I got more responses to my July newsletter about note-taking than anything else I’ve written here. I’ve since learned about Peter Matthiessen’s habit of filling in left-hand pages of a notebook with travel notes, leaving the right-hand pages blank in order to elaborate upon his observations later. I’ve learned about five-year journals and daily concept planners. I’ve evolved my own note-taking habits in response to messages from readers and friends. (This evening I will even give a little “masterclass” on note-taking at Soho House Berlin, if you happen to be a member—in which case, can I borrow some money?)
This month, nothing fancy. Here’s some unfussy practical advice about writing, descended or extrapolated from my note-taking post. I want to hand out some things that I wish I’d known sooner, and that come up a lot when I teach.
Bad sentences are the hardest
Writing a bad sentence is exponentially harder than turning a bad sentence into a good sentence.
Staring down a blank page, making something out of nothing. There’s no purchase, just a sheer wall smeared with margarine that you need to climb. Even when the immediate, first result is a bad sentence, as it pretty much always is, it’s hard.
Turning a bad sentence into a good sentence is easier. It draws on your critical as well as your creative faculties. And critical faculties are always at the ready. You use them every day, many times a day. You use them to decide which color to paint your nails, when to take the chicken out of the oven, when to put down a novel you don’t like or text your friend a recommendation. Critical faculties are constantly exercised, all day long. When you revise a sentence, or just tweak things in a first draft, you are simultaneously writing and reading—revision is the habit of reading yourself like you’re someone else.
We have a lot of practice reading, but much less practice writing. When writing a first draft, you can’t draw on your expertise as a reader or even your taste, really—there’s nothing to draw toward. If you try to read what isn’t yet fully formed, you’ll fail, because the writing will be too bad to consider. You just have to bootstrap some text into existence. To do that, you have to turnoff your critical faculties, just to allow the bad writing to flow. This goes against almost every impulse and incentive in (the non-creating parts of) our lives.
Is anyone reading this anymore?
That’s why the SFD, Shitty First Draft, is such a nice concept for me as a writer. (This term comes from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a creative writing bible that was popular when I was in college and grad school, but which I’ve heard may have fallen off in favor of newer guides. Years later, I still think about SFDs, pretty much every day.)
That’s also why the notebook, with its unreflective, automated writing processes, is so important to me, so vital to the drafting. It removes all of the pomp from the writing process. The more you can automate the first moments of writing, getting the bad stuff down in order to later turn it into the good stuff, the more you will write, and the better (and easier) it will feel.
I fear that beginning writers often think of all writing as equally hard, from first draft to final edits. They struggle to assemble a first draft and assume that they don’t have the talent or dedication to write, or they despair when their first drafts are really, really, really bad. First drafts are meant to be bad. Give yourself a break. The real work is revision, which comes later.
(There is an un-fun corollary to this user-friendly advice, which is that revision is a long, demanding process, and that good writing comes out of many, many drafts. Advice about drafting is the carrot, advice about revision the stick. Don’t think about the stick.)
Put your subjects in motion
This is a tip mostly for long-form journalists or magazine writers—for people writing narratives based in reporting/fact. And really, it’s mostly useful for the subset of those writers who write what is sometimes called “immersive journalism” or who find themselves narrating scenes with firsthand observations.
There is no algorithm for structuring a piece of magazine writing. On the contrary, the puzzle of structure is often what attracts writers to the form. Every story demands its own structural reckoning. Yet there are conventions. Magazine stories are often broken down into scene-like sections. A writer working on a 6,000-word story might reasonably expect to end up with six sections, each about 1,000 words long, of which three or four might be thought of as full “scenes.” The others would include exposition and information, or else filler interviews with experts, or maybe little memories or mini-scenes. One challenge when writing a story structured like this is figuring out how to make it feel like one long, engrossing narrative. Another challenge is to produce individual scenes that flow—that feel natural rather than stilted.
Here is a trick, one that becomes feasible only when you are taking copious notes about the world around you: Do whatever you can to put your subjects into action. Make them move. Engender situations where two subjects talk to each other, rather than to you. Create or invite yourself to an activity that you can observe without being a necessary part of: a meeting, a ritual, a physical challenge, a workplace task. A leisure activity. The more central to your story, the better.
As readers, we want to see bodies in motion, not talking heads. If you’re just conducting interviews in hotel rooms, or if you treat descriptions of the world around your reportorial eye as “color” to accompany interviews and facts, rather than treating them as the stuff at the heart of the story, it will show in the final product. The world around your subjects is what informs their lives, way more than your questions do. The more you attend to that world, keeping it front and center, the more you’ll be able to show of it, and—often, it seems to me—the better your nonfiction writing will be.
Most of the time, when I have the luxury to work on a story for a long while, often in a place that is new to me, I will expend a lot of my goodwill as a journalist trying to achieve scenarios described above. I will go out fishing with fishermen or hunting with hunters, sit in on meetings among activists or between protesters and counter-protesters, perform radiation experiments with radiation experts, record music with musicians, attend ceremonies and marches. I will structure my story around the lives of the people I’m reporting on, not around my own quest for information about them. The rhythm of someone’s life is itself an untranslatable kind of information.
That said, not every story needs to be, or can be, scenic or narrative, and some narratives should be based on memories and recounted experiences, rather than firsthand observations by a journalist. Human-rights reporting, like crime reporting, often depends on memories recounted by subjects, so there is often no way around it, and writers learn how to adjust their aesthetic and structural concerns to reflect the conditions under which a story is reported. My recent New Yorkerpiece on detention in Xinjiang was a narrative based almost entirely on interviews, conducted in private homes and hotel rooms, and every scene was a recounting or a memory. I knew that nothing that happened in front of me could do anything but distract from their remembered lives.
There can be advantages to this approach, too: narrative economy, the whiff of orality with its ancient fireside appeal. But it will always be the case that a story based in firsthand observation has special qualities of presence and detail, and those without are restricted in certain ways.
Most stories, in fact, mix these approaches. My friend Jennifer Percy’s “The Lost Ones” is a beautiful example of a story about subjects in motion, braiding reported scene and memory together. Some of the motion Percy was present for, other times it was described to her. It’s one of the most deceptively simple and accomplished magazine stories I’ve ever read.
I’ve never seen this particular piece of advice made explicit before, but good magazine writers all seem to understand it, maybe intuitively. Maybe it’s just obvious! So at the risk of obviousness: setting a subject or several subjects in motion is key to a scene that feels natural, dramatic, and rich. Sitting a subject down in a hotel room or having a back-and-forth conversation with them—a sometimes-necessary approach for which you have to appear in the piece as an interlocutor or else awkwardly erase yourself from the scene—will never achieve that richness of effect.
“The Lost Ones”
The only way to get better at this sort of thing is to read a lot of stories, and then reread them, analyzing how they work; how long they take to do what they do; where the scenes start and stop; where, how, and how often characters get introduced; etc. Let’s break down “The Lost Ones” into its main sections just to look briefly at the way Percy structures the blocks of narrative and information. You’ll want to read it first:
The opening section incorporates both recalled memories—Yasuo Takamatsu recalls getting in touch with a dive shop to start looking for his wife, whom he lost in the tsunami, then goes on his first dive—and a reported scene where Percy accompanies Takamatsu and another diver, Narita, on a later dive. (914 words)
Notice how the section’s two scenes are qualitatively different as a result of how Percy got the information (interview vs. firsthand experience).
In the recalled scene, there are few reportorial, descriptive details, but Percy has compensated for this by focusing, first in her interview, and later in her writing, on Takamatsu’s emotional state and subjective experience when diving. She situates his responses in an incisive, chilling close-third-person-POV paragraph:
“Takamatsu took a boat out to sea. He was scared. The water wasn’t clear, and he knew that below the surface, there were dangers — he could get caught by a rope or cut by debris. A flipper might hit his head and flood his mask. The regulator might not work. He might panic. He could die of hypothermia, entanglement, the bends.”
In the reported scene—the switch is announced with the utilitarian “One day,…”—Percy goes out on a diving trip with Narita, another man who lost a loved one to the tsunami. The scene is completely different, filled with sensory details of the world we are in, enacting—showing—what was previously only told to us (including Narita’s nervousness and grief, and his love for his daughter). Some of this is indicated symbolically, through Percy’s selection of details, some of it more plainly descriptively:
“A heavy rain began the morning I watched Takahashi prepare Narita for a dive. It was January 2016, a warm winter, and the flowers were blooming. Narita had arrived to the shop late, in blue clogs and khaki wind pants. He stood in the corner and tucked his hands under his armpits. He looked at the floor. The room was filled with white orchids.”
The second section recalls the day of the tsunami and Yuko’s disappearance. It is an entirely remembered scene, put together through Percy’s interviews with Takamatsu. Despite drawing on interviews, Percy is able to dramatize the memories through the details she gets out of her interviewee. (917 words)
Most brilliantly (to me), this extended remembered scene contains a nested memory inside of it. The patience required to extract this level of detail in a difficult interview, and the wisdom to insert it here, at the height of the story’s tragedy, blows me away. Percy is a master at concretizing even the smallest detail into scene, whether she was present for it or not:
“He had no way to reach Yuko, so he went home. She had been lost once before, he told me, on one of their first dates, when Takamatsu took her to a shrine on New Year’s Eve. He told her not to get lost in the crowd, but she did anyway, for 20 minutes, until he found her again in the flow of exiting people. He would never forget those 20 minutes.”
3. This section features both Narita’s memories of the day of the tsunami and its aftermath, the years of searching, incorporating touches of Percy’s own research and expert interviews. (1,052 words)
Even the expert interviews, which tend to float a little awkwardly on top of a piece of immersive writing, are nicely dramatized here by memory and detail:
“Tetsuya Takagi, a forensic pathologist at Tohoku Medical and Pharmaceutical University in Sendai, told me about the fates of bodies lost in the sea. The day of the tsunami, he was teaching in Tokyo. At the request of the Tokyo police, he traveled to Sendai and visited gymnasiums filled with bodies. Over eight days, he examined nearly 200 corpses.
“If a body is taken into the ocean and disappears,” Takagi told me, “it’s hard to say what happens to it. No one ever really knows how the sea moves or flows. If a body is pulled down to a certain depth, it stays there. If it catches in fishing equipment, it might float across the Pacific and turn up in Hawaii.”
4. The fourth section begins in scene (“On a Friday morning,”) again telegraphing to the reader the journalist’s presence in the action. Percy has arranged it so that she can follow the story’s subjects on their search—she has given herself the precious gift of scene and action to describe. The story’s subjects aren’t just talking to her, they’re interacting with each other and engaged on their own mission, which Percy is there to document. We’re right at the story’s middle. In some ways, this section is also the narrative heart of the story—it’s what that editors will use to frame the story through headline, description, photos, etc. It includes Percy’s most personal moments of analysis and comparison (a French song, Heidegger), as well as stuff like this: “We found a pile of purple starfish stashed like cookies behind a mound of old fishnet. He dipped his fingers into a pile of rope and watched crabs scatter.” (995 words)
5. Using the memories of one of Yuko’s fellow employee’s family members, who attended a trial where the bank’s only survivor described the tsunami from the employees’ (and therefore Yuko’s) point of view, Percy paints a picture of the day of the tsunami from the perspective of the story’s “lost ones.” (805 words)
I find it remarkable that Percy finds a new way to engage the material she’s reporting, rather than having us continue to follow the main subjects around on dives, which could easily get repetitive. A structure emerges, revealing (only on rereading, of course…) that Percy is swinging us back and forth in time, each time using new memories/scenes to build on what came before. The sections are:
1 - The survivors searching years later
2 - The lost ones on the day of the tsunami
3- The survivors searching years later / The lost ones of the day of the tsunami
4- The survivors searching years later
5- The lost ones on the day of the tsunami…
6. Percy visits a victim’s family’s house. This scene among family members is wrenching to read, and although it is mainly a direct face-to-face interview, Percy artfully intertwines dialogue and memory (and because there are multiple people in the house, they interact with each other satisfyingly even in a sit-down-with-journalist arrangement). (1,221 words)
This part includes really lovely, sad, scenic details:
“They never found Emi’s cellphone. Hiromi didn’t want to close her daughter’s account, so she wrote a letter to the carrier and asked to keep it open because it was the only way she could communicate with her daughter. The phone company came to the house with a new phone — same number and address — as an offering to the family. Hiromi added the cellphone to the shrine. Emi’s friends text her on her birthday. Hiromi texts her every day. I’m sorry, she writes. I’m sorry.
Masaaki disappeared into his bedroom. Hiromi and the grandmother wept. “We need cake,” Hiromi said. The grandmother hurried to the kitchen and returned with cake. Chocolate, strawberry, chestnut. Masaaki was alone in the darkness of his bedroom. The women ate cake and Hiromi told me a story about her daughter’s hair. Because Emi was missing, they didn’t have anything to put in the grave. She wanted something. So she pulled some of Emi’s hair out of the drain and buried it”
Notice also how each section is the same length—each is almost exactly 1,000 words—giving the whole piece a sense of balance and proportion. It feels totally polished and complete. It’s only with time and effort—both close reading and writing your own work—that you start to figure out how even the most polished writing is formed out of early, rough notes: the crabs, New Years’ Eve, the hair in the drain, the coils of rope.
Recommended Reading
Mark Mayer is the author of Aerialists, a singular collection of short stories. Each story in the book is a fine-toothed invention, a machine made of human organs (or an organ made of machines), pumping out fresh ideas, language, emotions. Nothing dull or predictable is permitted to happen in them, nor are they formalist experiments or self-consciously difficult. I loved Mark’s stories when we were at Iowa together, could hardly believe a friend was writing them. Now they’re in a book, for anyone to read!
Mark gave such a neat set of three recommendations I can’t even bring myself to edit them down to just one or two, so here they are in full:
For years, I’ve been thinking about the last sentence of Annie Proulx’s preposterous one-pager “The Blood Bay,” which is in her first collection of Wyoming Stories, Close Range. This is the story where three hard-shit Wyoming cowboys find a vain Montana cowboy frozen to death because he got expensive boots instead of decent winter clothes. “That can a corn beef’s wearin my size boots,” one says. A ridiculous set of exchanges ensues beginning with a cowboy named Dirt Sheets sawing through the corpse’s shin bones because the boots are frozen on. Thawing happens, poker losses happen, pampered horses sleep indoors due to the cold. A hermit named Old Man Grice misreads the severed feet: “He’s ate Sheets. Ah, I knew he was a hard horse, but to eat a man whole. You savage bugger.” By the end, everyone’s gotten something for themselves: boots, gold, a horse of legendary appetites. The story ends, “The arithmetic stood comfortable.”
Probably because of my dork love of simple math, I’ve been collecting stories and essays with comic or tragic arithmetic ever since I saw that sentence. (Send me more, people!) The most astounding may be the story James Baldwin tells in “Take Me to the Water” (in No Name in the Street) about the suit he bought to wear to a 1968 Carnegie Hall event with Martin Luther King and then wore two weeks later to King’s funeral. When Baldwin mentions to a reporter that he can never wear the suit again, a childhood friend now working for the post office calls asking for it, and a painful reunion follows when Baldwin arrives by limousine with the suit.
For a third entry I’ll mention The Good Story, a weird book of exchanges that J.M. Coetzee co-wrote with a psychoanalyst with the Proulx-worthy name Arabella Kurtz. In one, they wonder if narrative’s comfortable arithmetic is its big lie, its way of suggesting that moral forces even our fates out in the end. The level balance sheet at the end of a story assures us that the repressed always returns, that Oedipus is always punished for killing a stranger at a crossroads, when in real life crimes go unpunished and fortunes go unbalanced. “What if the true secret, the inadmissible secret, the secret about secrets, is that secrets can indeed be buried and we can indeed live happily ever after?”
