July 26, 2023
Down-time for the brain
My memoir, mentioned in the previous two posts, took me years to write and, during that time, I chewed on the question, How do I tell the difference between what compels me and what compels the reader?
I knew my intended audience: people who had gone through what I was writing about. But the knowledge that we had experiences in common wasn’t enough. I had to figure out what was important to them.
I’ll never forget the day the answer hit me, and I wasn’t even consciously thinking about the problem. Typically for what happens after I’ve allowed my brain to rest, this insight was exactly what I needed.
It was simply that readers are compelled by their feelings (in the case of the subject of my memoir). They are not interested in my feelings. It’s only where the two overlap that I can hope to engage them. Although this didn’t give me an inside look into their full experience, it still provided a starting point from which I could decide what to cut.
July 19, 2023
Get flow first, and cut later
Seeing what to leave out of your novel, memoir, or essay begins with including everything. It’s essential to let yourself go when writing your early drafts because—if you’re like me—you’re bound to put in all the material that’s important to you. Why fight this urge? You can always go back and cut.
Those unrestrained first, second, and third drafts are a crucial expression of your creative drive. If you let your artistic impulses steer your work, it’s much more likely to be your best.
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?
June 20, 2018
Can writers connect with readers just like musicians do?
Unlike musicians performing live, writers must wait for audience response, except in public readings. Given the long delay between publication and reader feedback, how can we establish a sparkling connection? This delay makes our job harder than the musician’s, but it’s still possible to gain energy from a successful essay or book, and to build on this energy for our next round of work.
I learned this writing columns for five and a half years for my local newspaper, the Casper [Wyoming] Star-Tribune. Initial response was positive. This fueled my confidence and in turn sparked ideas for future columns. When I encountered pleased readers at the bank, grocery store, or public library, they almost always thanked me for what I’d written—sometimes six months ago or more—and mentioned the way in which a particular column had helped them.
Because of this, I began to sense a live connection between what I wrote and how readers responded.
Music of Writing 