Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 42—Roy Peter Clark, America's Writing Coach on Living a Life of Language, Lowering Standards, and the Meaning of Literacy
151 Plays8 years ago
Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools and The Art of X-Ray Reading, joined me on #CNF.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Roy Peter Clark
00:00:01
Speaker
patty they're seeing efforts
00:00:03
Speaker
Hope you're having a CNFing good week. I snagged you a great guess this week. Luck on my part and generosity on the part of one Roy Peter Clark, America's writing coach, scholar, and author of five books on writing in the past 10 years. That would be writing tools, the glamor of grammar, help for writers, writing short,
00:00:32
Speaker
and the art of x-ray reading. I'm going to repeat that. Five books in ten years. I revisit them all the time to sharpen the saw and each time I revisit say writing tools I become a better and better writer. I can't recommend them enough.
Roy's Early Life and Writing Development
00:00:51
Speaker
So in this episode you'll learn a lot about Roy and how Roy came to live inside the language and how those early experiences led him ultimately to the Poynter Institute where he was able to coach and influence a nation of writers.
00:01:10
Speaker
Now, I debated whether to break this up into two episodes, but decided to leave it as one lump sum. I think you'll get a lot out of it. You can do it in one sitting, or visit it piecemeal. I do hope you'll share this episode with others. Subscribe if you haven't already to hashtag CNF. Rate it if you haven't already, et cetera, et cetera.
00:01:34
Speaker
So thanks for listening, guys. Now just sit back and enjoy the one and only Roy Peter Clark. Well, this is so wonderful that I get a chance to speak with you. I've been such a fan of your work for so long, and I'm just really grateful and thankful that you were able to carve out some time here to talk shop. So thanks so much for doing that.
00:02:00
Speaker
Well, so now it being 2017, your first official year of retirement, I wonder what goals have you put in place to approach this new frontier? Well, it's a very complicated issue and it's a complicated process.
00:02:30
Speaker
So I thought that I might, so I'm gonna, my 69th birthday is next Monday. And as I imagined, and this year is the 40th anniversary of my coming to St. Petersburg to begin working as a newspaper writing coach and then finally over to the Poynter Institute. So originally I thought that I might
00:02:59
Speaker
I might work full-time per pointer until I was maybe about 72, so another three years. I have plenty of energy, plenty of stuff to do. I think that what persuaded me to retire is a kind of a, mostly a feeling of timing that in terms of your commitment to a particular institution, especially in an era now when very few people are
00:03:29
Speaker
spending, you know, working 20, 30, 40 years for the same employer, that there's a kind of a natural order of things in which it's time to sort of step aside and let the younger creative folks at a place like Pointer
00:03:51
Speaker
step up and assume responsibility for sort of leading it into the
Thoughts on Retirement and Influences
00:03:57
Speaker
future. Gene Patterson, who was my mentor, but sometimes
00:04:01
Speaker
be asked questions about what should we do, what should we do, what about the future of newspapers, this and that, and he'd say, ladies and gentlemen, it's your turn. And so that was behind, that was the primary incentive for changing my role at Poynter. Now, I kind of liked the way that certain athletes like baseball players like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, you know,
00:04:31
Speaker
would announce that this was there like last year and have a kind of a victory tour. You know, um, and so pointer, I've signed a contract with pointer for this year to work on certain important projects, projects that are, have always been part of, uh, of my passion for being here and working here.
00:04:57
Speaker
So, although I'm no longer a full-time employee, I'm at Pointer most of the time. Pointer.org remains my primary outlet for publishing work. I wrote a piece a couple of days ago
00:05:17
Speaker
about Donald Trump's use of quotation marks. I wrote a piece that's running today, a kind of reflection on the life and career and influence of Jimmy Breslin. I'm thinking of writing, I was very influenced growing up by the music of Chuck Berry. I mean, he's now passed. So I've got things to do. I've got things to write over the last few months, the ESPN,
00:05:46
Speaker
website called the undefeated which website about sports and culture and race and politics and uh... and so i've i've written half dozen pieces for them they're looking at another one so i think find that i'm i'm not retired in that sense i'm just not working full-time for porter anymore right yeah it sounds like a very late retirement these days is
00:06:13
Speaker
Isn't quite what it used to be it's not like going out the seat or anything a lot of people are just really keeping up Keeping up and doing the work, and it sounds like you're as busy as ever I do think you know I've come to admire people who I've not used this metaphor before but you know sort of you know we were a certain age and
00:06:42
Speaker
Uh, it doesn't mean that you, that for example, you have to leave your family, right? You no longer a member of your family or when you're a certain age, it doesn't mean that, uh, you can no longer be a member of the church or, or of the chess club or, or whatever. And so there are these, these passions you have in these, of these values that you develop.
00:07:09
Speaker
and some practices to which you're attached. And whether they're golf or music or writing or reading, these are things that you can do to the end of your life. There's a, one of the most famous musicians and inventors was a man who died about three, four years ago, Les Paul. So Les Paul invented
00:07:37
Speaker
or was one of the inventors of the electric solid body guitar. And Les Paul, at the age of, until he was 91 or 92, was playing one night a week at a little jazz club in New York City. And young guitar players, some of them, you know, stars in their own right would show up and play gigs with them.
00:08:03
Speaker
And a guy, a man named William Zinzer, a writer and an editor who wrote a very influential writing book called On Writing Well. I wrote a piece celebrating his 90th birthday and he was blind by the time he was 90. And he was living in an apartment in New York City. And he was still doing a couple of things. He would have writers who would come visit him
00:08:34
Speaker
And even though he couldn't see their stories, he would coach them and edit them and tutor them in some way. And in addition, he had a young poet who would come in and it was giving him poetry lessons into his 90s. And he exchanged some messages where he said to me, let's keep this mission going.
00:09:04
Speaker
And that to me was this mission to our attachment to the craft, storytelling, reading and writing. Ultimately, freedom of expression. Those have become my role model. So 20 years from now, I'll be 89. My parents, my mom lived until she was 96.
00:09:33
Speaker
So if I live till 90 and I hope that that year I'm still learning something about the craft and I'm still helping in some way, if I can, uh, if I have the capacity to do that. And that's, you know, that's a lucky little, a fortunate place to be.
00:09:54
Speaker
Yeah, and you bringing up the way Zinser couldn't, he couldn't see anymore and read in the traditional sense, but he was still coaching basically by ear. And that's something you write about a lot is that auditory nature of pros and everything. So it's one of those things where it can really, your coaching style and skills can still evolve as maybe one sense depletes, another one can sort of increase to fill its void.
00:10:22
Speaker
Yeah, and there are, you know, there's some famous blind authors. I'm thinking, you know, John Milton, I think wrote Paradise Lost. I think he was blind by that point, I'm not sure. James Joyce, you know, was blind. And it's very interesting to think of these authors who, they didn't have voice recognition technology.
00:10:52
Speaker
but they had secretaries. I don't mean in the traditional sense. I mean, I think they're called, I think the technical word for this type of person is Emanuensis, E-M-A-N-U-E-N-S-I-S, you have to look that up. But I think in Emanuensis, the kind of person that comes in, and you've been up all night thinking and memorizing this poetry, and then you dictate it, and somebody else writes it down for you.
00:11:22
Speaker
And so language, written language comes, written language is very, very late in human history. And so the spoken word, you know, precedes it by millennia as the storytelling and other
Childhood and Literary Influences
00:11:44
Speaker
related capacities.
00:11:47
Speaker
Now, it's something that you write about in the introduction to glamor of grammar. You note that you've been, you almost, you encourage people, anyone who would actually pick up and buy that book is living in the language, and that's something that you kind of repeat throughout that introduction. And that living in the language, I wonder where that, where did that come from for you when you were growing up? I just happened to have this little,
00:12:16
Speaker
I wasn't planning this. I'm reaching out right now and I happen to have it nearby. And it's a really precious family document. And it's what used to be called a baby book. And so three days after I was born, a family that knew my family gave my mom and dad, gave my mom,
00:12:45
Speaker
this baby book and what it is is a little velveteen covered keepsake in which you, in which a mom will write things and keep things. And so there are photographs, because actually I'm looking at a little lock of my hair, which is kind of scary, I wish I still had it. It has things about
00:13:12
Speaker
My first words, first little picture that I drew, it's quite a little treasure chest. There's this particular place that makes me laugh every time I read it. It says mother's notes and it says age 16 months, right? So 16 months. I'm a mathematician so I know that's a one year, four months, right? So my mom writes, Roy is at the talk of the neighborhood. He can speak more than any child his age.
00:13:42
Speaker
He can sing every other word of seesaw, Jack and Jill, and I'm looking over a four-leaf clover, besides a wonderful vocabulary, mimics everything and everybody, okay? Then it says, age 24 months, now I'm a terrible two-year-old. The fact that I haven't written anything for eight months should speak for itself. Roy is...
00:14:11
Speaker
is a real boy and all of my time is spent running around after him. He can recite the entire alphabet, can read the letters A, E, F, W, M and L. Not bad, huh? Still sings all day long. So look, I cannot even, this is before, this is a time before my memory exists, right? I mean, I don't have any capacity yet. My brain hasn't evolved to the point where I can remember
00:14:41
Speaker
what I was doing at age one or two. And they're imprinted as a result of nature and nurture is a love for language and a love for music. And I play music in almost every workshop, a writing workshop that I do. So it's really funny and eerie and a little humbling to know that because of the way that you came in the world, that
00:15:10
Speaker
your life with language was somehow determined. Yeah. Yeah, you just had a capacity for it. Had a capacity, had people who nurtured it, right? I'm sure I was read to, I was sung to. I was part of a big Italian American family on my mother's side. They were talkers, they were storytellers. They're very expressive, very loving.
00:15:40
Speaker
So as a result of all those things, I wound up and still am living a life of language. Once again, not just that I have this capacity, but that I have this passion and the world would be better
00:16:04
Speaker
if more people could find a way to make that step, to make that leap to cross the bridge from having language in you to having the ability to kind of swim around and play around inside the language.
00:16:28
Speaker
Do you remember some, as you were in grammar school, elementary school, what were some of those maybe influential, real early books that people put in your hands? Because you had the propensity to speak and hear the language before you even knew what it was, essentially. And then as someone gave you something written, as you learned to read,
00:16:53
Speaker
What was that experience like for you as someone who was just drawn to the language anyway and then to see it in this new form and understand it in its new form? I think that looking back, stories and language came to me in different forms and formats and expressions. As I'm growing up,
00:17:22
Speaker
So I was born in, I'll put it this way, since I was born in March of 1948, I can say with confidence that I was conceived in 1947. Okay, so I'm a baby boomer, born two years after the end of World War II.
00:17:47
Speaker
And I was, the year I was conceived was essentially the first year that television, that televisions were sold commercially. And in 1948, the year I was born, suddenly there were not just a few thousand of these new inventions, but there were millions of them being sold around the country. And as a New Yorker,
00:18:14
Speaker
I was close to, I was in the media, one of the media capitals of the world. And that meant that I had access to television very, very early. And I would say that, you know, that had a profound and beneficial effect on my life. My brother Vincent, who's younger than I am, just told me recently, he says, I've never regretted
00:18:42
Speaker
a single hour of watching television and people would argue that television and other forms of technology are somehow at war with literacy but they were placed literacy but but to me in my life they were they were complimentary so my first stories were probably cowboy stories cowboy adventures you know hop along Cassidy but also
00:19:10
Speaker
you know, puppet shows, kid shows, Howdy Doody, and then nursery rhymes. And I actually have a copy on my shelf. I can see if I can reach it. Hang on. About three years old, I'm still living in New York city in a little apartment. I do remember being read to
00:19:38
Speaker
And there was this, in 1950, there was a collection of children's stories, poems, rhymes, legends, nursery rhymes, that was published by a popular publisher called Whitman. They did a lot of publishing for children's stuff. And this is called Children's Stories, selected by the Child Study Association. And in it,
00:20:09
Speaker
There are, it's quite a significant collection of 40 or 50 stories like Puss in Boots, and maybe just some copies, some examples. Yeah, yeah. So there was the, there's a story of, well, there are these poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. And there's a story of Noah's Ark.
00:20:37
Speaker
And there's the children's story of Winkin, Boogin, and the lion and the mouse. So these are little parables and beast tables and things like that. And Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp. So it was a little, little treasure chest. And there was a one story in particular. It's a poem about a boy and his shadow. It's called My Shadow. And my mother,
00:21:06
Speaker
for years and years later, I mean into her 80s and 90s, could recite the first stanza. I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me and what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He's very, very like me from the heels up to my head. And I see him jump before me when I jump into my bed. The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow, not at all like proper children.
00:21:31
Speaker
which is always very slow. For he sometimes shoots up taller than an India rubber ball, and he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all. He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play, and can only make a fool of me in every sort of way. He stays so close beside me, he's a coward, you can see. I think shame to stick to nursing as that shadow sticks to me. One morning, very early, before the sun was up, I rose,
00:22:01
Speaker
and found the shining dew in every buttercup. But my lazy little shadow, like an errant sleepy head, had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed. So, and I remember this, this poem for years and years and years and years. And I was, I was visiting Canada. I was doing a writing workshop in Canada and it was actually in a little town.
00:22:26
Speaker
in Ontario called Shakespeare, Ontario. It's near the town where they have somewhere Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Ontario. And damn it, if I didn't see a copy of this book, I didn't even know what the name of the book was. It was called Children's Stories. It was kind of generic, so it would have been really hard to just kind of search for it. And I found it and I purchased it.
00:22:54
Speaker
And I reread it and I was astonished at how interesting the stories were. It's very joyful experience, re-experiencing those stories. And when I read that book, read that poem, and I looked up, I looked at the end of it and I said, holy shit, this was by Robert Louis Stevenson.
00:23:16
Speaker
So I did a little research, I eventually wound up writing an essay called My Shadow and it points out that this innocent little poem about a tiny boy who has this unruly shadow who kind of gets him in trouble and like won't act like other proper little children would and he disappears and he grows tall and he
00:23:44
Speaker
and he stays behind in bed and he has all these bad habits, all the things you wouldn't want to teach to a child. That this was written about a year, within a year of the time that Stevenson published Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which is the ultimate story about the dark
00:24:12
Speaker
I mean, the light and the shadowy personality of a human being. How these can both be embedded in the same person. So I've actually, I now have a very, very rich collection here at Pointer and at home of what I call the formative books, and those would be
00:24:42
Speaker
the books I read or were read to me from cradle like to about college and I keep rereading them and I keep seeing new things in them and in x-ray reading I describe what it has meant for example to reread Gatsby over the years you know six or seven times and then the text is
00:25:10
Speaker
mostly the same and maybe we know a little bit more about the author than we did, but every time we reread something that was formative in our experience, we're probably going to see new things in it because our autobiography has changed since last we read it.
00:25:29
Speaker
Yeah, and you pick up, it's just like as you age and change around a static text, making it not so static, it's like your antenna just tuned to different frequencies within that book. Very much so. Which is why I think that sometimes, like I understand why we ask high school students to read Gatsby, but I was a pretty smart high school student.
00:25:57
Speaker
probably naive in many ways in terms of experiences outside of school, sheltered and protected in lots of ways. But I was not equipped to understand what a powerful work of art and a powerful artifact of American culture Gatsby was and is.
00:26:24
Speaker
And as you said, in high school, you're pretty precocious and smart in that sense. As a reader and a writer in the schools you were passing through, what were some early validations that you had that sort of pointed you down a path of a career in letters and writing? I would attribute my development and my future success
00:26:54
Speaker
to the work of a single teacher, although I was blessed with good teachers throughout my career at every level. But I had this eighth grade teacher at a Catholic school on Long Island. And he was a Franciscan brother. He was Irish. His name was Richard McCann.
00:27:24
Speaker
He died in his fifties. I'm sure he smoked cigarettes most of his life. He was known to us. They had, they chose names other than their given names. So he was, he was brother Aloysius. And, and I came to think of him and, and as an adult and as a professional, I, I actually reached out to him and
00:27:52
Speaker
And we had two or three meetings in person when he was in his fifties and I was in my forties, I guess. And he came to understand how much he meant to my development. And as an eighth grade teacher in an all boys school at that point, he did some things that were really novel and really different. One of the things he did,
00:28:22
Speaker
was that he would read, he would read whole novels to us aloud. You wouldn't think you would do that with a group of like 30 or 40 like 8th grade boys? Right? No. No, that would be a really hard thing to do. That would be an absolute nightmare.
00:28:50
Speaker
one of those tough Catholic schools and things like that but aside from that you know he would and I still know those stories I still read read those stories on occasional occasionally in one case I wrote some pieces about a Catholic novel called Mr. Blue that had gone out of print and
00:29:19
Speaker
And as a result of, partially as a result of that activity, the book was republished by a small Catholic press. So that was one of the things he did. The other thing he did is that this was a school without a library or resource center. But fortunately, the public library
00:29:47
Speaker
was a five minute walk from our classroom. It was essentially one block from our classroom. And he created a reading list which had about 50 books on it. And I don't know how often we did it, but we did it a lot is we get to his class and instead of sitting in a classroom for 90 minutes or whatever with the subject matter, boom,
00:30:15
Speaker
Okay, get out of here, you know? And the idea was that you could go to the public library. You never know when he was going to show up, so you didn't fuck around, right? Yeah. And you either looked up these books, borrowed these books, or you found something that you thought was better. And you could go with that as well. Huh.
00:30:44
Speaker
These were, some of these books, I would think of would have been books for young readers, you know, like teenagers, but most of them were not. Most of them were serious novels, either historical stories or a thick novel called The Last Hurrah, which became a well-known movie which was about
00:31:15
Speaker
Irish Catholic politics in the city of Boston. Really, really good story. And I remember finishing that book, borrowing it from the library, finishing it, and then like holding it in my hand and realizing that something like had really changed in my life. That I had graduated from the Hardy Boys. Right.
00:31:44
Speaker
and Superman and Batman comics. Didn't mean I wouldn't still enjoy those things, but I understood that there was something beyond it that would probably be part of my life forever.
00:32:00
Speaker
last week when i spoke with uh... jennifer ness line uh... essayist and founder of full-grown people was kind of an online literary journal and she had a influential teacher in high school who it is you know they you know she had read yet been assigned the cannon so to speak but then she they were handed out
00:32:21
Speaker
Alice Walker is the color purple, and she realized that unlocked a whole new world. Like, oh, you can do that in writing. And that must have been kind of why, when you held the last hurrah there, like, oh, that just unlocked an entirely new universe for you. Yeah, very much so. And here's where it gets a little complicated, and there are some historical issues.
00:32:50
Speaker
and technology issues to account for. So why was I attracted to the last hurrah? The reason, the primary reason was, was that I was gaining access really for the first time to the world of adult secrets. So this has changed dramatically in
00:33:17
Speaker
American culture, maybe world culture. But the 1950s, I'm sure you've heard stories about the fact that Ricky and Lucy Ricardo were not permitted to sleep in the same bed. You know this, right? Right. Yep. She, and she, you know, she could not say the, she could, she could not say the word pregnant. They could not use the word pregnant. They were, she was expecting. And so
00:33:48
Speaker
Post-war 1950s America was very sanitized with some flash points to kind of counterbalance it, like Elvis Presley gyrating on the stage of Ed Sullivan's variety show.
00:34:12
Speaker
but they cropped him from the waist down, you know, so you couldn't see the naughty part. You know, and so in that environment, the only way you could get access to adult secrets was through reading and you either read stuff that you weren't supposed to read or else if you had a good
00:34:39
Speaker
a smart adult in your life, they would help you sort of make that step. And I think Richard McCann, he was a Catholic brother, he was a Franciscan, but he was no prude. And I think that as long as you knew that you were getting more and more of those secrets opened up to you, there's the incentive
00:35:10
Speaker
to read. Neil Postman wrote a book that influenced me a lot called The Disappearance of Childhood. And he argued that in the 1950s and into the 1960s, there was a big separation between childhood and adulthood. But that what happened is that the culture began erasing those boundaries. And I think that's continued to happen. I wonder what the
00:35:41
Speaker
I wonder what the average age in the United States is of exposure to first exposure to hardcore pornography. I bet you it's shockingly young. Yeah, I can say I was 12. I'm 36 now, I was 12 when it first appeared before me on a video cassette. Yeah, and even if you're not looking for it, well, it's really to get access.
00:36:10
Speaker
you know, so I've got, you know, where's my phone? There it is. I mean, you know, I, it could be there in, uh, in 10 seconds, uh, with, um, digital technology and iPhones and iPads. And in my day we thought it was daring in elementary school and even at the high school to, to look up dirty words in the dictionary if we could find them. And so now you have a world
00:36:40
Speaker
where I would argue that young people are exposed to the secrets of adult life way too early and with some detrimental effects. Now I don't want to go back in time, but one of the things that, one of the consequences of this is that you no longer have to read anything or read very much in order
00:37:11
Speaker
to find out, discover the things that I discovered when I read Catcher in the Rye. Yeah. Or the Scarlet Letter. Or, you know, whatever it happened to be. So I kind of, in an old school kind of way, sometimes I'm tempted to kind of mourn the loss of that, those kinds of discoveries.
00:37:39
Speaker
But maybe what's happening is that it's not just exposure to the topics of topics, adult topics like sex, death, violence, serious illness, betrayal, you know, those kinds of things. But maybe now it's reading can help a young person
00:38:08
Speaker
make sense of those things. Process it better. Process it, deal with it. Learn how to talk about it. And certainly, girls are way ahead of boys in that category.
College and Academic Experiences
00:38:26
Speaker
If you go to a bookstore, you can see the gender differences in terms of the marketing of books.
00:38:37
Speaker
boys have access to graphic novels and those are the kind of works that are created for them and girls have a much richer literature to drop on. So as you progress through school, where did you go to college and how did you end up in Alabama for your first teaching gig?
00:39:06
Speaker
You know, I was really interested in, I love sports, still do, maybe not with the same passion that I used to, but I love basketball. I live in New York. The Northeast was one of the basketball sort of, I don't know, regional centers.
00:39:30
Speaker
So my interest in colleges were first attracted to college athletic teams, basketball teams in particular. Princeton had a fantastic basketball team in the 1960s led by a guy named Bill Bradley, who was a presidential candidate at one time. He was a senator from the state of New Jersey, a Rhodes Scholar. And McPhee wrote a book about him. Yeah.
00:40:01
Speaker
Yeah, what's the name of that book? The Sense of Where You Are? Yep. And so I was a smart kid. I didn't think I could play basketball at Princeton. I mean, I was way beyond that dream. But so I applied to Princeton. That was the only Ivy League school I applied to.
00:40:30
Speaker
a group of Catholic schools, Catholic colleges, and to my shock and dismay, I didn't get into Princeton. I got the letter. My mom got the letter. She opened it up. It was a really, really sad day, that April day, April of 1966.
00:40:56
Speaker
I was a salutatorian at an elite boys' Catholic school, and the valedictorian was a guy named Jeff Colucci, who was really smart. He was the best student in the school by far, and he was class president, and he was a track athlete. And he wanted to go to Dartmouth.
00:41:22
Speaker
And he didn't get in. We've talked about this years later. There's a conspiracy theory that says that the guidance counselors wanted all the best students to go to Catholic schools, Catholic colleges, and so that they undermined the efforts to get into Ivy League schools. I now no longer believe that.
00:41:52
Speaker
It's been interesting to think about and talk about over the years. So I wound up going to Providence College and Providence had a great basketball school. So I knew them from that and my high school teacher, my history teacher.
00:42:12
Speaker
who was also the basketball coach, was a graduate of Providence College. He's still alive, I just learned. And named Jim Schwartz. So I not only got in, as I expected I would, but I got a very, very generous scholarship.
00:42:30
Speaker
would have mounted to almost a full scholarship. Other teachers approached me and said, you know, you should really go to a better school. You can do better. But, you know, I grew up in a working class family. I had two younger brothers. This was a really, this was a gift that I could, I could kind of pay my mom and dad back for their support. To say, you know, let's do this.
00:42:59
Speaker
It wasn't a great school, but it had an absolutely outstanding English department. And it had a very elite honors program called liberal arts honors program. And I got really smart at Providence College by working with the teachers in the English department and the teachers who ran the arts honors program. I mean, the arts honors program was fantastic experience.
00:43:28
Speaker
It was essentially a three year, six semester course that a great works course, mostly Western civilization, with some Eastern stuff, you know, included. But you read the Iliad or the Odyssey, like the first week, and then three years later,
00:43:57
Speaker
You were reading Freud and I don't know, James Joyce. So you read one book a week and you were responsible for writing a thousand word essay on that book. And there were only 12 or 15 of you. You met for two, two and a half hours each week. And you had two teachers.
00:44:27
Speaker
One teacher was the one who ran the whole seminar and the other teacher was like the best teacher on that book in the college. So for example, if you read German philosophy, Hegel or Kant, there would be a teacher from the philosophy department who would come and work with the class.
00:44:55
Speaker
If you were reading Don Quixote, then someone from the Spanish department would come and work with you. Very intense, very intensive, kind of competitive, and I'm still in touch with some of the students from that program. A kid named Bobby McIntyre, Bobby McIntyre, but of course he's a grown man now.
00:45:25
Speaker
Um, uh, who was a, a mathematics major who was in the liberal arts honors program went on to become, I think the founding director for a group in Washington. Um, DC called something like the Institute for Tax Justice, Lindsay waters.
00:45:51
Speaker
who was a year older than when I was, but was still part of our liberal arts group, became one of the top editors at Harvard University Press in the humanities. Austin Sarat, S-A-R-A-T, Austin Sarat, went on to become maybe one of the most popular and influential political science
00:46:22
Speaker
kind of public philosophy teachers and scholars at Amherst University Press and yeah we've done good and yeah they made you really think and think about that stuff with a with a certain focus that just translated across professions yeah so the idea is that what
00:46:52
Speaker
What makes you, there was a teacher at Stanford who came to Appointments Institute one time for a program. I worked with her in a couple of projects. Her name is Shirley Bryce Keith, H-E-A-T-H. I'm not sure whether she's still teaching. I haven't been in touch in a while. But she asked me a question.
00:47:24
Speaker
It was very formative. She said to me, what does it mean to be literate in America? Really? Okay, I don't know. I'm not, what do you mean? Yeah, like, well, who are the most literate people in America? I said something smart-ass thing like, like, Shirley, like you and me? No. No, I said, no, they're famous people. And I just blurted out a couple of names. I said, I don't know.
00:47:52
Speaker
Susan Sontag and William F. Buckley Jr. And I realized that after I mentioned these two names, both of whom now passed away, that I couldn't in many ways, I could not have chosen two more different individuals, man, woman, liberal, progressive, left, very conservative,
00:48:23
Speaker
on the right. She kind of, like, why have you mentioned these two people? I said, well, I'm not sure. She says, okay, what did they do that makes you want to call them literate? So she, she did this Socratic kind of questioning of me and she told me, I said, look, they, there are these behaviors and if you practice these behaviors,
00:48:52
Speaker
It marks you as literate. And what are they? Well, the first two are very obvious. If you're literate, you read. And you read in certain ways. And if you're literate, you write. And you write in certain kinds of ways. But it's that third element that I think people underestimate or fail to see.
00:49:23
Speaker
And that is that if you are a literate person, you have the capacity to talk about how meaning is created through reading and writing. It's not just a matter of reading and writing. That'd be good enough. That's two thirds of the way there. But as you grow as a reader and as a writer, you gain the capacity
00:49:50
Speaker
to talk about how reading and writing works. Maybe I could draw an analogy saying that if you're a highly literate and knowledgeable musician, you have the ability not only to read music and to play music, but you have the ability to talk about music, right? And to talk about how certain movements in music
00:50:16
Speaker
affect the listening experience or stimulate the emotions in certain kinds of ways. What I say very often about Providence College is that I wouldn't say it taught me how to be a writer, but it certainly taught me how to be a reader and how to be a thinker and talker
00:50:44
Speaker
about how reading works and operates. And it was later that in graduate school and then in my and then in my in Alabama that the writing aspects kind of kicked in.
00:51:02
Speaker
Yes, it looks like that going right back to Robert McCann and then having this experience in Providence with these extremely literate teachers that taught you the meaning, like the true meaning of literacy.
00:51:19
Speaker
that you were able to translate that into your own style of teaching. So you bring that to, let's say, Alabama. So that's a big departure from New York City and Providence, for sure. So what was that experience like, bringing your sense and taste and literacy to a different region and to start exercising that craft you'd been honing for a few years at that point?
00:51:49
Speaker
Um, once again, uh, I wanted to go to graduate school. I applied to, uh, this time I didn't, I did not apply to Princeton. I was still pissed. You know, I didn't want to belong to any club that wasn't, that wouldn't have me as a member. And so, um, but I applied to the other Ivy league schools and I got into, I got into Brown university and I wanted to go to Brown.
00:52:16
Speaker
Uh, I was about to become engaged to be married. My wife, my future wife lived in Rhode Island and I wanted to be as close to her as possible. Uh, the problem was that, um, just could not afford to pay for a, an Ivy league education, even at the graduate level, you know, no scholarships, no fellowships available to me at that particular time. And I get a phone call, I get a letter from, um,
00:52:46
Speaker
almost at my old hometown university, so Stony Brook is part of the State University of New York system, one of the big campuses, known mostly for science. I want to say it's about 50 miles or so from Manhattan, out on the north shore of Long Island, and they offered me a very generous fellowship. In other words, not just tuition free,
00:53:17
Speaker
but also a stipend that I could apply to my living expenses. So it was once again money or decision about costs that drove me back to Stony Brook. Stony Brook was a dreadful campus and a very disorganized crazy school back in the
00:53:46
Speaker
the sixties and early seventies. Graduate school is kind of a, graduate school is really about narrowing. You know, I mean, if you broadened yourself in college as you should, then you begin to sort of narrow your interests a little bit, uh, intellectual and your intellectual interests and also your,
00:54:16
Speaker
what you plan to do with your learning. And so I knew that I wanted to become an English professor. The English department at Stony Brook was good, had some quite famous scholars and professors. They had a small group of very, very good teachers in medieval literature.
00:54:43
Speaker
They became lifelong friends and colleagues, Donald Fry, Marty Stevens. I would wind up doing my dissertation on Chaucer. It was another way of me, I wanted to sort of learn English literature and language from the beginning. And so that was a really good choice for me as it turned out.
00:55:08
Speaker
both on a personal level. And it's like I wound up getting a PhD in English literature concentration on medieval studies. I wanted to teach Chaucer. I wanted to teach Shakespeare and other forms of literature as happens at colleges and universities. And I got my PhD in 1974. I had a wife and I had a child.
00:55:38
Speaker
daughter Allison named after a character in the Canterbury Tales. I applied to a hundred schools. People forget, but if you wanted to apply to a hundred schools back then, you had to type a hundred letters. Right. And I got
00:56:03
Speaker
I got four requests for interviews, and it was during a very bad economy. 1974 was the very bad economy. There was the Arab oil embargo, long gas lines. The Vietnam War was, had kind of, was finally coming to an end.
00:56:28
Speaker
The draft was over a lot of, there was a kind of where you'd have to fact check this, but as I remember it, there was a kind of a blood of PhDs because people had extended their education to try to get student deferments from the draft. So they wouldn't have to go fight in the jungles of Vietnam. So I interviewed, gosh, what St. James, three, four schools.
00:56:57
Speaker
And I got one job offer, and it was in Montgomery, Alabama. People were delighted, a little surprised, but I was considering it. My family was a little shocked, kind of thrown off balance. But, you know, I wanted to start a career. And a lot of the other kids, the young people, in their mid-twenties,
00:57:28
Speaker
who just drew a 50 mile circle around Manhattan and said, here's where I want to work. They didn't get any jobs. And so I could be, I could become with a brand new PhD and assistant professor at a branch campus of Auburn university in Montgomery, Alabama.
Cultural Exposure in Alabama
00:57:49
Speaker
And I have to say that professionally, in retrospect, it was the most important decision that I ever made.
00:57:57
Speaker
You know, like in the, in the aftermath of this election, we're kind of thinking or talking about the way that Americans kind of maybe don't know each other the way we thought or the way they need to. Like that there are parts of the American experience that are completely hidden from other people. And so yes, it was a cultural change.
00:58:27
Speaker
Yes, there were many different issues to be confronted on, politics, race, region. Rather than it being, rather than, what it did for me was it just threw open the door of American culture, American language, American politics, race.
00:58:55
Speaker
if you think about it, I arrived there six years after the assassination of Dr. King and a decade after the civil rights legislation was passed and I could travel, I could stand in a place in downtown Montgomery and I could look
00:59:25
Speaker
up the hill a little bit and see where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated president of the Confederacy. And I could look down the steps of the Capitol and see where George Wallace, well, I had a chance to meet by the way, where George Wallace had declared in a famous speech, segregation now, segregation forever.
00:59:53
Speaker
And then I could turn my head and look down the hill a little bit and sit, I think it's called the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, I think that's the name of the church, which was Dr. King's church, where he went back to Atlanta. I could see the bus stops where the Montgomery Bus Boycott had been
01:00:20
Speaker
had been, you know, brought to life. And it was like, I was, it was amazing history, which I had only the lightest kind of book knowledge. What it made me want to do was to write about what I was learning. I had the help of a very progressive group of journalists and other community leaders
01:00:50
Speaker
and church leaders in Montgomery who were on the progressive side of the racial issue. I realized how courageous they had to be to take a progressive view as white people, take a progressive view on race in the South. And so I began to write, I began to write for the New York Times op-ed page
01:01:18
Speaker
I began to write for other publications. And that was the doorway that led me from the Academy to the journalism world. It created this kind of posture for me, where I could have my left foot in the world of
01:01:46
Speaker
the Academy in the scholarly world. And I could have my right foot in the world of working journalists who were the chroniclers of American life, American democracy, and American culture. And I think I've spent my life
01:02:09
Speaker
I'm not stuck in that position. It's just that I can go to my left like a basketball player, right? Yeah. I can go to my left. I can go to my right. And so that that experience could not have been created. If I had stayed in New York or in New England, I'm sure I would have been in an English department for a while, you know, and I'm sure I would have been happy in lots of ways. The academy in English departments kind of changed.
01:02:39
Speaker
after, you know, the 1970s, I'm probably what would be called a modernist. And a lot of my sensibilities, I think there is such a thing as a kind of a canon of literature. I think it needs to be enriched and expanded and diversified. The more extremes, extreme
01:03:09
Speaker
expressions of postmodernism kind of left me cold. And especially the scholarship of literature, when I tried to read it, read it, it was so encrusted with jargon and so far from the joy of the experience of literature that I think that many times I thought, hey, you got out just in time.
01:03:38
Speaker
Yeah. So how did you come to meet Gene Patterson? So it was through the auspices of another southern editor and journalist and editorial writer named Ray Jenkins.
Shift from Academia to Journalism
01:03:55
Speaker
He's a member of a group of southern editorialists who were more progressive on the issues of race.
01:04:07
Speaker
and who had found their voice as agents of change in the South, and who were people of moral and physical courage. And he befriended me, and I learned it a lot from him. I told him, after he helped me get my first essays in print,
01:04:35
Speaker
in newspapers and I told them that, you know, I think that I would like to expand my teaching capacity so that I'm teaching reading, I'm teaching writing, I'm teaching literature, I'm teaching language. I think I'd like to develop a course in journalism and I started reading some books
01:05:04
Speaker
kind of helped me think about that. Think about how journalists do things. It was the first time I heard phrases like who, what, where, when, and why, and how, and the first time I heard about this writing structure called the inverted pyramid. And we had talked about, we had planned maybe that I would do some work for the
01:05:31
Speaker
Montgomery advertiser journal and his paper there. And then he approached, uh, then he came and he said, you know, I just talked to this editor, Bob Haman, who works with, um, a famous editor named Jean Patterson. And Jean is president of the American society of newspaper editors this year. And he wants to start this writing improvement program.
01:05:59
Speaker
And it's this paper, he's looking for someone who can help them do that. What do you think? Would you be interested in doing that? So it was a result of that conversation between Bob Hayman and Ray Jenkins that led to my being asked to come down to St. Petersburg. And it was exactly 40 years last month that I made the trip from Montgomery to St. Petersburg.
01:06:29
Speaker
and sat in a room with seven or eight men, they were all men at that time, who were sort of the journalism leaders in St. Petersburg and Florida, Nelson Pointer, the owner of the paper, Gene Patterson, the editor, and they liked what they heard. They offered me at a small increase in my salary and opportunity
01:06:57
Speaker
to spend the year there working on this project. And then I was supposed to go back to the university. And I was completely ready to do that. And that one year turned into 40 and no looking back.
01:07:14
Speaker
So what questions were writers asking of you then, and over the course of your career too, what questions do you most often field from writers looking to, even novice writers, or just anyone looking to improve? Like 40 years ago, what were you hearing, and then what were you hearing going forward in the ensuing decades? Yeah.
01:07:43
Speaker
The Pointer Institute republished the first essay I wrote about my experience in the newsroom. So six months into my experience, I wrote a couple of thousand words, as I recall, for the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. And what was really interesting is how my description of the problem, as I first saw it,
01:08:13
Speaker
has kind of retained its, what would you call it, its viability or its significance? Yeah, its relevance for sure. Its relevance? Yeah. And so it was just things like, it was things that were clarified for me by meeting another writing coach who was about my father's age.
01:08:42
Speaker
came from the World War II generation. His name was Donald Murray. And after Patterson hired me, Tom Winship, who is the editor of the Boston Globe, hired Donald Murray to be a writing coach at the Globe. And Murray had actually won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his 20s. He was a very young man. Wow. At the time. And Murray
01:09:13
Speaker
went on to be a very influential writing composition teacher and sort of writing theorists, if you will, practical theorists. So he became a kind of a papal figure for English teachers at every level. And he came to Poynter and he worked with me. He articulated some of these issues in ways that
01:09:42
Speaker
I couldn't quite see it first. So for example, I'm about to echo Murray saying that, you know, to the struggling writer, a good writing looks like magic, but it's not magic. It's a set of rational steps. You can learn the steps. You can learn the names of the steps. Well, what's an example of a step? Well, every piece of writing needs a focus.
01:10:09
Speaker
a central idea, an organizing principle, a nut, a kernel of truth or emotion or feeling, an idea, and all the other parts of the work that you've written reinforce that in some way. And you could be writing a poem or a college dissertation, and ultimately you're still responsible
01:10:40
Speaker
for figuring out what this piece of writing is really about. Just that construct alone allows you as a writer or as a writing coach or as a teacher of writing, as an editor, to kind of figure out what's happening when a piece of writing really works and what's happening when a piece of writing is in trouble.
01:11:06
Speaker
Now, I just talked about this in terms of a piece of writing, but that writing is produced by a human being. And the writer or teacher's responsibility is not just to perform autopsies on a cadaver, you know, to fix a broken story. It's to work with a human being or a creative human being in order to help
01:11:35
Speaker
improve their craft, their techniques, to sharpen their strategies, to become a better reader, writer, and a better talker about reading and writing so that you can step into the pathway of someone who learns something new about the craft every day.
01:11:57
Speaker
Yeah, and so much of your book writing over the years, the fact that you wrote five books in ten years on the craft of writing just blows my mind every time I think about it. You really... It must. It's a what a feat of generation and not only just generation of
01:12:18
Speaker
uh... of material but of just such valuable valuable work to to writers and readers alike it's you've stripped down the the artifice like you said like you showed
01:12:30
Speaker
It does feel like magic to someone who hasn't been trained to see where the scaffolding was bolted into the side of the building. So it's like what you've done is you've stripped a lot of that away to show yes, this is very much attainable if you're willing to do the work. Yeah, I think that's right and I think here's more Donald Murray. Remember Roy?
01:12:59
Speaker
a page a day equals a book a year. You know, what is that? Well, it's a kind of an, it's an aphorism, right? About writing. It's this kind of like little Zen like saying, but it has practical implications and it has a psychological and emotional implications. So why is it that so many people who finish their PhD, PhD coursework,
01:13:28
Speaker
And even their exams never get their degrees because somehow they lack the capacity to write the dissertation. And I think I could have had another career just coaching people on their dissertations so they could get their degrees.
01:13:50
Speaker
because I think it is, I think that people are paralyzed. I think they're paralyzed by their fear of, you know, the marathon of the ideas that, oh my God, now I'm going to have, how am I going to produce something that has this 300 pages or whatever? You know, I can barely, I can barely write a term paper.
01:14:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's the bird-by-bird process. Exactly right. And in fact, Don Fry, my dissertation director, and became my colleague at Pointer, one of my best friends ever, he said, when I was getting ready to write my dissertation, he said, look, you can write a term paper, right? Yes. OK. All right, here's what you're going to do over the next
01:14:49
Speaker
four, five, six months. You're going to write, you're going to write 10 term papers. I looked at him funny. He said, he said, do the math. The only thing he did for me is he got me to, at first, he was a very good editor, but at first he got me to lower my standards, you know, not to wait until all the research was finished before I started drafting something, you know, kind of the,
01:15:19
Speaker
the value of doing some exploratory writing. And I didn't have all the vocabulary to understand what was happening there, but looking back, that was clearly the case. And I don't think my dissertation was very well written, but I was able to generate out of it. I remember also at the time when I was at Auburn, you know, I think a half dozen journal articles, scholarly journals,
01:15:48
Speaker
at a time when I thought I wanted to be an English professor for life. I remember very vividly after my first experience with journalism is really sitting back and looking at the different life spans of a piece of writing. How in the academy you could get an idea
01:16:20
Speaker
in 1974, you could research it in 1975. You could write it, write an article in 1976. It could be accepted in 1977 and appear in 1978. Like there's this five year span between ignition and landing on the moon. Whereas in journalism, you could see something on television sparked your interest.
01:16:50
Speaker
You can write about it, and people in America could be talking about it two, three, four days later. And there was a whole different bio-rhythm, which sort of attracted me, I have to say. Orwell was an important figure, because Orwell was a journalist, novelist, scholar, and Orwell wrote about politics and the English language.
01:17:20
Speaker
and language was central to works like 1984 and to all of his essays. I remember the first time I ever worked with a group of journalists before I went to St. Petersburg was in Montgomery through Ray Jenkins, and it was a seminar for Southern editorial writers. And I remember exploring sort of reading their editorials
01:17:50
Speaker
looking at their use of language, looking at the distance between the language that was really fresh and the language that was really stale, talking about the relationship between language misuse and political corruption, essentially Orwell opened that door for me. So it was a good,
01:18:21
Speaker
And I've been, you know, faithful to him ever since. Now, writing about writing, you know, it's always going to draw a certain measure of attention to yourself. It's kind of like if you're a personal trainer, you can't be fat. And it's like, so if you're writing about writing, it's like,
01:18:46
Speaker
you almost, the scrutiny is that much higher because you gotta hold yourself to a higher, to the standard you're writing about and an even higher standard because it's gonna cause some, people are gonna look at your work a little with a heavier eye and I wonder how you approach that degree of scrutiny given how much you've coached and how much you've written about writing over the years.
01:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's a very important question. It's what I called, you used a good analogy. My version of that is the dentist with bad teeth. Yeah, yeah. You know, and the opposite was true. So I come from a family where people have
01:19:42
Speaker
some chronic skin problems, you know, over the years. Nothing dangerous but little psoriasis or dermatitis or something like that, a little rash here or whatever. Some milder forms of skin cancer since I live in Florida. But I remember going for the, going to the dermatologist for the first time and the door opened up and there was a woman who walked in
01:20:11
Speaker
She was a young doctor. I don't think she, she probably in her, in her thirties. And I said to myself, I have picked like a really the best dermatologist in the world. This person of all of God's creatures has the most perfect skin I've ever seen. And then I kind of,
01:20:39
Speaker
You know, she was a fine doctorate, but over the years I said, you know, maybe that wasn't right. Maybe it's the person who has the experience of struggling through something, who can better identify with my circumstances. And so I think that about a week ago,
01:21:09
Speaker
Just a few days ago, I dangled a modifier in an essay I wrote about Trump's definition of quotation marks. And there was a gleeful correction by, especially since the sentence in which I was, the sentence I had written
01:21:39
Speaker
had mentioned the fact that I had written a book on grammar. So to make a grammar or a, you know, a usage mistake, in a sentence where you're bragging about how good you are with language. So, you know, it's like that scene in Animal House where
01:22:03
Speaker
Kevin Bacon, one of his early roles, he plays the cadet in the Bad Fraternity. And the vicious fat boys are paddling him. And they smack his ass and he says, thank you, sir. May I have another? So it was one of those moments.
01:22:30
Speaker
But I got out ahead of it. I said I was going to leave the mistake up there for a couple of days and suffer the consequences. And I then admitted that I had done this on Twitter. People thought it was funny. And I think what happened in a case like that is although nowadays there's always going to be
01:22:59
Speaker
So there's always going to be some trolls and they're going to be people who don't read your work very carefully and criticize it harshly. In general, if you have a reputation and a history of being a champion of writers, of identifying with the work of writers, their triumphs and their struggles,
01:23:29
Speaker
if you are always in the game, not just coming out of the hills after a battle and to shoot the wounded, that people are going to give you the benefit of the doubt. It's like you earn the right
01:23:56
Speaker
to be, um, you're in the right to make mistakes. And if anybody, I don't hide these, but if anybody could come to my office and look at a 350 or 400 word manuscript that I've written and read the thousand or so marks that copy editors from little Brown
01:24:25
Speaker
make on my manuscript. A lot of them are formatting issues or corrections. But yeah, there's my share of redundancy and awkwardness and insensitivity and lack of clarity.
01:24:52
Speaker
And so, yeah, I'm fortunate enough to have a team of people surrounding me, not just one team, but teams of people surrounding me whose job it is to help me get my best work in print. And it's my mission to open the door for literacy and good writing wider and wider.
01:25:21
Speaker
so that more and more people can imagine themselves as belonging to communities of riders, you know, nations of riders, whatever it happens to be. Yeah, because it's a team sport. Yes. Well, it's not only that, but let's say, you know, I think people are thinking about this right now in a very harsh and contentious political moment that
01:25:51
Speaker
We say things like we live in a democracy. We say things like we have freedom of expression. We talk about the history and the power of the First Amendment. And every day I walk into the Pointer Institute, every day for more than three decades, the first, the last thing I see before I enter the building is this marble plaque.
01:26:17
Speaker
with the words of the First Amendment on it. So I'm reminded every day that there is this ideal against which I should always judge my own work and help others towards the fulfillment of that ideal in their work. What good is freedom of expression if we lack the means to express ourselves?
01:26:46
Speaker
my articulation of a mission and purpose both as a writer and a writing teacher.
Philosophy and Challenges of Writing
01:26:53
Speaker
Yeah, and that seems to be really at the core of, if you had to put an arc over the five books you've written in the last 10 years that you're giving a lot of nuts and bolts and strategies help to find that community, grammar to hone the swim and live in the language and writing short for the internet and then the x-ray reading of like, let's get to that.
01:27:22
Speaker
subterranean river that's going underneath a lot of these great works. It's kind of like a web, if you will, that all are kind of just feeding off each other in that sense. My great college English teacher, a brilliant teacher, brilliant scholar, and a very generous human being. His name was Rene Fortin. He died at the age of 61. I never saw him
01:27:50
Speaker
I don't think for a moment, including doing softball games, when he didn't have a cigarette in his hand. So, you know, he died, he died young, but not until he had filled me up with literature and language. And the first book that we read, so he was my college
01:28:17
Speaker
literature teacher, and I studied with him every year. I managed to find a way to do that. So I went ahead and I, in the first class, is we read The Dubliners, a collection of short stories by James Joyce. And then we read, the second book we read was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is a novel, kind of an autobiographical novel.
01:28:46
Speaker
by James Joyce. And the third book we read was Lord Jim by Conrad. And the fourth book was another novel by Conrad. And I can't remember the name. Right. So I'm telling you this because he taught us this kind of little lesson, a sort of a theory. And the way he described it was that writers, especially great writers,
01:29:16
Speaker
wind up writing the same book over and over and over again. Now that was a strategy that he used to allow us to say, to look at, for example, um, look at the short stories by James Joyce and then look at his novel and he'd ask questions like, what evidence is there? If you didn't know,
01:29:44
Speaker
If these works didn't have anybody's name on it, how would you know that they belong to the same offer? And that was a very invigorating question, sort of challenge for us. And so I am very much tuned in to your insight about these five books that
01:30:10
Speaker
They are not, I wouldn't say that they are the same, they're five different books, but they form a kind of, without being a series, they form a kind of a coherent whole. And to figure out what that is, I think you have to use the big words.
01:30:38
Speaker
words like literacy and language and learning and craft and discipline and close reading, but also culture, community, democracy. There's a scholar named James Carey, C-A-R-E-Y,
01:31:07
Speaker
with the Dean of Journalism at Illinois and started the PhD program in journalism at Columbia. And his advice, he was a few years older than I was, he represented for me a slightly older generation of scholars. And he said, attach yourself to a lot of scholars
01:31:31
Speaker
do attach themselves ultimately to very narrow little things. Not little things, but niches, niches. Not Nietzsche, but niches. You know, slave narratives of the 1830s, you know, the south of the 1830s. Now, if you actually attach yourself to that topic, and did it right, of course,
01:32:01
Speaker
You might be looking at a few writers and studying them and them, but you'd hope you'd almost be able to predict that that study would, could, and should lead you to big ideas about what America means, what its vision and ideals were for itself and its people.
01:32:29
Speaker
how it failed so miserably on so many occasions, how beyond those failures, there could be hope and progress.
Exploring New Writing Forms
01:32:41
Speaker
So yeah, I, you know, it's funny, I have to make a decision as to whether I want to write another book or not. I assume that I will. I have some old projects that
01:32:58
Speaker
I've always wanted to sort of translate into book form and I might work on some of those but one of the interesting conflicts in my life as a professional especially in the last 10 or 12 years is that there's some writing that I think I would like to do but that the writing would look very different from these
01:33:26
Speaker
five books. It might be a novel. It might be a play. I might write about a social issue. What happens is that when you become successful as an author in a particular field, it becomes very difficult to abandon that field for other kinds of writing. Does it make any sense? Yeah, it's like being typecast.
01:33:56
Speaker
Yeah, but it's beyond being typed. It is being typecast, but the idea is that if someone's saying, okay, Clint Eastwood, right? You're making these great Westerns. You're really, really good at making Westerns. But I don't want to make Westerns. I want to make like a cop movie. Okay, but Dirty Harry's got to just
01:34:21
Speaker
There's gonna be the same guy that you played, you know in the spaghetti Western. Yeah, I like your analogy, but I think it more as being If you're making a series of if you're Who's this guy is it Judd Apatow is that his name? Yeah. Yeah comedy writer. It was a comedy writer, right? Yep So let's say that guy Wants to make
01:34:52
Speaker
a very serious social drama. Well, it's like when Adam Sandler did Punch-Drunk Love. Yeah. Yeah, it's like out of context. Yeah, and so if you have an agent, as I do, and editors, as I do, who also have investment in your success, what you hear is things like that when an author
01:35:21
Speaker
becomes an author who kind of has become one of the authors and sort of dominates a kind of a category. Like Stephen King, right? Stephen King wrote a really good book on writing. Yeah. But but it's notable for the for its difference to everything else he's done. And so Donald Hall, the poet, very versatile writer,
01:35:50
Speaker
one said about Donald Murray. They're both from New Hampshire, as I recall. And Hall said about Murray, Don Murray is a very good writer. Pause about writing. And I said, Oh boy, that's a really interesting compliment. And, but it's also a critique.
01:36:17
Speaker
It's a critique of the writing that Murray did that was not about writing, his poetry and his novels. And so at the age of 69, am I satisfied in being a decent and influential writer about writing? And I'm saying, yeah, that'd be cool. That's not a bad legacy, but as somebody
01:36:47
Speaker
who created that legacy by devoting himself to the craft and by learning new things about writing. I don't think I'm going to be able to continue that journey just by writing about writing along that I need some other moves. And I'm working on it a little bit.
01:37:13
Speaker
And when you're in the throes of that creative process or generating pages, what does your routine look like?
Writing Process and Techniques
01:37:23
Speaker
Your morning routine as you're sort of gearing up the engine to try to get a good day's work done and win the morning and win the day? I can write fast. And I can write earlier than other people, but I don't mean earlier in the day.
01:37:42
Speaker
I mean, I can begin the process before other people would think I'm ready. So I like, I think some people have called it, I like zero drafting. I like, so I might write about Chuck Berry today or tomorrow. You know, I have an essay in my head saying, you know, what I learned about writing
01:38:13
Speaker
from listening, from growing up listening to Chuck Berry. And I can say, now I have to learn a bunch of stuff before I could publish an essay on that title. I have to learn a lot about him. I have to study his lyrics. I have to listen to some of the music.
01:38:39
Speaker
I probably have to play some of it myself to remind myself what it feels like. I could do all those things, but I could sit down right now and give you in an hour, a thousand words on Chuck Berry. And what that draft would do, not even a first draft, like a zero draft, that draft would teach me what I know and what I think, but it also teach me what I need to learn.
01:39:08
Speaker
as a general method for a short piece of writing, like a piece of daily journalism or daily reflection or kind of an act of public scholarship or whatever. That's the way I like to work. When I'm working on a project, a book project, it's very important for me
01:39:36
Speaker
to identify the units of construction, the smallest unit of construction. So in the case of writing tools, that smallest unit would be a 800 to 1,000 word essay on one tool. What's good for me, and I need
01:40:06
Speaker
I need to create 50 of those units to have 50,000 words and have a book. At some point, what's going to work best for me and make me most productive is when I get into a mode where I'm just cranking out those units without paying too much attention to their quality. You're lowering that bar of perfection.
01:40:36
Speaker
kept lowering the standards early in the process because I know that the hardest part is not writing the good sentence or, you know, the hardest part is getting 300 pages under your belt. If I think about it that way, it doesn't work very well for me. But if I sit down on a Monday morning and begin a chapter,
01:41:06
Speaker
maybe come back the following day and following morning and finish it up. I'm kind of a one to two hour writer, which is to say that for the mornings in general, I used to do it earlier. Now I do it a little bit later in the morning. So mid morning is a good time for me from mid morning to noon. I can either write a column short essay,
01:41:36
Speaker
draft of a chapter, you know, those kinds of things. As I get more and more into a project and I'm capable of seeing the parts, what I try to do is that I map these. And the way I map them is that I tend to, I can't do it so well in my office because I've moved recently.
01:42:04
Speaker
but in my old office I had a big pack board bulletin board and so If I have an idea of a book Well, here's a good example. Let's say my next book is going to be The 100 greatest writing books of all time. Okay. Yeah, so I've got a I've got a collection probably I've got a collection of most of those so if I wanted to write that book I
01:42:32
Speaker
what I would do is probably on index cards. I would write the names of the book at the top, the author, and maybe one sentence on the card. That reminds me of why I selected that book. And then I'm going to tack it up on the board. And then over time,
01:43:03
Speaker
you're going to see 100 of those up on the board. And corresponding to those will be paper files as well as computer files, which has William Zimzer's On Writing Well. And I'll be able to, you know, and so
01:43:30
Speaker
Once I get the materials, so it's a combination of kind of creating a kind of, I don't know, the equivalent for this kind of book of a storyboard, where you can see the parts all at once. One of the things I don't like about, one of the in capacities to me of word processing,
01:43:59
Speaker
is that it's really hard to do that sometimes. The screen's not big enough really to give you that full vista, that full vantage of the parts of the project. What's nice about it, the only way to maybe get around that is to maybe print out a page when you're done. That way you can start to see a pile grow and that way you actually feel there's substance and not just pixels of what you're doing.
01:44:29
Speaker
Yeah, no doubt about it. And with books on writing, I feel that writers of any degree of skill and novices, especially, that it's very easy to say, oh, I'll start my project, whatever that is, after I'm done reading this.
01:44:52
Speaker
And then it's just, it's a way of productive procrastination because you're actually, you're learning very valuable insights, but you're not putting into practice per se. But you also need to be mindful of, this is kind of a continuing education thing, a sharpening of the saw, if you will. And I wonder how you balance
01:45:13
Speaker
that continuing ed portion of like writing about writing or reading about writing and then also making sure that you sit down and do the work too. Yeah, I think that goes back to, so the first book length work I wrote was my PhD dissertation.
01:45:39
Speaker
And let's see, yeah, I'm staring at, so there's a bound copy in my bookcase, and I'm looking at it right now. And I'm looking at it, I can see it's as a black cover, but yeah, it looks like a book. I have no idea how many pages are there. All hand-typed, that's how it was created, although this may be a,
01:46:07
Speaker
Maybe a copy of it, I'm not sure. But so Don Fry, my dissertation director, and his wife, who was an archeologist, went to Greece summer of 1974 to work on a project, archeology, classical studies. So he was not going to be around very much.
01:46:38
Speaker
for me to consult. These days, no problem. We just, you know, Skype each other or whatever, right? Yeah. But back in the day, if you were in Greece, you were in Greece, you were not available. What I remember is he was saying, come on, let's get this thing done. Let's get this thing done. And
01:47:02
Speaker
He gave me this coaching about breaking it up into these term papers and then writing these term papers and slapping them together, writing an introduction. It basically gave me a way in which to be productive. And I just did whatever he told me and I got to it. And then what was interesting is that I had a five person committee
01:47:33
Speaker
reading the dissertation and there was a debate. There was one member of the committee who didn't think that the dissertation was strong enough that it was missing some important bits of research. There was a conversation and they made a decision that they would pass, they would approve the dissertation
01:48:03
Speaker
But that during the dissertation defense, rather than making it a gentle, happy little party, as was the custom at Stony Brook, that they were going to cross-examine me. They were going to make me defend what I had written. And so I had one of the most contentious defenses, apparently, in the history of the English department there at the time.
01:48:31
Speaker
which I said, no, I wish somebody had whispered in my ear so that I've been better prepared for it. The point was that not one day in my entire life, since 1974, has anybody made any reference besides myself to the fact that I hadn't written
01:49:00
Speaker
the most perfect visitation in history. In other words, there are times when you don't have everything that you could have or all the material in the background that you need. Um, and it's not going to matter that much. Uh, I do believe in a kind of, in a, I believe in a form of over reporting.
01:49:29
Speaker
which to say that it's better for you to have done a little too much reporting than not enough. But that being said, if the effect of too much reporting is that you miss deadlines or you don't get to the work or you're not productive enough, then I think you have to reimagine your process and your craft. And all I'm saying is if you do some research,
01:49:57
Speaker
Come on back and sit down and write about it for a while. Just write about it for yourself. Send a message to yourself. Send a memo to yourself. Send a memo to a friendly, a friendly reader and learn what you need to learn in order to take the next step in the process. In most cases,
01:50:25
Speaker
You'll be shocked to discover you have enough for a paper. You have enough for an essay. You have enough for a book. And if you don't, if some test reader or copy editor thinks that you don't, there's still time to get what you need.
01:50:46
Speaker
yeah it's easy to be crippled by in paralyzed by research always thinking like you need just one more one more sorely i gotta go to one more source where the primary or person and it's gonna round it out perfectly but honestly it's like you'll always find an excuse to try to find one more person
01:51:05
Speaker
If you can but it's like kind of like what you were saying earlier like writing before you're ready Is also a good way to break that chain that of yeah of that information flood. Yeah Yeah, I'm just gonna paraphrase what you just said and I think it's true. I would say put this way too often More research is an excuse for not writing. Mm-hmm
Social Media and Encouragement
01:51:31
Speaker
Yeah, let me just get you out of here on this note. Where can people find you online and continue to follow your work? Thank you for asking. I'm an old school guy, but I do have, I've been encouraged by my younger colleagues to
01:51:57
Speaker
become more active on social media. You can find me on Facebook and you can find me on Twitter, which I really enjoy using as a form of expression. So I'm at Roy Peter Clark on Twitter. I am formally retired from full-time work, but I still publish essays on the Poynter Institute website and that's Poynter
01:52:32
Speaker
Google search my name and you'll find plenty of stuff there. Check me out on Amazon. If I can pimp my books just a little more for reasons I can't exactly explain. I'm happy to say that
01:52:54
Speaker
Lately, Amazon and some other booksellers, especially Amazon, have been offering my book at a significant discount. So I think writing tools is available these days, the new 10th anniversary edition for about $7. And that's great. I'm very, very happy about the way Little Brown
01:53:24
Speaker
has published and marketed my books and the way Amazon has sold them. Fantastic. Well, Roy, this was such a pleasure for me to get to talk to you and talk shop. Thank you so much for carving time out of your schedule to do this. This was a lot of fun. Listen, that's been great, but I appreciate your reaching out to me. And I wish the best to all the writers who will be listening to this.
01:53:51
Speaker
Hey, what's this? An outro? Yeah, that's right. Thanks for listening, everybody. If you need it this far, all I ask for you is to share the episode, subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music, like the hashtag ZNF Podcast page, and follow me on Twitter. That's actually a lot of stuff, and if you could do a quarter of it, I'd be happy.
01:54:14
Speaker
But also, do you know someone who wants to be on the show? You got a good guest idea? Do you want to be on the show if you're a writer of non-fiction? Just email me. Also, since you made it this far, I'm happy to give you a free editing consult. Just email me. I didn't tease that out on purpose. It's that simple. And lastly, a quote from my favorite all-time movie. Stay cool. Stay cool forever.