Citations

Writing_Tools__50_Essential_Strategies_for_Every_Writer_(Roy_Peter_Clark)

"Vigorous writing is concise,"

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.

"The life so short, the craft so long to learn."

• Do not try to apply these tools all at once. Aspiring golfers swing and miss if they try to remember the thirty or so different elements of an effective golf swing. I promise you a case of writing paralysis if you think about too many of these tools when you sit down to write. Let your writing flow early. You can reach for a tool later. • You will become handy with these tools over time. You will begin to recognize their use in the stories you read. You will see chances to apply them when you revise your own work. With time, they will become part of your process, natural and automatic. • You already use many of these tools without knowing it. You cannot think, speak, write, or read without them. But now these tools will have names, so you can talk about them in different ways. As your critical vocabulary grows, your writing will improve.

1. Nuts and bolts: strategies for making meaning at the word, sentence, and paragraph levels 2. Special effects: tools of economy, clarity, originality, and persuasion 3. Blueprints: ways of organizing and building stories and reports 4. Useful habits: routines for living a life of productive writing

A writer composes a sentence with subject and verb at the beginning, followed by other subordinate elements, creating what scholars call a right-branching sentence. I just created one. Subject and verb of the main clause join on the left ("a writer composes") while all other elements branch to the right.

Subject and verb are often separated in prose, usually because we want to tell the reader something about the subject before we get to the verb. This delay, even for good reasons, risks confusing the reader.

If the writer wants to create suspense, or build tension, or make the reader wait and wonder, or join a journey of discovery, or hold on for dear life, he can save subject and verb of the main clause until later. As I just did.

"It was one horrible thing to watch," said Helen Amadio, who was walking near her Hampden Avenue home when the crash occurred. "It exploded like a bomb. Black smoke just poured." Begin with a good quote. Hide the attribution in the middle. End with a good quote. Some teachers refer to this as the 2-3-1 tool of emphasis, where the most emphatic words or images go at the end, the next most emphatic at the beginning, and the least emphatic in the middle, but that's too much calculus for my brain. Here's my simplified version: put your best stuff near the beginning and at the end; hide weaker stuff in the middle.

George Orwell, who wrote of verbs: "Never use the passive where you can use the active."

Embedded in all that verbal activity is one splendid passive verb: "His pale eyes were frosted with sun glare." Form follows function. The eyes, in real life, received the action of the sun, so the subject receives the action of the verb. That's the writing tool: use passive verbs to call attention to the receiver of the action. When columnist Jeff Elder described the extinction of an American species, the passenger pigeon, in the Charlotte Observer, he used passive verbs to paint the birds as victims: "Enormous roosts were gassed from trees. . .. They were shipped to market in rail car after rail car. ... In one human generation, America's most populous native bird was wiped out." The birds do nothing. They are done unto.

A strong active verb can add dimension to the cloud created by some uses of the verb to be. Strunk and White provide a nifty example. "There were leaves all over the ground" becomes "Leaves covered the ground." A four-word sentence outworks seven words.

Here, then, are your tools of thumb: • Active verbs move the action and reveal the actors. • Passive verbs emphasize the receiver, the victim. • The verb to be links word and ideas.

To understand the difference between a good adverb and a bad adverb, consider these two sentences: "She smiled happily" and "She smiled sadly." Which one works best? The first seems weak because "smiled" contains the meaning of "happily." On the other hand, "sadly" changes the meaning.

To put it another way, why is "Wish and hope and think and pray" stronger than "Wishin' and hopin and thinkin' and prayin' "? With apologies to Dusty Springfield, the answer resides in the history of English as an inflected language. An inflection is an element we add to a word to change its meaning. For example, we add -s or -es to a noun to indicate the plural. Add -5 or -ed to a verb, and we distinguish present action from the past.

Even though author Raymond Chandler uses the static "was" five times, he creates a sense of the present — the here and now — by the injection of -ing words. So the writer should not worry about the occasional and strategic use of an -ing word, only its overuse when the simple present or past tense will suffice. Sometimes a single -ing creates the desired effect. In this passage from a biography of U.S. Senator Bob Dole, we learn of the care he received after a terrible war injury: Bob held on, and made it through the operation. The fever disappeared and the other kidney worked, and by fall, they'd chipped away the whole cast. Now they were trying to get him out of bed. They hung his legs over the edge of the mattress, but it made him weak with fatigue. It took days to get him on his legs, and then he shook so, with the pain and the strangeness, they had to set him back in bed.

There, in the middle, rests a single exception ("they were trying") to describe immediate and continuous effort.

1. When I add -ing, I add a syllable to the word, which does not happen, in most cases, when I add -s or -ed. Let's take the verb to trick. First, I'll add -s, then -ed, giving me tricks and tricked. Neither change alters the root effect of the verb. Tricking, with its extra syllable, sounds like a different word. 2. The -ing words begin to resemble each other. Walking and running and cycling and swimming are all good forms of exercise, but I prefer to point out that my friend Kelly likes to walk, run, cycle, and swim.

Write what you fear. Until the writer tries to master the long sentence, she is no writer at all, for while length makes a bad sentence worse, it can make a good sentence better.

A close reading of Wolfe suggests some strategies to achieve mastery of the long sentence: • It helps if subject and verb of the main clause come early in the sentence. • Use the long sentence to describe something long. Let form follow function. • It helps if the long sentence is written in chronological order. • Use the long sentence in variation with sentences of short and medium length. • Use the long sentence as a list or catalog of products, names, images. • Long sentences need more editing than short ones. Make every word count. Even. In. A. Very. Long. Sentence.

Writers shape up their prose by building parallel structures in their words, phrases, and sentences. "If two or more ideas are parallel," writes Diana Hacker in A Writer's Reference, "they are easier to grasp when expressed in parallel grammatical form. Single words should be balanced with single words, phrases with phrases, clauses with clauses."

A pure parallel construction would be "Boom, boom, boom." Parallelism with a twist gives us "Boom, boom, bang."

Think of a long, well-written sentence with no punctuation except the period. Such a sentence is a straight road with a stop sign at the end. The period is the stop sign. Now think of a winding road with lots of stop signs. That analogy describes a paragraph with lots of periods, an effect that will slow the pace of the story. The writer may desire such a pace for strategic reasons: to achieve clarity, convey emotion, or create suspense.

Parenthetical expressions are best kept short and (Pray for us, Saint Nora of Ephron) witty.

Such ruthlessness is best applied at the end of the process, when creativity can be moderated by coldhearted judgment. A fierce discipline must make every word count.

Perkins reduced one four-page passage about Wolfe's uncle to six words: "Henry, the oldest, was now thirty."

• Cut any passage that does not support your focus. • Cut the weakest quotations, anecdotes, and scenes to give greater power to the strongest. • Cut any passage you have written to satisfy a tough teacher or editor rather than the common reader. • Don't invite others to cut. You know the work better. Mark optional trims. Then decide whether they should become actual cuts.

"Although they look like a first draft, they had already been rewritten and retyped ... four or five times. With each rewrite I t ry to make what I have written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that is not doing useful work."

• Adverbs that intensify rather than modify: just, certainly, entirely, extremely, completely, exactly. • Prepositional phrases that repeat the obvious: in the story, in the article, in the movie, in the city. • Phrases that grow on verbs: seems to, tends to, should have to, tries to. • Abstract nouns that hide active verbs: consideration becomes considers; judgment becomes judges; observation becomes observes. • Restatements: a sultry, humid afternoon.

My words and sentences are shorter. The passage is clearer. I use this strategy to fulfill a mission: to make the strange workings of government transparent to the average citizen, to make the strange familiar.

Fifty-five words in all, forty-eight of one syllable. Only one word ("accepted") of three syllables. Even the book title works this way. Simple language can make hard facts easy reading.

Remember that clear prose is not just a product of sentence length and word choice. It derives first from a sense of purpose — a determination to inform. What comes next is the hard work of reporting, research, and critical thinking. The writer cannot make something clear until the difficult subject is clear in the writer's head. Then, and only then, does she reach into the writer's toolbox, ready to explain to readers, "Here's how it works."

In a paragraph of fifty-three words, only two are repeated ("you" and "the"). The rest is a fountain of interesting language, an inventory of deviance that defined the dark side of the Crescent City before Hurricane Katrina washed so much of it away. One final piece of advice: Leave said alone. Don't be tempted by the muse of variation to permit characters to opine, elaborate, cajole, or chortle.

Too often, writers suppress their vocabularies in a misguided attempt to lower the level of language for a general audience. Obscure words should be defined in texts or made clear from context. But the reading vocabulary of the average citizen is larger than the writing vocabulary of the typical author. As a result, scribes who choose their words from a deeper well attract special attention from readers and gain reputations as "writers."

All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words. The writer sees and hears and records. The seeing leads to language.

When we say "I see," we most often mean "I understand." Inexperienced writers may choose the obvious detail, the man puffing on the cigarette, the young woman chewing on what's left of her fingernails. Those details fail to tell — unless the man is dying of lung cancer or the woman is anorexic.

At the St. Petersburg Times, editors and writing coaches warn reporters not to return to the office without "the name of the dog." That reporting task does not require the writer to use the detail in the story, but it reminds the reporter to keep her eyes and ears opened.

Scanlan found the detail that told the story of the family's enduring grief. He noticed a piece of tape over the light switch next to the front door: BOUNTIFUL, Utah — Belva Kent always left the front porch light on when her children went out at night. Whoever came home last turned it off, until one day in 1974 when Mrs. Kent told her family: "I'm going to leave that light on until Deb comes home and she can turn it off." The Kents' porch light still burns today, night and day. Just inside the front door, a strip of tape covers the switch. Deb never came home.

I opened my phone book at random and discovered these names on two consecutive pages: Danielle Mall, Charlie Mallette, Hollis Mallicoat, Ilir Mallkazi, Eva Malo, Mary Maloof, John Mamagona, Lakmika Manawadu, Khai Mang, Ludwig Mangold. Names can provide a backstory, suggesting history, ethnicity, generation, and character.

Don't forget nicknames, street names, stage names, and pen names. What are the practical implications of naming for writers?

2. J. K. Rowling, the popular author of the Harry Potter series, has a gift for naming. Think of her heroes: Albus Dumble-dore, Sirius Black, and Hermione Granger. And her villains: Draco Malfoy and his henchmen Crabbe and Goyle. Read one of the Harry Potter novels, paying special attention to the book's universe of names.

4. The next time you research a piece of writing, interview an expert who can reveal to you the names of things you do not know: flowers in a garden, parts of an engine, branches of a family tree, breeds of cats. Imagine ways to use such names in your story.

"Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print,"

So what is the original writer to do? When tempted by a tired phrase, such as "white as snow," stop writing. Take what the practitioners of natural childbirth call a cleansing breath. Then jot down the old phrase on a piece of paper. Start scribbling alternatives: white as snow white as Snow White snowy white gray as city snow gray as the London sky white as the Queen of England

Under pressure, write it straight: "The mayor is keeping his plans secret." If you fall back on the cliche, make sure there are no other cliches nearby. More deadly than cliches of language are what Donald Murray calls "cliches of vision," the narrow frames through which writers learn to see the world. In Writing to Deadline, Murray lists common blind spots: victims are always innocent, bureaucrats are lazy, politicians are corrupt, it's lonely at the top, the suburbs are boring.

The writer controls the pace for the reader, slow or fast or in between, and uses sentences of different lengths to create the music, the rhythm of the story.

Writers name three strategic reasons to slow the pace of a story: 1. To simplify the complex 2. To create suspense 3. To focus on the emotional truth

Paret got trapped in a corner. Trying to duck away, his left arm and his head became tangled on the wrong side of the top rope. Griffith was in like a cat ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat. He hit him eighteen right hands in a row, an act which took perhaps three or four seconds, Griffith making a pent-up whimpering sound all the while he attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin. Notice the rhythm Mailer achieves with three short sentences followed by a long one filled with similes of action and violence. As Paret's fate becomes clearer and clearer, Mailer's sentences get shorter and shorter: The house doctor jumped into the ring. He knelt. He pried Paret's eyelid open. He looked at the eyeball staring out. He let the lid snap shut.... But they saved Paret long enough to take him to a hospital where he lingered for days. He was in a coma. He never came out of it. If he lived, he would have been a vegetable. His brain was smashed.

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear. Don't just write words. Write music.

The big parts of a story should fit together, but the small parts need some stickum as well. When the big parts fit, we call that good feeling coherence; when sentences connect, we call it cohesion.

"The paragraph is essentially a unit of thought, not of length,"

"The purpose of paragraphing is to give the reader a rest. The writer is saying to him: 'Have you got that? If so, I'll go on to the next point.' " But how much rest does a reader need? Does it depend on subject matter? Genre or medium? The voice of the author? "There can be no general rule about the most suitable length for a paragraph," writes Fowler. "A succession of very short ones is as irritating as very long ones are wearisome." In a long paragraph, the writer can develop an argument or build a narrative using lots of related examples.

This technique — a four-word paragraph after one of sixty-four words — can be abused with overuse, but to create surprise it packs a punch.

This shapely paragraph helps the writer develop a whole story within a story, complete with exposition, complication, resolution, and payoff at the end. Too many paragraphs of such length, however, eradicate the white space on a page, and white space is the writer's friend — and the reader's. "Paragraphing is also a matter of the eye," writes Fowler. "A reader will address himself more readily to his task if he sees from the start that he will have breathing-spaces from time to time than if what is before him looks like a marathon course."

Tom Wolfe once told William F. Buckley Jr. that if a writer wants the reader to think something the absolute truth, the writer should render it in the shortest possible sentence. Trust me.

Instead, the writer forces us to hold these two characteristics in our mind at the same time. We have to balance them, weigh them against each other, compare and contrast them.

At the end of his most famous passage on the nature of love, Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians: "For now, faith, hope, and love abide, these three. But the greatest of all is love." The powerful movement is from trinity to unity, from a sense of the whole to an understanding of what is most important.

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. If we check these sentences against our theory of numbers, it would reveal this pattern: 1 -2-5-1. In the first sentence the author declares a single idea, stated as the absolute truth. In the next sentence, he gives the reader two imperative verbs. In the next, he spins five metaphors. In the final sentence, the writer returns to a definitive declaration — so important he casts it in italics.

Most writers have at least two modes. One says, "Pay no attention to the writer behind the curtain. Look only at the world." The other says, without inhibition, "Watch me dance. Aren't I a clever fellow?" In rhetoric, these two modes have names. The first is called understatement. The second is called overstatement or hyperbole. Here's a tool of thumb that works for me: The more serious or dramatic the subject, the more the writer backs off, creating the effect that the story tells itself. The more playful or inconsequential the topic, the more the writer can show off. Back off or show off.

A 1964 essay by John Updike begins, "We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements." That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion? The answer is in his second sentence: "Consider the beer can." To be even more specific, Updike complained that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of opening a can of beer. Pop-top and beer rest at the bottom of the ladder, aesthetic experience at the top.

Two questions will help you make this tool work. "Can you give me an example?" will drive the speaker down the ladder. But "What does that mean?" will carry him aloft.

But what is voice, and how does the writer tune it? The most useful definition comes from my friend and colleague Don Fry: "Voice is the sum of all the strategies used by the author to create the illusion that the writer is speaking directly to the reader from the page." The most important words in that definition are "create," "illusion," and "speaking": voice is an effect created by the writer that reaches the reader through his ears, even when he is receiving the message through his eyes.

• What is the level of language? That is to say, does the writer use street slang or the logical argument of a professor of metaphysics? Is the level of language at the bottom of the ladder of abstraction or near the top? Does it move up and down? • What "person" does the writer work in? Does the writer use I or we or you or they or all of these? • What are the range and the source of allusions? Do these come from high or low culture, or both? Does the writer cite a medieval theologian or a professional wrestler? Or both? • How often does the writer use metaphors and other figures of speech? Does the writer want to sound more like the poet, whose work is rich with figurative images, or the journalist, who uses them for special effect? • What is the length and structure of the typical sentence? Are sentences short and simple? Long and complex? Or mixed? • What is the distance from neutrality? Is the writer trying to be objective, partisan, or passionate? • How does the writer frame her material? Is she on beat or offbeat? Does the writer work with standard subject matter, using conventional story forms? Or is she experimental and iconoclastic?

To test your writing voice, the most powerful tool on your workbench is oral reading. Read your story aloud to hear if it sounds like you.

No, I mean out loud, and loud enough so that others can hear.

4. Save the work of writers whose voices appeal to you. Consider why you admire the voice of a particular writer. How is it like your voice? How is it different? In a piece of freewriting, imitate that voice.

Good work has parts: beginning, middle, and ending. Even writers who achieve a seamless tapestry can point out the invisible stitching. A writer who knows the big parts can name them for the reader, using such markers as subheadings and chapter titles. The reader who sees the big parts is more likely to remember the whole story.

And so, as a survival mechanism, I invented the reverse outline. I would write a full draft of the story and then create the outline. This turned out to be a useful tool: if I could not write the outline from the story, it meant that I could not discern the parts from the whole, revealing problems of organization.

Although I still don't work from a formal outline, I write a plan, usually a few phrases scribbled on a yellow pad. And here's another tool I learned: an informal plan is nothing more than the Roman numerals required by a formal outline. In other words, my plan helps me see the big parts of the story.

In a newspaper or magazine, the parts may carry subheadlines or subtitles. Writers should write these subtitles themselves — even if the publisher does not use them.

1. Shakespeare's plays are divided into five acts, each divided into scenes. Read a comedy and a tragedy, such as As You Like It and Macbeth, paying attention to the structure of the play and what Shakespeare tries to accomplish in each of the big parts. 2. Find the longest piece you have written in the last year. Using a pencil, mark it up according to its parts. Now label those parts with headings and subheadings. 3. Over the next month, pay attention to the structure of the fiction you read. Notice the point where you begin to perceive the global structure of the work. After you finish the work, go back and review the chapter titles and their effect on your expectations as a reader. 4. Listening to music helps writers learn the structures of composition. As you listen, see if you can recognize the big parts of songs. 5. For your next story, try working from an informal plan that plots the three to six big parts of the work. Revise the plan if necessary.

Reports need not be dull, nor stories interesting. But the difference between story and report is crucial to the reader's expectation and the writer's execution. Bits of story — call them anecdotes — appear in many reports. But the word story has a special meaning, and stories have specific requirements that create predictable effects.

A wonderful scholar named Louise Rosenblatt argued that readers read for two reasons: information and experience. There's the difference. Reports convey information. Stories create experience. Reports transfer knowledge. Stories transport the reader, crossing boundaries of time, space, and imagination. The report points us there. The story puts us there.

Who becomes Character. What becomes Action. (What happened.) Where becomes Setting. When becomes Chronology. Why becomes Cause or Motive. How becomes Process. (How it happened.)

South African writer Henk Rossouw combines story and report to good effect. With a single sentence he moves us to another time and place, and to a desperate experience: When Akallo Grace Grail woke up, she could feel the cool night air on her face, but she couldn't move. Most of her body was under sand. Where was her gun? If she'd lost it, her commander in the Lord's Resistance Army would beat her up. As she dragged herself out of the shallow grave, everything that had happened that day came back to her. To learn why the life of this African woman deserves special attention, Rossouw explains how she made the journey from "hell to college." To help us grasp the rigor of that journey, Rossouw turns from story to report mode: In sub-Saharan Africa, only one-quarter of the students enrolled in postsecondary education are women, according to a World Bank estimate from the mid-1990s. About 60 percent of African women live a life that consists of working the land and raising children. Ugandan women bear an average of 6.8 children, and early marriages are encouraged, with rural women marrying as young as 14 years of age. Uganda awards 900 scholarships each year to help women get into college: 10,000 women apply for them, (from the Chronicle of Higher Education) By combining story and report, the writer can speak to both our hearts and our heads, creating sympathy and understanding. WORKSHOP 1. Look at the newspaper with the distinction between reports and stories in mind. Look for narrative opportunities missed. Look for bits of stories embedded in reports.

Human speech, captured as dialogue on the page, attracts the eyes of the reader and, if done well, advances the story.

In many ways dialogue defines a story because its power drags us to the scene and sets our ears to the action. Reporters capture human speech with a purpose different from novelists. They use speech on the page not as action but as an action stopper, a place in the text where characters comment on what has happened.

The writer follows advice often given to new reporters: get a good quote high in the story. A good quote offers these benefits: • It introduces a human voice. • It explains something important about the subject. • It frames a problem or dilemma. • It adds information. • It reveals the character or personality of the speaker. • It introduces what is next to come. But quotes also contain a serious weakness. Consider this quote from a page one story in the New York Times: "Less than two percentage points we can handle just by not eating out as much." This quote comes from a woman named Joyce Diffender-fer on how her family copes with mounting credit card debt. But where is Joyce Diffenderfer when she speaks these words? In her kitchen? At the desk where she pays her bills? In her workplace? Most quotes — as opposed to dialogue — are dis-placed. The words are spoken above or outside the action. Quotes are about the action, not in the action. That's why quotes interrupt the progress of the narrative. Which returns us to the power of dialogue. While quotes provide information or explanation, dialogue thickens the plot. The quote may be heard, but dialogue is overheard. The writer who uses dialogue transports us to a place and time where we get to experience the events described in the story.

3. Develop your ear for dialogue. With a notebook in hand, sit in a public space, such as a mall or an airport lounge. Eavesdrop on nearby conversations and jot down some notes on what it would take to capture that speech in a story.

In a wonderful essay, Nora Ephron describes a lady who hopes to become the winner of a national baking competition: Edna Buckley, who was fresh from representing New York State at the National Chicken Cooking contest, where her recipe for fried chicken in a batter of beer, cheese, and crushed pretzels had gone down to defeat, brought with her a lucky handkerchief, a lucky horseshoe, a lucky dime for her shoe, a potholder with the Pills-bury Poppin' Fresh Doughboy on it, an Our Blessed Lady pin, and all of her jewelry, including a silver charm also in the shape of the doughboy, (from Crazy Salad) I love what is not in this sentence: vague character adjectives, words like superstitious or quirky or obsessive. Ephron's litany of details opens Edna Buckley up for inspection. Cloudy adjectives would close her down.

The best writers create moving pictures of people, images that reveal their characteristics and aspirations, their hopes and fears.

Instead she shows us a woman preparing her children for school: Then she sprays them. She shakes an aerosol can and sprays their coats, their heads, their tiny outstretched hands. She sprays them back and front to protect them as they go off to school, facing bullets and gang recruiters and a crazy dangerous world. It is a special religious oil that smells like drugstore perfume, and the children shut their eyes tight as she sprays them long and furious so they will come back to her, alive and safe, at day's end.

1. Some writers talk about doing research until they arrive at a dominant impression, something they can express in a single sentence. For example, "The mother of the cheerleader is overbearing and controlling." They may never write that sentence. Instead, they try to re-create for the reader the evidence that led them to this conclusion. Try out this method on some of your stories.

3. Sit with notebook ready in a public place: a mall, a cafeteria, a sports stadium. Watch people's behavior, appearance, and speech. Write down the character adjectives that come to mind: obnoxious, affectionate, caring, confused. Now write down the specific details that led you to those conclusions.

James M. Cain creates a double effect in this passage, placing the innocent "sugar bag" between the mechanical "ball bearings" and the criminal "blackjack." A sack for sugar loses its sweetness when converted into a murder weapon.

Here is his memorable lead, a sidebar to the main story: Richard Hornbuckle, auto dealer, golfer, Baptist, came within two feet Friday of driving his yellow Buick Skylark off the Sunshine Skyway Bridge into Tampa Bay. That simple sentence takes twenty-five words, but each one advances the story. First, Miller takes advantage of the protagonist's unusual name — Hornbuckle — with its auto imagery. This will turn out to be the story of an auto dealer driving a used car with good brakes. And Miller, a master of detail, gets good mileage out of "yellow Buick Skylark." "Yellow" goes with "Sunshine," and "Skylark" goes with "Skyway." He's playing with words. But the real fun comes with those three nouns after the subject, for each foreshadows a thread of narrative in the story. "Auto dealer" sets up a description of Hornbuckle's work schedule and how he came to be at that spot on that day. "Golfer" prepares us for the crazy moment when — during his escape from the vehicle — Hornbuckle turns back to retrieve his golf clubs from the trunk. (He probably had a tee time later that day.) And "Baptist" makes way for a wry quote in which the reluctant believer turned survivor swears that he'll be in church the next morning. "Auto dealer, golfer, Baptist."

"One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."

1. Do you ever violate the principle of Chekhov's Gun? Do you place seemingly significant elements high in your work that never come into play again?

The immense popularity of the novel The Da Vinci Code comes not from Dan Brown's graceful prose style, but from a clever plot built on a series of cliffhangers. A small sample will demonstrate this simple but powerful effect: • "As he fell, he thought for a moment he saw a pale ghost hovering over him, clutching a gun. Then everything went black." • "Before Sophie and Teabing could respond, a sea of blue police lights and sirens erupted at the bottom of the hill and began snaking up the half-mile driveway. "Teabing frowned. 'My friends, it seems we have a decision to make. And we'd better make it fast.' " • "Langdon dialed zero, knowing that the next sixty seconds might answer a question that had been puzzling him all night." "Langdon felt shaky as he inched deeper into the circular room. This had to be the place." Each of these examples ends a chapter, fueling the reader's desire to learn what happens next. So if you want to sell a gazillion books, learn how to craft the cliffhanger.

Think of it as the "to be continued" effect, and consider how much some of us resent waiting six months to find out what happens.

Any dramatic element that comes right before a break in the action is an internal cliffhanger.

Who done it? Guilty or not guilty? Who will win the race? Which man will she marry? Will the hero escape or die trying? Will the body be found? Good questions drive good stories.

If the internal cliffhanger drives the reader from one section to the next, the engine moves the reader across the arc from beginning to end.

Will the quirky old doctor finally give up the brain, which is his talisman and life's work? That sentence never appears in the story but keeps the reader focused on the destination through the curious side trips along the way.

Finally, we should note that some stories are driven not by what questions, but by how. We know before the opening credits that James Bond will conquer the villains and get the girl, but we are driven to know how.

Good writers anticipate the reader's questions and answer them. Editors will keep lookout for holes in the story where key questions are left unanswered. Storytellers take these questions to a narrative level, creating in the reader a curiosity that can only be quenched by reaching the end.

1. Review a collection of your recent work. See if you can find story engines, or at least potential story engines. 2. Look for stories that capture your attention. Does the story have an engine? If so, what is the question that the story answers for you?

Like our walker in the forest, the reader makes predictions about what lies down the road. When readers encounter boring and technical information, especially at the beginning, they will expect more boring matter below. When readers read chronological narratives, they wonder what will happen next.

Think of a gold coin as any bit that rewards the reader. A good start is its own reward, and crafty writers know enough to put something shiny at the end, a final reward, an invitation for readers to return to their work.

Repetition works in writing, but only if you intend it. Repeating key words, phrases, and story elements creates a rhythm, a pace, a structure, a wavelength that reinforces the central theme of the work. Such repetition works in music, in literature, in advertising, in humor, in political speech and rhetoric, in teaching, in homilies, in parental lectures — even in this sentence, where the word "in" is repeated ten times.

Simple descriptions of standard camera angles should help you imagine how to use your "word cameras" for a variety of effects: • Aerial view. The writer looks down on the world, as if standing atop a skyscraper or viewing the ground from a blimp. Example: "Hundreds and hundreds of black South African voters stood for hours on long, sandy serpentine lines waiting to cast their ballots for the first time." • Establishing shot. The writer stands back to capture the setting in which action takes place, describing the world that the reader is about to enter, sometimes creating a mood for the story. Example: "Within seconds, as dusty clouds rose over the school grounds, their great widths suggesting blasts of terrifying force, bursts of rifle fire began to sound, quickly building to a sustained and rolling roar." • Middle distance. The camera moves closer to the action, close enough to see the key players and their interaction. This is the common distance for most stories written for the newspaper. Example: "Scores of hostages survived, staggering from the school even as intense gunfire sputtered and grenades exploded around them. Many were barely dressed, their faces strained with fear and exhaustion, their bodies bloodied by shrapnel and gunshots." • Close-up. The camera gets in the face of the subject, close enough to detect anger, fear, dread, sorrow, irony, the full range of emotions. Example: "His brow furrowed and the crow's feet deepened as he struggled to understand.. .. The man pulled at the waistband of his beige work pants and scratched his sun-aged face. He stared at her, stalling for time as he tried to understand, but afraid to say he didn't." • Extreme close-up. This writer focuses on an important detail that would be invisible from a distance: the pinky ring on the mobster's finger, the date circled on the wall calendar, the can of beer atop a police car. Example: "The hand of the cancer-care nurse scooped the dead angel fish out of the office aquarium. Patients at this clinic had enough on their minds. They didn't need another reminder of mortality."

1. Read selections of your recent work, paying attention to the distance between you and the story subjects. Look for your tendencies. Do you move the camera around? Or do you settle for a safe middle distance?

Tom Wolfe argues that realism, in fiction and nonfiction, is built on "scene-by-scene construction, telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative." This requires, according to Wolfe's manifesto in The New Journalism, "extraordinary feats of reporting," so that writers "actually witness the scenes in other people's lives."

This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Anthony Shadid, covering the war in Iraq for the Washington Post, practicing a form of immersion journalism, getting close to the action, capturing scene after bloody scene.

The scene is the basic unit of narrative literature, the capsule of time and space created by the writer and entered by the reader or viewer. What we gain from the scene is not information, but experience. We were there on that sidewalk with Nora Ephron. We are there.

From childhood, we inhale scenes. We experience them from literature and news reports, from comic strips and comic books, from movies and television, from advertising and public service announcements, from our memories and dreams. But all these are mimetic, to use an old-fashioned literary term. They are imitations of real life.

The writer's goal is to reflect the world, to render the here and now, so that readers can see it, feel it, understand it. But the job of the writer is not merely to capture scenes and compile them. These scenes, these moments within scenes, must be placed in a meaningful order, a storyboard, a script, a sequence.

1. The next time you do fieldwork, pay attention to the scenes you witness. Record these scenes in enough detail that you can re-create them for the reader. 2. As you invent scenes for fiction, keep your ears open for dramatic dialogue that can help readers enter the experience. 3. Try an exercise created by Tom French. With a group of friends or students, view an interesting photograph or portrait (French favors Vermeer). Although these images are static, the writer must place details in an order that the reader can follow. Write a scene describing each image, then compare your work. 4. Learn sequencing from careful viewing of film. Study a favorite movie. Hit the pause button often. Notice how the director lines up the scenes. How is meaning derived from the sequence?

For more than thirty years, the Wall Street Journal has perfected this technique with whimsical front-page features. Reporter Ken Wells begins a story with an anecdote: Emma Thornton still shows up for work at 5 a.m. each day in her blue slacks, pinstripe shirt and rubber-soled shoes. A letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, she still dutifully sorts all the mail addressed to "One World Trade Center," and primes it for delivery. But delivery to where and to whom? Why is this anecdote important? The answer requires a little altitude, a movement off the narrative line up to a higher level of meaning, a nut paragraph (in this case two paragraphs): Since Sept. 11, as many as 90,000 pieces of mail a day continue to flood in to the World Trade Center addresses that no longer exist and to thousands of people who aren't alive to receive them. On top of that is another mail surge set off by well-wishers from around the U.S. and the world — thousands of letters addressed to, among other salutations: "The People Hurt," "Any Police Department" and "The Working Dogs" of "Ground Zero, N.Y." Some of this mail contains money, food, even biscuits for the dogs that were used in the early days to help try to sniff out survivors. The mix of World Trade Center mail and Ground Zero mail represents a calamity for the U.S. Postal Service, which served 616 separate companies in the World Trade Center complex whose offices are now rubble or relocated. No reader wants to be fooled by a story lead that promises narrative, only to discover a body dense with information. That is why the writer's movement from anecdote to meaning would be nothing more than a shell game without a return to the narrative line, to the world of letter carrier Emma Thornton. The writer delivers: "Her route in the North Tower has been transformed into a 6-by-6 steel cubicle ... surrounded by tall metal racks of pigeonholes." The broken line is a versatile story form. The writer can begin with narrative and move to explanation, or begin with straight information and then illustrate the facts with an anecdote. In either case, the easy swing, back and forth, can feel like clockwork.

The shorter the story form, the more precious is each word. So polish your jewelry.

Good writers strive for originality, and they can achieve it by standing on a foundation of narrative archetypes, a set of story expectations that can be manipulated, frustrated, or fulfilled in novel ways, on behalf of the reader. Examples include: the journey there and back winning the prize winning or losing the loved one loss and restoration the blessing becomes the curse overcoming obstacles the wasteland restored rising from the ashes the ugly duckling the emperor has no clothes descent into the underworld My high school English teacher,

My high school English teacher, Father Bernard Horst, taught me two important lessons about such archetypes. First, he said, if a wall appears in a story, chances are it's "more than just a wall." But, he was quick to add, when it comes to powerful writing, a symbol need not be a cymbal. Subtlety is a writer's virtue.

When I first read that paragraph in college, it struck me with a force that transcended its literal meaning. It took me years to recognize the rich texture of its symbolic iconography: the names of the archangels Gabriel and Michael; the instruments of Christ's Passion ("crosses," "spears," and "thorns"); the evocation of the last days ("fall," "descent," "living and dead"). The fact that these were veiled from my first view is a virtue of the story, not a vice. It means that Joyce did not turn symbols into cymbals.

From our earliest years, we learn that stories have endings, however predictable. The prince and princess live happily ever after. The cowboy rides into the sunset. The witch is dead. The End. Or in the case of sci-fi movies: The End? Too often, in real life, the prince and princess get a divorce. The cowboy falls off his horse. The witch eats the baby. That's the dilemma for writers: reality is messy, but readers seek closure.

I did not write from an outline, or even from much of a plan, but I knew that in the final chapter the good guy, who is afraid of heights and lightning, would be fighting the bad guy at midnight, atop a giant bridge, in a hurricane. In other words, I didn't know the stopping points along the way, but I wrote with an ending in mind. So I was not surprised to learn that J. K. Rowling began writing the Harry Potter series by crafting the final chapter of the last book and has even revealed the last word: "scar."

There are endless ways to begin and end a piece of writing, but authors rely on a small toolbox of strategies, just as musicians do. In musical compositions, songs can build to a crescendo, or fade out, or stop short, or echo the opening. In written compositions, the author can choose from among these, and more: • Closing the circle. The ending reminds us of the beginning by returning to an important place or by reintroducing us to a key character. • The tieback. Humorist Dave Barry likes to tie his ending to some odd or offbeat element in the body of the story. • The time frame. The writer creates a tick-tock structure, with time advancing relentlessly. To end the story, the writer decides what should happen last. • The space frame. The writer is more concerned with place and geography than with time. The hurricane reporter moves us from location to location, revealing the terrible damage from the storm. To end, the writer selects our final destination. • The payoff. The longer the story, the more important the payoff. This does not require a happy ending, but a satisfying one, a reward for a journey concluded, a secret revealed, a mystery solved. • The epilogue. The story ends, but life goes on. How many times have you wondered, after the house lights come back on, what happened next to the characters in a movie? Readers come to care about characters in stories. An epilogue helps satisfy their curiosity. • Problem and solution. This common structure suggests its own ending. The writer frames the problem at the top and then offers readers possible solutions and resolutions. • The apt quote. Some characters speak in endings, capturing in their own words a neat summary or distillation of what has come before. In most cases, the writer can write it better than a character can say it. But not always. • Look to the future. Most writing relates things that have happened in the past. But what do people say will happen next? What is the likely consequence of this decision or those events? • Mobilize the reader. A good ending can point the reader in another direction. Attend this meeting. Read that book. Send an e-mail message to the senator. Donate blood for victims of a disaster.

You will write better endings if you remember that other parts of your story need endings too. Sentences have endings. Paragraphs have endings. As in The Great Gatsby, each of these mini-endings anticipates your finale.

I end with a warning. Avoid endings that go on and on like a Rachmaninoff concerto or a heavy metal ballad. Don't bury your ending. Put your hand over the last paragraph. Ask yourself, "What would happen if this ended here?" Move it up another paragraph and ask the same question until you find the natural stopping place.

1. Review your most recent work. Place your hand over the last paragraph and ask yourself, "What would happen if my story ended here?" Is the natural ending hiding? 2. Read stories, listen to music, and watch movies with endings in mind. Pay close attention to details and themes planted early to bear fruit at the end.

3. Some journalists report for leads. Fewer report for endings. The next time you do research, watch and listen for a strong ending. What happens when you begin with an ending in mind? 4. Just for fun, take some of your recent work and switch the beginnings and the endings. Have you learned anything in the process?

Writing down your mission turns your vague hopes into language. By writing about your writing, you learn what you need to learn. I scribbled my mission for "Three Little Words" on two pages of a legal pad. It covers the content and the form of the story, what I was writing about and how I wanted to write it. My mission begins: "I want to tell a human story, not just about AIDS, but of the deeply human themes of life, love, death, sorrow, hope, compassion, family, and community." The mission statement includes these goals: • I want to portray my protagonist as a fully human character — and not some kind of cardboard saint. • I want to do this so people can identify with and care for her and her family. It's so easy to see people with AIDS as "the other," the outcast, suffering sinners. • I want to help illuminate AIDS, and help educate the public about key aspects of the disease. • I want to advance the conversation about sexual culture and its impact on public health. I want to portray my protagonist's husband in a respectful way to avoid the common equation that Homosexuality = AIDS = Death. • I want to do this in a form — twenty-nine short chapters — that will give people a chance to know, to learn, to care, and to hope. As for the format: • I want to restore the form of the serial narrative to newspapers — using the shortest chapters possible. • I want to reconcile the values of short and long writing in American newspapers. • I want to write each chapter with (a) a stand-alone quality, (b) a cliffhanger ending, (c) a sense of a new starting point. I cannot overstate the value of this exercise. It gave me a view over the horizon as I drafted the story. This 250-word mission statement, which took about ten minutes to write, helped create a 25,000-word series. It provided the language I needed to share my hopes with other writers, editors, and readers. It could be tested, expanded, revised — and it was — during the writing process.

Mission statements can bring into focus individual stories or an emerging body of work. For example, • "I want to write a city government budget story so clear and interesting that it will attract readers who ignore such coverage." • "I want to write a story about a World War II veteran but tell it from his point of view and in his voice." • "I want to use crime stories in the newspaper to generate ideas for some fictional short stories." • "I want to write unbiased stories on topics that polarize American citizens."

1. Write a short mission statement for your next work. Use it to think about your writing strategies and aspirations. Share it with someone else, as a reality check, and to get suggestions on how to achieve it.

4. Imagine that famous authors had written mission statements for their masterpieces. What would they look like? Choose a favorite work and try to write one.

Put simply, productive authors write stories in their heads. Blind poets and novelists such as Milton and Joyce did this, composing narrative passages through long nights only to be milked by transcribers in the morning. In this respect, the journalist is no different from the literary artist.

Put yourself in the place of a reporter covering a breaking news story, say a fire at a construction site. This reporter has spent a half day at the scene, filling a notebook with details. She must now drive twenty minutes to the newsroom. There the writer will have one hour before deadline. Adrenaline kicks in. No time to procrastinate. You must write today, not tomorrow. Twenty minutes in the car are precious. Perhaps the reporter will turn off the radio and begin writing the story in her head. Some reporters can rehearse and remember several paragraphs. More likely, she may begin to imagine the three big parts of the story, or a few key expressions, or a focusing theme, perhaps a tentative lead: "High winds whipped a brush fire into an inferno Thursday, destroying most of a three-block condo complex on the outskirts of Ybor City." Deadlines move writers to action, a reality that students in every discipline know too well. Exam writing is a form of writing on demand. Even when given two weeks to write a report, a typical student (I did it too!) waits until the last night to begin writing. The wise teacher confers with the student along the way to inspire research, preparation, and rehearsal. The wise student starts "writing" the paper the day it is assigned.

The writer must not write in order to write. To write quickly, you must write slowly. To write with your hands, you must write in your head.

I believe that the so-called "writing block" is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance. . . . One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It's easy to write. You just shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing,

Trust your hands. Forget your brain for a while, and let your fingers do the writing. I only had a vague sense of what I wanted to say in this chapter until my hands typed some sloppy copy. • Adopt a daily routine. Fluent writers prefer mornings. Afternoon and evening writers (or runners) have the whole day to invent excuses not to write (or run). The key is to write rather than wait. • Build in rewards. Any routine of work (or non-work) can be debilitating, so turn habits of delay into little rewards: a cup of coffee, a quick walk, your favorite song. • Draft sooner. Many writers use research to fill up available time. Thorough exploration is a key to a writer's success, but overresearching makes writing seem tougher. Write earlier in the process so you discover what information you need. • Discount nothing. Some days you will write many poor words. Other days you'll write a few good words. The poor words may be the necessary path to the good words. • Rewrite. Quality comes from revision, not from speed writing. Fluent writing gives you the time and opportunity to turn your quick draft into something special. • Watch your language. Purge your vocabulary (and your thoughts) of negative words and self-talk like procrastination and writer's block and delay and "this sucks." Turn your little quirks into something productive. Call it rehearsal or preparation or planning. • Set the table. When work piles on my desk, I find it hard to stick to my fluent writing routine. That is when I take a day to throw things away, answer messages, and prepare the altar for the next day of writing. • Find a rabbi. We all need a helper who loves us without condition, someone who praises us for our productivity and effort, and not the quality of the final work. Too much criticism weighs a writer down. • Keep a daybook. Story ideas, key phrases, a startling insight, these can be fleeting. A handy companion, like a notebook, laptop, or daybook, helps you preserve the stimuli and ingredients for new writing.

1. For your next project, begin writing much earlier than you think you can. Write a summary of the day's research. Write a memo to yourself on what you've learned. Write a conditional first paragraph. Let all of this writing teach you what else you need to learn.

3. If you are a plodder, it may be worth your time to experiment with some forms of freewriting. If you are stuck, try writing on your current topic, for three minutes, as fast as you can. The purpose is not to create a draft, but to build momentum. 4. For one month, keep a daybook. Use it to jot down ideas and capture some phrases. Tell yourself that no sentence in your daybook will appear in your finished work. This will help lower your standards. Now write some memos to yourself. This early writing may help speed up your process.

Mind you, you are not yet to write it. The work you are doing on it is preliminary. For a day or two you are going to immerse yourself in these details; you are going to think about them consciously, turning if necessary to books of reference to fill in your facts. Then you are going to dream about it----There will seem no end to the stuff that you can find to work over. What does the heroine look like? Was she an only child, or the eldest of several? How was she educated? Does she work?

I may. .. plan out every scene ... in a novel before I sit down to write it.... I must know — from personal observation, not reading — the shapes of windows, the nature of doorknobs, the aspect of kitchens, the material of which dresses are made, the leather used in shoes, the method used in manuring fields, the nature of bus tickets. I shall never use any of these things in the book. But unless I know what sort of doorknob his fingers close on how shall I... get my character out of doors?

YORBA LINDA, Calif. — When last the nation saw them all together, they were men of steel and bristling crew cuts, titans of their time — which was a time of pragmatism and ice water in the veins. How boldly they talked. How fearless they seemed. They spoke of fixing their enemies, of running over their own grandmothers if it would give them an edge. Their goals were the goals of giants: Control of a nation, victory in the nuclear age, strategic domination of the globe. The titans of Nixon's age gathered again today, on an unseasonably cold and gray afternoon, and now they were white-haired or balding, their steel was rusting, their skin had begun to sag, their eyesight was failing. They were invited to contemplate where power leads. Such work is no accident, and Von Drehle shares the secrets of readiness. Under pressure, he falls back on the basics, thinks about what happened, why it matters, and how he can turn it into a story.

Whenever I take a big step in my writing, I begin by reading. Of course, I read for content. If I'm writing about anti-Semitism, I read Holocaust memoirs. If I'm writing about AIDS, I read biomedical texts and social histories of the disease. If I'm writing about World War II, I read magazines from the 1940s. So, by all means, read for content.

But also read for form, for genre. If you want to write better photo captions, read old issues of LIFE magazine. If you want to become a better explainer, read a great cookbook. If you want to write clever headlines, read the big city tabloids. If you want to write a screenplay about a superhero, read stacks of comic books. If you want to write witty short features, read The Talk of the Town in New Yorker magazine.

[ W]hen we were living in Brentwood Park we fell into a pattern of stopping work at four in the afternoon and going out to the pool. He would stand in the water reading (he reread Sophie's Choice several times that summer trying to see how it worked) while I worked in the garden. That's how smart writers continue to learn, by reading work they admire again and again "to see how it works."

Here are some reading tricks for writers: • Read to listen to the voice of the writer. • Read the newspaper in search of underdeveloped story ideas. • Read online to experience a variety of new storytelling forms. • Read entire books when they compel you; but also taste bits of books. • In choosing what to read, be directed less by the advice of others and more by your writing compass. • Sample — for free — a wide selection of current magazines and journals in bookstores that serve coffee. • Read on topics outside your discipline, such as architecture, astronomy, economics, and photography. • Read with a pen nearby. Write in the margins. Talk back to the author. Mark interesting passages. Ask questions of the text.

I temper my enthusiasm for reading with this caution: there will be times in the middle of a writing project when you may want to stop reading. While drafting the tools in this book, I stopped reading about writing. I did not want my fascination with the topic to seduce me away from my writing time; nor did I want to be unduly influenced by the ideas of others; nor did I wish to be discouraged by the brilliance of finished, published work.

3. Read an interesting passage aloud. Then put it away and freewrite on a topic of your choice. Explore the influence that flows from this experiment.

To save string, I need a simple file box. I prefer the plastic ones that look like milk crates. I display the box in my office and put a label on it, say, "The Plight of Boys." As soon as I declare my interest in an important topic, a number of things happen. I notice more things about my topic. Then I have conversations about it with friends and colleagues. They feed my interest. One by one, my box fills with items: an analysis of graduation rates of boys versus girls; a feature on whether video games help or hinder the development of boys; a story about decreasing participation by boys in high school sports. This is a big topic, so I take my time. Weeks and weeks pass, sometimes months and months, and one day I'll look over at my box and hear it whisper, "It's time." I'm amazed at its fullness, and even more astonished at how much I've learned just by saving string. For me this process also works for fiction. During a long plane trip, I scribbled the opening scenes of a short novel titled Trash Baby, in which a thirteen-year-old boy finds a baby abandoned near a Dumpster. As the story took shape over months, I saved more and more string: newspaper stories about abandoned babies, manslaughter trials of distraught mothers, the development of "safe haven" laws to allow mothers to drop off newborns at hospitals with no questions asked.

For about 6 years now, in the time it's taken to write my biography of John Adams, I have largely abandoned reading anything written in our own day. For along with research of the kind to be expected with such a book, I have been trying as much as possible to know Adams through what he read as well as what he wrote, and the result has been one of the most enjoyable forays of my writing life.

I spread out voluminous material on the large conference-room table where I worked. As I read through what I had at hand for a particular chapter, I took time to think about it. After I inhaled the material and searched out still more, sometimes from the public record, sometimes from my assistant's notes and my other archival sources, I made an outline and then started writing. I could see how the writing forced me to be more rigorous, to rethink, to look up new information, to check facts meticulously, to recognize where a piece was missing, here and there, and where the logic was flawed. I identify with this method: save string, gather piles of research, be attentive to when it's time to write, write earlier than you think you can, let those early drafts drive you to additional research and organization. This process may appear too long and unproductive, with too much saving, storing, and thinking. The trick for me is to grow several crops at the same time. Fertilize one crop, even as you harvest another.

2. What other big topics not reflected in your current writing interest you? Which one fascinates you the most? Create a box or a file and label it.

Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird gets its title from an anecdote about her brother. At the age of ten, he struggled with a school report on birds. Lamott describes him as "immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead," but then, "my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'

If they sat each morning for an hour to write a single page — 250 words — they could finish a thesis in less than a year.

When my children were young, I volunteered to teach writing in their elementary school. After each class, I scribbled notes in a journal, never taking more than ten minutes to complete the task. What had I learned that day? How did the children respond? Why was that bright student staring into space? After three years, I thought I might have a book in me about teaching children to write. I had never written a book and did not know how to begin, so I transcribed my journal entries. The result was about 250 pages of typed text, not yet a book, but a sturdy foundation for what was to become Free to Write: A Journalist Teaches Young Writers.

If you work hard at your cross-disciplinary education, supporting the marriage of words and visuals, you will prepare yourself for a future of innovation and creativity. You can do this without sacrificing the enduring values of your craft. This requires not just the Golden Rule — treat others the way you want to be treated — but what my old colleague Bill Boyd calls the Platinum Rule: Treat others the way they want to be treated. How does the copyeditor want to be treated? What does the photographer need to do her best work? And what gives the designer satisfaction? The only way to know for sure is to ask.

Here are the kinds of people I need: • A helper who keeps me going. For years, my teaching partner Chip Scanlan has played this role for me, especially when I am working on a long project. Chip has a rare quality as a colleague: he is capable of withholding negative judgments. He says to me, over and over again, "Keep going. Keep writing. We'll talk about that later." • A helper who understands my idiosyncrasies. All writers have quirks. The fleas come with the dog. I find it almost unbearable to read my published work in the newspaper. I assume I'll encounter some terrible mistake. My wife, Karen, understands this. While I cower under the covers with my dog, Rex, she sits at the breakfast table, crunching her Rice Chex, reading my story in the paper and making sure no unforeseen horror has appeared. "All clear," she says, to my relief.

• An expert helper to match my topic. My current interest often dictates the kind of helper I need. When I wrote about the Holocaust and the history of anti-Semitism, I depended on the wisdom and experience of a rabbi, Haim Horowitz. When I wrote about AIDS, I turned to an oncologist, Dr. Jeffrey Paonessa. Such people may begin as interview subjects, but the deeper you get into a topic, the more they can turn into sounding boards and confidants.

To become a fluent writer, she argues, one must silence the internal critic early in the process. The critic becomes useful only when enough work has been done to warrant evaluation and revision.

For Godwin, weapons against the Watcher include such things as deadlines, writing fast, writing at odd times, writing when you're tired, writing on cheap paper, writing in surprising forms from which no one expects excellence.

In summary: • Do not fall into the trap of arguing about matters of taste. • Do not, as a reflex, defend your work against negative criticism. • Explain to your critic what you were trying to do. • Transform arguments into conversations.

Not long ago, I found myself in a large bookstore where I stumbled on what turned out to be a writers' group. About a dozen adult writers sat in a tight circle, listening to a young man read a passage from his recent work. After the reading, the other members picked it apart. They accused the writer of misusing words, of writing too much description or not enough. I resisted the powerful urge to jump into the circle and indict them for their petty negativity. What stopped me was the reaction of the writer: he gazed into the eyes of each critic, nodded in understanding, jotted down the remark, and offered thanks. He was grateful for any response that would help him sharpen his tools, even when that response bordered on the insensitive. Take a lesson from this earnest young writer. Even when an attack is personal, in your mind deflect it back onto the work: "What was it in the story that would provoke such anger?" If you can learn to use criticism in positive ways, you will continue to grow as a writer.

In other words, the writer conceives an idea, collects things to support it, discovers what the work is really about, attempts a first draft, and revises in the quest for greater clarity.

• Sniff around. Before you find a story idea, you get a whiff of something. Journalists call this a "nose for news," but all good writers express a form of curiosity, a sense that something is going on out there, something that teases your attention, something in the air. • Explore ideas. The writers I admire most are the ones who see their world as a storehouse of story ideas. They are explorers, traveling through their communities with their senses alert, connecting seemingly unrelated details into story patterns. Most writers I know, even the ones who work from assignments, like to transform the topics of those assignments into their own focused ideas. • Collect evidence. I love the wisdom that the best writers write not just with their hands, heads, and hearts, but with their feet. They don't sit at home thinking or surfing the Web. They leave their houses, offices, and classrooms. The great Francis X. Clines of the New York Times once told me that he could always find a story if he could just get out of the office. Writers, including writers of fiction, collect words, images, details, facts, quotes, dialogue, documents, scenes, expert testimony, eyewitness accounts, statistics, the brand of the beer, the color and make of the sports car, and, of course, the name of the dog. • Find a focus. What is your essay about? No, what is it really about? Go deeper. Get to the heart of the matter. Break the shell and extract the nut. Getting there requires careful research, sifting through evidence, experimentation, and critical thinking. The focus of a story can be expressed in a title, a first sentence, a summary paragraph, a theme statement, a thesis, a question the story will answer for the reader, one perfect word. • Select the best stuff. One great difference stands between new writers and experienced ones. New writers often dump their research into a story or essay. "By God, I gathered all that stuff," they think, "so it's going in." Veterans use a fraction, sometimes half, sometimes one-tenth of what they've gathered. But how do you decide what to include and, more difficult, what to leave out? A sharp focus is like a laser. It helps the writer cut tempting material that does not contribute to the central meaning of the work. • Recognize an order. Are you writing a sonnet or an epic? As Strunk and White ask, are you erecting a pup tent or a cathedral? What is the scope of your work? What shape is emerging? Working from a plan, the writer and reader benefit from a vision of the global structure of the story. This does not require a formal outline. But it helps to trace a beginning, middle, and ending. • Write a draft. Some writers write fast and free, accepting the inevitable imperfection of early drafts, moving toward multiple revisions. Other writers, my friend David Finkel comes to mind, work with meticulous precision, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, combining the drafting and revising steps. One way is not better than another. But here's the key: I once believed that writing began with drafting, the moment my rear hit the chair and my hands hit the keyboard. I now recognize that step as deep in the process, a step that becomes more fluid when I have taken other steps first. • Revise and clarify. Don Murray once gave me a precious gift, a book of photographed manuscript pages titled Authors at Work. In it you see the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley crossing out by hand the title "To the Skylark," revising it to "To a Skylark." You watch as the novelist Honore de Balzac writes dozens upon dozens of revisions in the margins of a corrected proof. You can observe Henry James cross out twenty lines of a twenty-five-line manuscript page. For these artists, writing is rewriting. And while word processors now make such revisions harder to track, they also eliminate the donkey labor of recopying and help us improve our work with the speed of light.

So in my focus box, I keep a set of questions the reader may ask about the story. In my order box, I have story shapes such as the chronological narrative and the gold coins. In my revision box, I keep my tools for cutting useless words.