Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

by Roy Peter Clark

  Since Sept. 11, as many as 90,000 pieces of mail a day continue to flood in to the World Trade Center addresses that no longer exist and to thousands of people who aren’t alive to receive them. On top of that is another mail surge set off by well-wishers from around the U.S. and the world—thousands of letters addressed to, among other salutations: “The People Hurt,” “Any Police Department” and “The Working Dogs” of “Ground Zero, N.Y.” Some of this mail contains money, food, even biscuits for the dogs that were used in the early days to help try to sniff out survivors.

  The mix of World Trade Center mail and Ground Zero mail represents a calamity for the U.S. Postal Service, which served 616 separate companies in the World Trade Center complex whose offices are now rubble or relocated.

  No reader wants to be fooled by a story lead that promises narrative, only to discover a body dense with information. That is why the writer’s movement from anecdote to meaning would be nothing more than a shell game without a return to the narrative line, to the world of letter carrier Emma Thornton. The writer delivers: “Her route in the North Tower has been transformed into a 6-by-6 steel cubicle… surrounded by tall metal racks of pigeonholes.”

  The broken line is a versatile story form. The writer can begin with narrative and move to explanation, or begin with straight information and then illustrate the facts with an anecdote. In either case, the easy swing, back and forth, can feel like clockwork.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Read the work of Nicholas Lemann for examples of the broken line. Analyze his movement from narrative to analysis in books such as The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America and The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.

  2. Review your recent work. Find missed opportunities where you could have used the broken line.

  3. Read the collection of Wall Street Journal features titled Floating Off the Page. Search it for interesting examples of the nut paragraph and the general movement between information and narrative.

  4. As you review your work, look for examples where you have used the nut paragraph to reveal the higher meaning of the story. Pay attention to what comes after this paragraph. Do you move back to narrative, or are you practicing bait and switch on the reader?

  5. As you read or write fiction, pay attention to the way information and explanation mix with narrative. Notice if facts are blended into the story or framed as separate elements.

  TOOL 37

  In short works, don’t waste a syllable.

  Shape short writing with wit and polish.

  I’ve seen the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian. At forty-five carats, it is big and blue and buxom, but not beautiful. Smaller gems have more facets and reflect light with more brilliance. The same can be true of writing. In the ideal, the author of a great big novel should not waste a syllable, but he will, and chances are, in an ocean of words, the reader will not notice. The shorter the story form, the more precious is each word. So polish your jewelry.

  Writing with video images and natural sound, Charles Kuralt mastered making each word—each pause—count:

  “I have fallen in love with American names,” wrote the poet Stephen Vincent Benét.

  Well, really—how could you not? Not if you’ve been to Lick Skillet, Texas, and Bug Tussle, and Nip and Tuck, and Cut and Shoot. In California you can travel from Humbug Flat to Lousy Level, with a detour to Gouge Eye.

  Could the good people of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, use some Hot Coffee, Mississippi, to wake them up?

  You can go from Matrimony, North Carolina, to Caress, Virginia—or from Caress to Matrimony.

  I have passed time in Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky, and Bowlegs and Tombstone, Big Chimney and Bull Town. And I liked Dwarf, Kentucky, though it’s just a little town.

  “I have fallen in love with American names.” How could anybody not? (from American Moments)

  Poet Peter Meinke taught me that short writing forms have three peculiar strengths: power, wit, and polish. Their brevity gives short works a focused power; it creates opportunity for wit; and it inspires the writer to polish, to reveal the luster of the language. Kuralt’s essay exemplifies all three, capturing the power of the American language with witty examples off the American map, each clever name another facet cut into the diamond.

  In his column for the Charlotte Observer, Jeff Elder wrote this response to a query about the extinction of an American species:

  Passenger pigeons looked like mourning doves, but more colorful, with wine-red breasts, green necks and long blue tail feathers.

  In 1800, there were 5 billion in North America. They were in such abundance that the new technology of the Industrial Revolution was enthusiastically employed to kill them. Telegraphs tracked their migration. Enormous roosts were gassed from trees while they slept. They were shipped to market in rail car after rail car after rail car. Farmers bought two dozen birds for a dollar, as hog feed.

  In one human generation, America’s most populous native bird was wiped out.

  There’s a stone wall in Wisconsin’s Wyalusing State Park. On it is a bronze plaque of a bird. It reads: “This species became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of man.”

  When I ask readers to appreciate this piece, they point to its many shiny facets. They notice:

  • “The phrase ‘rail car after rail car after rail car’ looks like a rail car.”

  • “The words ‘were gassed’ carry connotations of a holocaust.”

  • “The first paragraph is filled with natural imagery, but the second contains the language of destructive technology.”

  • “Given their extinction, it is fitting that the pigeons looked like ‘mourning’ doves. The author takes advantage of that coincidence.”

  In short writing, the reader sees the ending from the get-go. With his ending, Elder adds a finish to the surface of the text.

  Good fiction can be short or long, and longer works can contain powerful, witty, and polished shorter elements: anecdotes, scenes, descriptions, vignettes, set pieces that can be lifted out of the work for inspection and delight. Here is a paragraph from one of my favorite boyhood novels, Herzog by Saul Bellow:

  The wheels of the cars stormed underneath. Woods and pastures ran up and receded, the rails of sidings sheathed in rust, the dipping racing wires, and on the right the blue of the Sound, deeper, stronger than before. Then the enameled shells of the commuters’ cars, and the heaped bodies of junk cars, the shapes of old New England mills with narrow, austere windows; villages, convents; tugboats moving in the swelling fabric-like water; and then plantations of pine, the needles on the ground of a life-giving russet color. So, thought Herzog, acknowledging that his imagination of the universe was elementary, the novae bursting and the worlds coming into being, the invisible magnetic spokes by means of which bodies kept one another in orbit. Astronomers made it all sound as though the gases were shaken up inside a flask. Then after many billions of years, light-years, this childlike but far from innocent creature, a straw hat on his head, and a heart in his breast, part pure, part wicked, who would try to form his own shaky picture of this magnificent web.

  It might take a long semester (and another book) to appreciate that passage. The wit—the governing intelligence—of the prose appears in those long fragments that capture the view from inside a moving train; in the exciting movement from junked cars to exploding stars; in that amazing image of human conflict and aspiration, topped off by a straw hat.

  There is no more underdeveloped writing form in American journalism than the photo caption, but Jeffrey Page of the Record in New Jersey reveals the storytelling potential of this short form. Frank Sinatra had just died, so imagine a one-column photo that shows Sinatra from the waist up. He’s wearing a tux with a black bow tie. He has a mike in his hand. He’s crooning.

  If you saw a man in a tux and black bow tie swagger on stage like an elegant pirate, and if you had been told he would spend an hour singing Cole Porter,
Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart, and if when he opened his mouth you heard a little of your life in his voice, and if you saw his body arch back on the high notes (the ones he insisted you hear and feel and live with him), and if his swing numbers made you want to bounce and be happy and be young and be carefree, and if when he sang “Try a Little Tenderness” and got to the line about a woman’s wearing the same shabby dress it made you profoundly sad, and if years later you felt that his death made you a little less alive, you must have been watching this man who started as a saloon singer in Hoboken and went on to become the very definition of American popular music.

  How did Page get away with a 166-word caption—written in a single sentence with the main clause near the end—without using the dead man’s name? He tells me, “I know, I know, it violates every damned rule. Screw it. They keep telling us to take chances, right? So I did.… If you’re a U.S. paper, and especially if you happen to be in New Jersey, you don’t have to tell people that they’re looking at a picture of Sinatra and not Mother Teresa.”

  WORKSHOP

  1. Reread the four short pieces above. Study them for their polished style. Make an inventory of the techniques the writers use to create their brilliant jewels.

  2. Find the shortest piece you have written in the last year. Compare it to the examples in this section. Revise it so that every word works.

  3. Write a photo caption like the one above. Practice, using news and feature photos from newspapers and magazines.

  4. Begin a collection of short writing forms. Study how they are written. Make a list of techniques you could use in your writing.

  TOOL 38

  Prefer archetypes to stereotypes.

  Use subtle symbols, not crashing cymbals.

  At some point, all writers confront the mythic, symbolic, and poetic, which is why they need to be aware (and beware) that common themes of narrative writing have deep roots in the culture of storytelling.

  In 1971 John Pilger described a protest march by Vietnam veterans against the war:

  “The truth is out! Mickey Mouse is dead! The good guys are really the bad guys in disguise!” The speaker is William Wyman, from New York City. He is nineteen and has no legs. He sits in a wheel-chair on the steps of the United States Congress, in the midst of a crowd of 300,000.… He has on green combat fatigues and the jacket is torn where he has ripped away the medals and the ribbons he has been given in exchange for his legs, and along with hundreds of other veterans,… he has hurled them on the Capitol steps and described them as shit; and now to those who form a ring of pity around him, he says, “Before I lost these legs, I killed and killed! We all did! Jesus, don’t grieve for me!” (from The Last Day)

  Since the Greek poet Homer sang The Iliad and The Odyssey, writers have composed stories of soldiers going off to war and their struggles to find a way home. This story pattern—often called there and back—is primeval and persistent, an archetype so deep within the culture of storytelling that we writers can succumb to its gravitational pull without even knowing it.

  Ancient warriors fought for treasure and reputation, but in the passage above, the blessing becomes the curse. Symbols of bravery and duty turn to “shit” as angry veterans rip them from green jackets and toss them in protest. These soldiers return not to parades and glory, but to loss of faith, with limbs that can never be restored.

  Good writers strive for originality, and they can achieve it by standing on a foundation of narrative archetypes, a set of story expectations that can be manipulated, frustrated, or fulfilled in novel ways, on behalf of the reader. Examples include:

  the journey there and back

  winning the prize

  winning or losing the loved one

  loss and restoration

  the blessing becomes the curse

  overcoming obstacles

  the wasteland restored

  rising from the ashes

  the ugly duckling

  the emperor has no clothes

  descent into the underworld

  My high school English teacher, Father Bernard Horst, taught me two important lessons about such archetypes. First, he said, if a wall appears in a story, chances are it’s “more than just a wall.” But, he was quick to add, when it comes to powerful writing, a symbol need not be a cymbal. Subtlety is a writer’s virtue.

  “The Dead,” by Irish author James Joyce, is the tale of a married man named Gabriel who learns at a holiday party that his wife is haunted by the memory of a young man. Years earlier, Michael Furey had died for her love. Countless times I have read the final paragraph:

  A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

  When I first read that paragraph in college, it struck me with a force that transcended its literal meaning. It took me years to recognize the rich texture of its symbolic iconography: the names of the archangels Gabriel and Michael; the instruments of Christ’s Passion (“crosses,” “spears,” and “thorns”); the evocation of the last days (“fall,” “descent,” “living and dead”). The fact that these were veiled from my first view is a virtue of the story, not a vice. It means that Joyce did not turn symbols into cymbals.

  Some of the best writers in America work for National Public Radio. The stories they tell, making great use of natural sound, open a world to listeners, a world both fresh and distinctive, yet often informed by narrative archetypes. Margo Adler admitted as much when she revealed to me that her feature story on New York homeless people living in subway tunnels borrowed from her understanding of myths in which the hero descends into the underworld.

  More recently, NPR reported the story of an autistic boy, Matt Savage, who had become, at age nine, an accomplished jazz musician. The reporter, Margo Melnicove, tapped into the standard form of the young hero who triumphs over obstacles. But the story gives us something more: “Until recently Matt Savage could not stand to hear music and most other sounds.” Intensive auditory therapy turns the boy’s neurological curse into a blessing, unleashing a passion for music expressed in jazz.

  We use archetypes but should not let them use us. Consider as a cautionary tale, argues Tom French, the reporting on the dangers to women of silicone breast implants. Study after study confirms the medical safety of this procedure. Yet the culture refuses to accept it. Why? Perhaps it arises from the archetype that vanity should be punished, or that evil corporations are willing to profit from poisoning women’s bodies.

  Use archetypes. Don’t let them use you.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as an introduction to archetypal story forms.

  2. As you read and hear coverage of military actions around the globe, look and listen for examples of the story forms described above.

  3. Reexamine your writing from the last year. Can you identify pieces that fit or violate archetypal story patterns? Would you have written them differently?

  4. Discuss Father Horst’s advice: a symbol need not be a cymbal. Can you find a symbol in your work? Is it a cymbal?

  TOOL 39

  Write toward an ending.

  Help readers close the circle of meaning.

  From our earliest years, we learn that stories have endings, however predictable. The prin
ce and princess live happily ever after. The cowboy rides into the sunset. The witch is dead. The End. Or in the case of sci-fi movies: The End? Too often, in real life, the prince and princess get a divorce. The cowboy falls off his horse. The witch eats the baby. That’s the dilemma for writers: reality is messy, but readers seek closure.

  In 1999, the New York Times company commissioned me to write a newspaper serial novel I titled Ain’t Done Yet. The story takes place in the months leading up to the millennium and involves an old investigative reporter tracking down the leader of a doomsday cult. I did not write from an outline, or even from much of a plan, but I knew that in the final chapter the good guy, who is afraid of heights and lightning, would be fighting the bad guy at midnight, atop a giant bridge, in a hurricane. In other words, I didn’t know the stopping points along the way, but I wrote with an ending in mind. So I was not surprised to learn that J. K. Rowling began writing the Harry Potter series by crafting the final chapter of the last book and has even revealed the last word: “scar.”

  To write good endings you must read them, and few works of literature end with the poignant majesty of The Great Gatsby.

  And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.