Nobel laureate Alice Munro has shared some thoughts in the past on writing and reading, and Maria Popova collects a few for a post on her Brain Pickings site. Quoting Munro: "A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows."
Writers and writing
The Nieman Foundation is marking its 75th anniversary, and Nieman Storyboard has collected its most popular posts on narrative writing. Here's Rebecca Skloot on the structure of her The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: "The story of the cells and what happened to Henrietta take on such a different weight if you learn about them at the same time that you’re learning about the science, the scientists and her family, what happened to them and where they are now."
Poynter's Roy Peter Clark is a speaker at ScienceWriters2013, and his new book How to Write Short is prompting discussion of journalism in the Twitter age. CJR's Trevor Quirk seems to lament the changes but Carlos Lozada in the Washington Post writes that Clark "rejoices in the quality short writing he sees everywhere, on Facebook and Twitter feeds, in text messages and Match.com profiles."
Lane DeGregory is a Pulitzer-winning Tampa Bay Times feature writer and the reported author of this email to a journalism student asking for advice from the experienced: "When I was starting out, my editor often told me what the story was about before I ever went out to report it, so I tried to tailor my questions and observations and even the writing to what I thought the editor wanted. But the story you set out to get isn’t always the story that’s really there."
The master of stark prose died last month, and right away the appreciations started appearing. Here are a few: Maria Popova reviews Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, and David Haglund goes over the exceptions and hedges. Poynter's Roy Peter Clark recounts his buffet-line conversation with Leonard about exclamation points. And Rick Anderson takes a stab at giving Goldilocks a Leonard makeover.
It's one of the three main axioms of writing, "Write what you know." But does that mean you shouldn't write about something unless you know it inside and out? Not at all, Ben Yagoda writes in the New York Times. Instead, just learn it: "The idea is to investigate the subject till you can write about it with complete confidence and authority. Being a serial expert is actually one of the cool things about the very enterprise of writing: You learn ’em and leave ’em."
Maria Popova quotes authors on their routines. Susan Sontag started at eight and wouldn't answer the phone until noon. Simone de Beauvoir didn't write before 10 a.m. Hemingway, of course, wrote standing up. And William Gibson: "As I move through the book it becomes more demanding. At the beginning, I have a five-day workweek, and each day is roughly ten to five, with a break for lunch and a nap. At the very end, it’s a seven-day week, and it could be a twelve-hour day."
The author of the indispensible “On Writing Well” has lost his vision but still coaches students through the minefields of non-fiction narrative. Writing in the New York Times, Dan Barry describes William Zinsser's lasting influence: "People come to him in stages of typed-out paralysis, stalled, uncertain whether they have written too much or too little. He tries to help them organize their thoughts by condensing, reducing — learning what not to include."
The author of Hiroshima admitted only 12 students to his Yale seminar, but the knowledge dispensed there stayed with his students for life, Peter Richmond writes for Nieman Storyboard: “I won’t presume to be exact in recalling the first thing he said to us (this was 37 years ago), but I remember it being very close to this: 'If anyone in the room thinks of himself or herself as an artist, this is not a course for you. I teach a craft.'”
Here's one from the "Let's eat Grandma" division: Joshua Yearsley offers three examples and four more tips on proper adverb placement: "When used correctly, adverbs provide key pieces of information. They can be the difference between the reader being totally lost and being along for the ride. However, one very common error in academic writing is improper placement adverbs and adverbial phrases." One tip: "If you don’t need an adverb/adverbial phrase, don’t use one."