Writing Tools

by Roy Peter Clark

  Writing the big game story requires readiness enough. Now try to imagine what it took for Associated Press correspondent

  Mark Fritz to write this 1994 account of the genocidal massacre in Rwanda:

  Nobody lives here anymore.

  Not the expectant mothers huddled outside the maternity clinic, not the families squeezed into the church, not the man who lies rotting in a schoolroom beneath a chalkboard map of Africa.

  Everybody here is dead. Karubamba is a vision from hell, a flesh-and-bone junkyard of human wreckage, an obscene slaughterhouse that has fallen silent save for the roaring buzz of flies the size of honeybees.

  For such principled work, Fritz won a Pulitzer Prize. One admirer remarked: "What makes his stories exceptional, beyond the enterprise and raw courage they demanded, was the homework — reading, research, scouring databases, interviewing experts — that preceded his field reporting."

  Few writers in America are as versatile as David Von Drehle, book author and reporter for the Washington Post. When in 1994 he was assigned to cover the funeral of former president Richard Nixon, Von Drehle knew he'd be writing on deadline against a small army of competitors. "Deadlines always make me shiver," he admits, but the shivers are a physical manifestation of his readiness to produce prose like this:

  YORBA LINDA, Calif. — When last the nation saw them all together, they were men of steel and bristling crew cuts, titans of their time — which was a time of pragmatism and ice water in the veins.

  How boldly they talked. How fearless they seemed. They spoke of fixing their enemies, of running over their own grandmothers if it would give them an edge. Their goals were the goals of giants:

  Control of a nation, victory in the nuclear age, strategic domination of the globe.

  The titans of Nixon's age gathered again today, on an unseasonably cold and gray afternoon, and now they were white-haired or balding, their steel was rusting, their skin had begun to sag, their eyesight was failing. They were invited to contemplate where power leads.

  Such work is no accident, and Von Drehle shares the secrets of readiness. Under pressure, he falls back on the basics, thinks about what happened, why it matters, and how he can turn it into a story. He must do enough homework to answer these three questions:

  1. What's the point?

  2. Why is this story being told?

  3. What does it say about life, about the world, about the times we live in?

  I end with the story of a famous foreign correspondent and novelist, Laurence Stallings, who was assigned in 1925 to cover a big college football game between Pennsylvania and Illinois. The star of the day was Red Grange. Known as the Galloping Ghost, Grange dazzled the crowd with 363 yards of total offense, leading the Illini to a 24-2 upset victory over Penn.

  The famous journalist and author was awestruck. Red Smith wrote that Stallings "clutched at his haircut" as he paced up and down the pressbox. How could anyone cover this event? "It's too big," he said, "I can't write it," this coming from a man who had once covered World War I.

  Someone should have quoted Shakespeare to him: "the readiness is all."

  WORKSHOP

  1. With the help of a friend, list possible big writing projects that could emerge from your specialty or area of interest. Begin homework on these topics, preparation that will help you down the road.

  2. As you watch big sporting events, such as the World Series or the Super Bowl or the Olympics, rehearse in your head possible scenes you would write for the most dramatic stories. Compare and contrast your approaches with those that appear in print and on air.

  3. Big stories need good titles. Review your recent work to see if your titles match the intensity and quality of the text. For your next project, brainstorm titles early in the process to focus your research and writing.

  4. If you write fiction, review the process of research and preparation for novelists described by Brande and Ford. Try using those strategies as homework for a short story. If they work for you, apply them to more ambitious projects.

  By the third grade, I knew I was a good reader. My teacher, Miss Kelly, told me so. She was impressed, she said, that I could recognize the word gigantic in a story about Davy Crockett, who killed "a gigantic bear." Why, then, did it take me twenty more years to imagine that I was a writer? Perhaps it's because we teach and learn reading as a democratic craft — necessary for education, vocation, and citizenship — but writing as a fine art. Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.

  One thing we know for sure: writers read for both form and content.

  If you piece together a puzzle, you benefit from the image on the box. If you try a new recipe, it helps to see a photo of the finished dish. If you work with wood, you need to know the difference between a bookcase and a credenza. The writer must answer this question: what am I trying to build? And then this one: what tools do I need to build it?

  Whenever I take a big step in my writing, I begin by reading. Of course, I read for content. If I'm writing about anti-Semitism, I read Holocaust memoirs. If I'm writing about AIDS, I read biomedical texts and social histories of the disease. If I'm writing about World War II, I read magazines from the 1940s. So, by all means, read for content.

  But also read for form, for genre. If you want to write better photo captions, read old issues of LIFE magazine. If you want to become a better explainer, read a great cookbook. If you want to write clever headlines, read the big city tabloids. If you want to write a screenplay about a superhero, read stacks of comic books. If you want to write witty short features, read The Talk of the Town in New Yorker magazine.

  In her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes a moment in the life of her late husband, author John Gregory Dunne:

  [ W]hen we were living in Brentwood Park we fell into a pattern of stopping work at four in the afternoon and going out to the pool. He would stand in the water reading (he reread Sophie's Choice several times that summer trying to see how it worked) while I worked in the garden.

  That's how smart writers continue to learn, by reading work they admire again and again "to see how it works."

  I started work on "Three Little Words," the long newspaper serial in short chapters, by searching for models. I read Dickens, whose novels were serialized. I read Winesburg, Ohio, a series of connected short stories by Sherwood Anderson. I read The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, a serialized newspaper story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In all these cases, the chapters were too long. Surprisingly, I found my pattern in the adventure stories of my youth. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries had chapters I could read in about five minutes or less, with a mini-cliffhanger at the end.

  When you find you can't put a story down, you should put the story down. Put it down and think about how it works. What magic did the writer conjure to propel you from paragraph to paragraph, page to page, chapter to chapter?

  I call such an act X-ray reading. One way writers learn from stories is to use their X-ray vision. (After all, Superman was also a newspaper writer, and boy, could he type fast.) X-ray reading helps you see through the text of the story. Beneath the surface grinds the invisible machinery of grammar, language, syntax, and rhetoric, the gears of making meaning, the hardware of the trade.

  Here are some reading tricks for writers:

  • Read to listen to the voice of the writer.

  • Read the newspaper in search of underdeveloped story ideas.

  • Read online to experience a variety of new storytelling forms.

  • Read entire books when they compel you; but also taste bits of books.

  • In choosing what to read, be directed less by the advice of others and more by your writing compass.

  • Sample — for free — a wide selection of current magazines and journals in bookstores that serve coffee.

  • Read on topics outside your discipline, such as architecture, astronomy, economics, and photography.

  • Read
with a pen nearby. Write in the margins. Talk back to the author. Mark interesting passages. Ask questions of the text.

  I temper my enthusiasm for reading with this caution: there will be times in the middle of a writing project when you may want to stop reading. While drafting the tools in this book, I stopped reading about writing. I did not want my fascination with the topic to seduce me away from my writing time; nor did I want to be unduly influenced by the ideas of others; nor did I wish to be discouraged by the brilliance of finished, published work.

  Scholars argue that reading is a triangular transaction — a manage a trois — among author, text, and reader. The author may create the text, argues Louise Rosenblatt, but the reader turns it into a story. So the reader is a writer after all. Voila!

  WORKSHOP

  1. Go to a bookstore and immerse yourself in the magazine section. Drink as much coffee as you need. Look for publications that stretch your interest and challenge your standards.

  2. Find an author to admire. Read several works by this writer with a pen in hand. Mark passages that work in special ways. Show these to a friend and X-ray them together. What writing tools did you find?

  3. Read an interesting passage aloud. Then put it away and freewrite on a topic of your choice. Explore the influence that flows from this experiment.

  4. If you are an editor or a teacher, use a shared reading experience to inspire your writers or students. Or do this with a friend. Swap stories you like and X-ray them. Why do they work? What tools of language do they reveal?

  When writers tell me stories about working on big projects, they use one of two metaphors to describe their method. The first is composting. To grow a good garden, you need to fertilize the soil. So some gardeners build compost heaps in their yards, mounds of organic material containing scraps, like banana peels, that others would throw away. The second is saving string. Bits of twine get rolled into tiny balls that grow into bigger balls that grow, in extreme cases, into balls of civic pride. A man named Francis Johnson created a ball of twine that weighed more than 17,000 pounds, was twelve feet in diameter, and became the main roadside attraction for the town of Darwin, Minnesota.

  Johnson should become patron saint of those who save bits of writing, hoping that one day they will grow into something publishable. Here's how it works for me: I will be struck by a theme or issue in politics or culture. Right now, for example, I am fascinated by the plight of boys. As the father of three daughters, I've watched many young women succeed in education and flourish in careers, while young men lag behind. I lack the time or knowledge to write about this topic now, but maybe I will someday. My chances will improve if I begin to save string.

  To save string, I need a simple file box. I prefer the plastic ones that look like milk crates. I display the box in my office and put a label on it, say, "The Plight of Boys." As soon as I declare my interest in an important topic, a number of things happen. I notice more things about my topic. Then I have conversations about it with friends and colleagues. They feed my interest. One by one, my box fills with items: an analysis of graduation rates of boys versus girls; a feature on whether video games help or hinder the development of boys; a story about decreasing participation by boys in high school sports. This is a big topic, so I take my time. Weeks and weeks pass, sometimes months and months, and one day I'll look over at my box and hear it whisper, "It's time." I'm amazed at its fullness, and even more astonished at how much I've learned just by saving string.

  For me this process also works for fiction. During a long plane trip, I scribbled the opening scenes of a short novel titled Trash Baby, in which a thirteen-year-old boy finds a baby abandoned near a Dumpster. As the story took shape over months, I saved more and more string: newspaper stories about abandoned babies, manslaughter trials of distraught mothers, the development of "safe haven" laws to allow mothers to drop off newborns at hospitals with no questions asked.

  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 rethink, 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 top
ics. 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.

  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.