Tag: Susan Orlean

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
Aging San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Permission of Fridays

Doug always walked a half-step ahead, which meant he saw things first, which meant I was usually watching him see them — the tilt of his head, the small pause before he brought the camera up — before I ever turned to look myself. Market Street on a Friday morning has its own weather system, independent of the sky: the gray light fog gives even bright colors.

We would set out with no destination, which was the whole method — what Jay Maisel, who died this summer at ninety-five, called going out empty. Leave the plan at home, he taught generations of photographers, so there’s room left in you to see something you didn’t already expect. You cannot plan to be astonished. You can only put yourself in the path of it and hope.

I have thought about those walks more than I expected to, now that they are gone. Not gone dramatically — no falling-out, no single last Friday we knew was the last Friday. Covid arrived and shut the passes between people the way weather closes a mountain road, and by the time it reopened, the rhythm had broken. We still talk. We just don’t walk anymore, and I have never entirely worked out why something so simple didn’t start back up, the way you’d think a habit that good would insist on its own return. It just didn’t come back.

Susan Orlean, in Joyride, writes about being a writer as a kind of permission — an excuse to linger in places past the point a normal person would move along, and then to go back and report on what was seen. She’s citing Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

A camera grants the identical permission a notebook does. Nobody stops a man with a camera on Market Street and asks him what he’s doing there. The camera is its own credential — I have a reason to be looking at you, at this doorway, at the light falling across these particular twenty feet of sidewalk, longer than is socially normal. Doug and I weren’t tourists and we weren’t reporters and we weren’t, most days, even talking about what we saw until afterward, over lunch. We were two men who had given ourselves formal license to pay attention to a city we loved, as if it might not be there next Friday.

It mostly was there next Friday. Until it wasn’t, in the way that most disruptions to a good practice aren’t dramatic so much as quietly permanent — a scheduling gap that never gets rescheduled, a street that starts to feel unfamiliar again because you stopped walking it with intention. I still have the pictures. A woman waiting at a bus stop with an expression I never satisfactorily explained to myself. The chess player’s hands, mid-reset, waiting on the next stranger. Doug, once, caught by someone else’s lens, walking a half-step ahead of a man he didn’t know was photographing him photographing the city.

The third instruction is the one that survived when the walks didn’t. I don’t walk Market Street with Doug anymore, but I’m telling you about it now, on a blog nobody assigned me to keep for twenty-five years. The credential just changed instruments — camera to keyboard. Orlean’s point, I think, is that the excuse and the obligation were always the same thing. You get to be there because you intend to come back and testify, and the testifying is the toll, due whether or not the place is still there when you go looking for it again.

Doug and I are not going to start walking on Fridays again. I’m too old for that kind of recommitment, and pretending otherwise would just be a nicer way of lying to myself. Plus physically it’s just beyond me now. This essay is itself a kind of substitute — the telling standing in for a habit of attending that got interrupted and never fully repaired.

Mary Oliver’s instructions don’t say what to do when the astonishment outlasts the practice that produced it. Maybe that’s the fourth instruction nobody wrote down: keep telling about it anyway, especially after you’ve stopped going. Or at least remembering.

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
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.

Categories
Books

The Observer Observed

I first encountered Susan Orlean not in person, but in the ashes. Specifically, the ashes of the Los Angeles Central Library. Reading The Library Book was a masterclass in how to weave a forensic investigation with a love letter to a public institution. It was reportage, but it possessed a beating heart. She has spent decades at The New Yorker perfecting the art of the “curious observer”—the person standing just to the side of the frame, noticing the detail everyone else missed.

That is why picking up Joyride felt different.

In a memoir, the observer must finally step in front of the lens. The transition from The Library Book—which is about the preservation of collective memory—to Joyride—which is about the fluidity of personal memory—is a fascinating shift. When a journalist writes a memoir, there is often a tension. They are used to looking outward, hunting for the story in orchids or arsonists. Turning that gaze inward requires a different kind of bravery.

“A commute has a destination; a joyride has only a duration.”

The title itself suggests a specific philosophy of living. It implies that the movement itself is the point. As I read, I found myself thinking about the difference between navigating a life and simply driving through it. Orlean captures that distinct feeling of the wind in your hair, the blur of the scenery, and the realization that the “plot” of our lives is often just the things that happen while we are busy steering.

We read writers like Orlean not just for what they saw, but for how they saw it. In Joyride, she reminds us that the most interesting routes are rarely the most direct ones. A great read!