Tag: longform

Categories
Storytelling Writing

The Craft in the Work: A Reading Guide to Ten Storytellers

There’s a kind of reading that’s really a form of listening — not to what a writer is saying but to how they’re solving a problem. Every great piece of nonfiction is an argument about structure, and most writers never explain it aloud. The argument is in the choices: where the piece starts, when it digresses, what it leaves out, how it ends. You can enjoy the work without seeing any of this. But once you start seeing it, you can’t stop — and eventually, some of it becomes yours.

This guide is for both kinds of reading. Each writer here is worth your time as a reader. Each one also has something specific and stealable for anyone who writes. I’ve tried to name both.

The ten: John McPhee, Robert Caro, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Michael Lewis, Joan Didion, David Grann, Sam Anderson, Susan Orlean, Tom Junod, and Wright Thompson. Different registers, different obsessions, different methods. What they share is a commitment to making difficult things feel inevitable — and the discipline to make that look effortless.

They fall into three loose clusters, which might help you find your entry point. Structure builders — McPhee, Caro, Grann — write pieces that feel inevitable because the architecture is invisible but load-bearing. Emotional access — Orlean, Junod, Thompson — get you inside feeling before you know you’re there. Voice and form — Didion, Sullivan, Lewis, Anderson — the sentence, the digression, the explanatory seduction, the essay as genuine inquiry. The clusters overlap, and the best writers in each group are doing all three things at once. But if you’re trying to solve a specific problem in your own writing, the clusters tell you where to look first.

Continue reading “The Craft in the Work: A Reading Guide to Ten Storytellers”
Categories
Friends Gratitude Kindness Living

The One Thing Money Doesn’t Buy

Somewhere there is a couch that launched a hedge fund.

It belonged to a man named Carter, and for the better part of a year it was where Dan Loeb slept while he figured out what came next. No office. No fund. No Third Point. Just a friend’s apartment and the specific grace of someone who didn’t need you to have already become something before they let you in the door.

When Loeb finally landed at Jefferies, Carter gave him a few hundred thousand dollars to manage. That became a million. The million became seed capital. Third Point was built on top of it — thirty years of it, billions of dollars of it — and all of it traces back, in some straight unbroken line, to a couch and a person who said yes before the evidence was in.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy asked him about it near the end of a long conversation. The kindest thing anyone has ever done for you — it’s the question O’Shaughnessy always asks, and it always cuts through. Loeb had just finished making a case for kindness as a serious value, not a soft one. Something that belongs at the top of the hierarchy, he said, next to honesty and intelligence. The mechanism that unlocks empathy. He noted, almost reluctantly, that it also compounds in business — before adding that the moment you start treating it as an investment, you’ve already lost the thread.

Then he quoted Palmer Luckey.

The one thing money doesn’t buy you is friends that believed in you when you had nothing.

Luckey built Oculus in his parents’ garage. Sold it for two billion. Founded Anduril. He has spent his adult life proving that if you are relentless and strange and right, you can make almost anything happen with money. And what he noticed, somewhere in all of that, is where money stops. Not at luxury. Not at access. It stops at loyalty that predates your success. You cannot purchase the memory of Carter’s couch. You cannot acquire, at any price, the specific knowledge that someone held you when you were nothing yet.

I have been thinking about the people in my own life who did some version of this. Not always with money. A call made on your behalf before you knew you needed it. A door held open to a room you couldn’t see. These moments are nearly invisible when they happen. They only become legible later, once the room turns out to matter — once you can look back and trace the line.

The line is always shorter than you think. And it always ends at a person.

Categories
Reading Writing

The Starting Five I Keep

On November 25, 1963, every journalist in America was at Arlington Cemetery covering the state funeral of John F. Kennedy. Jimmy Breslin went to find the grave digger.

His name was Clifton Pollard. He was paid $3.01 an hour. He had been called in on his day off because the foreman thought he was the best they had, and the foreman was right about that. Breslin spent the morning with him while the ceremony unfolded a few hundred yards away — the dignitaries, the riderless horse, the flag folded into a triangle and handed to a widow. Pollard ate a ham sandwich and kept working.

The piece Breslin filed that afternoon is still taught in journalism schools sixty years later. Not because it covered the funeral better than anyone else. Because it didn’t cover the funeral at all. It found the true subject by ignoring the announced one.

That instinct — turn away from the obvious, walk toward the unglamorous specific, trust that the universal is hiding there — is the one idea I’ve returned to more than any other. It shows up in two very different writers who occupy, in my mind, the same position on the roster.

Breslin got there through deadline fury and a saloon-bred instinct for where the real story was breathing. He didn’t theorize about it. He just did it, on a deadline, in a city that rewarded the loud and the fast. John McPhee got to the same place by an entirely different route: patience, structure, and a willingness to spend six months learning how canoes are made or what happens to a piece of shad on its way up the Delaware River. Breslin worked like a man catching a cab. McPhee worked like a man building a cathedral.

But the underlying claim is identical. If you stay with a specific, unglamorous subject long enough — if you resist the pull toward the obvious center — it will eventually yield something that couldn’t have been reached directly. Pollard and his shovel. The orange grower and his grove. The nuclear physicist who also happens to be a canoe builder. The method is the same. Look where no one else is looking. Wait longer than feels reasonable. Write what you find.

This is one player, really. Just wearing two different jerseys.

The second seat belongs to Wright Thompson — not a single book but a stance. The premise that the most revealing place in any story isn’t the event itself but the moment before and after it, when the subject is alone with something they haven’t yet put into words. Every piece in this tradition is quietly asking: what is this person carrying that they can’t say out loud? It’s a question that turns out to apply well beyond sportswriting. It applies to most things worth writing about.

The third is whatever the Apple design era taught about constraint and clarity. Not nostalgia — something more durable. The idea that removing something can be an act of confidence. That the most useful things often appear to be doing less than they are. This one surfaces constantly in writing, in argument, in the editing pass where you decide what the piece actually needs versus what it accumulated along the way. Features are easy to add. Knowing what to cut requires a different kind of certainty.

The fourth is the philosophy embedded in spaced repetition — not the algorithm but the claim underneath it. That knowledge you don’t revisit isn’t really yours. That understanding decays on a predictable schedule whether you acknowledge it or not. The honest response isn’t anxiety about this; it’s the habit of return. Going back to the same passage, the same idea, the same question on a different day, and finding it has changed — or finding that you have.

The fifth seat shifts. That’s probably the right design. Four constants and one that evolves is roughly the correct ratio for a starting lineup that has to play in different eras. Right now that seat belongs to the question of what AI does to a practiced human sensibility — whether it erodes it by substitution or clarifies it by contrast. Earlier it was held by a certain kind of systems thinking. Before that, something else. The player who earns that spot is always the one asking the question the current moment most needs answered.

The coach who wins five championships doesn’t do it with the same roster. But he does it with the same philosophy. The starting five aren’t the players who happened to be good once. They’re the ones who keep earning their minutes regardless of what the season throws at you.

Breslin knew where to find Clifton Pollard because he’d been looking in that direction his whole career. The skill wasn’t the story. The skill was knowing that the story was never where everyone else was standing.

That’s the one I keep coming back to.

Categories
Family Fathers Living Sports

The Flashlights He Left Behind

There’s a Wright Thompson piece from 2007 that I keep returning to. It was filed during the Masters, and it’s technically about golf the way the ocean is technically about water.

The setup is simple: Thompson is at Augusta National for work, credentialed sportswriter in the press tent, watching the ceremonial first shots and the azaleas and all of it. His father had dreamed of attending just once. His father is dead. The piece is what happens when Thompson walks the course trying to find him.

I don’t know how to write about it without sounding like I’m describing a dream to someone who wasn’t there. So let me start with the craft.

Thompson opens with chipped beef on toast. He’s on the clubhouse veranda, waiting for Arnold Palmer, and a stranger asks what he ordered. “It was my dad’s favorite meal,” Thompson explains. A silence falls. “Did you ever bring him here?” the stranger asks. “No,” Thompson says, turning away.

That’s the whole wound, opened in three lines of dialogue. No commentary. Just the weight of the unanswered invitation — the trip that never happened — sitting there in a plate of chipped beef. The best sportswriters understand that the specific detail does what abstraction never can. Thompson doesn’t tell you he carries grief. He shows you where it lives.

Then comes the structural move that makes the piece something more than a personal essay. Thompson builds a rhythm — three times, he lands the phrase that is Augusta — each time widening the frame. Nicklaus on 18, glancing at his son, repeating his own father’s last words. Tiger winning in 1997, finding Earl in the gallery, a son’s head on a father’s shoulder. And then, quietly, devastating: This, too, is Augusta: me, needing a daddy more than ever.

By the time the narrator’s grief enters the frame, the reader has already been prepared to receive it. The repetition is a kind of structural kindness. Thompson is telling you: pay attention, something is being built here. When it arrives, it doesn’t feel sudden. It feels inevitable.

The piece has a spine you don’t notice until you’ve read it twice. Thompson asks the same question at two different moments: Daddy, are you out there?

The first time, he’s standing in the rain, alone, by a sapling planted exactly one year after his father’s death. He’d been standing guard over the tree in a downpour, soaked, because he’d been unable to protect his father in life. No answer comes. Just the shattering windows of water falling from the sky.

The second time, he’s in the bleachers at Amen Corner. He whispers it. And from somewhere across the course, a roar rises from the gallery, moving through the pines, fading back to silence.

Thompson is careful here. He writes: Understand that I don’t believe in stuff like this and am certain it is a coincidence. That hedge is the whole story. The man who doesn’t believe in signs is exactly the man who most needs to find one. The moment works precisely because he doesn’t oversell it. He puts it down and lets it be what it is — or what the reader needs it to be.

The passage I keep coming back to is near the end, not at the emotional peaks. Thompson has just watched Jim Gray, the television reporter, carefully lift the rope so his white-haired father can slip beneath it. A small thing. A son holding a rope. And Thompson realizes he’s watching himself in reverse — that the transition he’s been grieving his way through is also a transition toward something.

The piece ends not with closure but with continuation. He buys a tiny green Masters onesie. A small knit golf shirt for a toddler. And the last line the sales clerk offers — meant as a coo over the cute little clothes — lands as the verdict Thompson has been seeking all week: Oh, good daddy.

It’s the right ending because it doesn’t answer the grief. The hole in your chest after losing your daddy never gets filled, Thompson writes, and he means it. What the ending does instead is redirect the inheritance. He’s received everything he needed. He just needs to pass it on.

That’s what the best longform sportswriting can do when it’s working at full power. The Masters is the container. Inside it: a meditation on what fathers give us that we don’t fully inventory until they’re gone, and what we owe the children we haven’t had yet.

Thompson filed this piece for a newspaper. He was 30 years old. That this exists at all feels like its own small miracle — a man sitting down in grief and producing something that will outlast the tournament, and probably him.

Go read it. The link is here. Then come back and sit with it for a while.

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.