Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

by Roy Peter Clark

  For many of the agents in the room, O’Neill was an unfamiliar face, and no doubt it was odd to be suddenly taking orders from a man they had never before met. But most had heard of him. In a culture that favors discreet anonymity, O’Neill cut a memorable figure. Darkly handsome, with slicked-back hair, winking black eyes, and a big round jaw, O’Neill talked tough in a New Jersey accent that many loved to imitate. He had entered the bureau in the J. Edgar Hoover era, and throughout his career he had something of the old time G-man about him. He wore a thick pinky ring and carried a 9-mm automatic strapped to his ankle. He favored Chivas Regal and water with a twist, along with a fine cigar. His manner was bluff and profane, but his nails were buffed and he was always immaculately, even fussily, dressed: black double-breasted suits, semitransparent black socks, and shiny loafers as supple as ballet slippers—“a nightclub wardrobe,” as one of his colleagues labeled it.

  I wish I could write a character paragraph that worked so hard. Perhaps I’ll be able to someday if I can compile and name the elements of character harvested from Wright’s description. From top to bottom they include:

  Hairstyle: slicked-back

  Facial features: winking black eyes, big round jaw

  Speech patterns: tough talk in a New Jersey accent

  Mannerisms: buffed nails

  Habits: gun strapped to ankle

  Tastes: scotch and water with a twist, a fine cigar

  Brand labels: Chivas Regal

  Jewelry: thick pinky ring

  Clothing: black double-breasted suits, black semitransparent socks, shiny supple loafers

  We now have an image of O’Neill from head to toe, but it strikes me how inadequate that list is compared to how those details operate in context. Not only must such status words be mined through research and reporting, but they must be organized using some reliable strategies.

  • Show and tell: Although the character details stand out, they do so from a setting of abstract language. We learn that O’Neill cut a memorable figure in an FBI culture of anonymity; that he was bluff, profane, handsome, and immaculate; that he reminded some of the G-men of “Untouchables” vintage. That’s quite a bit of telling in a single paragraph, well balanced by Wright’s showing all the specific evidence listed above.

  • Feel the tension: Wright captures the tensions and seeming contradictions within the character of a man whose work is so important to the defense of America. He is an old-time FBI agent who wears a pinky ring, reminiscent of a mobster. He straps a gun to his ankle, probably right over those semitransparent socks. He projects a tough-guy image but wears shoes “as supple as ballet slippers.”

  • Use static action: Even in a paragraph that comes off as a series of static snapshots, the description of O’Neill appears in a narrative context. That first sentence does the trick: “For many agents in the room, O’Neill was an unfamiliar face, and no doubt it was odd to be suddenly taking orders from a man they had never before met.” O’Neill’s reputation precedes him into that meeting room, and, in a sense, we are meant to “size up” the new boss based on our first visual impressions as well as rumors and anecdotes passed along by others.

  When I think of my own difficulties in describing character, I find solace in Wolfe’s description of this element of craft—status details—from The New Journalism as the “least understood” of the narrative strategies:

  This is the recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving toward children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene.

  Such advice will always inspire bad writing along with the good, endless descriptions of assistant district attorneys pushing up their glasses or tugging on their earlobes. Editors lie in wait for such useless details and cut them. Wolfe was more into mission than decoration: “The recording of such details is not mere embroidery in prose. It lies as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature.”

  John O’Neill, we would learn from Wright, died on 9/11 under the rubble of the World Trade Center. You can find him, very much alive, within the pages of The Looming Tower.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Read other works by Lawrence Wright and the nonfiction of Tom Wolfe, paying special attention to the passages that introduce new characters. Use my list of categories above to test the performance of the author.

  2. Practice on yourself. If you were a character in your own story, what details would bring you to life? Begin with physical description, moving north to south: hairstyle, glasses, makeup, clothing, especially brand names or perhaps messages on T-shirts (JIMI HENDRIX OTHER WORLD TOUR). Don’t forget foot-wear: teal Crocs or low black Converse All Star sneakers? Do you call them Cons, or Chuck Taylors (after their creator) or simply Chucks?

  3. To write better character descriptions, hone your powers of observation. In office waiting rooms or airport lounges, at church services, or on commuter trains, watch people closely, paying attention to the details that set them apart. Now imagine describing them in a scene and in that particular setting.

  4. Look at an example of a character description in one of your own stories. How does it compare to the one of Agent O’Neill written by Lawrence Wright? Think of the kind of reporting you would have to do to capture the level of detail exhibited by a master writer and storyteller.

  TOOL 55

  Look for the “inciting incident” to kick-start your story.

  Attend to the moment that changes a day—or a life.

  The most memorable news event of my adult life was the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. To understand the power of 9/11 as story, consider a concept in screenwriting that Robert McKee describes as the inciting incident, the event that puts a story into action.

  Once you grasp this storytelling strategy, you begin to recognize it everywhere, in stories small and big. A fog turns Rudolph into Santa’s heroic headlight. Horton hears a Who. In The King’s Speech, a shy prince with a speech impediment must assume the throne after the death of his father and the abdication of his brother—and then make a radio speech that calls his people to a war against fascism.

  Consider the opening sequence of every episode of Law & Order. It begins in a typical New York City setting, where we meet two or three new characters. They may be hotel maids, or deliverymen, or a couple kissing in the park. Happy, sad, angry, inebriated, they are immersed in the comfortable cycle of everyday life. Then something happens—a bolt from the blue.

  A maid finds a bloody corpse in the bathtub; a deliveryman stumbles over a dead body in an alley; a lover sees something strange in the shadows of a tree.

  These characters have one job: to discover a dead body—in narrative terms, to spark the inciting incident. We will not see them again. After the quotidian rhythms of city life are disturbed by murder, it becomes the job of cops and prosecutors to restore Gotham to some version of normal.

  “The inciting incident,” writes McKee in his book Story, “radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life.” Dorothy runs away from home to save Toto and is swept up in the twister. It will be the job of the writer to get her back to Kansas so she can help restore order to a safe and loving place called home.

  It is the morning of September 11, 2001, a beautiful late-summer day in New York City, the sky a vivid blue. I sit in Florida at the breakfast table and watch the Today show. A well-coiffed Matt Lauer interviews author Richard Hack, who has written a book about Howard Hughes. I might have said to myself, “Hack is an unfortunate last name for a writer.”

  The interview ends abruptly as Lauer listens to a producer talking into his earpiece. He tries to grasp what he is hearing. Before long we see live video of smoke pouring from the World Trade Center and hear reports that a “small plane” has flown into the north tower. We hear talk of a terrible acc
ident, until the flash of another plane comes into view and then disappears, a large jetliner flying straight into the south tower, exploding in a fireball.

  A bolt from the blue.

  The inciting incident of our lifetimes.

  Nothing will remain the same.

  We spend the next decade trying to restore order, through pat-downs at airports and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; through retribution upon terrorists wherever they may be hiding. We resort to desperate measures. We spy on citizens, humiliate prisoners, and torture suspected enemies.

  Air travel is transformed and distorted. Our economy sinks into a deep ditch. Immigrants and Muslims become scapegoats. Our major institutions, from governments to schools to banks and businesses, teeter on the edge of exhaustion and collapse.

  Bin Laden is dead, an American bullet through his eye. He will not create a worldwide caliphate enforcing Islamic law. But he may have achieved an important goal. He may have made us less like us—and more like him. To defeat him, we choose to send into battle our darker angels.

  In his book On the Origin of Stories, New Zealand scholar Brian Boyd argues that the evolution of the human brain to enable language and fiction has played a central role in our survival. We are a storytelling species. In fiction we invent the conflicts that stories must resolve. This virtual reality, this substitute experience, prepares us to resolve the conflicts of the real world.

  The first stories in Western culture are epics of war in what we now call the Middle East. In The Odyssey, Ulysses takes years to fight his way back to hearth and home. But something has happened back in Ithaca: A crowd of suitors has occupied his household, coveting the wife and wealth the clever warrior left behind. This inciting incident heats up the narrative until the epic moment when the hero’s righteous anger explodes into mass slaughter.

  Nonfiction works at a second level. Not only does it build our muscles to face future struggles, but at its best, it works in the here and now. Stories expose corruption, ignite the flames of justice, and restore the well-being of a community. Boyd also argues that the elevation of heroes and the death or ostracism of villains reinforce the value of collaboration among humans, a form of cooperation that helps us not only to survive and endure, but also to prosper. As it was for Homer, so it is for those of us who live to tell and retell the stories of 9/11 to our children and grandchildren. We can now narrate parables of survival in the hope that our culture, political system, and way of life will re-form and carry on. Prosperity eludes us and may do so for some time to come, but many great stories end without the hero reaching the Promised Land, even as he looks down from heights to see the wasteland restored.

  While the inciting incident is crucial, the big bang that propels the story, it is never enough. The writer must raise the stakes for the main characters—in gambling slang, must “up the ante.” Kurt Vonnegut noted that writing a good novel required the author to find a sympathetic character and then spend hundreds of pages doing horrible things to him. Think of the stages of Cinderella’s degradation before her fairy-tale salvation.

  The King’s Speech offers an elegant example. The prince is a relatively insignificant member of the royal family, encumbered and embarrassed by his stuttering. As he seeks help from a therapist, the stakes are raised by events in the world around him, in this order:

  1. His father dies, placing him second in line for the throne.

  2. His charismatic brother abdicates the throne to marry an American woman.

  3. Hitler comes to power and drags England toward war.

  4. Hitler, a fabulous orator, makes full use of the dominant medium of the day—radio.

  5. The new king is called upon to speak to the nation, via radio, to rally the Brits against Nazi Germany.

  Notice how the stakes are raised, from a mild form of personal humiliation at the beginning, to the fate of the nation at the end.

  WORKSHOP

  1. I know someone who received a diagnosis of breast cancer and news that her mother had died on the same day. Two inciting incidents that have life-changing effects. Review your own life story. Make a list of inciting incidents that you think might ignite a good personal essay or memoir.

  2. Now that you’ve cataloged inciting incidents in your own life, interview a familiar person with the goal of eliciting his or her inciting incidents. Look for specific scenes in which this person’s normal life was interrupted. When you find a good one, continue the interview to discover how and when normal life was restored.

  3. Take a familiar story, such as The Wizard of Oz or Star Wars. Analyze it through the lens of McKee’s theory of the inciting incident. Describe the incident (mean lady wants to take Dorothy’s dog), then list the moments in which the author raises the ante: Dorothy runs away, runs into a storm, storm lifts house, house lands on witch, etc.

  4. While most inciting incidents are destructive—corpse is found, plane flies into building, hurricane hits New Orleans—not all of them are. Look for stories that fall into the “be careful what you wish for” category: man wins lottery, woman is given expensive engagement ring, friendly wizard shows up at your birthday party. It is in these seemingly positive narrative contexts that a perceived blessing can turn out to be a curse, leading to dramatic action.

  AFTERWORD

  So there you have them: a shiny new set of writing tools and a workbench on which to store them. Use them well, to learn, to find your authentic voice, and to see the world—with startling intensity—as a storehouse of story ideas. Use them to become a better student, a better teacher, a better worker, a better parent, a better citizen, a better person. Own these writing tools. They now belong to you. Keep them sharp. Share them with others. Add your own. Take pride in your craft. Join a nation of writers. And never forget to get the name of the dog.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writers who care about the craft owe a debt to Donald M. Murray, perhaps the most influential writing teacher in the nation’s history. Don’s fingerprints appear on many of these tools. I thank him for teaching me how to think of writing as a process, how to listen to writers, and how to gather tools for my workbench.

  Thanks to Thomas French of the St. Petersburg Times, who has taught me so much about narrative, including how to build story engines, how to report for scenes, and how to place them in a meaningful sequence.

  Don Fry has been my writing teacher for more than thirty-five years. He started as my graduate school mentor, became my friend and then my colleague. To sharpen my writing tools, I have borrowed Don’s definition of voice along with his ideas on how to reward readers with “gold coins.”

  Christopher “Chip” Scanlan has taught me the value of freewriting, critical thinking, and planning, helping me tame that watcher at the gate, the critical voice that sounds in my brain, especially when I’m writing about writing.

  My thanks to Carolyn Matalene, who taught at the University of South Carolina. Carolyn reintroduced me to the ladder of abstraction and warned me of the dangers of the middle rungs. She also encouraged me to study rhetorical grammar and helped me clarify the notion that the number of elements in a piece of writing has meaning.

  I have worked with these inspirational teachers at the Poynter Institute, which has been my professional home since 1979. Poynter is the nonprofit school for journalists that owns the stock of the St. Petersburg Times, one of America’s best newspapers. My career in Florida began when the legendary editor, Gene Patterson, transformed me from a young assistant professor of English into a writing coach. Karen Brown Dunlap and Keith Woods now preside over Poynter with a care and devotion that continue to inspire my best work.

  My friends and helpers in St. Pete are too numerous to mention here. But I could not have produced the tools without the encouragement of Bill Mitchell and Julie Moos, who direct Poynter’s world-famous Web site (www.poynter.org), and intern Elizabeth Carr, who remains number one in my book. Thanks to Kenny Irby for my author photo.

  My gratitude extends to the many
online writers and editors who have linked to the original versions of the tools, and to the thousands of readers who have offered support, encouragement, and deserved correction.

  Many tools came from formative conversations with authors, poets, and journalists across the country. These have included Jacqui Banaszynski, Bill Blundell, David Finkel, Jon and Lynn Franklin, Jack Hart, Anne Hull, Kevin Kerrane, Mark Kramer, Kate Long, Peter Meinke, Howell Raines, Diana Sugg, David Von Drehle, Elie Wiesel, and Jan Winburn, to name a few.

  Just as one generation of athletes borrows moves from an earlier one, so have I paid close attention to the authors who have written about writing. If you’ve read this book, you’ll recognize my debt to Strunk and White, William Zinsser, Dorothea Brande, George Orwell, Rudolf Flesch, Anne Lamott, Max Perkins, Louise Rosenblatt, Frank Smith, Tom Wolfe, and many more.

  From elementary school through graduate school, I’ve been educated by teachers and mentors who have nurtured me for years and years. These include Richard McCann, Bernard Horst, Richard Geraghty, Rene Fortin, Rodney Delasanta, Brian Barbour, John Hennedy, Paul Van K. Thomson, John Cunningham, Marty Stevens, and Guinavera Nance. Special thanks go to Mary Osborne and the late Janie Guilbault.

  I owe at least one big apple and a crate of citrus to two marvelous New Yorkers. My agent, Jane Dystel, recognized the potential in this collection of writing tools and led me through the liturgies of publication with consummate professionalism, fun, and care. She also introduced me to Tracy Behar, who worked so hard to bring this book to Little, Brown. Under her wise and gentle direction, I was able to reimagine and reshape Writing Tools for the broadest possible audience. I can’t imagine working with a more supportive editor.