Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

by Roy Peter Clark

  Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.… And one fine morning———

  So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald plants the seeds for this ending early in the novel, at the end of chapter one, when narrator Nick Carraway sees Gatsby for the first time:

  I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

  Powerful lessons are embedded in this passage. Look at the phrase “unquiet darkness.” The author shows us that sentences and paragraphs have endings too, even as those endings foreshadow the book’s final scene, some 160 pages later, when the green light, the dock, the outstretched arms will return, freighted with thematic significance.

  These techniques are not for novelists alone. My colleague Chip Scanlan wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he argued that journalists should take lessons from citizens when it comes to asking good questions of politicians:

  As Bob Schieffer of CBS News polishes his questions for the final presidential debate tomorrow, he might want to take a page from Daniel Farley. And Randee Jacobs. And Norma-Jean Laurent, Mathew O’Brien, James Varner, Sarah Degenhart and Linda Grabel.

  In that lead paragraph, Chip lists the names of citizens who had asked effective questions in the previous presidential debate. In his final paragraph, Chip closes the circle, replaying the chords he struck in the beginning:

  So tomorrow Mr. Schieffer can serve the public interest and teach his fellow reporters an important lesson about truth-gathering. He can model his questions on those asked by a handful of Missourians who understand the toughest questions are those that show the country what a candidate won’t—or can’t—answer.

  There are endless ways to begin and end a piece of writing, but authors rely on a small toolbox of strategies, just as musicians do. In musical compositions, songs can build to a crescendo, or fade out, or stop short, or echo the opening. In written compositions, the author can choose from among these, and more:

  • Closing the circle. The ending reminds us of the beginning by returning to an important place or by reintroducing us to a key character.

  • The tieback. Humorist Dave Barry likes to tie his ending to some odd or offbeat element in the body of the story.

  • The time frame. The writer creates a tick-tock structure, with time advancing relentlessly. To end the story, the writer decides what should happen last.

  • The space frame. The writer is more concerned with place and geography than with time. The hurricane reporter moves us from location to location, revealing the terrible damage from the storm. To end, the writer selects our final destination.

  • The payoff. The longer the story, the more important the payoff. This does not require a happy ending, but a satisfying one, a reward for a journey concluded, a secret revealed, a mystery solved.

  • The epilogue. The story ends, but life goes on. How many times have you wondered, after the house lights come back on, what happened next to the characters in a movie? Readers come to care about characters in stories. An epilogue helps satisfy their curiosity.

  • Problem and solution. This common structure suggests its own ending. The writer frames the problem at the top and then offers readers possible solutions and resolutions.

  • The apt quote. Some characters speak in endings, capturing in their own words a neat summary or distillation of what has come before. In most cases, the writer can write it better than a character can say it. But not always.

  • Look to the future. Most writing relates things that have happened in the past. But what do people say will happen next? What is the likely consequence of this decision or those events?

  • Mobilize the reader. A good ending can point the reader in another direction. Attend this meeting. Read that book. Send an e-mail message to the senator. Donate blood for victims of a disaster.

  You will write better endings if you remember that other parts of your story need endings too. Sentences have endings. Paragraphs have endings. As in The Great Gatsby, each of these mini-endings anticipates your finale.

  I end with a warning. Avoid endings that go on and on like a Rachmaninoff concerto or a heavy metal ballad. Don’t bury your ending. Put your hand over the last paragraph. Ask yourself, “What would happen if this ended here?” Move it up another paragraph and ask the same question until you find the natural stopping place.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Review your most recent work. Place your hand over the last paragraph and ask yourself, “What would happen if my story ended here?” Is the natural ending hiding?

  2. Read stories, listen to music, and watch movies with endings in mind. Pay close attention to details and themes planted early to bear fruit at the end.

  3. Some journalists report for leads. Fewer report for endings. The next time you do research, watch and listen for a strong ending. What happens when you begin with an ending in mind?

  4. Just for fun, take some of your recent work and switch the beginnings and the endings. Have you learned anything in the process?

  PART FOUR

  Useful Habits

  TOOL 40

  Draft a mission statement for your work.

  To sharpen your learning, write about your writing.

  In 1996 the St. Petersburg Times published my series “Three Little Words,” the story of a woman whose husband died of AIDS. The series ran for twenty-nine consecutive days and received unprecedented attention from local readers and journalists everywhere. A month of chapters was a lot to ask of readers. But here was the catch: no chapter contained more than 850 words, so you could keep up with the narrative by reading five minutes a day. Long series, short chapters.

  Good writers turn stories into workshops, intense moments of learning in which they advance their craft. I learned more about reporting and telling stories from “Three Little Words” than from any other writing experience of my life. I’m still learning from it. But I did not learn how much I learned until I stumbled on a strategy I’ve turned into a tool: I write a mission statement for each story.

  Whether we want them to or not, readers and critics examine the work of writers to grasp a sense of our mission and purpose. Too often, writers resist, as Mark Twain did when he posted this notice atop his most famous novel:

  Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

  But where the writer is silent, the critic, in this case Bernard De Voto, fills the void:

  Huckleberry Finn also has become a universal possession. It is a much deeper book than Tom Sawyer—deeper as of Mark Twain, of America, and of humanity. When after some stumbling it finds its purpose, it becomes an exploration of an entire society, the middle South along the river. In accomplishing this purpose it maintains at the level of genius Mark’s judgment in full on the human race. It is well to remember that no one had spoken so witheringly to Americans about themselves before Huck raised his voice.

  Most writers aspire to some invisible next step—for a story or a body of work. For some, this aspiration remains unfilled, becomes malignant, and metastasizes. Writing down your mission turns your vague hopes into language. By writing about your writing, you learn what you need to learn.

  I scribbled my mission for “Three Little Words” on two
pages of a legal pad. It covers the content and the form of the story, what I was writing about and how I wanted to write it. My mission begins: “I want to tell a human story, not just about AIDS, but of the deeply human themes of life, love, death, sorrow, hope, compassion, family, and community.” The mission statement includes these goals:

  • I want to portray my protagonist as a fully human character—and not some kind of cardboard saint.

  • I want to do this so people can identify with and care for her and her family. It’s so easy to see people with AIDS as “the other,” the outcast, suffering sinners.

  • I want to help illuminate AIDS, and help educate the public about key aspects of the disease.

  • I want to advance the conversation about sexual culture and its impact on public health. I want to portray my protagonist’s husband in a respectful way to avoid the common equation that Homosexuality = AIDS = Death.

  • I want to do this in a form—twenty-nine short chapters—that will give people a chance to know, to learn, to care, and to hope.

  As for the format:

  • I want to restore the form of the serial narrative to newspapers—using the shortest chapters possible.

  • I want to reconcile the values of short and long writing in American newspapers.

  • I want to write each chapter with (a) a stand-alone quality, (b) a cliffhanger ending, (c) a sense of a new starting point.

  I cannot overstate the value of this exercise. It gave me a view over the horizon as I drafted the story. This 250-word mission statement, which took about ten minutes to write, helped create a 25,000-word series. It provided the language I needed to share my hopes with other writers, editors, and readers. It could be tested, expanded, revised—and it was—during the writing process.

  If you need encouragement to write a mission statement, let me assure you that many book authors write such expressions of purpose, which often show up as introductions or epilogues. Here’s what Mark Bowden wrote at the conclusion of Black Hawk Down, a newspaper series, book, and movie about the American incursion into Somalia:

  When I began working on this project in 1996, my goal was simply to write a dramatic account of the battle. I had been struck by the intensity of the fight, and by the notion of ninety-nine American soldiers surrounded and trapped in an ancient African city fighting for their lives. My contribution would be to capture in words the experience of combat through the eyes and emotions of the soldiers involved, blending their urgent, human perspective with a military and political overview of their predicament.

  As for the form of Black Hawk Down, Bowden wrote: “I wanted to combine the authority of a historical narrative with the emotion of the memoir, and write a story that read like fiction but was true.”

  Mission statements can bring into focus individual stories or an emerging body of work. For example,

  • “I want to write a city government budget story so clear and interesting that it will attract readers who ignore such coverage.”

  • “I want to write a story about a World War II veteran but tell it from his point of view and in his voice.”

  • “I want to use crime stories in the newspaper to generate ideas for some fictional short stories.”

  • “I want to write unbiased stories on topics that polarize American citizens.”

  My “Three Little Words” workshop goes on and on as I hear from readers and journalists years later. From this distance, I see things I would have done differently: reduce the number of chapters; make the reporting and writing methods more transparent; create a straighter narrative line by eliminating one flashback. By writing that mission statement, I not only kick-started my own learning, but I also created a path where many others could ride along.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Write a short mission statement for your next work. Use it to think about your writing strategies and aspirations. Share it with someone else, as a reality check, and to get suggestions on how to achieve it.

  2. Do the same for the body of your work. Where is the next level for you, that unseen but imagined destination over the horizon?

  3. Study some of your old pieces, especially ones you deem successful. Write a mission statement after the fact, listing what you learned from each.

  4. Imagine that famous authors had written mission statements for their masterpieces. What would they look like? Choose a favorite work and try to write one.

  TOOL 41

  Turn procrastination into rehearsal.

  Plan and write it first in your head.

  Almost all writers procrastinate, so there’s a good chance that you do too. Even among professionals, delay takes many forms. The film reviewer checks her e-mail messages for the tenth time. The novelist makes yet another trip to Starbucks, his fourth tall vanilla latte of the day. The famous scholar stares into space. So don’t feel down if you find it hard to get started on that business report or college assignment.

  The word procrastinate derives from the Latin word cras, meaning “tomorrow.” Never write today what you can put off until tomorrow. With that sentiment, writers experience procrastination as a vice, not a virtue. During the process of not writing, we doubt ourselves and sacrifice the creative time we could use to build a draft.

  What would happen if we viewed this period of delay not as something destructive, but as something constructive, even necessary? What if we found a new name for procrastination? What if we called it rehearsal?

  A wonderful teacher of writing named Donald Graves began to notice that even little children engage in this process of mental preparation. He discovered that the best young writers rehearsed what they wanted to say. And why not? Don’t teenagers rehearse a request for a later curfew, or an increase in allowance, or more time to complete a school assignment? We all rehearse, and that includes writers. Our problem is that we call it procrastination or writer’s block.

  Put simply, productive authors write stories in their heads. Blind poets and novelists such as Milton and Joyce did this, composing narrative passages through long nights only to be milked by transcribers in the morning. In this respect, the journalist is no different from the literary artist.

  Put yourself in the place of a reporter covering a breaking news story, say a fire at a construction site. This reporter has spent a half day at the scene, filling a notebook with details. She must now drive twenty minutes to the newsroom. There the writer will have one hour before deadline. Adrenaline kicks in. No time to procrastinate. You must write today, not tomorrow.

  Twenty minutes in the car are precious. Perhaps the reporter will turn off the radio and begin writing the story in her head. Some reporters can rehearse and remember several paragraphs. More likely, she may begin to imagine the three big parts of the story, or a few key expressions, or a focusing theme, perhaps a tentative lead: “High winds whipped a brush fire into an inferno Thursday, destroying most of a three-block condo complex on the outskirts of Ybor City.”

  Deadlines move writers to action, a reality that students in every discipline know too well. Exam writing is a form of writing on demand. Even when given two weeks to write a report, a typical student (I did it too!) waits until the last night to begin writing. The wise teacher confers with the student along the way to inspire research, preparation, and rehearsal. The wise student starts “writing” the paper the day it is assigned.

  Foolish students wait too long to get their hands moving, until the pressures of deadline become irresistible and destructive. The alternative is to reframe the periods of inaction into forms of rehearsal. There is a Zen-like quality to such wisdom: The writer must not write in order to write. To write quickly, you must write slowly. To write with your hands, you must write in your head.

  Here the dilatory habits of writers come into play. One writer daydreams, another eats, another walks, another listens to music, another paces, another drinks and drinks then visits the john, another checks e-mail or cell phone messages, another tidies up a desk, another tal
ks, talks, talks. Each act of procrastination can become a time of planning and preparation. The writer can say with conviction to the skeptical parent, teacher, or editor: “I am not procrastinating, Minion, I am rehearsing.”

  More debilitating than procrastination is writer’s block, but even this inhibition turns out to have a creative source: high standards. Listen to poet William Stafford:

  I believe that the so-called “writing block” is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance.… One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing. (from Writing the Australian Crawl)

  No standards. What could be more liberating for the writer? The wisdom of the poet’s advice can be seen in the hundreds upon thousands of texts created each day in the form of e-mail messages and Web log entries. Relaxed standards are persuading a generation of online writers that they are members in good standing of the Writing Club. It would not be hard to make a case that the standards of most bloggers are too low, that these digital innovators would make themselves more readable and persuasive by raising their standards—but only at the end of the process.

  In addition to rehearsal and the lowering of standards, consider these strategies for crushing procrastination: