Book authors testify to a single-minded immersion in a subject or character, a habit that can lead to the obsessive saving of string. Biographer David McCullough described in the Washington Post the depths of his passion:
For about 6 years now, in the time it’s taken to write my biography of John Adams, I have largely abandoned reading anything written in our own day. For along with research of the kind to be expected with such a book, I have been trying as much as possible to know Adams through what he read as well as what he wrote, and the result has been one of the most enjoyable forays of my writing life.
Once the writer builds a compost mountain, what happens next? Former secretary of state and author George P. Shultz explained to the Post how he dug in to write a book:
I spread out voluminous material on the large conference-room table where I worked. As I read through what I had at hand for a particular chapter, I took time to think about it. After I inhaled the material and searched out still more, sometimes from the public record, sometimes from my assistant’s notes and my other archival sources, I made an outline and then started writing. I could see how the writing forced me to be more rigorous, to re-think, to look up new information, to check facts meticulously, to recognize where a piece was missing, here and there, and where the logic was flawed.
I identify with this method: save string, gather piles of research, be attentive to when it’s time to write, write earlier than you think you can, let those early drafts drive you to additional research and organization.
This process may appear too long and unproductive, with too much saving, storing, and thinking. The trick for me is to grow several crops at the same time. Fertilize one crop, even as you harvest another. In my office I have several boxes with labels on them:
• I have an AIDS box, which culminated in the publication of the series “Three Little Words.”
• I have a millennium box, which culminated in publication of the serialized newspaper novel Ain’t Done Yet.
• I have a Holocaust and anti-Semitism box, which culminated in the series “Sadie’s Ring.” It is now a book manuscript looking for a home.
• I have a box titled “Civil Rights,” which culminated in an anthology of newspaper columns from the 1960s on racial justice in the South.
• I have a box titled “Formative Reading,” bursting with materials on critical literacy, which I thought would become a book. It has produced several articles.
• I have a box called “World War II,” which produced two newspaper features, one of which might become a small book someday.
Inventory the topics in my boxes: AIDS, the Holocaust, racial justice, the millennium, World War II, literacy. These are topics of inexhaustible interest, capable of generating a lifetime of reporting, storytelling, and analysis. Each one, in fact, is so huge, so imposing, it threatens to overpower the writer’s energy and imagination. This is the reason to save string. Item by item, anecdote by anecdote, statistic by statistic, your boxes of curiosity fill up without effort, creating a literary life cycle: planting, cultivation, and harvesting.
Right now, buried in routine, you feel you lack the time and energy to undertake enterprising work. Maybe you have a day job but want to research a novel. Perhaps you feel worn out writing many short items every day for a company newsletter. Where will you find the energy to write in depth? If you rebel against the clutter of paper piled in a box, start an electronic file or a paper file in a manila folder. As you perform your routine work, talk about your special interest. Gather opinions and anecdotes from across the landscape. Scribble them down, one by one, fragment by fragment, until one day you look up and see a monument of persistence, ready to be mounted in the town square.
WORKSHOP
1. Review your writing from the last couple of years. List your big categories of interest and curiosity. For which of those topics do you want to save string?
2. What other big topics not reflected in your current writing interest you? Which one fascinates you the most? Create a box or a file and label it.
3. Do an Internet search on one of your new topics. Spend time exploring. Add to your file some items from blogs and Web sites that connect with your interest.
4. Imagine you are writing a work of fiction on a theme of passionate interest. Brainstorm the methods you could use to gather string on your topic.
TOOL 45
Break long projects into parts.
Then assemble the pieces into something whole.
Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird gets its title from an anecdote about her brother. At the age of ten, he struggled with a school report on birds. Lamott describes him as “immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead,” but then, “my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”
We all need such coaching to remind us to break long projects into parts, long stories into chapters, long chapters into episodes. Such advice is both encouraging and practical.
Where writers gather, I often ask this question: “How many of you have run a marathon?” In a group of one hundred, maybe one or two will raise a hand. “If properly trained and motivated, how many of you think you could run twenty-six miles?” A half dozen more. “What if I gave you fifty-two days to do it, so you only had to run a half mile a day?” Most of the hands in the room go up.
Most doctoral students who finish all their class work, and pass all examinations, and complete research for a dissertation never get a Ph.D. Why? Because they lack the simple discipline required to finish the writing. If they sat each morning for an hour to write a single page—250 words—they could finish a thesis in less than a year.
When my children were young, I volunteered to teach writing in their elementary school. After each class, I scribbled notes in a journal, never taking more than ten minutes to complete the task. What had I learned that day? How did the children respond? Why was that bright student staring into space? After three years, I thought I might have a book in me about teaching children to write. I had never written a book and did not know how to begin, so I transcribed my journal entries. The result was about 250 pages of typed text, not yet a book, but a sturdy foundation for what was to become Free to Write: A Journalist Teaches Young Writers.
Tiny drops of writing become puddles that become rivulets that become streams that become deep ponds.
The power of this writing habit is overwhelming, like Harry Potter being told for the first time that he is a famous wizard. You are now reading Tool 45—in what was once a yearlong online series—headed for Tool 50. If I had said to my editors, “You know, I’d like to write a book of writing tools,”I never would have done the work. At the front end, book projects seem impossible to get your arms around, like hugging a polar bear. Instead, I pitched the writing tools project as fifty short essays, delivered at the rate of one or two per week.
The same strategy could have produced the book on my nightstand, The Lord Is My Shepherd by Harold Kushner, a superb writer and teacher. The foreword begins:
I have been thinking about the ideas in this book for more than forty years, since I was first ordained as a rabbi. Every time I would read the Twenty-third Psalm at a funeral or memorial service, or at the bedside of an ailing congregant, I would be struck by its power to comfort the grieving and calm the fearful. The real impetus for this book came in the wake of the terrible events of September 11, 2001. In the days following the attacks, people on the street and television interviewers would ask me, “Where was God? How could God let this happen?” I found myself responding, “God’s promise was never that life would be fair. God’s promise was that, when we had to confront the unfairness of life, we would not have to do it alone for He would be with us.” And I realized I had found that answer in the Twenty-third Psalm.
Writers search for the focus of a story, and what a strong focusing idea to write a book about a single fourteen-line prayer, one that has such significance w
ithin the Judeo-Christian context. Imagine writing a book about the Lord’s Prayer, or the Ave Maria, or one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. But how to organize the writing and reading of such a book? Kushner provides an elegant solution: each chapter is devoted to one line of the psalm. So there is a chapter called “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” and another called “Though I Walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” and another called “My Cup Runneth Over.” A 175-page national bestseller is divided into an introduction and fourteen short chapters, handy units for the writer and the reader.
Bird by bird, tool by tool, line by line.
WORKSHOP
1. Admit it. You want to write something bigger than you’ve ever written before, but you can’t get your arms around the project. The length or breadth of it intimidates you. Cut up the monster. In a daybook or journal, break it up into its smallest parts: chapters, sections, episodes, vignettes. Without referring to any notes or research materials, write one of these small units. See what happens.
2. The next time you are in a bookstore, take a peek at several big volumes: novels, memoirs, almanacs. Check out the table of contents and figure out the structural units that make up the book. Now check individual chapters to see how they subdivide. Notice these small parts in the rest of your reading.
3. Traditionally, the Bible comprises books, chapters, and verses. Browse through the King James Version and pay attention to how the books divide. Notice the differences, for example, among Genesis, Psalms, and the Song of Songs.
4. Before you draft your next story, scribble on a legal pad what you conceive as the parts of the story. Don’t just write down beginning, middle, and end. Try writing down the smaller parts of those bigger parts.
TOOL 46
Take an interest in all crafts that support your work.
To do your best, help others do their best.
I abhor the image of the writer as a solitary figure. That romantic stereotype, associated with loneliness and struggle, has alienated many aspiring writers and blown a cloud over one of the craft’s shining truths: that writing is a social activity.
I remember my first published work, a Christmas poem for a 1958 school newspaper:
On a cold and snowy night
In a land so far away,
A babe was born in Bethlehem,
Born on Christmas Day.
They laid Him in a manger,
No place for a king,
But it seemed just like a palace
When they heard the angels sing.
I was a proud ten-year-old poet when I saw my name emblazoned above the text, but it took a small Long Island village to publish that singsongy verse. It took a teacher to invite us to write. It took my mother to brainstorm with me. It took another student to draw a little illustration. It took a school clerk to type stories onto mimeographs and another to run them off and distribute them. It took the students and some of their parents to praise me. With that early experience shaping my writer’s soul, I ask forgiveness for my visceral rejection of the tormented writer on the mountaintop.
If you aspire to improve as a writer, begin with your self-interest: if your story is well edited, accompanied by a powerful photograph, on a page that is well designed, it will look more important and more people will read it. You would be foolish to ignore or belittle that power.
In fact, you will never reach your potential as a writer unless you take an interest in all of the associated literary crafts. Cultivate this habit: ask questions about the crafts of copyediting, photography, illustration, graphics, design, and Web site production. You need not become an expert in these fields, but it’s your duty to be curious and engaged. One day, you will talk about these crafts without an accent.
Just as important, make nice with people who come forth to help you. If you do not yet write for publication or as part of your job, practice collaboration with the people who help you now: friends, teachers, fellow students, members of a writing group or book club, fellow bloggers or Web site editors and designers.
To find the right mood, imagine that you are the author of a wonderful novel that has been optioned to a film studio. You have received a huge advance to write the screenplay. Now think of all the associated crafts that will contribute to the perfection of your work. Think about the directors and actors, the cinematographer, the film editor, the set designer, the score composer, and many more. Carry the vision of that rich collaboration into all of your writing.
As I develop as an author and journalist, these key figures continue to make my work better:
• Copyeditors. Ignore the traditional antagonism that leads writers to believe that copyeditors are vampires who work at night and suck the life out of stories. Instead, think of copyeditors as champions of standards, invaluable test readers, your last line of defense. I once wrote a story about two brothers with terrible physical handicaps, boys who had been separated for years. I described their wonderful reunion, how the brothers watched cartoons and fed each other Fruit Loops. A copyeditor, Ed Merrick, called me to check on the story. He offered his praise for a job well done, but said he had sent a news clerk down to the supermarket (this was before the convenience of the Internet) to check on the spelling of Fruit Loops. Sure enough, the correct spelling was Froot Loops. Nice catch. The last thing I wanted was for the reader to notice this mistake, especially at a high point in the story. Years later, I would see Ed and give him the thumbs-up sign in gratitude for his Froot Loops fix. Talk to copyeditors. Learn their names. Embrace them as fellow writers and lovers of language. Feed them chocolate.
• Photographers. Make sure photo assignments are considered early in the process, not as an afterthought. Using television journalism as a model, look for opportunities for you and the photographer to work side by side. Help the photographer understand your vision of the work. Ask questions about what the photographer sees. Use the work of the photographer to document the story. Let the photographer teach you about focus, framing, composition, and lighting. Ask the photographer what you can do to help.
• Designers. As your project develops, make sure you include visual artists in the conversation early in the process. Learn from them what you need to see and bring back from a scene, material that can be converted into sparkling visual and design elements. Ask your editor and visual journalists how you can help them while you are doing research or writing early drafts.
Remember that good work takes time—and not just for you. Learn to meet your deadlines to give others time to do their jobs. Even if you lack the authority to convene conversations, encourage early planning that includes all key players. The more interested you become in the associated crafts, the more you will be invited into decisions about how your work is presented and perceived.
Between 2001 and 2005, I wrote more than five hundred columns and essays for the Poynter Institute Web site. I am no expert on how to produce a story across media platforms. But I am adapting my writing tools and habits to a brave new world of media technology. The opportunity to write in different voices, the chance to interact with the audience, the adventure of crossing old boundaries—all these require a richer imagination and greater collaboration than ever before.
If you work hard at your cross-disciplinary education, supporting the marriage of words and visuals, you will prepare yourself for a future of innovation and creativity. You can do this without sacrificing the enduring values of your craft. This requires not just the Golden Rule—treat others the way you want to be treated—but what my old colleague Bill Boyd calls the Platinum Rule: Treat others the way they want to be treated. How does the copyeditor want to be treated? What does the photographer need to do her best work? And what gives the designer satisfaction? The only way to know for sure is to ask.
WORKSHOP
1. If you work in a news organization or for a publishing house, if you are writing a film documentary or a nonfiction narrative, if you write for a Web site or a newsletter, you depend on others to accomplish your best w
ork. List the names of these people. Make sure you have their phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
2. Develop a schedule of conversations with each person on your list. Apply the Platinum Rule. Ask them what they need to do their best work.
3. Encourage the kind of support you desire. Don’t just complain. If someone has written a good headline or saved you from a mistake, reward that good work with praise.
4. Read about the associated crafts. Find a good book on photography. Read some design magazines. Listen to conversations about these crafts and develop a lexicon so that you can chime in.
TOOL 47
Recruit your own support group.
Create a corps of helpers for feedback.
Now that we have dismantled the disabling myth of authorship as a lonely craft, you can free yourself of the need to rent a loft overlooking the ocean, your only companions a portable typewriter, a bottle of gin, and a kitty named Hemingway.
In the real world, writing is more like line dancing, a social function with many partners. As we’ve seen, some of those partners—a writing teacher, a workshop group, a Web producer, a copyeditor—may be assigned to us. Other helpers can and should be of our choosing.
Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer Page 18
