June 14, 2023
More wisdom from Barbara Tuchman
How do you tell a streamlined tale to engage readers and keep them turning the pages?
I’ve learned part of the answer from Barbara Tuchman, an excellent historian and equally skilled writer. Her advice is simple: Don’t tell all your good stories. Include only the minimum to make your point or further your narrative, and be ruthless in cutting all that great material you want to keep.
In her essay, “The Historian’s Opportunity,” she writes, “Ability to distinguish what is significant from what is insignificant is sine qua non. Failure to do so means that the point of the story, not to mention the reader’s interest, becomes lost in a morass of undifferentiated matter. What it requires is simply the courage and self-confidence to make choices and, above all, to leave things out.”
For years I struggled with this question of what to leave out, and finally began to see.
Next: What was that process?
August 2, 2018
Wander-writing
Wander-writing, unlike freewriting, begins with a topic or idea, but there the structure stops. In wander-writing we start approximately where we do in a first draft, but instead of trying to produce a coherent piece, we let our subject take us wherever it goes.
I also do this frequently with any project I’ve already begun, but feel is going off the rails, even slightly. It’s an easy, relaxing way to explore my ideas and to tackle problems of organization or approach. After enough wander-writing for this purpose, I usually discover that my difficulties have resolved themselves, and I can easily complete whatever I was working on.
The supreme virtue of wander-writing is our liberation from any requirement to impose order on what we’re writing, to improve it, to stay on topic, or to revise. The rule is to let the subject lead us to what we are really thinking, or what we most want to write about it. This sweeps aside mental clutter and also deepens our writing—important benefits of letting our creative selves go.
July 11, 2012
Evaluating Your Own Work, Part Two
The multiple distractions of evaluating our own writing help to explain why this is such a difficult job. Small mistakes jump out at us; then we have to stop and fix them or make a note to come back later. Larger problems of structure and writing style also emerge, bothering us with the indecision of “Do I try to fix this now, or continue reading?”
I can’t count the number of times I’ve sat down with a chapter or a whole section of a current manuscript, planning to read it all the way through to try to get a sense of the whole, then being sidetracked by all the small yet important problems I encounter.
February 29, 2012
When Your Writing Won’t Behave, Part Three: Solving the Problem
We’ve seen that the urge to tell the reader everything can slow down our narrative, confuse it, and nearly make it impossible for us to write. All because of the aftershocks from the initial impetus to write our novel, essay, play, or poem.
Fortunately, the solution is simple: give yourself plenty of time to write freely and without restrictions. This habit, I’ve found, gives free rein to all our sidetracks and off-topic ideas. Over time, these aftershocks spend themselves, and then we can write our main points without so many distractions.
February 22, 2012
When Your Writing Won’t Behave, Part Two: The Primal Urge
Behind most writing projects, both fiction and nonfiction, lies the primal urge, “I need to tell you this.” It’s irresistible, and probably makes our job easier in the long run because it motivates us. Yet problems of flow and organization arise from multiple urges, like the aftershocks of an earthquake: “I need to tell you this…and this, and this, and this.” Soon your whole narrative is in a tangle, and you can’t see what to leave in and what to take out.
Music of Writing 