Tag: creative nonfiction

Categories
Authors Writing

Write Till You Drop

An atmospheric evening scene shows a writer's desk lit by a warm lamp, featuring stacks of paper, books, and an empty coffee cup, while a large metal safe stands open nearby.

Annie Dillard died on Tuesday, September 15, at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. She was 81.

I have been reading her for years, and I keep returning to her because she makes writing feel both more serious and more alive. She was demanding without turning grim. She reminded you that the work is hard, then made you want to sit down and do it anyway.

Her essay “Write Till You Drop,” published in The New York Times in May 1989 and collected in The Writing Life, contains more useful advice about writing than many books on the subject. The line I remember first is this one: “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” That seems to me the whole assignment. Pay attention to what stops you. Find the thing you cannot quite explain. Then try to give it a voice.

Dillard tells of a student asking a well-known writer, “Do you think I could be a writer?” The writer asks back, “Well, do you like sentences?” What a perfect answer. Writing begins there—not with wanting to be a writer, but with liking sentences enough to make them, take them apart, and make them again.

I have been blogging since 2001. Over that time I have written thousands of sentences, some better than others. The blog has been a way of noticing what I notice. It has also taught me that the only reliable way to keep writing is to write. Not to wait for a grand subject or a clear runway. Just begin with the thing at hand and see where the sentences lead.

Dillard is especially good on the danger of saving things. “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time,” she writes. Do not hold back the best image, the sharpest thought, or the story you think belongs somewhere more important. Use it now. If you lock it away, she warns, you may open the safe later and find ashes.

That lands differently for me now. I recently started keeping a list of words and phrases I love, after reading that Susan Orlean has long done the same. I like the habit. It sharpens attention. But Dillard would probably lean over my shoulder and say: Good. Now spend them. A list is not the work. The words have to leave the safe.

The same is true of the book I am working on about Interstate 280. It is a long project, full of engineering, politics, landscape, memory, and side roads that keep turning into stories of their own. A smaller treatment might be easier. But Dillard has an answer for that, too: “It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.”

She says a writer should play the edges of the field, like a tennis player who reaches for the shots that land at the lines. That feels right for the I-280 book. The highway is the center of the court, but much of the life is at the edges: a dam, a billboard that is not there, a ridge preserved from development, an engineer whose name has nearly disappeared. Those are the shots worth chasing.

Dillard closes with Michelangelo’s note to an apprentice: “Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.” That is not complicated advice. Neither is her deeper promise: “No manipulation is possible in a work of art, but every miracle is.”

I keep a folder for the I-280 book. It is getting fat: a dam, a billboard that is not there anymore, a ridge somebody fought to preserve, an engineer whose name I have to look up every time. None of it is spent yet. Dillard would want to know what I am waiting for.

Categories
Writing

The Unfinished Note

I’ve been sitting with a Susan Orlean line for a few days now, the way you sit with a splinter you can’t quite locate.

“Stories don’t need a ‘conclusion,’ a flourish of finality. It’s better to leave readers falling forward, tumbling through the piece and beyond it, finishing the tune in their heads.”

What strikes me isn’t the advice — plenty of writing teachers have said something like it — but the verb she chose. Tumbling. Not drifting. Not lingering. Tumbling. There’s a loss of control in that word, a small helpless momentum, the way you take one more step than you expected on a dark staircase and your body has to catch up to itself.

I’ve always been suspicious of endings that arrive wearing their own bow. You can feel them coming, those last paragraphs — the rhythm slows, the sentences get more declarative, the writer seems to straighten up and clear their throat. And then comes the lesson, the restatement, the turn toward uplift or hard-won wisdom. The piece explains what it was about. You close the browser tab and that’s the end of it.

But some pieces don’t end so much as they stop, at the right moment and the right angle, and something in you keeps moving. You find yourself thinking about them in the shower two days later. You’re not remembering the conclusion because there wasn’t one. You’re still inside the piece, finishing the tune, as Orlean says. The writer handed you the melody and walked off mid-phrase.

I think about this with music. Jazz, especially. The best solos don’t resolve — they suggest a resolution and then leave the air charged with it. Miles Davis understood that the note you don’t play is still a note. The silence after the phrase is part of the phrase.

I’m not sure I’ve ever actually written an ending this way. Most of my pieces come in for a landing; I can feel myself starting to circle and descend. Maybe that’s the real lesson in Orlean’s line — not a craft note about structure, but a challenge to trust the reader enough to leave the door ajar. To believe the piece was good enough that they’ll want to keep walking around inside it.

I’m still not sure I do.

Categories
Storytelling Writing

The Nerve of the Opening Line

For years I wrote first paragraphs that explained what I was about to say, which is a little like a joke that begins by describing how funny it is.

Susan Orlean has a better idea. In her book Joyride, she writes that a lede doesn’t need to preview the story or summarize what the rest of the piece will be about. What’s important is that it captivates readers and holds them fast to the page so they keep reading.

The conventional wisdom about ledes is that they exist to tell readers what they’re about to read. The billboard theory of the opening. Here is what this story is. Here is why it matters. Here is what you’ll find if you continue. The lede as table of contents, compressed.

Orlean is saying something stranger and more honest: the lede’s job is not to inform. It’s to hold the reader.

There’s a distinction there worth sitting with.

Informing a reader is a transaction — you transfer content, they receive it. Holding a reader is something else entirely. It’s closer to what a magician does in the first thirty seconds of a performance, or what a stranger does when they say something at a party that makes you turn and face them fully. You haven’t learned anything yet. You’ve just been made to stay.

The ledes that have held me longest tend to have almost nothing to do with the stories they open.

Joan Didion begins “The White Album” with a single sentence — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — that takes the entire essay to even partially fulfill.

Gay Talese opens his Frank Sinatra profile not with Sinatra’s voice or his legend but with a man going silent: “Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing.”

Tracy Kidder opens The Soul of a New Machine not with computers but with a boat in a storm, Tom West awake for four straight nights while everyone else is seasick, the rest of the crew left wondering what on earth this man does for a living.

None of these ledes summarize. All of them hold.

What they share, I think, is a quality of disturbance. They’ve moved the ground slightly underfoot. Something is tilted.

Didion’s first sentence argues that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and you feel the vertigo in it immediately — wait, is that true? Is that a good thing or a desperate thing?

Talese gives you a man diminished by illness and silence, and everything that follows is measured against that diminishment.

Kidder’s boat goes somewhere that prose about minicomputers wouldn’t, and by the time you’ve crossed that dark water with West, you’re already a different kind of reader than you were on page one.

I think about this when I try to write.

I grew up reading ledes the billboard way — I thought the first paragraph was a promise about what the reader would receive. And sometimes I still write them that way, which is to say I write them first and delete them later, because they’re stage fright disguised as generosity. Here is what I’m about to tell you really means please don’t leave before I find my footing.

The Orlean formulation — captivate, hold, keep reading — shifts the pressure off the writer’s anxiety and onto the reader’s experience. The question is no longer what do I need to tell them? The question is what will make them unable to leave?

That’s a harder question. It requires knowing something about what people can’t resist. Strangeness. Motion. A body in trouble. A door left open. The suggestion that someone knows something you don’t.

The best ledes I’ve ever written didn’t come first. They came after I’d already written the whole piece and finally understood what it was actually about — which turned out not to be the thing I thought it was about at the start. You can’t write the sentence that makes someone stay until you know what you’re asking them to stay for.

The lede isn’t a promise. It’s a wager. You’re betting that the reader will follow disturbance into the dark — and the only way to make that bet is to trust the disturbance yourself first. Most of us don’t. Most of us write the billboard because we’re afraid that if we don’t explain what’s coming, the reader will leave.

But the reader doesn’t leave because they’re confused. They leave because nothing reached out and held them.

The explanation never does that. The strangeness might.