Tag: writing craft

Categories
AI AI: Prompting

The Price of the Barstool

Some genius out in California — one of the AI guys, the smart ones, always the smart ones — says the trick to getting a machine to understand you is to stop typing and start talking. Ramble for ten minutes, he says. Total mess. Say whatever’s in your head, contradict yourself, circle back, don’t clean it up. The machine, he says, is better at finding what you meant than you are.

I could’ve told him that thirty years ago for the price of a cup of coffee, except I would’ve told him to go find a bartender.

Every good bartender in this city has been doing this since before anybody could spell computer. You sit down, you’re a mess, you talk for twenty minutes about your ex-wife and your kid’s tuition and the guy at work who’s getting the promotion you should’ve gotten, and it comes out in no particular order, and somewhere in the fourth minute you say the one true thing — I think I’m afraid I already peaked — and the bartender doesn’t say a word, just wipes the bar down in front of you, and by the time you leave you know something about yourself you didn’t know when you walked in. Nobody paid Sam a nickel for that. Nobody gave him a paper to publish.

Now they’ve built a machine that does the same trick and they’re calling it a pattern. They put it in a paper. Somebody in Palo Alto’s going to raise money on it.

Here’s what I’ll say for the guy — he’s right, and being right is rarer than people think in that business. The mess is where the truth lives. Nobody ever said something true the first time they tried to say it cleanly. You clean it up too fast, you’ve written a memo. You let it run messy, you’ve said something.

But I’ll tell you what he won’t put in the paper, because it doesn’t fit on a slide. The machine will hand you back a cleaner version of your ten minutes, and it’ll sound better than what you said, and half the time it’ll be missing the one part that was actually true, because the true part usually comes out sounding wrong the first time. That’s the part a bartender knows and a machine doesn’t. Sam wouldn’t have cleaned up your sentence. He’d have just remembered you said it, and brought you another one, and let you sit there with it.

They’ll charge you a subscription for the part where it listens. The part where somebody sits with what you actually said — that’s still free, if you can find the right stool.

Categories
Writing

Wait, What? The Art of the Irresistible Lead

A few weeks ago I sat with a fresh draft of one of my daily reports, the cursor blinking on a perfectly serviceable first sentence. It told the reader exactly what the piece was about. It was clear. It was polite. And it was, frankly, a little boring.

I deleted it and tried again. Then again. On the fifth try, something shifted. The sentence wasn’t flashy, but it carried a quiet spark of surprise—an unexpected detail that made even me lean in. In that moment I felt the familiar thrill of a good lead doing its quiet work: not demanding attention, but inviting it.

Susan Orlean has long been one of my quiet heroes in this regard. She crafts first sentences that land like gentle provocations—declarative, sometimes absurd, always authoritative in their own small way. They dare you not to keep reading, even when the subject seems, at first glance, ordinary.

For years now I’ve paid close attention to these opening moves—not just in Orlean’s work, but across the writers who consistently pull me in and refuse to let go. In a world of endless distractions and shorter attention spans, the lead is no longer optional; it is an act of hospitality. It says, gently but firmly: Come sit with this for a while. There’s something worth your time here.

This post is my reflection on that craft—why it matters, what the masters do so well, and how those of us who write (whether for blogs, reports, letters, or larger ambitions) might get better at it. Along the way I’ll share specific examples that still make me pause and smile, plus some practical ways I’ve tried to strengthen my own first sentences. Because if curiosity and receptivity are part of my compass, then learning to write better leads feels like one small, ongoing way to live into that.

Why Leads Matter More Than Ever

Attention is the scarcest resource we have. A strong lead doesn’t just inform—it seduces, surprises, or jolts the reader into “Wait, what?” mode. It earns those first crucial moments in a distracted world.

When I struggle with a draft, it’s often because the opening is doing too much summarizing and not enough inviting. A great lead respects the reader’s time while promising payoff. It’s generous. And in my own writing, whether a morning report or a more personal essay, refining the lead has often clarified the entire piece.

Masters of the Lead

Over time I’ve noticed how the same principles appear across very different forms. Feature writers like Susan Orlean seduce us into caring about subjects we didn’t know existed. Obituary writers work under tighter constraints but with profound stakes—distilling a life into something that honors the dead while engaging the living.

Orlean often opens with vivid, affectionate character portraits or surprising details that feel like delightful invitations. One classic: “In Bulgaria, some tennis balls are like dumplings.” It’s playful, specific, and instantly makes you wonder about the world these athletes inhabit. Another strength is the rapid, layered sketch: “John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth.” The list is cinematic; the twist humanizes. Orlean writes the way a reader experiences the story, starting at the beginning and pulling you along with warm observation.

Obituary writers like Alden Whitman show the form’s power under pressure. Whitman conducted thoughtful advance interviews, framing them as biographical updates rather than morbid exercises. He asked reflective questions about identity, turning points, and what mattered most—gathering the intimate details that made his leads gracefully revealing. His portraits treated lives as coherent stories, full of flavor and humanity. Modern masters like Margalit Fox continue this with witty, precise openings that capture essence in one surprising stroke. British obituary traditions add elegant wit and anecdote, often using a single eccentricity to humanize even formidable figures.

The contrast is illuminating. Orlean’s warmth draws you in with delight and empathy. Joan Didion might open the same subject with cool cultural dissection, noting contradictions and performance. Wright Thompson would make it mythic and sensory. Jimmy Breslin would give it street-smart heart and working-man respect.

I sometimes test this by imagining how each would open a scene I actually remember: Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in 1969. I was young, new to Berkeley, and the place felt like a sanctuary. The cigar smoke drifted out onto the sidewalk. Moe himself held quiet authority behind the counter. Browsers moved slowly, as if time among books was time well stolen. He bought books fairly—no haggling, just a fair price—and held court with that cigar while the avenue hummed with protest outside.

Orlean might begin with affectionate observation: the smoke, the quiet authority, the browsers moving as if time were something you could borrow among the shelves. Didion would coolly note the cultural performance—the revolutionary texts amid fading energy. Thompson would immerse you in the sensory sanctuary, the myth of the place. Breslin would tell it like a guy at the bar: Moe buying books fairly, no nonsense, holding court with that cigar while the world outside churned.

Each approach turns the same details—cigars, fair dealing, the charged atmosphere—into something that hooks and reveals. What unites them is deep curiosity and receptivity: seeing people and places fully, with compassionate attention.

How to Get Good at Leads

Mastery comes from deliberate practice. Here are approaches I’ve found helpful:

  • Read and dissect. Keep a notebook of great leads. Note what emotion or curiosity they trigger and what promise they make.
  • Write multiples. For any story, draft five versions—zinger, scene, metaphor, question, quiet setup—then choose or combine.
  • Draft first, revise last. Write the piece, then craft the lead. Or iterate after you know the emotional core. Read aloud.
  • Hunt arresting details. Look for surprising combinations (Orlean) or telling contradictions (Didion). Your own memories are full of them.
  • Get feedback early. Share just the lead. Ask: Does this make you want to read more?
  • Experiment with constraints. Try ultra-short leads or imitate a master’s voice, then adapt to yours.

Over time this becomes instinctive. Leads force clarity about what your story really is.

Common Pitfalls

Avoid summaries that feel polite but boring, or cleverness that sacrifices clarity. The best leads align with your internal compass—generous, empathetic, curious. They reflect compassionate honesty: offering truth with care.

Writing better leads is one small way to live my life theme more fully. It’s about paying close attention, finding the spark in the everyday, and inviting others to do the same.

These values are my compass—and today, curiosity feels like the right direction.

Categories
AI Photography

The Price of the Cold

Two men are standing close to a brick wall trying not to talk, because talking wastes what little warmth is left in a body that has been outside too long. One of them has a camera — Jerry Schatzberg, a fashion photographer. His hands are jammed half into his coat pockets between shots. The other man has his collar up around his ears and a scarf wound twice, black and white, and he is not moving much, because moving costs heat, and heat is the one thing neither of them has enough of. Schatzberg raises the camera. His fingers, by this point, are not entirely his own. When he presses the shutter there is a tremor in it he did not order and cannot undo.

The picture comes out smeared at the edges. Bob Dylan’s face, in the frame, is dissolving slightly into the gray behind him, like a man photographed through a windshield in the rain. It is, by any studio standard, a bad photograph. Schatzberg knows it’s a bad photograph. He has made a career out of not taking bad photographs.

And it became the cover of Blonde on Blonde, which is the best rock album ever recorded, and in nearly sixty years nobody has managed to improve on it by reshooting it clean. The blur isn’t a decision. It’s a symptom — of two men standing in the cold too long, of a photographer choosing, afterward, to keep the evidence of his own discomfort instead of erasing it.

There’s a difference between an accident and serendipity that I don’t think gets said out loud enough, and it matters more than it used to. An accident is the cold — involuntary, uninvited, spent before you know if it was worth spending. Schatzberg didn’t choose to shiver. His hands moved because his body was doing what bodies do at a certain temperature, and the shutter caught what his hands actually did, not what he meant to do. Serendipity is what happens next: a verdict, rendered after the fact, that the wreckage of an intention was better than the intention itself. The accident is what makes the verdict possible. Without the cold, there’s nothing to render a verdict on.

I’ve been sitting with a large language model most days for the better part of a year now, watching it write, asking it to try again, watching it try again in a way that is never quite the same and never quite different enough to matter. Somewhere upstream of me there is a number called temperature, and I will never see it. Somebody else did, once, in a meeting, and decided that the word for controlled, pre-approved, refundable randomness should be temperature — the same word for the thing that made Schatzberg’s hands shake, the same word for the actual physical stakes of standing outside too long in January without enough coat — and then set it, and moved on, and nobody in that meeting laughed, because nobody in the room had ever been cold in a way that mattered to the work.

Picture the room instead. It is climate-controlled to sixty-eight degrees, humidity held flat, year-round, by a building management system nobody thinks about until it fails. Somewhere in it, the hardware is generating your next five versions of a photograph like the one on Blonde on Blonde. Nobody in that room is going to lose feeling in their fingers today. Nobody’s collar is up. I don’t know his name — nobody outside the building does — but somebody like him tuned the sampling distribution and went home at six. That’s the guy in the good suit. He built the weather. He never once stood in it.

The small model inherits conclusions. It never inherits the cold. Whatever accidents shaped the teacher model’s own training — whatever costly friction produced the insight in the first place — the student model gets none of that weather. It gets the photograph, cropped and sharpened, with the blur removed because somebody along the way decided the blur was noise instead of signal — the way Schatzberg, a lesser photographer, might have reshot Dylan clean and thrown the bad one away. It is heir to a serendipity it never earned, because it was never present for the accident that made the serendipity possible. It is, in the most literal sense the industry means by the word, cheap.

I keep coming back to the fact that nobody at the API layer is shivering. That’s not a complaint, exactly. It’s just an observation about where the cost went. Somewhere in the training data, some human being was cold, or scared, or holding a fish that was starting to smell, or standing on a stepladder with ten minutes before the traffic came back, and that person paid a real price for a result they couldn’t yet know was good. The model downstream of all that gets the result without the price.

Two rooms, then. In one of them it is January in New York and a man’s fingers have stopped entirely obeying him. In the other it is sixty-eight degrees, always, on a Tuesday and on a Sunday and at three in the morning, and the machines are making you nine more versions of that same blur. Sixty-eight degrees. A number, upstream, that you will never see.

Categories
AI

The Taste Beneath the Summary

The real work of staying informed has never been volume. It has been the quiet, repeated acts of judgment: does this matter, to whom, why now, what is the signal beneath the noise.

A recent piece from Bridgewater’s AIA Labs and Thinking Machines Lab, “Learning to Replicate Expert Judgment in Financial Tasks,” describes training models to do the triage investors actually do—filtering news, research, central bank documents, internal notes, for relevance. Frontier models struggled with judgments that looked simple and weren’t. The fix wasn’t a bigger model. It was Qwen, fine-tuned on labeled examples from practitioners, and it beat the frontier leaders while costing a fraction to run.

The bottleneck was never model size. It was taste. And taste, it turns out, can be taught to something small and cheap, if you’re precise enough about what you’re teaching it—a market’s worth of Mercors is already proving the same thing at scale.

The researchers were clear that expert judgment doesn’t reduce to rules or prompts. It took high-quality, domain-specific labels from people doing the actual work. The most powerful systems will be built in partnership with practitioners who can say, and keep saying, what “good” looks like in their own context.

Which raises the question I haven’t answered yet: what would I actually put in the labels, if someone asked me to teach my own taste to a cheap model.

Categories
Cooking Cooking Tips Recipes

On Cooking Backward

I have been thinking about a steak, and about Charlie Munger.

Munger liked to say, “invert, always invert,” meaning that some problems give up more easily if you turn them around and look at them from the back.

I don’t know that he ever cooked a steak in his life, but the advice applies to one anyway. There is a method called reverse searing, and it works like this: you put the meat in a slow oven first, so it warms through gently and evenly, and only at the very end do you give it a hard, fast sear in a hot pan, just long enough for a crust.

This is backward from how most of us were taught — sear first, finish low — and it turns out the old way was mostly wrong, or at least less reliable. The middle of the meat and the outside of the meat have different jobs, and trying to make one method serve both has always been a small, forgivable mistake.

Tri-tip is a peculiar cut of beef — the grain runs one way across part of it and then quietly changes direction, so that if you slice straight through without noticing, you end up with something tougher than it needed to be. You have to find the place where it shifts and turn your knife with it. It isn’t hard, once you know to look. There’s usually a faint seam where the change happens, almost like a crease in fabric, and once you’ve found it you’ll find it every time after.

I don’t want to make too much of this. It does seem true, in cooking and in other things, that the order you do something in matters more than people let on, and that the patient, unglamorous part — the slow oven, the waiting — usually deserves more credit than it gets.

The sear is what you remember. The low heat is what made it possible.

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
Books Curiosity Living

Working the Seams

This book highlight popped up in my morning Readwise feed recently:

“Fishermen work seams—seams between slow water and fast, between deep water and shallow, between sunlight and shadow. The eddies around rocks, the bubble lines along banks. That’s where the fish are.”

Neil King wrote it in American Ramble, his account of walking from Washington to New York. He was watching fishermen, not fishing himself, which maybe explains why it reads less like instruction and more like revelation. When you’re the observer, you have room to notice what the practitioner is too busy doing to say.

The word seams is doing something I can’t stop thinking about. A seam is a joining. It’s the place where two different things meet and, in meeting, create a third thing: the edge itself. Not slow water, not fast water, but the turbulent conversation between them. The fish aren’t in the slow water. They aren’t in the fast water. They’re in the argument.

I think most of the interesting things in life happen at seams.

The best conversations aren’t the ones where everyone agrees. They’re the ones where two people with genuinely different orientations are standing at the same edge, looking at the same water. The friction between the views creates something neither would reach alone.

The best writing isn’t the settled opinion, the fully-arrived-at conclusion. It’s the essay in the old sense — the attempt — where you can feel the writer at the seam of what they know and what they’re reaching toward. The bubble line between understanding and confusion. That’s where the reader is, too, if they’re lucky.

I notice this on my own blog sometimes. The posts that feel most alive to me aren’t the ones where I knew what I wanted to say before I started. They’re the ones where I began at a seam — between something I’d always believed and something that recently unsettled it — and wrote my way along the edge, not knowing which bank I’d end up on.

There’s a version of this that applies to attention itself.

I dwell on how I pay attention — when I’m reading, when I’m walking, when I’m in conversation. And I’ve noticed that my attention goes flat in the middle of things. Flat terrain. Constant depth. Unchanging light. I have to work to stay present when nothing is in transition.

But put me at a seam — a moment where the mood in a room is shifting, where a piece of music is about to resolve or refuse to resolve, where someone is on the verge of saying something they’ve been circling for an hour — and I’m completely there. Attention is predatory, maybe. It goes where the tension is.

Which is what the fish are doing, of course. The seam isn’t just a metaphor for where interesting things happen. It’s why interesting things happen there. The fast water sweeps food along; the slow water lets you hold your position; the seam between them is where you can eat without being eaten. The fish are solving a real problem. They’re just also, accidentally, living beautifully.

I wonder sometimes if this is what makes a good editor, or a good friend who reads your drafts. They find the seams — the places where you’ve unconsciously papered over a tension, smoothed the fast water into the slow, given the reader no place to be a fish. “Something’s off here,” they say, and what they mean is: you resolved this too quickly. Stay in the argument longer.

The eddies around rocks, the bubble lines along banks.

I want to be a better noticer of those. Not to resolve them. Just to work them.

Categories
Authors

Tracy Kidder and the Human Code

Tracy Kidder died yesterday, March 24th, of lung cancer. He was 80.

I’ve been sitting with that quiet, heavy fact for a few hours now, staring at the screen, thinking about what his work meant to me—and specifically, about the enduring legacy of The Soul of a New Machine.

On its surface, the book is a chronicle of a team of engineers and coders at Data General Corporation, racing against the clock in the early 1980s to build a 32-bit minicomputer. If you haven’t read it, that description likely sounds like the synopsis for a dry technical manual. It is, gloriously, anything but.

What Kidder did—what hit me with such force when I first turned those pages—was capture the raw, unvarnished pulse of human obsession. He didn’t just document the architecture of a machine; he mapped the architecture of the minds building it. He translated the late-night pizza runs, the bloodshot eyes, the tribal hierarchies of the engineering floor, and the strange, almost religious fervor that overtakes people when they are creating something they profoundly believe in.

He called it:

“An adventure story, a kind of cultural anthropology.”

That is exactly right.

He ventured into a world most journalists would have fumbled or fundamentally misunderstood.

The early computer industry was hyper-technical, fiercely insular, full of impenetrable jargon, and populated by brilliant minds who regarded outsiders with a polite, if dismissive, suspicion.

But Kidder didn’t blink. He embedded himself. His deep reporting and novelistic prose illuminated the basement labs of tech just as deftly as he later illuminated home construction and global disease prevention. He held a fundamental trust that the human drama playing out inside the sterile machine room was worth finding. And he found it.

Reading Soul as someone who has spent years orbiting technology, I continually find myself marveling at a different kind of engineering: how does a writer actually do this? How do you make the arcane feel intimate?

As one reviewer aptly noted at the time, “Kidder makes the telling seem absolutely effortless.” Which is, of course, the ultimate tell. Effortless prose is always the product of staggering effort.

A friend once said of his process:

“Tracy throws up on the page and cleans up afterward. He was absolutely indefatigable in the writing.”

That immense labor shows—not as the sweat of a struggling author, but as the pure clarity of a master.

What the book quietly teaches, if you’re paying attention, is a profound lesson about the nature of craft itself.

Those Data General engineers weren’t just building a minicomputer. They were building an identity, a tribe, a shared sense of purpose. They were transferring a piece of themselves into the silicon and wire. Kidder understood this alchemy. He highlighted people who had mastered their realms, elevating them into characters whose struggles rang true because they were anchored by staggering amounts of research. He believed—and subsequently proved to the world—that ordinary people doing terribly difficult things in obscure rooms were worthy of the full weight of literary attention.

That was his extraordinary gift. And it is far rarer than it sounds.

The honors and brisk sales from the book vaulted Kidder into the top ranks of American nonfiction writers. But his true legacy lives in the narrative talents he inspired. I suspect a vast number of people who went on to write serious, empathetic nonfiction about technology read Soul at some formative moment and thought: This is how it should be done. I know I was one of them.

He will be deeply missed. But the book remains, waiting on the shelf. If you haven’t read it, today feels like exactly the right day to start.

Categories
News Writing

A Tribute to John F. Burns

“The commitment to fairness and balance and to shunning conventional truths when our reporting leads us in unexpected directions has been our gold standard.” — John F. Burns

As I’ve gotten older I pay closer attention to the obituary section of the New York Times. It frequently teaches me and brings back unusual memories that surprise me. Today it was my memory of years of reading the writings of John Burns brought back to life as I read his obituary.

Burns retired over ten years ago. I now remember thinking at the time just what a loss that would be for the paper. Reading Alan Cowell’s obituary of John F. Burns this morning, I felt that absence acutely.

For years, Burns was my first read—a “fireman” of the foreign desk who didn’t just report on the heat; he translated the embers.

Burns belonged to an era of journalism that felt more like a literary calling than a content cycle. He was a man who could find the “sweep of history” in the “telling detail of the present.”

Who else would think to frame the harrowing siege of Sarajevo through the haunting notes of a cellist playing Albinoni’s Adagio amidst the rubble? He understood that to explain a war, you must first explain the soul of the city being broken by it.

His career was a map of the 20th and 21st centuries’ most jagged edges—from the “wasteland of blasted mosques” in Bosnia to the “harrowing regime” of the Taliban in 1990s Afghanistan.

Yet, for all his Pulitzers and his debonair appearances in a Burberry raincoat on Red Square, there was a refreshing, stubborn humility to his craft.

He famously tilted against the “missionary complex” of modern reporting. He didn’t want to save the world; he wanted to see it—clearly, fairly, and without the blinding influence of ideology.

There is something deeply moving about his partnership with his wife, Jane Scott-Long which wasn’t familiar to me. While John was the “full force of talent” at the keyboard, Jane was the architect of safety, turning run-down Baghdad houses into fortified sanctuaries with “military-style blast walls” and, perhaps most essentially, a state-of-the-art coffee machine. They were a team that survived the “chaos of war” by creating a small, civilized center within it.

In his later years after she passed, Burns became more reclusive, a quiet departure for a man once known as a “raconteur with panache.” It’s a transition that mirrors the profession itself. He flourished in a pre-internet era, where time-zone differentials allowed for “considered writing.” Today, the “blue pencil” of the editor has been replaced by the instant, unvetted roar of the social feed.

His final story for the Times was about the reburial of King Richard III. It was a fitting end: a story about the “sweep of the centuries” propelling the news of the day.

As I reflect back on his work and my years of reading it, I realize that what I miss isn’t just the news he delivered. I miss the way he delivered it—with the patience of a historian and the heart of a poet. He kept the paper straight, and in doing so, he helped us keep our bearings in a world that so often feels lost. Especially today.

Categories
Creativity Writing

Beyond the Backdrop: Crafting Fiction

Michael Lewis recently interviewed author Amor Towles and the New Orleans Book Festival. They had a great conversation and I highly recommend it (YouTube video)!

Near the end of the conversation with Lewis, Towles shares an explanation of the role history plays in his writing. Turns out he’s shared this explanation many other times during other book talks.

Here’s a rough recap of his explanation:

Imagine that you’re in a theater and you’re about to see is stage play. Let’s say it’s a play of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” What you’re looking at is a living room of a wealthy Russian estate in the countryside with fine furniture. At the back of the room are two French doors, and if you look through them into the distance, you can see the cherry orchard itself. It’s spring, and the trees are in bloom, and you can see the blossoms.

What you’re looking at, of course, when you look across the stage through the French doors, is actually a painted canvas behind the doors. That’s the way a set crew will make a backdrop – they’re going to paint a picture of this orchard and drop it behind the doors. They will not paint it in a hyperrealist style but in an impressionist style like Renoir or Monet, because that’s what’s going to look right to the natural eye at that distance. It should look a little blurry to give the feeling that it’s afternoon. Maybe the blossoms look like they are even moving in the breeze.

In front of that, on either side of the French doors, are bookcases made out of plywood and painted to look like mahogany. On one side is a staircase that goes up to nothing, and on the other is a door that goes nowhere. All a part of the stage set.

But in front of all that is an actual table surrounded by actual chairs, and on the table is an actual china tea service.

It is very important that these things be actual because let’s say that there’s a sister sitting at the table having tea alone, and the brother slams this door as he comes in, stomping across this stage. He’s clearly in high emotion, and what we want to hear is the physicality of the wooden legs scraping across the wooden surface of the stage when he pulls back that chair to sit down and pulls himself up. When he slaps the surface of the table to make a point, we want to hear the physicality of that contact. And when the sister delicately, patiently puts down her teacup, we want to hear that gentle clink of the china on china. It’s very important that these things be real because that’s what allows us in the audience to focus on this moment in a very precise way.

For Towles, history is the painted backdrop, and he’s not interested in describing that in a hyperrealist style. He gives it an impressionist style because the role of history in his work is to provide a sense of time, of place, of mood – but that’s it.

Now in front of that, sits a lot of plywood that’s been painted to look like mahogany. This stuff he hopes makes you pause and ask “Did that actually happen or did he make that up?”

But in front of all that is the actual table and chairs. Just like in the play, it’s very important that that be very real to you. They should be so real to you that when you’re reading a scene around that table, you feel like you’re sitting at the table, and that you can read the changes in expression on the faces of the brother and sister. You can hear the nuances in their voices as they exchange their ideas and sentiments. It’s very important that this feel real to you because that’s actually where all of the action is.

Towles’ theatrical metaphor perfectly captures the essence of crafting historical fiction. History serves as the evocative backdrop, transporting readers to a specific era without getting bogged down in minutiae. This allows space for the reader’s imagination to flourish, fostering a deeper connection with the story. Towles’ intention is not to deliver a history lesson, but to create a believable atmosphere where characters and their narratives can truly shine.

At the heart of action is that single table with the china tea setting – the piece of the set that is startlingly, undeniably real. When the brother slams through the door in raging emotion, we don’t just want to see the movement – we must hear the grating screech of wooden chair legs against wooden floor. As the distressed sister delicately replaces her teacup in its saucer, that gentle clink of china on china must sing out and resonate.

Towles’s theatrical metaphor is a profound reminder that an author’s role is to create an immersive staging ground where characters can indisputably come to life for the audience. But the author’s craft is only fully realized when the players succeed in elevating the audience’s emotional experience from that of witness to full-fledged participant, intimately sharing the lives captured in that snapshot of illuminated reality.

Have you ever been swept away by a historical fiction novel that transported you to another time and place? If so, then you’ve likely experienced the magic that Amor Towles weaves with his words. Dive into one of Towles’ captivating novels and witness firsthand how he masterfully brings the past to life on the stage of his imagination. Perhaps, inspired by Towles’ approach, you’ll even pick up a pen and explore crafting your own fiction masterpiece.

Regardless, the next time you lose yourself in a captivating period drama, remember the artistry behind the scenes — the meticulous construction of a believable world where timeless human emotions take center stage.

Suggestion: start reading Amor Towles with his first novel: Rules of Civility