Tag: nonfiction

Categories
Writing

Still Learning

I never thought about rhythm in my writing. Not once.

A lifetime of writing. More essays than I can count. One book. And the sonic quality of my sentences — the way they moved, or failed to move, through a reader’s mind — simply wasn’t something I considered. I was too busy trying to say something true. I thought that was enough.

What changed was reading differently. Not for pleasure anymore, or not only for pleasure. David Perell conducts long interviews with writers about how they actually work — not what they believe about writing, but what they do, physically, at the desk, in the dark, before anyone sees it. He asks the same structural questions of very different writers and the patterns emerge slowly, the way patterns always emerge: first you see it once and think nothing of it, then you see it again, then you can’t stop seeing it. Rhythm came up constantly. Always in different language. Pacing. Breath. Music. Momentum. Always pointing at the same thing.

Then I found this from Susan Orlean:

My new preoccupation was on the sonic quality of my writing — the rhythm and tone of the sentences. I began reading all my work out loud, listening for places that lagged and dragged, that didn’t sparkle. I knew it was unlikely that anyone else was reading my stories out loud, but I was convinced that you do “hear” writing in your head as you read, and this pushes you (or stalls you) through the piece. I wanted the music — that is, this subconscious tonal effect — to match the subject.

I stopped. Read it again.

Because she was describing something real — something I had been doing wrong for twenty-five years without knowing it was wrong. You don’t know what you can’t hear. That’s the whole problem. The silence where the knowledge should be is itself silent.

I don’t read my work out loud. There’s something strange about it, something that breaks the spell — you stop being a writer and become an actor, hearing your own sentences hanging in the air, too exposed. But I do read and read again, more carefully now, looking for the wobble. Orlean’s point holds regardless of method: you hear writing in your head as you read it, and that hearing either carries you forward or it doesn’t. The ear that matters is the one inside.

George Saunders has a practice he describes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: he reads from the beginning of a piece over and over, and the moment something feels off — a word, a rhythm, a single syllable landing wrong — he stops and fixes it before moving forward. Never skips the trouble spot. Never tells himself he’ll come back. His opening pages accumulate dozens of passes before he ever reaches the end. What he’s really doing, underneath the technique, is training himself to feel the exact microsecond when a reader’s attention would start to drift. To catch the loss before it happens.

That’s not craft instruction. That’s building a new sensitivity where there wasn’t one before.

John McPhee works from the other direction entirely. His famous boxes — index cards, sorted into piles, piles arranged into sequences, nothing drafted until the structure is known — are about architecture before a single word is written. He’s deciding which rooms exist, and in what order, before he furnishes any of them. Where Saunders builds outward from one true sentence, McPhee builds downward from a blueprint.

But they’re asking the same question. McPhee: is this section in the right place? Saunders: is this word in the right place? Both listening for the moment the piece loses its hold on the reader. Both doing triage on something most writers never even examine.

What I’m still learning — slowly, and late — is that rhythm isn’t decoration. It isn’t the thing you tend to after the real work is done. It’s structural. A sentence moving at the wrong speed for what it’s carrying fails the thought itself, not just the ear.

There’s something else I’ve been thinking about. If rhythm is the thing that’s hardest to hear in your own work — if the ear takes years to develop — then maybe the most useful writing tool isn’t a grammar checker. Those are solved. What isn’t solved is the rhythm problem. An editor who listens for the wobble, explains what’s failing and why, and works through the fix with you rather than just patching it. Not a red pen. A teacher.

I’ve been experimenting with exactly that. An AI editor I call Clark. His job isn’t correctness. It’s the sonic quality of prose — the rhythm — the same thing Orlean was describing, the same sensitivity Saunders spent years training. Clark finds what’s working as hard as what isn’t. And when something fails, he explains what the reader’s inner ear is hitting and why. Helpful.

I didn’t know much about rhythm in writing when I was fifty. Didn’t know it at sixty.

I’m not entirely sure I know it now. But I know it more than I did, which might be the only kind of knowing that’s real.

A lifetime of writing. Still learning how to listen.

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
Living Retirement Sports Writing

The Architecture of a Wound

I have read a lot of Wright Thompson pieces over the years. Enough to notice that I finish them feeling slightly implicated — like I have been shown something true about a person I thought I understood, and the showing has cost me something comfortable. That’s not a common feeling after reading sportswriting. Thompson’s a different kind of sports writer.

His profile of Steve Kerr, published this week in ESPN, is a case study in how he does it.

Go read it now. Before you continue here. Go read it!

The opening line: “Steve Kerr walked into the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire with a secret.”

Thompson doesn’t start with biography or context or the Warriors’ season. He starts with dramatic irony — we are placed inside a moment where the subject knows something we don’t, where the gap between public persona and private reality is already established before we’ve gotten through the first sentence. We know, even before we know what the secret is, that the real story will be about what lives underneath the official one.

The secret is retirement. Kerr had made up his mind — 95% certainty — that this would be his last season. He checked in at the Beverly Wilshire, gave his room number, 516, as “Johnny Bench Joe Montana,” and then leaned across the breakfast table and almost mouthed the words: “I think it’s over.”

That room number detail is worth pausing on. It isn’t decoration. A man who has spent 40 years inside professional basketball has encoded legends into the passwords of his daily life — Bench’s number, Montana’s number, woven together as a mnemonic for a hotel room he’ll forget in three days. Thompson drops it and moves on without comment. He never explains it. He doesn’t have to. The detail does its work the way a good poem does: you carry it with you, and it means more the longer you hold it.

This is the loaded object, and Thompson deploys it everywhere. Late in the piece, the coaches bond over the same memory trick on the road — Thompson tells Kerr he’s in room 2225, “Emmitt Smith Rocket Ismail.” The repetition isn’t accidental. It’s Thompson showing us what the 82-game season actually is: a long chain of hotel rooms and encoded legends, a man building temporary homes out of other people’s greatness.

Thompson earns the loaded objects by earning the access. He spent the entire season alongside Kerr — embedded, unhurried, a still presence at the edge of the frame. The piece has the texture of someone who was there for the small moments precisely because he wasn’t hunting the big ones. He’s in the coaches’ locker room after losses, cracking Peronis on the team bus through the quiet midnight of Atlanta, at Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, at the Golden Gate Deli while Kerr eats his usual Honey Baked sandwich and texts “Conflicted” and then adds: “What’s Lulu think?” “She sees both sides.”

That kind of detail — the dog with two minds about retirement — is available only to a reporter who has spent enough time with a subject that the subject has stopped performing. Thompson collects these moments. They are the material.

But access is scaffolding. The building is what Thompson does with it.

Midway through the piece, he lands the paragraph that reorients everything that came before it. On January 18, 1984, a gunman shot Malcolm Kerr — Steve’s father, president of the American University of Beirut — in the head. A family friend reached Steve in his dorm room at 3 a.m. Steve asked if his father was okay. There was a long pause. “Your father was a great man,” the friend finally said.

Steve ran downstairs and pounded on his teammates’ doors. Then he went and sat on the curb. “On Speedway Boulevard,” he says, still remembering the cold concrete and the empty street. Thompson gives us that street name. He tells us Steve started walking, and that he hasn’t slowed down since.

Suddenly the retirement question isn’t about basketball at all.

The sport is Thompson’s vehicle. His real subject is always the wound underneath — what drives a person to keep competing, keep building teams, keep moving, and what it means when the movement finally starts to slow. The question running beneath the entire Kerr piece isn’t “Will he stay or go?” It’s the question Malcolm’s assassination put into his son at 18, still unanswered 42 years later: what do you do when the thing that protected you from the worst moment of your life stops being available?

Thompson makes this explicit in one passage near the end. Kerr describes his fear about retirement: the coaching job, he says, doesn’t just feed his soul — it helps him manage his chronic daily pain. The pain, we’ve learned by then, is rooted in unresolved trauma. Kerr has spent a year journaling every morning about his father’s death and then deleting what he wrote, following a therapy program based on the idea that emotional wounds express themselves as physical ones. The back pain that plagued him for 12 years — the migraines, the spinal leak, the decade of searching for relief from Mayo to Duke to England for stem-cell therapy — began the same year he took the Warriors job. Writing opens the lines of communication. Winning keeps them open. Retirement threatens to seal them again.

Thompson doesn’t editorialize. He just lays this all out, piece by piece, until the architecture becomes visible.

There’s a moment in Minneapolis, late in the piece, that sticks with me.

The NBA has postponed a game after a nurse named Alex Pretti has been killed by federal agents. Kerr gathers the team in a hotel ballroom. Later, working through what to say publicly, he does something Thompson says he’s never heard him do before — he invokes his father.

“My father was killed by extremists,” Kerr says, rehearsing lines. “I know how that story ends.”

Thompson can hear his voice catch between sentences. “I’m crying right now,” Kerr says.

At the press conference, Kerr doesn’t mention his father. He talks about the families who will never get their loved ones back. He didn’t have to say more. And Thompson, who was there for all of it — the hotel ballroom, the phone call, the media room — doesn’t have to explain the connection either. He’s done the work of showing us who Malcolm Kerr was, what his assassination meant, how Steve has carried it. The press conference lands with the full weight of everything we’ve already been given.

This is Thompson at his best: information as infrastructure, detail as detonator.

The piece ends not with a contract signing or a press conference. It ends with a granddaughter.

On the same day Kerr commits to returning — the decision made, the call to Steph placed, the band getting back together — his son’s younger daughter, Charlotte, takes her first steps. Kerr watches her toddle around the room. He thinks about his son as a toddler. He looks at the photograph on the wall of Nick and his older daughter grinning in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. “It all felt intertwined,” Thompson writes. “Blood family, basketball family, family. A cocoon, like his old Arizona manager said.”

That word — cocoon — has appeared once before. It’s what the Arizona manager called the arena the night Steve played two days after his father was killed. The crowd forming a protective warmth around a boy who had just lost everything. The team as shelter.

42 years later, it’s still what Steve Kerr is building and protecting. Thompson knew to plant the word the first time so it could bloom at the end.

That’s the technique. That’s what I mean when I say reading him costs something. In a wonderful way. He shows you that the things people build — teams, careers, dynasties — are sometimes just very elaborate answers to questions they were asked at 18 on a cold curb on Speedway Boulevard. And then he leaves you with a baby taking her first steps, and you feel the whole weight of it all at once.