TOOL 50
Own the tools of your craft.
Build a writing workbench to store your tools.
I’ve designed this final chapter as a guide for you to build a workbench to store your writing tools. So far, I have organized these tools into four parts. We began with nuts and bolts, things like the power of subject and verb, emphatic word order, and the difference between stronger and weaker elements in prose.
From there we moved to special effects, ways of using the language to create specific and intended cues for the reader. You learned how to overpower clichés with creativity, how to set the pace for the reader, how to use overstatement and understatement, how to emphasize showing over telling.
The next part offered sets of blueprints, plans for organizing written work to help both the writer and the reader. You learned the differences between reports and stories; how to plant clues for readers; how to generate suspense; how to reward readers for moving down the page.
This last part coalesced earlier strategies into reliable habits, routines that give you the courage and stamina to apply these tools. You learned how to transform procrastination into rehearsal; how to read with a purpose; how to help others and let them help you; how to learn from criticism.
One final step requires you to store all of your tools on the shelves of a metaphorical writer’s workbench. I began learning how to do this back in 1983 when Donald Murray, the teacher to whom this book is dedicated, stood in front of a tiny seminar room in St. Petersburg, Florida, and wrote on a chalkboard a blueprint that forever changed the way I taught and wrote. It was a modest description of how writers worked, five words that revealed the steps authors followed to build any piece of writing. As I remember them now, his words were:
In other words, the writer conceives an idea, collects things to support it, discovers what the work is really about, attempts a first draft, and revises in the quest for greater clarity.
How did this simple blueprint change my writing life?
Until then, I thought great writing was the work of magicians. Like most readers, I encountered work perfected and published. I’d hold a book in my hand, flip through its pages, feel its weight, admire its design, and stand awestruck at its seeming perfection. This was magic, the work of wizards—people different from you and me.
Finished writing may seem magical, but I could now see the method behind the magic. I suddenly saw writing as a series of rational steps, a set of tools, and with the help of Murray’s blueprint, I could construct a writer’s workbench to store them. Writing teachers at the Poynter Institute have been trying to stock that workbench for more than twenty-five years now, cleaning it, expanding it, reorganizing it, adapting it to various writing and editing tasks. Here’s my annotated version:
• Sniff around. Before you find a story idea, you get a whiff of something. Journalists call this a “nose for news,” but all good writers express a form of curiosity, a sense that something is going on out there, something that teases your attention, something in the air.
• Explore ideas. The writers I admire most are the ones who see their world as a storehouse of story ideas. They are explorers, traveling through their communities with their senses alert, connecting seemingly unrelated details into story patterns. Most writers I know, even the ones who work from assignments, like to transform the topics of those assignments into their own focused ideas.
• Collect evidence. I love the wisdom that the best writers write not just with their hands, heads, and hearts, but with their feet. They don’t sit at home thinking or surfing the Web. They leave their houses, offices, and classrooms. The great Francis X. Clines of the New York Times once told me that he could always find a story if he could just get out of the office. Writers, including writers of fiction, collect words, images, details, facts, quotes, dialogue, documents, scenes, expert testimony, eyewitness accounts, statistics, the brand of the beer, the color and make of the sports car, and, of course, the name of the dog.
• Find a focus. What is your essay about? No, what is it really about? Go deeper. Get to the heart of the matter. Break the shell and extract the nut. Getting there requires careful research, sifting through evidence, experimentation, and critical thinking. The focus of a story can be expressed in a title, a first sentence, a summary paragraph, a theme statement, a thesis, a question the story will answer for the reader, one perfect word.
• Select the best stuff. One great difference stands between new writers and experienced ones. New writers often dump their research into a story or essay. “By God, I gathered all that stuff,” they think, “so it’s going in.” Veterans use a fraction, sometimes half, sometimes one-tenth of what they’ve gathered. But how do you decide what to include and, more difficult, what to leave out? A sharp focus is like a laser. It helps the writer cut tempting material that does not contribute to the central meaning of the work.
• Recognize an order. Are you writing a sonnet or an epic? As Strunk and White ask, are you erecting a pup tent or a cathedral? What is the scope of your work? What shape is emerging? Working from a plan, the writer and reader benefit from a vision of the global structure of the story. This does not require a formal outline. But it helps to trace a beginning, middle, and ending.
• Write a draft. Some writers write fast and free, accepting the inevitable imperfection of early drafts, moving toward multiple revisions. Other writers, my friend David Finkel comes to mind, work with meticulous precision, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, combining the drafting and revising steps. One way is not better than another. But here’s the key: I once believed that writing began with drafting, the moment my rear hit the chair and my hands hit the keyboard. I now recognize that step as deep in the process, a step that becomes more fluid when I have taken other steps first.
• Revise and clarify. Don Murray once gave me a precious gift, a book of photographed manuscript pages titled Authors at Work. In it you see the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley crossing out by hand the title “To the Skylark,” revising it to “To a Skylark.” You watch as the novelist Honoré de Balzac writes dozens upon dozens of revisions in the margins of a corrected proof. You can observe Henry James cross out twenty lines of a twenty-five-line manuscript page. For these artists, writing is rewriting. And while word processors now make such revisions harder to track, they also eliminate the donkey labor of recopying and help us improve our work with the speed of light.
Sniff. Explore. Collect. Focus. Select. Order. Draft. Revise.
Don’t think of these as tools. Think of them as tool shelves or toolboxes. A well-organized garage has the gardening tools in one corner, the paint cans and brushes in another, the car repair equipment in another, the laundry helpers in another. In the same way, each of my process words describes a mode of writing and thinking that contains its own tool set.
So in my focus box, I keep a set of questions the reader may ask about the story. In my order box, I have story shapes such as the chronological narrative and the gold coins. In my revision box, I keep my tools for cutting useless words.
A blueprint of the writing process will have many uses over time. Not only will it give you confidence by demystifying the act of writing, not only will it provide you with big boxes in which to store your tool collection, but it will also help you diagnose problems in individual stories. It will help you account for your strengths and weaknesses over time. And it will build your critical vocabulary for talking about your craft, a language about language that will lead you to the next level.
WORKSHOP
1. With some friends, take a big piece of chart paper and with colored markers draw a diagram of your writing process. Use words, arrows, images, anything that helps open a window to your mind and method.
2. Find a piece of your writing that did not work. Using the writing tasks described above, identify the part of the process that broke down. Did you fail to collect enough information? Did you have a problem selecting the best material?
&n
bsp; 3. Using the tasks, create a scoring grid. Review a portfolio of your writing and grade yourself in each of the categories. Do you generate enough story ideas? Is your work well ordered?
4. Interview another writer about her writing process. Turn it into a conversation in which you describe your own methods.
5. On a blank piece of paper, list your favorite writing tools to add to this collection. Good luck and keep writing.
PART FIVE
Bonus Tools
TOOL 51
Take advantage of narrative numbers.
Let the clock tick or the room number show.
Different writing groups prescribe different ways to render a number inside a text, so that advice to a rocket scientist might not apply to a poet; and the form of statistics inscribed in an academic report will look different from that laid out by a sports reporter. As you exit one language club and enter another, be ready to learn new ways of playing the numbers game.
Be sure not to restrict the use of numbers to arithmetic or statistics, because numbers, it turns out, have powerful applications in the world of letters. Story numbers help define the structure of narratives in works ranging from The Decameron (ten young people each narrating ten stories) to “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” to Seven Samurai.
Here’s a quick list of narrative elements in which numbers seem particularly important:
• 007: This number gives James Bond a license to kill. He is, on occasion, on the trail of “Number 2,” one of the top dogs in a society of spy killers. (I always imagined that the world’s worst copy editor would try to trim 007 to just 7.)
• Number 6: This is the number given to the character played by Patrick McGoohan in the cult television series The Prisoner. Kept captive in a surreal village, the hero protests that he is not a number, but a free man.
• Catch-22: Absorbed into mainstream culture, this title of a novel by Joseph Heller described a trap of logic that was impossible to escape: “To get the equipment, you need to fill out the requisition forms, but there are no requisition forms, so you can’t have the equipment.” In essence, it’s a number that embodies a cultural idea.
• Client 9: This became the code name for New York governor Eliot Spitzer when he was caught using the services of a prostitution ring. The veil of the number creates more mystery than would a pseudonym.
• High Noon: The classic Western movie in which the passage of time, and thus the clock, became a character, a strategy known as the tick-tock.
• 24: The television series that took the tick-tock to a higher level; the action is said to occur within a single day, with each episode covering one hour of that day and with a digital readout of the time introducing each commercial break.
• Stalag 17: The number could just as easily have been 11 or 19, but any such number would lend particularity to this story of a prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. I don’t know why, but it matters to me that 17 is a prime number, indivisible by other numbers.
• The Sixth Sense: Who knew it was the ability to see and converse with dead people?
• 9/11: It no longer represents just a date, but a long horrific narrative, the consequences of which we are still feeling.
Let’s examine such numbers in a specific narrative context, two stories from the Washington Post in 2007 by Dana Priest and Anne Hull on the deficient care of war-wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center:
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss.
The style feels investigative: pointed, accusatory, assertive in the face of a collapsing building and broken promises. The phrase “Building 18” seems part of an indictment, evidence in the form of a microcosm, a specific building that stands for a corrupt bureaucratic system.
A second story begins with even more narrative details:
In Room 323 the alarm goes off at 5 a.m., but Cpl. Dell McLeod slumbers on. His wife, Annette, gets up and fixes him a bowl of instant oatmeal before going over to the massive figure curled in the bed. An Army counselor taught her that a soldier back from war can wake up swinging, so she approaches from behind.
The tick-tock set off by the alarm begins a scene of a devoted wife and a wounded husband confined to Room 323, a little world in which worthy characters struggle to survive what their country has done to them and what it has failed to do for them.
As we’ve seen already, narrative numbers work in titles, often adding specificity and mystery, as in the schlocky science fiction movie Plan 9 from Outer Space, or in an acclaimed Esquire story (July 2000) by Michael Paterniti, “The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy.” The narrative describes the famous and unsolved crash of an airliner over Long Island Sound:
What these people held in common at first—these diplomats and scientists and students, those lovers and parents and children—was an elemental feeling, that buzz of excitement from holding a ticket to some foreign place. And what distinguished that ticket from billions of other tickets was the simple designation of a number: SR 111.
That number, standing out as it does at the end of the paragraph, feels like a perverse lottery ticket, where the prize is death and your number is up.
Writers and editors have come to think of numbers as the enemies of good narrative, little blood clots in the flow of interesting language. But here we see that just the right number at just the right moment can drive the story forward and reconcile nonfiction’s most important fraternal twins: writing and reporting.
Numbers are the tools of counting, of course, but also the tools of memory. They help us keep track of narrative characters, sequences, or challenges, as reflected in these common numbered phrases:
1. The chosen one
2. Just the two of us
3. Three-dog night
4. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
5. Five-star hotel
6. Six-pack
7. Seven-year itch
8. Behind the eight ball
9. Ninth inning
10. Hang ten
In the last books of the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling invents a magical object called a Horcrux that will play a crucial role in the conclusion of her massive narrative. An evil wizard, in this case Voldemort, can seek immortality by dividing his soul into pieces and hiding the pieces in special objects. To kill Voldemort finally and completely, each Horcrux must be destroyed: a diary, a ring, a locket, a goblet, a diadem, a snake, and even, in a great plot twist, Harry himself. If you’ve read the books or seen the movies, you know how all this plays out. The key, though, is the traditionally magical number, seven, which generates the subplots that keep the reader and the viewer eager with anticipation.
WORKSHOP
1. Most people have favorite numbers, the kind they may play in the state lottery. Among mine are 7 (number of my childhood sports hero Mickey Mantle), 27 (day of month I was born), 44 (worn on back of football jersey), 66 (year I graduated from high school, but also from a favorite song: “Route 66”). Make your own list of favorite numbers with a brief explanation of their significance.
2. Favorite numbers are not the same as significant numbers. Interview a friend with the purpose of compiling a list of significant numbers in the life of a regular person. For a baby boomer it might be: Social Security number, draft lottery number, birth date, wedding anniversary, annual salary, graduation dates, dates of historical events (JFK was assassinated on 11/22/63), sports championship dates, sports records. As you think of these, imagine stories in which they would be details.
3. This chapter lists well-known stories in which numbers are significant. Double the size of this list with your own examples. Don’t forget songs in which numbers are important: “Beechwood 4-5789.”
4. The use of numbers in narratives is often related to the passage of time. For example, a villain will often set a
timer for an explosive designed to destroy a building. The heroes must escape or the device must be disarmed before the digital readout hits 000. Such a strategy intensifies the feeling we call suspense. Be attuned in your reading and film-watching to the use of suspenseful numbers.
TOOL 52
Express your best thought in the shortest sentence.
A short sentence has the ring of gospel truth.
As a writer and teacher, I try to learn something about the craft every day. A gold coin of inspiration may come in my reading, in a conversation with another writer, or even in the process of revising this chapter.
I learned an important lesson, somewhat unwittingly, on July 19, 1975, while watching an interview with two of my favorite writers, William F. Buckley Jr. and Tom Wolfe. Wolfe was making fun of an art critic who had begun an essay with the sentence “Art and ideas are one.”
“Now, I must give him credit for this,” said Wolfe. “If you ever have a preposterous statement to make… say it in five words or less, because we’re always used to five-word sentences as being the gospel truth.”
The five-word sentence as the gospel truth.
Granted, Wolfe was being a little cynical, but the truth of what he was saying still applies. Express your most powerful thought in the shortest sentence.
Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer Page 20