develops momentum. Faulkner once said:

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

Faulkner was working from his imagination. Nonfiction writers like McPhee draw from their piles of notes. Once they have enough material, they start, like Faulkner, to chase their characters and putting them into actual scenes, summaries, descriptions, and analyses.

3. Research and Interviewing

Before you write a word, you need to gather information, from books and websites, observation and interviewing, daydreaming and structured brainstorming. Then you sort and select.

Research involves not only library/Internet research, but also getting out into the field to observe the real world. That process raises the anthropologist’s dilemma. When you show up to observe people, your presence can affect people’s behavior:

As you scribble away, the interviewee is, of course, watching you. Now, unaccountably, you slow down, and even stop writing, while the interviewee goes on talking. The interviewee becomes nervous, tries harder, and spells out the secrets of the secret life, or maybe just a clearer and more quotable version of what was said before. Conversely, if the interviewee is saying nothing of interest, you can pretend to be writing, just to keep the enterprise moving forward.

Never worry about looking smart to the interviewee. What matters is getting information, not looking good. “Who is going to care if you seem dumber than a cardboard box?” McPhee asks.

4. Getting Words on Paper

Everyone, at one time or another, faces the dread of an empty screen with no ideas. McPhee offers a familiar solution: Forget you’re a writer and pretend you’re just an ordinary person trying to explain a topic to a friend or loved one.

For six, seven, 10 hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere. … What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about that block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you were not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine, you whimper, you outline your problem, and you mentioned that the bear has 55-inch waist and a neck more than 30 inches around but could run nose to nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rest 14 hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining and just keep the bear.

Start, then, by venting. Forget about what you want to say. You explain what you would write about if you could. In that process, the words start to flow. The words are not perfect, mind you. But you manage to get words on paper. “Just stay at it,” McPhee says. “Perseverance will change things.”

The trick is to melt the frozen mind. If you have done the research, you have surely something to say. If you’re scared, for whatever reason, your knowledge and insights are out of reach — but they’re never too far below the surface. You can coax them to the surface, sooner or later.

“The mind is working all the time,” McPhee says. “You may actually be writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it 24 hours a day – yes, while you sleep – but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until this exists, writing has not really begun.”

To write even a short piece — say, 1,200 to 1,500 words, the length of a typical college paper — requires hundreds of choices, as McPhee notes:

Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than 1 million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: if something interests you, it goes – if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you got.

Whatever you do, get something down on paper. Don’t even think of judging whether it’s good or not.

How could anyone ever know that something is good before it exists? And unless you can identify what is not succeeding– unless you can see those dark hunky spots that are giving you such a low opinion of your pros as it develops– how are you going to be able to tone it up and make it work?

So spill whatever you know onto a sheet of paper. Once you have words on paper, then you can sort it and decide what deserves to stay.

So: Research, blurt, sort, delete, shift. Rinse, repeat.

5. Start Strong, Finish Strong

Once you begin composing your piece, the most important pieces are the start (known in journalism as “the lead” or “lede”) and the finish.

“The lead, like the title, should be a flashlight that shines down into the story,” McPhee says. “A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don’t use the lead.”

The right lead hints at everything, directly or indirectly–not just substance, but style too. Reading the lead is like meeting your tour guide for the first time. She tells you about the trip ahead–what sites you’ll visit, how much information she will offer, what kinds of stories she’ll tell, and, in general, what kind of company she will provide along the way.

The finish might be even more important. It’s your destination. Ideally, it should respond to the question or issue that the lead raises. The finish should feel like the end of a trip. You’ve arrived and you now know much more that you knew at the beginning. Issues that once puzzled you now make sense. Characters who once seemed incomplete are now complete.

In a sense, the lead and the conclusion are always talking to each other as the story or essay proceeds. This dialogue helps you to make decisions for the middle pieces. You can’t talk about just anything and everything anymore. You talk only about what it takes to get from the beginning to the end.

6. Making Comparisons

All communication involves comparing one thing with another, different thing. To learn about a new topic — a simple fact, a concept, a feeling — we need to relate it to something else.

John McPhee’s mastery of the metaphor and simile might seem a stylistic flourish. To be sure, his greatest talents involve his ravenous gathering of facts and insights and his ability to find just the right form to lay out these facts and insights.

But McPhee’s ability to create fresh metaphors and similes reveals–and enables–his sparkling mind. If he spoke in flat and familiar cliches, his thinking would be dull and orthodox. This drabness would be an undertow, pulling down even his best findings.

One of the great joys of Draft No. 4 is the richness of McPhee’s metaphors and similes. A few examples:

• In describing his fascination with oranges, how they’re grown and marketed and the kinds of cultures they support, McPhee describes a habit he picked up whenever his travels took him to Penn Station: “There was a machine in Pennsylvania Station that cut and squeezed them. I stopped there as routinely as an animal at a salt lick.”

• Describing his desire to find the right word, he writes: “At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary.”

• On the organizing information into the right structure for a piece: It’s “like returning from a grocery store with materials you intend to cook for dinner. You set them out on the kitchen counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with.”

• To describe a coal train, McPhee guessed at an analogy: “The releasing of the air brakes began at the two ends, and moved toward the middle. The train’s very long integral air tube was like the air sack of American eel.” Once McPhee was satisfied with the metaphor’s aptness, he and his fact checkers had to figure out whether it was accurate. It was.

Metaphors and similes require broad knowledge. Who but McPhee, with his broad understanding of nature, could have come up with the simile of an eel’s air sack? Good comparisons require hard work. They do not just burst into your consciousness, like Kramer at Seinfeld’s door. Which reminds me …

Because they speak to what the reader already knows, metaphors and similes can date themselves quickly. When we use pop culture to evoke an idea, the insight lasts only as long as the pop-cult idea’s currency. A reference to the Jay Z or Kelly Clarkson or Rosie O’Donnell will be meaningless in a year or even a month. Still, if a pop culture reference captures an idea perfectly, use it. Just be sure to explain the image–quickly–so unknowing readers get the reference. (That, of course, can be like explaining a joke. As E.B. White noted: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”)

To get this right, adapt Mark Twain’s dictum–“When you catch an adjective, kill it”–to your comparisons. When you catch a fleeting pop-cult reference, kill it.

Still, McPhee lauds his New Yorker colleague Robert Wright for his use of an old cultural reference — the image on the Quaker Oats box — to describe the scientist Robert Boulding:

As it turns out, there is a certain resemblance. Both men have shoulder-length, snow white hair, blue eyes, and ruddy cheeks, and both have fundamentally sunny disposition, smiling much or all of the time, respectively. There are differences, to be sure. Boulding’s hair is not as cottony as the Oats Quaker’s, and it falls less down and more back, skirting the tops of his ears along the way.

Should Wright have used the Quaker Oats man? You could make a good case both ways. Anyway, if you use a time- or place-specific comparison, add a quick explanation, as Wright does with the Quaker Oats example.

7. Checking Facts

John McPhee is lucky in ways that most writers can never imagine. Like other New Yorker writers, he benefits from an army of fact-checkers. They sift his drafts, like gold panners, to find errors in his work. Often, McPhee will leave it to the fact checkers to find the facts. He uses notations like these to alert fact checkers of gaps in the draft:

WHAT CITY, $000,000, name TK, number TK, Koming.

In this case, Koming for what’s “coming” or TK for what’s “to come.” These notations, as McPhee explains, “are forms of a promissory note and a checker is expected to pay.”

The imperative to catch errors, McPhee argues, is existential. “An error is everlasting,” McPhee says. “Once an error gets into print it will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogues, scrupulously indexed … silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata.”

Errors can get embedded into the most innocent of constructions. McPhee writes: “The commas … were not just commas; they were facts, neither more nor less factual than the kegs of Bud or the color of Santa’s suit.”

Errors are like rats. Even the most aggressive efforts to exterminate them fall short. Errors elude even The New Yorker‘s vaunted fact-checking operation. Translators of McPhee’s article about the Swiss army identified 140 new errors. Error-busting, then, is a Sisyphean task. Even when you fail, trying is imperative.

8. Finding Voice

Everyone wants to stand out, to develop a “voice”–a distinct way of phrasing, scene-setting, describing, explaining–that sets him apart from other writers.

How do you do it?

To start, ironically, you imitate others. You find writers whose work you admire, and you study the structure and pacing of their work. You notice the way they introduce a topic, build sentences and paragraphs, describe a face or a moment, deploy quotations or metaphors, break down a complex idea into pieces, or transition from one idea to another. You isolate one of those tricks and you imitate it. Then you do it again and again.

Then the magic happens. “Rapidly, the components of imitation fade,” McPhee writes. “What remains is a new element in your own voice, which is not in any way an imitation. Your manner as a writer takes form in this way, a fragment at a time.”

Which is like life, more broadly experienced. We find something to admire and align ourselves with it. We practice, practice, practice until it’s fresh and belongs, wholly, to us. In this way connection with others allows us to become who we are.

9. Finishing Touches

Here’s where the writer’s fun begins. After a lot of grinding–hard labor to gather the pieces and figure out how they might relate to each other–you can develop the ideas and characters and scenes with some depth and care. You can find the details that express “the people and the places and how the weather was,” to quote Hemingway.  You can find the words that express the ideas just right–les mots juste.

As it happens, McPhee’s daughters have followed in his footsteps as creatives. Two are novelists, one is an art historian, and another is a photographer. When they get stuck, they sometimes seek advice from each other and their father. McPhee shares this piece of advice he once offered his daughter Jenny:

The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy, I just fling words as if they were I were flinging mud on the wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft. With that, you’ve achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the eye and ear. Edit it again—top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time.

And when do you know you’re done? You just know. You run out of questions to ask. When you ask questions, you know the answer before your interviewee can respond. The scenes play vividly in your mind, in the right sequence, almost like a movie.

Nothing is random anymore.

At that point, you’re probably already thinking about the next story.

Postscript: A Personal Note

Many years ago, I got the time wrong for a meeting at Boston University. To pass time, I wandered over to the campus bookstore and found Levels of the Game. In describing a U.S. Open semifinal match, McPhee offers a glimpse not just of tennis and sports and strategy, but of the two Americas. Arthur Ashe was a black who grew up in segregated Richmond; Clark Graebner was a privileged country club kid from suburban Milwaukee. Subtly, McPhee reveals some of the underlying truths of race and class that don’t fit the usual ideological and partisan debates.

I sat on the floor and read until, in a jolt, I realized I had to hustle to my meeting. As I lifted myself off the floor, I knew what I wanted to do for my next project. With just a moment of thought, I decided to give the McPhee treatment to Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, when the Arizona Diamondbacks rallied in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 to beat the three-time defending champion New York Yankees. The game had everything—the sport’s best players and personalities, the convergence of trends that were changing the game, and an emotional undercurrent owing to the 9/11 attacks that happened six weeks before.

While writing that book, The Last Nine Innings, I occasionally returned to McPhee’s work. I read his book on Bill Bradley and long New Yorker pieces on nuclear proliferation, oranges, and geology. I picked apart his work, looking for tricks of the trade that I could use myself. I did not want to be McPhee; only one person can do that. But he is a master of longform narrative, worthy of study and emulation. He is, I suspect, as immersed in both the substance and form of storytelling as anyone alive. I have long envied the hundreds of students who have learned his approach in his creative nonfiction classes at Princeton.

Now, with Draft No. 4, he has invited writers everywhere into his seminar room.

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Tips from the Masters on Writing Your Book

If you want to write a book, you need to establish clear discipline and be ready for everything that could happen. But you can do it.

During November–National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo–400,000 people dedicate themselves to writing 50,000 words toward a novel. Participants get together in bookstores, church basements, coffee shops, classrooms to feed off each others’ energy and write an average of 1,666 words a day. Of course, people also write alone, at kitchen tables, on sofas, in candle-lit garrets, and more.

If they can do it, you can do it.

The important thing is that they write. Every day. On schedule. And at the end of the process, they have 50,000 words.

Here are seven simple tips for getting your manuscript done.

Go Inside the Character

Getting into characters’ heads means embracing all of them, including their misunderstandings, says Gay Talese, author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, The Kingdom and the Power, and other nonfiction narrative works. Leave it to the story–and the reader—to judge the characters. “I try to see people as they see themselves,” Talese says. “Bill Bonanno was a murderer, as was his father, as were those bodyguards I used to hang out with in restaurants along First Avenue in lower Manhattan. But I didn’t think they were so different from soldiers who are praised by their government as patriotic for committing murder. Protecting your buddies, that’s all it’s about.”

Listen for the Sounds You Create

John McPhee says the ultimate test for a piece of writing comes when you read it aloud: “Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. Sentence B may work out well, but then its effect on sentence A may spoil the rhythm of the two together. One of the long-term things about knitting a piece of writing together is making all this stuff fit. I always read the second draft aloud, as a way of moving forward. I read primarily to my wife, Yolanda, and I also have a friend whom I read to. I read aloud so I can hear if it’s fitting together or not. It’s just as much a part of the composition as going out and buying a ream of paper.”

Gossip!

Be a snoop and take notes voraciously, says Jane Smiley, author of A Thousand Acres. “Eavesdrop and write it down from memory–gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop! Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works. Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later. Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.”

Give yourself to love

All good writing begins with the heart, says Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Last American Man and Eat, Pray, Love (pictured). Of course, the heart is hard to figure out, but at least try. “I love this work. I have always loved this work. My suggestion is that you start with the love and then work very hard and try to let go of the results. Cast out your will, and then cut the line. Please try, also, not to go totally freaking insane in the process. Insanity is a very tempting path for artists, but we don’t need any more of that in the world at the moment, so please resist your call to insanity. We need more creation, not more destruction. We need our artists more than ever, and we need them to be stable, steadfast, honorable and brave – they are our soldiers, our hope. If you decide to write, then you must do it, as Balzac said, “like a miner buried under a fallen roof.” Become a knight, a force of diligence and faith.”

Don’t Just Summarize

Too often, writers rush to summarize rather than paying close attention to what actually happens, said Ernest Hemingway. “The greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action–what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.” Daily journalism is easy because it’s so disposable. “In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.”

Explore different worlds

Ultimately, writing is about translating someone else’s life and work to an audience with no real knowledge of either, said John Updike, author of Rabbit, Run and other books. “A man whose life is spent in biochemistry or in building houses, his brain is tipped in a certain way,” he said. “There is a thinness in contemporary fiction about the way the world operates, except the academic world. I do try, especially in this novel, to give characters professions. Shaw’s plays have a wonderful wealth of professional types. Shaw’s sense of economic process, I guess, helped him (a) to care and (b) to convey, to plunge into the mystery of being a chimney sweep or a minister. One of the minimal obligations a book has to a reader is to be factually right, as to be typographically pleasant and more or less correctly proofread. Elementary author ethics dictate that you do at least attempt to imagine technical detail as well as emotions and dialogue.”

Get physical

If a story does not affect you physically, something’s missing, said Susan Sontag, author of As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh. “The story must strike a nerve — in me,” she says. “My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.”

Richard Ben Cramer, author of What It Takes, agrees. “I want my books or articles to have the same impact a novel has on a reader,” he said. “Something has to happen to the character during which an emotional truth is revealed.”

Give it to ’em

Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, advised against holding back information. No need to be too cute withholding information, he said. “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”

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How to Be Creative, One Step at a Time

Image by John Hain

How does creativity happen? Is it, as some would say, a mystical process somehow connected to muses and gods? Or is it a process of grinding, getting up every day and working on the pieces so you can eventually put those pieces into a meaningful whole?

This is, of course, a false dichotomy. It’s not a matter of either/or. It’s both. So we need to understand how the mystical and the grinding come together.

One hint comes from something Linda Ronstadt said long ago: “In committing to artistic growth, you have to refine your skills to support your instincts.”

Or, to quote Louis Pasteur, “chance favors the prepared mind.”

1. Decide on a Plan

To build anything — a bridge, a treehouse, a casserole, a story — you need the right materials and the right skills. It takes a long time to develop the skills. The noted psychologist Anders Ericsson calculates that it takes 10,000 hours of focused, intent work to achieve mastery over a skill. It’s not just practice, practice, practice. It’s practice intently, practice open-heartedly, practice curiously.

I once met a banker named Stanley Lowe who was active in inner-city neighborhood revitalization and historic preservation. For Lowe, good intentions were never enough. Whenever do-gooders offered an idea for a project, he would challenge them: “What’s the plan?”

Without a plan, you don’t have much.

Writing well requires a vast trove of skills. Writers need to master the basic elements of the craft — sentences and paragraphs, grammar, punctuation, quoting, asking good questions, breaking down evidence, finding the right words, observing, sequencing ideas and images, zig-zagging back and forth from scene to summary, and much more.

Anyone can write reasonably well if they can write a great sentence. Nothing matters more than the sentence, as Ernest Hemingway explains in A Moveable Feast:

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, … I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.

Contrary to mystics who say that writing is a gift from the gods, bestowed on a lucky few, writing can be taught. I can spend an hour with anyone and show them how to write better and faster, right away. I can show anyone how to write “one true sentence” … and then another and another. After that, it’s up to you.

For you to master this and other skills, you must practice intently, as Ericsson says. You must practice in all kinds of contexts, with all kinds of subjects. You must practice with an open mind. You must realize that everything you write needs revision and editing. You must not be discouraged, but instead more determined, by that basic reality.

So burn all the necessary writing skills into your brain. I have identified 81 specific “elements” of writing. That’s my list. Yours might be 97 or 42. Whatever. You can master a whole raft of techniques and apply them to all kinds of challenges.

You can and must, as Ronstadt says, refine your skills. Or, as Pasteur says, prepare your mind.

Then what?

This is when it gets interesting.

2. Let Go

Now it’s play time. Now it’s time to let your imagination, your subconscious, direct you. In this process, mind and soul blend together. Here’s how William Faulkner’s mindsoul worked:

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

Passages like this encourage the mystic’s point of view, that writing is a gift of the gods proffered to a lucky few. But if you know anything about Faulkner or any other great writers (or even just good writers), you know that they work hard. They get up every morning and grind. When they want to quit, they don’t. When they experience writer’s block, they step away, like Hemingway, and reframe their problem.

But when you’ve done the hard work and struggled, mystical stuff does happen. And there’s even a process for that. Here’s how George Saunders describes the process:

A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices he’s arranged his hobo into a certain posture – the hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why is he looking over there? At that little blue Victorian house? Stan notes a plastic woman in the window, then turns her a little, so she’s gazing out. Over at the railroad bridge, actually. Huh. Suddenly, Stan has made a love story. Oh, why can’t they be together? If only “Little Jack” would just go home. To his wife. To Linda.

What did Stan (the artist) just do? Well, first, surveying his little domain, he noticed which way his hobo was looking. Then he chose to change that little universe, by turning the plastic woman. Now, Stan didn’t exactly decide to turn her. It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to him to do so; in a split-second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal “Yes.”

He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them.

Once the process of creation begins, it exerts its own power. The deeper you get into a story, the more detailed you must be. Every detail does two things. First, it makes everything more real and compelling. No one (except ideologues) gets excited about generalities. But everyone can get intrigued by real, flesh-and-blood characters. The more specific a situation, the greater its universal appeal.

Second, detail closes down some avenues while opening others. As we learn new details about the hobo, we open ourselves to new possibilities. Maybe the hobo had a relationship with the object of his eye, or someone like her. Maybe he once occupied a comfortable house, too. Maybe he has a whole world, far from the bridge, that he longs to recover. Every detail opens new possibilities. But it also closes possibilities. If the hobo remembers an old flame when he eyes the woman, other story lines fade away. He that woman is the image of an old love, then she is not the image of an old nemesis or landlady or teacher or boss or prosecutor.

Creation, as Faulkner says, begins to move of its own accord. The creator cannot plan everything at the beginning of the process. The creator can set the parameters of the story — it will take place at a certain time and place, with a certain set of characters, with a certain destination — but then allow the process of discovery to play a big role in moving the narrative forward.

3. Make Tweaks and Adjustments

Once the story takes off, it’s tweaking time. Hemingway said to “write with your heart, edit with your head.” Get stuff down on the page, then fiddle with it.

Again, George Saunders explains:

What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we’re adjusting that which is already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs. I write, “Jane came into the room and sat down on the blue couch,” read that, wince, cross out “came into the room” and “down” and “blue” (Why does she have to come into the room? Can someone sit UP on a couch? Why do we care if it’s blue?) and the sentence becomes “Jane sat on the couch – ” and suddenly, it’s better (Hemingwayesque, even!), although … why is it meaningful for Jane to sit on a couch? Do we really need that? And soon we have arrived, simply, at “Jane”, which at least doesn’t suck, and has the virtue of brevity.

But why did I make those changes? On what basis?

On the basis that, if it’s better this new way for me, over here, now, it will be better for you, later, over there, when you read it. When I pull on this rope here, you lurch forward over there.

It’s not just intuition, of course. A good writer has a process for tweaking and editing. I call my method “Search and Destroy.” Deliberately, I search for certain kinds of problems — weak starts or finishes, too many bully words (adjectives and adverbs), unclear images, muddled explanations, and so on — and then try to fix them.

As I look for problems in this way, new ideas occur to me. I need a different detail. What if I juxtaposed these characters/ideas? How can I fix this phrasing? Sometimes, addressing these issues opens the whole process up again. Sometimes I scrap whole sections or revamp them, with whole new approaches.

4. Bear Down and Let Go: One Strategy

In my seminars on storytelling, students learn how to both plan and let go. One of my favorite exercises is the Character Dossier. I give students a list of questions about the character. Step by step, we create a character from whole cloth. Every answer defines the character a little more. Every answer provides more detail, opening some possibilities and closing others. If you say a character was born in Moline, Illinois, in 1963, she cannot be a hipster millennial in Brooklyn in 2017. If she lost her parents in a plane crash when she was 12, she can’t deepen her relationship with them when she’s 40.

When we fill in the Character Dossier, we write much of the story. When we know enough about characters to set them into motion, they take over the story. That’s what Faulkner was talking about. Before the characters can lead us, we have to prepare them.

When we have a complete command of all the skills of writing — and when we have set up the model town, as Saunders describes it — we can let go. After we let our characters loose, we need to intervene again to give some kind of order to all the character sketches and scenes and details.

So, you see, creativity is a process of bearing down, then letting go … then bearing down again. Bear down, then let go, again and again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Image by John Hain.

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Follow This Day-by-Day Guide To Write Your Book (Not Just During NaNoWriMo)

The first piece of advice that all writers get is to “write what you know.”

By the time we have decided to write for an audience—to share thoughts, voluntarily, with anyone who will listen—we have developed a whole storehouse of experiences and memories, thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, and insights and ideas.

The trick is to use this storehouse to inspire and drive your writing—without creating unnecessary barriers.

National Novel Writing Month, a k a NaNoWriMo, offers an ideal opportunity to plumb your conscious and subconscious minds. Day by day, you can make deliberate efforts to understand yourself—and use that understanding to create something new.

But you don’t need to wait till November. Set yourself a goal to get a complete a draft of a novel–or memoir or how-to book or any other major piece of writing–in a month.

Without further ado, here’s your 30-day plan for connecting what’s deepest inside you to the novel you want to write—the novel you will write—this November.

1. “Writing is a code.” That’s what Margaret Atwood says, anyway. We all communicate all whole lives. But to become masters, we need to master specific skills and “tricks of the trade.”

Tasks: (1) Spend 15 minutes brainstorming the codes you’re going to have to crack as a writer. (2) Write 2,000 words describing what challenge your hero faces, how he’s going to crack the code

2. The journey. The ancient Greeks said: “Look to the end.” Every story takes the characters—and the reader—on a journey to some powerful ending. The novelist John Irving actually writes the last paragraph of his books first. He keeps that last paragraph as a North Star for his writing process. So ask yourself: Where do you want your characters to end up? How d you want them to differ b y the time they have experienced their adventure?

Tasks: (1) Imagine finishing your novel—how it all comes out. (2) Write your last paragraph and your last 2,000 words or the first and last paragraphs of many scenes of summaries.

3. The Arc. Aristotle said that great drama resembles an arc, which begins by introducing the characters and their world, then confronts the hero and others with increasingly intense challenges, and finally resolves with a new understanding and significant change in the character’s lives.

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Tasks: (1) Sketch out an arc for your life—first, as if your life were to end today; second, as if you would live till 90. (2) Write full action passages for one or two of the following points along the arc: Opening scene … The challenge … Crisis 1 … Crisis 2 …  Crisis 3 … Recognition …  Reversal … Denouement.

4. Scenes and summaries. All stories move back and forth between scenes and summaries. Scenes engage the reader physically; summaries allow a moment of respite and an opportunity to explain ideas and background. Scenes show particular people doing particular things at particular times and places, with particular motions and emotions. Scenes zoom in to capture the details of people’s lives, with a moment-by-moment description of action. Summaries offer sweeping assessments of the bigger picture, with an emphasis on what it all means, in order to set up scenes.

Tasks: (1) write does tabloid headlines for as many scenes and summaries as possible. (2) Write one scene and one summary, each 1000 words long. With the scene, just show the characters doing one thing after another—no exposition!

5. The hero. Who’s your hero? What’s his dilemma? All great stories offer the reader a character to root for—often superior in many ways, but still human with a need to deal with flaws and difficult situations. Is the hero young or old, virtuous or troubled, sociable or hermetic, tall or short, dark or light, fit or flaccid, rich or poor, happy or dissatisfied, knowing or clueless, young or old, male or female?

Tasks: (1) Brainstorm the various challenges you’ll face as an author. Make a list. Tack it over your computer. (2) Write one scene and one summary describing the hero’s deepest challenge.

6. World of the Story. The setting not only offers a “container” for a story, but also reveals much about the characters and their community. The setting is rich with clues about the characters, their struggles, their ideals, and their capacity to act.

Tasks: Describe your situation, your setting, a “day in the life,” and how it affects your work. (2) Describe one or two settings, in a total of 2000 words, by showing the characters moving around. Have each one of these as the openings of a chapter or scene. Example: Herb Clutter’s promenade.

7. The Crisis or Call. Every hero needs to face a crisis or call to action. In the midst of living a settled life, something happens to challenge the hero. Something internal (unresolved feelings and relationships, goals and ambitions, memories from the past) or external (an economic, romantic, social, professional, or other upheaval) takes the hero out of her comfort zone. Or some event issues a challenge. At first, she refuses to answer the challenge. But over time, she realizes she has no choice to do so.

Tasks: (1) Write down three times when you have faced a new, unexpected challenge in your life—and how you responded. Note how you felt physically amidst these challenges. (2) Describe the moment when your hero was first introduced to the challenge that he must face—and how he responded. Include denial and selfmisunderstanding. 2000 words.

8. The hero’s dossier. To tell a satisfying story, you need to know your hero—and other characters—inside and out. Who are these people? What do they look like? Where do they come from? What do they want? What have they done? Who do they spend time with? What do their mannerisms and habits betray about them?

Tasks: (1) Brainstorm intensely on your life and values. (2) Fill out a “character dossier” and write one scene and one summary to show that character to the reader. 2000 words, 1000 words for each fragment. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. The wheel of character types, Part 1. The best stories use action to reveal something about the hero and other characters—especially what those characters repress. Every character has an opposite. These opposites resist each other, but they’re also drawn to each other. What’s different in the opposite character is something that exists in all of us, but repressed. Start by considering the most consequential of character types—the hero and villain.

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Tasks: (1) Think of your biggest rival at one or two specific moments in your life. (2) Show the first interaction with the hero and villain (1000 words). Show a later interaction that reveals something totally surprising—but not, in retrospect since the hero and villain contains parts of each other.

10. The wheel of character types, Part 2. Other characters help to draw push the story forward. The pairs of opposites include the mentor and tempter … the sidekick and skeptic … and the mind and heart. Each one of these three pairs of types represents something in all of us.

Tasks: (1) Brainstorm for 15 minutes, feverishly, about two character types in your life. (2) Create scenes two characters—besides the hero and villain—acting or speaking with reference to the hero. Could be mentor, tempter, sidekick, skeptic, heart, or mind.

11. The wheel of character types, Part 3. Things get really interesting when three characters are part of a scene. Whenever two characters develop a relationship—of alliance or opposition—a third party lurks to scramble that relationship. Two lovers, for example, encounter a past lover. Two business partners encounter a revolt among workers. Parents encounter the demanding desires of a child. And so on.

Tasks: (1) Brainstorm about the dynamics of the triangles in your life—what make them stable, what made them volatile and changing. (2) Create scenes with interactions of TWO triangles. By now, make sure you cover all of the character types in the last three days. 9. 10. 11.

12. Act by Act. Give your story three distinct acts, using the narrative arc: The World of the Story, rising action, and resolution. In the World of the Story, show the people and places in a state of calm and order. Think of this as a settled status quo. Then show the hero confronted with something difficult—something so difficult, in fact, that hero cannot bear to face it head-on. Show that hero slowly, painfully, dealing with different aspects of that challenge, one by one. Show the character change with these encounters. Finally, give the hero an “aha”: moment, when he begins to understand the true nature of his life and world—and the need to change for his own survival and wellbeing.

Tasks: (1) Think about your life as a three-act play. How satisfying is the “conclusion”? Sketch your story on a sheet of paper. Ask what you need to reach your own “resolution.” (2) Review your story to date. Write opening and closing paragraphs for each part, making sure that you start and end strongly. Write a total of 200 new words, however distributed.

13. Dialogue. People’s language—their choice of words, their use of slang, how quickly they speak, their conversational tics— reveal much about their character. How they interact with others—whether they listen, interrupt, stay on the subject, show respect—reveals even more. And of course people speak differently in different places with different people.

Tasks: (1) List three important conversations you’ve had in your life. Show how you connected—or failed to connect—with the other persons. Try to understand what made the conversation work or fail. (2) Write three scenes, 750 words apiece, with only dialogue.

14. Parallel arcs. The best stories are really two or three stories rolled into one. Besides the main plot, which involves the hero’s journey, there are two or three subplots involving other characters or ideas. These plots and subplots intersect at critical moments in the story.

Tasks: (1) Write down the essence of the “plotline” of your life. Then write down the various subplots, involving friends and family and others, that intersect with your story at critical times for both. (2) Sketch out two subplots of your story. For each, describe the main character, the journey, barriers along the way, moments of intersection with the main plot, and how the journey ends.

15. Denial. Most stories are about one thing: How the hero and other characters deny some essential reality, and then struggle because of the denial. When the hero is first presented with his challenge, he does everything in his power to avoid confronting the truth. And for good reason: Change is painful, emotionally overwhelming. But a series of events force the hero to deal with pieces of the challenge.

Tasks: (1) Honestly, with no self-editing, make a list of the problems in your life that you avoid and try to deny. (2) Write a scene in which another character confronts the hero about a problem that he has been denying. Then write the background summary that shows the origin of this denial, with reference to past events—and try to build scenes into that summary as much as possible.

16. The Time Element. “Nothing concentrates the mind like a pending execution,” Samuel Johnson once said. Time pressures force characters to think, act, respond energetically—making more mistakes, but also discovering more things. Suspense begins with a ticking clock. TV shows like “Mission: Impossible” and “24” explicitly race against time. Even stories that suspend time, like Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, create tension about the question: Will the hero reenter the real world in time for a decent life? =

Tasks: (1) summarize all the tasks still ahead to finish your novel draft. (2) Write TWO scenes, 1000 or so words apiece, describing the hero or other character racing against the clock.

17. Taking Risks. The “Hail Mary” is one of the most exciting plays in football. With the game at stake, the quarterback launches a long pass with the hope of scoring big. But it’s also a risk—the other team could intercept the ball. Life is like that too. Sometimes we have to risk losing a lot to gain a lot.

Tasks: (1) Make a list of the riskiest things you have done, either on purpose or by neglect or recklessness. (2) Write a scene in which the character takes a big risk, then write a scene where his villain takes a big risk.

18. Beats. Every scene is a series of actions, one after another. Characters constantly thrust and parry, sometimes dramatically and sometimes subtly. To give your scene pacing and meaning, you need to make sure that every moment advances the story.

Tasks: (1) For ten minutes, write down everything that you said with a friend in a recent conversation. Show a constant move back and forth from positive to negative values and back again. (2) Write two scenes of about 1000 words apiece. Make sure that every moment produces some reaction and/or advances the story. Take out all details and actions that do not move the scene toward a memorable conclusion.

19. Suspense. Engage the reader best by creating a sense of uncertainty, which gets the reader guessing, and then solve that uncertainty. Cliffhangers bring the story to a point when something important is about to happen—and then break off the action.

Tasks: (1) For ten minutes, write down the moments in your life when you know something big was about to happen—but you didn’t know what. (2) Write two 1000-word scenes that do just this. Move the scene forward, beat by beat, and then end with an almost-dramatic conclusion. Save that conclusion—the answer to an important dilemma for the character—for the next section.

20. Senses. People— even reader—are physical creatures. So you need to make your story crackle with physical details. Make sure you use specific, precise words to evoke sights, sounds, and feelings.

Tasks: (1) write down as many sensory words as possible. Make as many observations as possible about the sights, sounds, and tactile qualities of people and things in your vicinity. (2) Go over all your fragments so far and replace all general descriptions with something visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.

21. Sentences. If you can write a good sentence, you can write anything. All too often, we get lost in long and meandering sentences. It’s only natural when you are engaged in such a creative process: one idea prompts another idea, then another and another.

Tasks: (1) Write down, one sentence at a time, all of the writing tasks you need to finish to complete your novel this month. Use full sentences. (2) Go through your drafts so far, sentence by sentence, and make sure that each one takes the characters—and the reader—from one place to another, different place.

22. Shapes. Writing uses three basic shapes—a straight line, a circle, and a triangle.

Tasks: (1) Sketch out your life, so far, using a line, circle, and triangle. (2) Write three separate passages of about 750 words apiece, either scenes or summaries. In one passage, take a straight, linear path. Don’t double back, don’t skip off to provide background; just show one thing after another. In the second passage, show a character or idea begin one place, develop, and end up where you started. In the third, depict the interaction of three characters and/or three ideas. Show how, when two interact with each other, the third has the potential to change their interactions.

23. Numbers. All good ideas can be expressed as ones, twos, threes, or longer lists of things. Ones put a person or place, hope or fear, thought or idea, front and center. You look at that one thing from different angles, as if inspecting a diamond. Twos present complements and oppositions—sidekicks and enemies, reinforcing or opposing ideas, consonant or conflicting feelings. Threes present the opportunity for real complexity. Think of the lover’s triangle. Whenever two sides bond, the third party lurks nearby, ready to upset everything.

Tasks: (1) Write down the most important idea in your life, something about your relationship with one important person in your life, then the most dynamic triangle in your life, and finally the five most important people, events, or values in your life. (2) Write four fragments of 500 to 750 words. In one fragment, focus on one person, thing, or idea. Make everything else revolve around that one person, thing, or idea. In another fragment, show two people, things or ideas competing with each other— and, below the surface, reinforcing each other. In the third passage, show a triangle of people, things, or ideas. Show how any two corners of the triangle can get stabilized or destabilized by the third. Finally, create a passage that explains or shows the complexity of things by listing a whole bunch of things—people, events, things, tasks, debts, fears, etc.

24. Discovery/exploration of sketchy places. Steven King says he writes scenes by imagining places and events that would scare him. Scary places are all around us—roads and highways where we can crash or get hit by a car … pools where children can fall and drown … parking garages or alleys where we can be mugged … hospitals where we can be mistreated or even tortured … taxis where drivers can take us to dangerous places … even offices where nightmare bosses and colleagues torture us emotionally.

Tasks: (1) Describe the freakiest place you’ve ever been in your life, with as many precise details as possible. (2) Create one sketchy place—a place that’s weird, gross, dangerous, sickly, otherworldly, creepy, Disneyesque, or otherwise alienating—and make something consequential happen to your character there.

25. Love. What captures the heart—the emotions, longing, deep and abiding interest or even obsession—of the hero or other characters? How the hero encounters and responds to love defines that character like nothing else.

Tasks: (1) Make a list of the loves of your life, with specific details about what was good and what was bad— and what were most moments in these relationships was most revealing about your character. (2) Write two scenes. In the first scene, show the moment when the hero meets his or her love interest for the first time. Show the character surprised by his or her interest—and holding back for some reason. In the second scene, show a major conflict between the two lovers. Don’t explain the conflict—show the conflict, so the reader can make sense of it on her own.

26. Failure and Frustration. Nothing matters more to a story than failure and frustration. How a character fails—coming up short in an honest effort or neglecting or denying something important—reveals something about his self-mastery. And how he responds—whether he learns and grows or rigidly rejects opportunities for growth—reveals his character.

Tasks: (1) Write down three moments of failure in your life— with as many details as possible about how you responded. (2) Write two short scenes—anywhere from 250 to 500 words—describing the moments when a character experiences failure. Try to show how their expressions and body language change at the moment when they realize they have failed.

27. Not What It Seems. The best stories operate on at least two levels—the level of the obvious and the level of the meaningful. Characters carry out different tasks, interact with others, make mistakes and grow—but underneath, they are really struggling with deeper challenges.

Tasks: (1) Think of three times in your life when you worked or played hard to achieve something (e.g., success in school, sports, work, love)—when something larger was really at stake (e.g., pride, dignity, revenge, honor, vindication). (2) Create two scenes of 1,000 words apiece in which your character strives for one thing, obvious for all to see—but gets his or her motivation from a deeper psychological yearning.

28. Powers. What are the hero’s greatest powers— and how does he deploy them? Does the hero possess extraordinary physical might? Intellectual powers? Emotional insight? Social wherewithal? Or does he possess some supernatural connections to other beings?

Tasks: (1) Make a list of people you know with the greatest physical power, intellectual power, social power, financial power, and moral power. (2) Write two scenes, each 1000 words, describing clashes of characters with different powers. Show how these characters attempt to use these powers, and how they respond to each other. For example, show someone of great wealth interacting with someone with social charisma or someone with a strong moral compass.

29. Surprises. What surprises can you sprinkle throughout the story? Above all, good stories show us things we cannot imagine without some prodding. If everything is predictable, after all, why bother reading? Storytelling is a two-way process. The writer offers a series of moments, with just enough details for the reader to add her own memory and imagination. Think of storytelling as a relay race, where the writer offers something surprising, then the reader adds her own thoughts.

Tasks: (1) List the ten most surprising things to happen in your life. Looking back, identify the missed signals that would have made these events less surprising. (2) Create two scenes in which important surprises happen to the hero and one other character, either together or separately. Then write scenes or summaries that provide the backstories, setting up those surprises.

30. Recognition and Reversal. Great stories end with a new level of understanding—for the story’s leading character’s and for the readers.

Tasks: (1) Make a list of three times in your life when you came to a brand new understanding of yourself, your values, and how the world works. Write down what caused you to gain this new wisdom. (2) Write the climactic scene of your novel. Show the character saying and doing something that he would not have been able to say or do before. Show how this new wisdom changes everyone around him.

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Brainstorming and the Creative Process

To write, you must first generate ideas. You can’t sit down at a laptop and just start spilling out coherent prose. Just as a builder needs construction materials, a writer needs ideas. And you need to figure out how to organize ideas–what’s most important and what’s less important, how to cluster the ideas, and how to identify the ideas that will arouse the reader.

Yes, we’re talking about brainstorming. It’s a process of searching your whole mind, with few preconceived ideas about what you want to say. It’s a way of digging deep. It’s a process of discovery.

So how does brainstorming work? Actually, brainstorming takes a number of forms. It doesn’t begin when you’re ready to write. It takes place when you’re sleeping and when you’re daydreaming.

So let’s look at the major dimensions of brainstorming.

Why Brainstorming?

To explore any topic, you must start with lots of research. But also get your subconscious involved. Allow your lifetime of knowledge and insight to contribute to your analysis.

When you tell yourself to do something, the brain rebels. Think of our failed New Year’s resolutions. We vow to stay on a diet, exercise regularly, pay bills on time, or control our temper. Despite our sincere efforts to make change, we fail.

The problem is twofold—narrow minds and resistance.

Making resolutions narrows the mind. Rather taking in the full range of possibilities, the mind focuses on the command’s subject. If I tell you not to eat ice cream, what are you going to think about? Ice cream.

Whatever you decide to do, your subconscious mind resists change. Our subconscious is a complex web of memories, associations, fears, and desires. Many of these thoughts we repress, so they feel illicit. But they remain, under the surface. And when they are challenged, they assert themselves.

Start With Research

Before brainstorming, do as much research as possible. When you read a book or article, write down a label for each idea in the margins. That way, when you go back to brainstorm, you can review all the key concepts in a few minutes.

Now, how do you arrange these ideas? Some writers cluster similar ideas together; others show connections between opposites. Some writers list data in one part of the sheet and general ideas or principles in another. Others cluster major concepts with specific data. One thing you must always do: draw diagrams and lines making connections among the ideas and data.

Whenever possible, draw charts and pictures. Show how ideas relate to each other. When you scribble, you excite your mind. You move away from linear thinking—first one thing, then another, then another … —when you draw pictures. You can see a whole bunch of ideas, and how they relate to each other, at a glance.

Simple stick figures work fine. Use them to illustrate the relations among characters (who), their passions and activities (what), the timing of actions (when), the location of activities (where), the reasoning behind activities (why), and their methods (how).

When you write, you need to arrange your ideas logically. But don’t rush this process. To brainstorm well, you need to create a free flow of ideas, without too much order.

Dreaming

A study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, reported in the journal Current Biology, reminds me of my early days as a college teacher.

Back in 1988 and 1989, I was teaching fulltime at St. Mary’s College of Maryland while completing work on my dissertation. I taught three classes every week. Every lecture was brand new. I knew a lot about these classes but also had to learn as I went.

Every night, I was able to do all the prep work for two of the three classes. But I was too exhausted to prep for the third class. So, before turning in, I quickly reviewed materials for the third class. I made no effort to write a lecture.

When I woke up the next morning, I knew exactly what to do with the third lecture. I turned on my computer and completed the lecture in short order. That third lecture, as it turned out, was usually better than the other two.

The reason is simple. I primed my mind to do all the hard work while I was sleeping. My dreams took the raw materials — the review of class notes — and organized the material for me.

Ever since then, I have tried to go to bed with an agenda. Whatever problem was vexing me — as a writer, teacher, friend, family member — I try to figure out while sleeping. And it usually works.

I am fond of saying that writing is, more than anything else, a series of problems that need solutions. How am I going to organize this book? How am I going to open this chapter? What evidence do I need for this argument? What’s the best way to introduce a character?

Of course, you cannot solve problems without useful information. So you need to gather and consider as much information as possible before hitting the pillow.

The key to getting the brain to work while dreaming, I have found, is letting go. When I push too hard to solve a problem, I tend to freeze my brain. Not only that, but it’s also harder to fall asleep. You can’t dream if you don’t sleep.

So here’s the formula for solving writing problems:

1. Review all the information and the possible solutions.

2. Get away from the issue by getting ready for bed — brushing teeth, having a glass of water, and so on. Don’t eat or drink alcohol before going to bed. If I have even a glass of wine after 7 or 8, I have a hard time sleeping through the night.

3. If your mind is too active, take a melatonin pill so you can settle down and sleep.

4. Dream away.

5. When you get up, take up the problem you were trying to solve. Chances are, if you had enough information before sleeping, you will come up with at least one or two possible solutions.

Daydreaming and Doodling

When his friends and associates thought about Bayard Rustin, they pictured a restless man, moving kinetically at rallies and demonstrations, exhorting and advising Martin Luther King, speaking in his high-pitched faux British accent, and exposing himself to the worst kind of abuse because of his commitment of nonviolent action.

I had the pleasure of exploring Rustin’s life while researching Nobody Turn Me Around, my account of the 1963 March on Washington. And what a life it was. Rustin was probably the greatest polymath of the civil rights movement. He was a great speaker, strategist, theorist, writer, and organizer. He did more than anyone else to etch nonviolence into the movement’s DNA. And, for extra measure, he was a first-rate singer, a lover of art, and an inspiration to generations of activists in the labor, antiwar, civil rights, and gay rights movements.

Even though I can picture him speaking and singing and leading marches, my indelible image is of Rustin doodling.

When I worked my way through the archives of Rustin and the March on Washington, I found a number of his doodles. They were usually Escher-like images, with layers of squares that curved toward some destination. When I saw the doodles, I guessed that they helped him visualize the complexities of the movement in the tumultuous summer of 1963.

Then I found one of the interns at the March on Washington headquarters. Peter Orris was then a high school student in New York; in the intervening years he has become a doctor but remained active in social causes. He’s a smart and decent man. Did he remember Rustin’s doodles? Yes, he said. He was so impressed that he asked Rustin to autograph one of the doodles.

All this came to mind when I discovered a recent TED talk by Sunni Brown about the power of doodling. Contrary to doodling’s reputation — at best, it’s considered a lazy diversion; at worst, it’s considered a sign of moral laziness and inattention — Brown sees doodling as an essential part of learning and creativity.

She points out that doodlers remember 29 percent more of verbal content than non-doodlers. Even more impressive, doodling excites the senses. We perceive the world through four “modalities” — verbal, auditory, kinesthetic, and symbolic. If you can engage two of those modalities, you will work more efficiently and creatively. Doodling engages all four!

And so her proposed definition of doodling: “to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think.”

So, writers of the world: Doodle! Don’t press yourself when blocked. Don’t just make lists (so linear). Don’t refine definitions. Don’t just read more or interview more. Doodle! Awaken the doodler within!

Brainstorming: From Wildness to Order

When we ask ourselves questions, the brain responds positively. The brain loves scavenger hunts. When you state a goal in the form of a question—like “How can I avoid having a high-calorie lunch today?”—the brain shifts into search mode. It comes up with all kinds of possibilities, rather than resistance.

That’s why brainstorming is so powerful. It sends our brains into search mode. And when it searches, it opens up your whole mind—even ideas that have been buried for years.

So what’s the best approach to brainstorming? Start by writing down everything you know about your topic—on a single piece of paper. Look at all your ideas, all at once. Grab a big sheet of paper—you can buy an 11-by-17 sheet at a copy center—to hold all your ideas.

Get wild. Let your thoughts run free. Use the “divergence” strategy to generate as many creative ideas as possible.

What’s the divergence strategy? Businesses use “divergence tests” in hiring to find the most creative candidates. Here’s how these tests work. Interviewers ask job candidates to list all the ways to understand a word or phrase. Narrow, literal-minded candidates list only obvious ideas; creative candidates list a number of surprising ideas.

Here’s an example: Name all the possible uses of a book. You could say books offer reading materials, cutouts for posters, doorstops, and goods to barter and sell. You might use a book as kindling, weapons, writing surfaces, cutting boards, straight edges, fans, noisemakers, blotters, coasters, Rorschach tests, and symbols. How many more uses could you find for a book?

Divergence tests offer a good way to approach brainstorming too. The more ideas you scribble on your page, the more creatively you can explore a topic.

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Tom Wolfe’s Lesson on Writing with Pizzazz

Two kinds of mindsets prevail among writers.

Style 1, the Clear and Simple School, insists that the purpose of writing is to inform and entertain as simply as possible. Partisans of this style call for short sentences, simple words, and uncomplicated messages. Forget about symbolism or erudite allusions. The Clear and Simple School is the literary version of Joe Friday: Just the facts, ma’am.

Style 2, the Rococo School, insists that clear and simple is really shallow and boring. Why not jazz up the prose? the Two Group asks. Why not create several layers of meaning, even in the simplest phrases? Why not offer the reader new discoveries with every reading of a piece?

In fact, the two schools are not as incompatible as they might seem. You see, even the most ornate prose is usually just a collection of simple phrases and ideas. When you break down a master of literary riffing, like Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, you see a string of simplicity.

Consider this passage from Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, in which Wolfe peals with horrified glee at the foolishness of modern builders. He shows a horde of interior designers and construction crews swarming over a law office, carrying faux-classical materials to dress up the sterile modernist design.

Every great law firm in New York moves without a sputter of protest into a glass-box office building with concrete slab floors and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings and plasterboard walls and pygmy corridors-and then hires a decorator and gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn these mean cubes and grids into a horizontal fantasy of a Restoration townhouse. I have seen the carpenters and cabinetmakers and search-and-acquire girls hauling in more cornices, covings, pilasters, carved moldings, and recessed domes, more linenfold paneling, more (fireless) fireplaces with festoons of fruit carved in mahogany on the mantels, more chandeliers, sconces, girandoles, chestnut leather sofas, and chiming clocks than Wren, Inigo Jones, the brothers Adam, Lord Burlington, and the Dilettanti, working in concert, could have dreamed of.

Now look at this passage, idea by simple idea:

Every great law firm in New York moves
without a sputter of protest
into a glass-box office building
with concrete slab floors
and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings and plasterboard walls and pygmy corridors
and then hires a decorator
gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars
to turn these mean cubes and grids
into a horizontal fantasy
of a Restoration townhouse.
I have seen the carpenters and cabinetmakers
and search-and-acquire girls
hauling in
more cornices, covings, pilasters, carved moldings, and recessed domes,
more linenfold paneling, more (fireless) fireplaces
with festoons of fruit
carved in mahogany on the mantels,
more chandeliers, sconces, girandoles, chestnut leather sofas, and chiming clocks
than Wren, Inigo Jones, the brothers Adam, Lord Burlington, and the Dilettanti,
working in concert,
could have dreamed of.

Each line is as simple as an Amish barn. This passage gets its energy form two things: the specificity of details and the piling-on of these details in just a couple of sentences.

When you want to pepper your prose with style, don’t think you need to be elaborate. In fact, think the opposite — that you need to be as simple as possible. If you find the specific details that others might not notice — and pile these details on top of each other, to create a collective portrait that overwhelms the reader — then you’ll wow the reader.

One warning, though. Don’t overdo it. Audiences love to be dazzled. They love the energy and the color of passages like this. But they can get overwhelmed too. Alternate this kind of linguistic pyrotechnics with a simpler, shorter style. Then you’ll have the best of Style 1 and Style 2.

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The Lede: How to Start Your Piece

Sir Laurence Olivier once said his goal, whenever he walked out on stage, was to seduce every woman in the audience. Whether he played Hamlet or Macbeth or Richard III, he wanted to draw his audience into an intense and sensual relationship. And he did not want to wait.

In this too-busy world, the writer needs to seduce the reader right away. If you do not lure the reader, he will go elsewhere. Every lead should somehow make the reader want to turn to a friend and say, “Hey, get a load of this.”

Whether you write a newspaper article, a short story or novel, a memoir or historical story—or even an academic argument about presidential power or the psychology of twins—you need to draw the reader into your piece. You cannot expect a reader to want to read just because you want to write. As Tom Wolfe asks, “Why should the reader be expected to just lie flat and let these people come tromping through his mind as if it were a subway turnstile?”

Leads can be as short as a single word or several paragraphs. Depending on the subject, audience, and medium, you will have more or less space to bring your reader into the story.

A Simple Trick

Fred Strebeigh, a  writing teacher at Yale, gives his students an essay and asks students to mark the end of the introduction with a slash. Some put the mark after a sentence, others after a paragraph, and others still after seven or eight paragraphs. But most students usually agree on a place where the story’s questions and themes have been laid out. There is no right answer, but the exercise shows his hard it can be to say enough but not too much, quickly but not too quickly.

Hook the Reader Right Away

How much time do you have to seduce the reader? Media experts say TV commercials have only two or three seconds to grab the viewer. People giving business presentations—before a captive audience!—only have a couple minutes to engage the audience. Donna Britt, a columnist for The Washington Post, says: “I have a couple of paragraphs, at most, to convince my reader: You don’t know everything you need to know about this. Given that, it’s really important to start off with a bang.”

Make it a Preview

A good lede requires more than a big come-on. You also need to preview the story or argument. Read the first lines of The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls:

I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading.

Want to read more? Of course you do. Walls brings you directly into the story. Using concrete images, she puts you in a particular place (a cab on a city street) and introduces you to a compelling character (her mother). She gives you the sensual details you need to feel the moment (“blustery March wind,” “steam,” collars turned up”). And she tells you something that demands an explanation (why her mother roots through a dumpster).

In sixty-nine simple words, Walls either reveals or teases us about the five W’s and one H—who (she and her mom), what (mother-daughter estrangement, eccentric behavior), when (an ordinary night), where (in the city), why and how (she will tell us—we hope). Just three sentences into a 288-page book, she has given us a cliffhanger that makes us want to read more.

Writers get in trouble when they open with an anecdote that does not explore the story’s core question. If you open with lush details about a person or place, or if you open with a vivid story, that might not be enough. You need to show, somehow, why these characters, places, or events matter. As Chekhov said, “One must not put a loaded gun on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”

Beyond the Five W’s

In the old days, before 24-hour news cycles, reporters learned to present the five W’s in every opening paragraph. The reader needed a quick overview of the story. The classic formula delivered. Nowadays, readers need a different kind of lead. They still need the five W’s, but they need an angle on old information.

Whether writing a hard-news story for a newspaper or more complex lead for a magazine or book, the goal remains the same. Think of the opening statement, the thesis, as a promise or a contract. The bargain is simple: In exchange for the reader’s time, the writer will deliver important arguments and enough evidence to prove those arguments. The reader deserves to know what she is getting into. She deserves to know whether the expedition is worth her while, and she deserves the information she needs to hold the writer accountable.

Read These Winning Leads

Read these leads from recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize:

Eric Newhouse (Great Falls Tribune in Montana) on the pervasiveness of alcohol in American society: “’When they put my baby on my breast, I knew something was wrong, so I lifted my head to look at him,’ Maza Weya said of her newborn. ‘I could smell the alcohol on his breath,’ she said. ‘My baby was born drunk.’ After years of drinking everything she could get her hands on, Maza Weya has managed to become sober. Her son isn’t so lucky.”

Gene Weingarten (The Washington Post) on how the public responds to a virtuoso violinist working as a street musician: “He emerged from the Metro at the L’Enfant Plaza Station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.”

Julia Keller (The Chicago Tribune) on the awful power of a tornado: “Ten seconds. Count it: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Ten seconds was roughly how long it lasted. Nobody had a stopwatch, nothing can be proven definitively, but that’s the consensus. The tornado that swooped through Utica at 6:09 p.m. April 20 took some 10 seconds to do what it did. Ten seconds is barely a flicker. It’s a long, deep breath. It’s no time at all. It’s an eternity.

Rick Bragg (The New York Times) on the rebuilding of New Orleans: “The little shotgun house is peeling and the Oldsmobile in front is missing a rear bumper, but Larry Bannock can glimpse glory through the eye of his needle. For almost a year he has hunkered over his sewing table, joining beads, velvet, rhinestones, sequins, feathers and ostrich plumes into a Mardi Gras costume that is part African, part Native American.”

Kenneth Weiss (Los Angeles Times) on the pervasive pollution of the oceans: “The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour. When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos. ‘It comes up like little boils,’ said Randolph Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are pocked with scars. ‘At nighttime, you can feel them burning. I tried everything to get rid of them. Nothing worked.’”

Diana Sugg (The Baltimore Sun) on the tragedy of stillborn children: “That chilly night in late October, the delivery room was so quiet. The doctor wrapped the 8-pound, 21-inch newborn girl in a pink-and-blue striped cotton blanket, pulled a matching cap over her brown hair and gently passed her to her mother. Margarete Heber cradled the baby. In the dim light, Heber could see the infant had her dark eyes, turned-up nose and distinctive chin. Perfect, except she was tinged blue. She had died just hours before she was born. Her birth would be her good-bye. “I am sorry,” Heber whispered, kissing her stillborn daughter on the forehead. “I am so, so sorry.”

Each of these leads puts the reader in a specific place. Usually, that place offers telling clues about the story’s characters and struggles. Often, that place shows a contradiction, which introduces a story of unexpected success or failure.

To test a lead, read it to someone and ask: “Now that know the topic, what else do you want to know?” If the listener cares and asks lots of questions, the lead probably works. Those questions can actually create a workable outline. When you frame an issue the right way, everything else follows naturally.

The Art of the Long Lead

Sit back for a few moments and read his 1997 Sports Illustrated profile of a family of tightrope walkers:

Consider your sister-in-law. Picture your whole family round the dining room table or the holidays, and start with your sister-in-law as she’s spooning the gravy. Think of all her strengths, her good intentions, as well as all the things that make you want to stick your fork into your thigh.

Look, I know you don’t know me from Adam—but just indulge me for a minute before the showstopper comes on. Turn to your brother now. You’re studying him as he drains his third beer, thinking of all the stupid arguments you’ve had, all the quirks of his that have made your teeth grind since you were kids.

Now your spouse. Don’t worry, she’s oblivious; she’s yapping to her sister. Consider her moods, her hormones, her chocolate addiction—the whole works. Got it?

Now close your eyes and imagine this. Imagine all of you at that table—brothers, sisters, in-laws—forming a human pyramid. Seven of you, stacked up in three tiers, except you’re not on the ground. You’re on a wire the width of your ring finger…three stories above the ground…the person on top standing on a chair…and no safety net below. To survive, your family has to synchronize every step and walk from one end of the 34-foot wire to the other. Just one failure to accommodate one of the niggling little pushes or pulls from that sister-in-law, one old jealousy between you and your brother, one bad night with your wife—hell, one cough or sneeze—and it’s coffins for all of you.

One more thing. You have to do this not once, but seven days a week, for two years, all over the country. Traveling and eating and sleeping and dressing together, hating one another and loving one another and handing one another your lives again and again and…. Look, the Guerreros are almost ready now.

LADEEZ and GENTLEMEN! You are about to witness CIRCUS HISTORY! Fifty years after the Wallenda family ASTONISHED the world with an UNPRECEDENTED seven-man pyramid on the high wire….

I read this lead to a writing class at Yale and asked students what else they wanted to know. They shouted out all kinds of questions: How did the Guerreros get involved in this business? What are their family feuds? Anyone ever get killed? How much do they make? How do they do it? And more. Guess what? The students’ questions formed a perfect outline of Gary Smith’s piece.

That is the sign of a great lead—when people want to know more, and they have a sense of what additional information they get by reading on.

Gary Smith’s lead does it all. He brings us into the world of the story—the circus, with all its odd characters and mysteries. He shows us something about the dizzying world of the characters—that high wire is three stories above the ground! He shows us something human—do they actually bicker? He gives us suspense—will they fall?

Are you ready to read more? I am.

The best leads combine vivid characters, conflict, and suspense about something that matters. Whether writing about a presidential assassination or a feature story about acrobats, you need to give the reader useful information and an emotional stake in the story.

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Fish’s Lament

Why don’t students learn how to write?

If you ever spend any time with college professors, you hear endless complaints about poor writing. At the end of the week, you can tell the ones who have papers to grade. They grimace, anticipating countless lost hours trying to decipher errant sentences in jargon-filled nonarguments.

(If you think the problem is unique to the U.S., think again. The situation is not any better in Britain and other English-speaking countries.)

What’s the source of the problem? College teachers, naturally, say the problem lies with high school. If only high school English classes did a better job, profs say, we wouldn’t have to do all this remedial work. Studies show that only about one-quarter of high school seniors write well. High school teachers, in turn, blame families for not setting limits on TV, computer time, texting, and other diversions.

But this all begs the question.

According to Stanley Fish, one of the innovative legal and literary thinkers of our time, students cannot write because no one ever teaches them.

In a series of columns for The New York Times, Fish reports his alarm at reading the poor writing of his graduate students. When he realized that the grad students were teaching writing to the undergrads, he was even more alarmed. Let Fish pick up the story:

I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham.

Fish proposes ditching all those po-mo classes in favor of classes that teach the basic. He proposes to start with writing strong sentences. In fact, even while serving as dean, he has taught basic composition classes using this method. Again, let Fish explain:

You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences. So it makes sense to begin with the question, What is a sentence anyway? My answer has two parts: (1) A sentence is an organization of items in the world. (2) A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.The second part tells you what kind of organization a sentence is, a logical one, and in order to pinpoint what the components of that logic are, I put a simple sentence on the table, something like “John hit the ball” or “Jane likes cake.” I spend an entire week on sentences like these (which are easily comprehended by students of any background), asking students to generate them, getting them to see the structure of relationships that makes them all the same on a formal level, getting them to see that the motor of meaning production is form, not content.

If that sounds like a grind, think again. Once students write strong sentences, they can do anything. In my writing classes at Yale, we spent hours working on sentences and paragraphs. I insist that my students give every sentence a strong “SVO core.” Every sentence needs to state, clearly, who’s doing what to whom. In fact, I ban the use of the verbs “to be” and “to have.” This artificial constraint turns off the auto-pilot and forces students to think through what they mean to say.

We also spent lots of time on paragraphs. As a basic goal, every paragraph should state and develop a single idea. Writing goes awry when paragraphs lurch in different directions. When you say whatever pops into your head, you lose sight on your point. So I have students mark their paragraphs with two- or three-word labels. If they have two or three labels, they need to recast the paragraph into two or three paragraphs — or, better yet, delete some of the material.

Stanley Fish has taken a lot of grief for his deconstructionist approaches to the law and literature. But even his conservative critics must agree that on the question of basic writing skills, he speaks the truth.

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