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Episode 207: Every Story is a Workshop with Roy Peter Clark
143 Plays5 years ago
"I wrote a column on my 30th birthday saying things I'd like ,by the time I was 40, was write one good book," says Roy Peter Clark.
I'd say he did. Try about a dozen with Writing Tools and Murder Your Darlings being two that you know and love.
He's @roypeterclark on Twitter.
Follow the show @CNFPod.
Let's give a big CNFin' welcome to Scrivener for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. Be sure to check them out to level up your writing game.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey CNFers, the creative non-fiction podcast is sponsored by Scrivener. Scrivener was created by writers for writers. It brings all the tools you need to craft your first draft together in one handy app. Scrivener won't tell you how to write, it simply provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing.
00:00:23
Speaker
I'm using it now for my insufferable rewrites, and it's amazing. My only regret is not having ponied up for this amazing program sooner. So, whether you plot everything out first or plunge in, write and restructure later, Scrivner works. Your way.
00:00:44
Speaker
How does a bastard orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, drop in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence that provinces while grow up to be a hero and a Scot? Yeah, I learned that.
00:01:00
Speaker
Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. That's right, CNFers.
Podcast Purpose and Guest Introduction
00:01:04
Speaker
It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan Romero. Hey, thanks for carving out some of your valuable time to listen to this humble little show. We've got Roy Peter Clark, America's writing coach, returning to the podcast to talk about his latest book on the craft.
00:01:29
Speaker
called Murder Your Darlings. And other gentle writing advice from Aristotle to Zinzer. It is published by Little Brown. He's at Roy Peter Clarke on Twitter. This was a fun one. Lots of amazing stuff to get to. I know you're gonna be able to run with, be inspired, and just hit, you know, you're just gonna get into it. You're gonna, you're gonna take off those headphones eventually. You're just gonna plug, you're gonna lock into whatever trip you got going on.
00:01:59
Speaker
Hey, keep the conversation going on Twitter, at CNF Podnapper and Little Mayor, would you?
Engagement Encouragement
00:02:05
Speaker
This show only grows if it deserves it. And if you think it deserves more attention, please share it with your network. You know, while you're at it, consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcast.
00:02:18
Speaker
Someone deleted their amazing five-star review. I don't know why. Maybe because I read it on the air. I don't know. So in a way, it's archived on the air, but it got deleted from Apple Podcasts, so we need to get it back. And then some. We're so close to 100. Let's get there.
00:02:32
Speaker
Also, be sure to head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly newsletter, where I share reading recommendations, tactical offerings, and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. I also raffle off books to whoever's on the list, so long as you're on the list. And don't unsubscribe. You're effectively entered in a raffle every single month. Pretty cool. First of the month, no spam, so far as I can tell, can't beat it.
00:03:05
Speaker
Oh boy, we're getting down to it, CNF-ers.
Personal Reflections
00:03:08
Speaker
I turned 40 on July 1st. It's coming up. And I'm not so much concerned about the numbers I am about the progress or lack thereof I've made in those 40 years.
00:03:21
Speaker
I mean, physically, I feel about the same as I did when I was 25, no joke. I'm every bit as strong, even stronger, by and large. I still own clothes that fit me from when I was in college, and I still wear now. I mean, say what you will about my style and how that's changed in 20 years, but that stuff still fits me. That's something.
00:03:43
Speaker
Sure, it's harder to lose some of the poundage on account of a slowing metabolism and a voracious appetite for the finest IPAs this land offers, but I'm lucky in that regard. Can't complain. A lot of people got it a whole lot worse than I do. But career-wise, I don't know, it's not so good.
00:04:04
Speaker
If my 25 year old self saw me now, he'd probably blow his brains out. I'm tired of not making any money. I know money isn't the be all and end all, but we need it, right? I'm ramping up the freelancing game to write for some brands, brand magazines, companies.
00:04:23
Speaker
And also doing some podcasts producing in the content marketing vein. It's just a different kind of shingle. But also doing, of course, the journalistic features I've come to love, the stuff that I got into this thing, this racket in the first place. A lot of the things that the people who come on this show do, the people I love to celebrate, the stuff I want to do, the stuff I unpack with them.
00:04:46
Speaker
That's the stuff that really charges my battery, so to speak. In any case, that's happening. I want to get this podcast growing. I think it needs to be in front of more people. I'm so grateful for the audience, but you know how it is. We always want a little bit more.
00:05:08
Speaker
Anyway, Patreon should be coming along so it can pass the collection dish. Probably like an entry level thing would be like $4 a month, a dollar an episode. That's something. I think a lot of you might be into that kind of thing. So, this is the shape of a writing career, right? I'll have more to say about this next week. It'll be a little more germane, but for now,
00:05:32
Speaker
just to let you know where I'm at. I'm ramping up, ramping up that game to take some agency. In this climate, ironically, freelancing feels more stable and certainly more nimble. In any case, that's where I'm at. I squandered my 30s, that great decade where the chess pieces are supposed to move in the right direction. In any case, I screwed the bishop and what are you gonna do?
Discussion on Writing Process
00:06:00
Speaker
So like I said, Roy Peter Clark is here.
00:06:03
Speaker
This is a fun one. He came on way back in early run of the show, and it's great to have him back to talk all kinds of shop, talk about his new book, Murder Your Darlings. He reads a sonnet he wrote, how he's handling the pandemic, how he's going about just how everything he's reading or writing is a workshop of some kind, which is a really great way to approach.
00:06:33
Speaker
this line of work. So in any case, I'm gonna get out of the way right now. Enjoy this episode brought to you by Scrivener. And let's go here what Roy Peter Clark has to say. Let's give him a CNF and welcome, hoo! Surprisingly productive as a writer.
00:07:02
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sitting here at my dining room table, which my wife says I can use every day except for Thanksgiving.
00:07:14
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Oh, that's great. I was gonna ask you, what is it like being a writer? Is it helping your productivity? Because I know there are some who are struggling with productivity, even before the more social unrest hit us the last couple of weeks. The pandemic was putting people in a weird funk, some people being really productive, like yourself and others, not knowing where to point their creative energies.
00:07:41
Speaker
Yeah, aside from those times when I'm diligently writing a book, I would say this has been one of the most productive periods of my professional life. And I think it's a number of different things, but it's the energy of the news.
00:08:05
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And it is the forceful requirement to pay closer attention to things than you have in the past. Here in Florida, the sky looks bluer. The sea looks clearer. The animal life is doing weird and interesting things, including especially the birds.
00:08:36
Speaker
And people are behaving in ways, good and bad, that really, I think if you're a writer, it just calls to you to pay closer attention and to try to make some meaning out of everything. So I've been writing for different audiences, I've been writing for
00:09:03
Speaker
for newspapers, for websites. I've been writing personal essays. I've been writing analysis of other stories. And I even wrote a poem that got published in the local press about our circumstances. Since it's short, I wonder if I could read it to you. Oh, yeah, I'd love it. Go for it.
00:09:28
Speaker
So this is a sonnet 14-line poem in the Shakespearean style, if I may be so bold to say. And it's called, House Arrest, St. Pete, Florida, April, 2020.
00:09:55
Speaker
I feel the pounding beat of house arrest, a sentence that we serve till who knows when. We do what all our wardens think is best and face a viral ban we hope to bend. We're stuck at home except to take a walk where seagulls croak their freedom overhead. My wife and I, we talk and talk and talk.
00:10:22
Speaker
I think divorce, but that joke's left unsaid. We live in times as fickle as the moon who grins at us with all his pals, the stars. What month is this? Now April, May, or June? My God, please let them open up the bars. Pandemics are not so, so bad, I think. I hug my toilet paper, pour a drink.
00:10:52
Speaker
So when I showed that to my wife, she says, she rolled her eyes, when she saw the word divorce. But Peter Meinke, who is a friend and also happens to be the poet laureate of the state of Florida, lives here in St. Pete, had a good laugh. And so that was enough for her. She understood that
00:11:20
Speaker
we were playing. So that's my sonnet and I'm sticking to it. Well, it's great to inject some sort of play into all of the writing that you're doing, no doubt. I'm sure some is much more sober analytical, like you were saying, but then to have something of this nature where it is a different kind of sandbox for you to just stretch a different kind of muscle, but also inject some levity into what's a pretty heavy time.
00:11:47
Speaker
Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about what makes us react with a kind of a higher degree of interest and energy to a piece of writing. And I've been playing with all the usual words, words like
00:12:09
Speaker
news, words like tone, voice, words like theme. And none of them seem adequate to this sort of feeling that I have.
Exploring 'Spirit' in Writing
00:12:27
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And so I've sort of experimentally working right now
00:12:34
Speaker
with another word, which is not usually used in this context. And the word I've chosen is like spirit. So a certain piece of writing has spirit. Well, what does that mean? Let's look at the word spirit for a minute, right? It's related to the word spiritual, related to in Christian theology,
00:13:03
Speaker
The Holy Spirit is one of the persons of the Trinity, but the word comes from the Latin word to breathe. So it's related to inspire, you know, expiration, inspiration. It's all about helping you take a breath, making you take a breath.
00:13:30
Speaker
and filling you with something that you need to live. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard experts in recent days, recent weeks, talking about the importance of breathing, of taking a moment, taking a breath,
00:14:00
Speaker
Inhaling, exhaling. It's part of yoga. It's part of normal exercise. It fights anxiety and the symptoms that come with it. So I think something could be serious. Something could be very, very serious, as I'll describe in a second, and have spirit.
00:14:29
Speaker
but it also could be quite lighthearted and have spirit. So it's not, we're not talking about tone and we're not, the same writer can imbue stories with completely different tones for different audiences with this particular feeling I'm talking about. It came about just a few days ago during the height of the protests
00:14:57
Speaker
when a former student of mine, Kelly Benham French, who's now a teacher at Indiana University, sent me a story written by one of her students. Her name is, the student's name is Mary Claire Malloy. And Kelly said, you've got to read this. You have to read this, this is amazing. And so she's been sending out her students
00:15:26
Speaker
to cover various aspects of the current circumstances. And in this particular case, it was protests in Indianapolis. So Mary Claire went out with a seasoned veteran photojournalist. Mary Claire is a 19-year-old freshman.
00:15:56
Speaker
And she came upon, they decided to look at the scene of where there had been a shooting, a killing the night before. And when they got there, it was daytime, they found a man with a mask on, on his hands and knees.
00:16:19
Speaker
scrubbing blood off of the sidewalk, which had been the site of, not only the site of the shooting, but where a man had died the night before. Now the man who was scrubbing didn't know who had been shot, what the circumstances were, but thought it was just disrespectful to leave this
00:16:50
Speaker
Bloodstain unattended so went out you bought stuff brought it back scrubbed and was really really hard to get the stain off and it was getting on his His clothes and his shoes later that day He would learn That the man who had been killed was a friend of his oh no So
00:17:19
Speaker
He talks about the friend. He goes out. He leaves the spot. He looks down. There's less of a stain, but the stain is still there. It's very stubborn. And he's determined to come back the next day and do his best to try to finish the job. Well, this was an amazing story. And I'm just describing
00:17:48
Speaker
the kind of plot of the story and not its wonderful sort of language and details. And this is a young woman of tremendous promise. And I wrote a long analysis of some of the things that I thought she had done particularly well. But I said that
00:18:17
Speaker
What I get most from it is this feeling, this kind of spirit of consolation. What could be a more gruesome self-imposed responsibility than cleaning up the blood of a friend? And yet, somehow, I come out of it
00:18:43
Speaker
being comforted and even hopeful that something good might come of it. I compared the story to a famous story, Brendan, from what must have been 1963. It's kind of an iconic story in American journalism studies where Jimmy Breslin, the New York columnist, went down
00:19:11
Speaker
to Washington DC to cover the burial of the assassinated president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And rather than watch all the famous people, he wound up finding and interviewing the man who dug the president's grave. I said, you know, I said the very different circumstances
00:19:38
Speaker
But somehow in this column by this young woman, I feel the same spirit of consolation that I felt the first time I read the Breslin column. And I thought that was kind of a bold claim. And then last night, I got a message, an email message from Kevin Breslin, the son of the late Jimmy Breslin.
00:20:08
Speaker
sending along a note of appreciation and congratulations to Mary
Learning from Stories as Workshops
00:20:19
Speaker
Claire for having written such a story in the spirit of his father. So, boy, that was some day's work. And it fills me with hope as a writer and a teacher.
00:20:38
Speaker
that personally, I'm learning something new about the craft every single day, including from a 19-year-old freshman at Indiana University.
00:20:50
Speaker
Well, it's amazing how those kinds of sketches really illustrate the true humanity of it. It's gate to least profiling the tuba player at the back of the parade. It's finding these real touchstones that really connect us to the people around us, not these highfalutin' celebrity types.
00:21:11
Speaker
this poor man scrubbing the blood of a friend that he doesn't even know it's his friend's blood quite yet. And then, of course, the famous gravedigger piece. These are the pieces that resonate for generations, really. Yeah. So one of the things I mentioned, I'm the writer and teacher I am.
00:21:38
Speaker
because of the teachers I had. And my sophomore year in high school, I went to a kind of an elite Catholic boys' school on Long Island, not far from the great Gatsby territory, if I may say so. And I had a Catholic priest named Bernard Horst. And boy, looking back,
00:22:05
Speaker
His lessons have stuck with me, and one of his lessons was, I think we were reading poetry of Robert Frost, and he said, men, since we were all boys, men, sometimes a wall is not just a wall. Boy, that's true in America these days, isn't it? Right.
00:22:37
Speaker
Sometimes a wall is a symbol. Okay, so that was lesson number one. But lesson number two was, men, just remember this when you're looking for symbols. He wrote this on the board because you have to. A symbol, S-Y-M-B-O-L.
00:23:03
Speaker
need not be a symbol, C-Y-M-B-A-L. In other words, you don't have to crash it over the reader's heads. It can be subtle, almost imperceptible, but underlying something more important. And here's a story
00:23:30
Speaker
about a stubborn stain. That's a phrase from the story in the headline. That this man is on his knees trying to scrub away and it's just, it's sticking to him and he's working as hard as he can and it just won't go away. It made me think of how many times the word
00:24:00
Speaker
stain is used to describe the racial history of the United States of America, starting with slavery in 1619, right? Like this is the stain, this is the stubborn stain on the soul of America. She doesn't have to say that, right? But the story kind of shows that in
00:24:29
Speaker
in its own very, very wise and careful way. Yeah, and the thing, not that I ever, I haven't read this piece yet and I can't wait to read it.
00:24:44
Speaker
but also it's like maybe in early drafts, maybe it was more explicitly stated, but it's one of those things where over the course of rewrites and with some, maybe some help from a key reader or a mentor or a teacher can say, you know what, like the mere act of you just saying what he's trying to scrub off the sidewalk, like that is the S-Y-M-B-O-L symbol and not the other kind of symbol. And those are the things that reveal themselves through rewriting.
00:25:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's very true. I remember I had a lovely dog, a golden retriever who was great with my three daughters. His name was Lance. He got sick and he died under very sad circumstances. We have a 40-foot tree that I'm looking at right now in my front window that was planted in his honor. But I wrote this essay about him years ago.
00:25:42
Speaker
And the last sentence was, I miss my dog. And my friend, Tom French read it and said to me, Roy, we know you miss your dog. You proved it in 2000 words.
00:26:10
Speaker
You showed us how many ways that you miss your dog. You don't need to say it. So that's always right. That's a classic issue for writers. Show. Do I show? Do I tell? Or like a kindergarten student, do I show and tell? For me, it always depends on my mission and purpose, right? What I hope the reader will take away from the piece.
00:26:41
Speaker
Yeah, and you're someone who really likes a really short, punchy sentence. And as you said, I miss my dog. I can picture you in a book that you're writing. We're like, here's four words. They all have one syllable. Dog is right before the full stop. And in a sense, too, it echoes to me just having read and then seen the movie of Shawshank Redemption of red narrating when Andy finally gets out. And he says, I guess I just miss my friend.
00:27:11
Speaker
And it's one of those things where it's kind of the same sentences there, but they, uh, one stayed in the movie and then Tom, you know, it was just like, Hey, Roy, your 2000 word essay basically summed up that final sentence. So it's so contextualized, but it's, it's great to play those off each other and in a craft sense. Yeah, this, uh, it's, it's really interesting. It's just something that, how should I say this?
00:27:40
Speaker
You learn something at a particular time in your life and career, but you know it abstractly or you know it from a distance. And then there comes a moment when you need something and maybe there's this ghost, ghostly recollection of past, which can be revitalized and can be brought to the present and that
00:28:09
Speaker
That notion that the short sentence, that good writers often say their most powerful thought for their shortest sentence. The last time I was in the, I wrote something from the New York Times, which was several years ago, it was about that point.
00:28:37
Speaker
that the short sentence rings with the kind of gospel truth. And I learned that from a conversation years and years ago between William F. Buckley Jr., a conservative editor and commentator who had a PBS show firing line and was interviewing Tom Wolfe, the author. And Tom Wolfe
00:29:08
Speaker
was talking about how writers can lie and how writers lie. And one of the ways they lie is with a short sentence because they can speak untruths and make it sound like the truth. Writers who write with a good purpose, a noble purpose for the public good use that same strategy
00:29:36
Speaker
to kind of bring home an idea or thought or lesson. The New York Times, was it about two or three weeks ago? The New York Times front page on Sunday had 1,000 names of those who had died from the coronavirus, representing the number 100,000 who had died nationally.
00:30:04
Speaker
And it was a very dramatic chronicle of the dead. And it was accompanied by a column by Dan Barry, who is one of the best writers. He's one of the, he's a goat. He's one of the greatest of all time to write for that newspaper. And he was commenting on
00:30:31
Speaker
the loss of ritual and ceremony during the pandemic, right? Simple things like parties, birthday parties, but also graduations, right? Weddings put on hold, but most powerfully, the inability to mourn the dead. And that
00:31:00
Speaker
This front page was an attempt to compensate in some small way for that loss. And there's a point in the column where he writes, even the dead have to wait. Now I'm looking at my arms right now and they are
00:31:27
Speaker
Haripolating, which is the fancy word for those bumps that you get when something chills you. So yeah, I mean, that's the power of the short sentence when it's used well.
00:31:44
Speaker
I love in your latest book, too, where you write actually in the afterward about, you know, of course, like Don Murray is one of your writing mentors and peers who always comes up in your books. And I love that you write that this book took me higher and deeper in the craft than I thought possible. It's interesting because
00:32:09
Speaker
I devote, my first book in this sequence, about 12 years old now, was written and dedicated to Don Murray and his wife Minnie Mae, who were real, they were the godparents of thousands of writers at all different levels of development.
00:32:35
Speaker
And so I dedicated it to him and I sent him a copy of like a review copy. And he passed away just before the book was published. But his influence, his fingerprints, if you will, are all over. And one of the things that, one of the words
00:33:02
Speaker
he liked to use most was surprise. He thought good writing was all about the surprise. The thing that you didn't know when you first sat down to write, but came to you along the way. The word, the phrase, the idea, the joke,
00:33:32
Speaker
the conflict, the insight, whatever it is. The other thing he would say is, and I think we both built our careers as writing coaches around this idea that every story is a workshop. Every story I read is a workshop for me because I read with my x-ray glasses on.
00:34:03
Speaker
I want to see things in a text that I can use. And every story that I write is a workshop because it advances my knowledge of the craft, of language, of storytelling, of audience, of meaning, of my relationship to
00:34:34
Speaker
people who are closest to me in my life, but also my relationship to the public. And that relationship to the public is increasingly important right now when there's so much at stake in the world with people living with such danger and uncertainty.
00:35:00
Speaker
And yeah, and you mentioned surprise and of course that relationship with the public. And in what other ways might you say that as you write this book took you higher and deeper into the craft than I thought possible? And what other ways did this murder your darlings take you to those places that after all these years, you're still finding new things and new things to learn and new things in your own writing? You know, so...
00:35:28
Speaker
They're about, this is a loose number I'm about to offer. They're about 50 writing books. They're 32 chapters in Word of Your Darlings. So the title is Word of Your Darlings and Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinzer. And I have to say that as I was gathering these books,
00:35:55
Speaker
to write about, there came a moment when I looked down on my left and there was a copy of Aristotle's poetics. And I looked to my right and there was a copy of Bill Zinser's book on writing well. And it kind of blew my mind. I said, oh my God.
00:36:22
Speaker
I've got A to Z right here. But the power of that or the value of that was that it gave me not just alphabetically, it not only fulfilled the alphabetical trope,
00:36:41
Speaker
but it gave me almost 3,000 years of literary history. That was a wonderful, I didn't plan that or anticipate it, but it became a wonderful surprise. Now some of the books, I would say most of them are books that I was very familiar with and used over many years as a writer and a teacher.
00:37:08
Speaker
And it was pretty easy for me to harvest from a particular book a very practical lesson that I could communicate to readers. Say, here's, for me, this was the most interesting or important or useful lesson. Here's how I used it, and now I'm passing it on to you.
Influences and Inspirations
00:37:37
Speaker
But in some ways, some of the books were brand new. They may have been written a while ago, but I just recently found them. There's an example I'm going to share with you. It's chapter 18 in a section called Storytelling and Character.
00:38:06
Speaker
The book is called Fables of Identity, Studies in Poetic Mythology. And it was written by a literary critic I've known about since graduate school. His name was Northrop Frye. He wrote a famous book called Anatomy of Criticism, a Canadian scholar. And it just so happened
00:38:37
Speaker
that two small colleges closed and their small libraries were sent here to St. Petersburg to a bookstore in a mall called 321 Books, which I visit quite a lot.
00:39:03
Speaker
Hardcover books $3 softcover $2 children's book $1 3 2 1 books so I bought a large stack of books on writing and journalism from these Abandoned library books and one of them was this book and it's a study of various famous literary figures like James Joyce and
00:39:31
Speaker
in Milton, but the introduction was absolutely remarkable. And so here's, I'm going to read just a little bit of what I get out of it. So the title is, Write for Sequence, Then for Theme. Readers want to know what happens next and also what it all means. And then at the top is a little, of each chapter there's what I call a toolbox.
00:40:01
Speaker
which tries to, in a paragraph, distill the meaning of the chapter. Toolbox, for as long as there have been stories, authors have played with time, and so can you. We say that life is experienced in chronological order, but that does not take into account dreams or memories. Stories have the power to distract us from daily life and plunge us into narrative time.
00:40:32
Speaker
Our experience of storytime differs with each reading. Our first reading is usually sequential, a compulsive drive to discover what happens next. At some point, our memory takes control. What happens next is replaced by what does it all mean? Those questions give writers a dual responsibility.
00:40:57
Speaker
We attend to both what happens and what it means. We move from scenic action to matters of theme, myth, and archetype. Okay? So, do you know the James Bond movie with Sean Connery Goldfinger?
00:41:19
Speaker
Yes. Okay. So it was the first James Bond movie I ever saw. It was the third that was made, but it was the first that my dad brought me there. And I really got to thank my dad for doing it because, you know,
00:41:37
Speaker
in a conservative Catholic family. It was a little racy, should we say, right? And more than typical violence and more than typical kind of sexuality. And how should I say this? I can think of a dozen moments in the movie, which I remember.
00:42:07
Speaker
But I really can't tell you what order, I can't reconstruct for you the order in which they appear, that is the plot or the sequence. But what I can render with great enthusiasm is, man, it was so freaking cool. It was real. This guy, this guy is so,
00:42:36
Speaker
So cool for a hero of a certain age. So I think that's, as a writer, I have to really think about that, about how I'm going to render the sequence of events to create a vicarious experience for readers, but also how I'm going to imbue those things with meaning. And we have lots of different words
00:43:06
Speaker
Well, in journalism, we have words like, what's the news here? What's the news peg? What's the lead? What's the headline? There's a technical term called the nut graph. You know, kind of sometimes if you begin a story with an anecdote in the third or fourth paragraph, you kind of explain to readers why you're reading this little bit of story. But there's also,
00:43:35
Speaker
in other disciplines, there's words like theme, there's word like thesis. So those things are, I think all of those belong in a big box in my writing garage that has the word focus on the front of it.
00:44:03
Speaker
For Murray, focus was the central act. What is the story about? No, what is the story really about? What are the several important things that the story is about that all attach themselves to one key idea or thought or expression or insight? So, you know, it was wonderful.
00:44:31
Speaker
to read an old book that I didn't know existed that I bought for three dollars and that led me down
00:44:41
Speaker
a really useful path. What do you think becomes the challenge for a writer of any ilk, but probably someone who's more on the novice spectrum? So a writer who might get sucked into the vortex of writing books, but never actually does any writing. I'm sure you've run into these people. What would you say to somebody of that ilk?
Early Career and Advice
00:45:04
Speaker
So I was once that person.
00:45:11
Speaker
I remember, I was a writing coach, a young writing coach in 1977 when I arrived at the St. Petersburg Times, which is now called the Tampa Bay Times. And I was hired by Gene Patterson, who was a great American editor in the South and a champion of civil rights, by the way, and a great
00:45:40
Speaker
writer himself, maybe arguably the best writer among newspaper editors of the 20th century. Hard to find somebody better. He was my hero in many ways. When he was in Atlanta, editor of the Constitution from 1960 to 1968, and think about what was happening in Atlanta during those years and in the South.
00:46:08
Speaker
the height of the Civil Rights, the classic period of the Civil Rights Movement. And Gene wrote an 800-word signed daily column every day for nine years. Wow. I said, by the way, I published with a southern historian, Ray Arsenault,
00:46:34
Speaker
Great collection of his work called the changing south of Jean Patterson journalism and civil rights 1960 1968 so I read 3258 of his columns in sequence and I assumed which which good journalists shouldn't do that He would have written two columns on Thursday and two on Friday
00:47:03
Speaker
So to get the weekend off, he'd go fishing. He told me, no. He said, if I did that, the second columns would always be too weak. He said, I have, I will tell you, he says, I've written many a column on a Saturday or Sunday in a fishing boat with a line in the water. So he brought me into journalism and I wrote a column.
00:47:34
Speaker
on my 30th birthday saying things I'd like to do by the time I was 40. And one of them was write one good book. And I got my chance after a three year experience in which I became a volunteer writing teacher.
00:48:02
Speaker
in my daughter's elementary school. So I taught fifth graders to write using the strategies of journalism for three years. After every class, I would scribble for about 10 or 15 minutes into a little journal. And I accumulated those. And I didn't know how to begin, but at least I had my journal entries
00:48:30
Speaker
And so on a manual typewriter, children who are listening ask your parents what that is. It's that device that makes that wonderful clickety-clack sound. I opened up my journals and I typed them. I re-typed them to learn what was there and everything like that. So I wound up with 200 or 220
00:48:58
Speaker
pages of text, but definitely not a book. I was fortunate enough to be reading a collection of stories published in a book written by the New Yorker author, John McPhee, who is still writing now well into his 80s. In fact, I have a chapter that's devoted to him in the book, Murder Your Darlings.
00:49:26
Speaker
this collection of the John McPhee reader was compiled and edited by a man who became a friend named Bill Howarth. And what Bill does brilliantly is not just introduce these individual works to the reader in the introduction,
00:49:54
Speaker
but he describes Howard's, I'm sorry, he describes McPhee's process in detail. It's a fairly elaborate process, has about 10 steps. It involves index cards and files and decisions that you make at different points of the process.
00:50:21
Speaker
And I said to myself, hey, what do I have to lose? And I followed that process every step of the way, a kind of meta recipe for how to write a book, which is one of the reasons I decided that that book, the John McPhee Reader, along with a new book that he wrote about writing called The Fourth Draft, that was gonna be in Murder Your Darlings.
00:50:50
Speaker
And I have to say that all the books I've written since then, you'll find the trail of that original process. To kind of encourage young writers or inexperienced writers who may want to write a book, I offer two pieces of advice. The first comes from
00:51:20
Speaker
Again, Donald Murray, who said to me, Roy, a page a day equals a book a year. No, that can't be possible. Yeah, we'll do the math, right? A book is like 60, 70, 80,000 words, right? So if you're doing a page a day, you're doing a thousand words every four days.
00:51:47
Speaker
So yeah, a page a day equals a book a year. So I like that concept. I built it into a lot of my work. I says, I'm not going to run a marathon for you 26 miles unless you give me 52 days. If I can do a half mile a day, I'm your boy.
00:52:14
Speaker
So the idea of taking a big project and breaking it up into its smallest parts. The other thing I encourage all writers is to sacrifice for a while the idea of a first draft and substitute for it something, I didn't make up this term and I wish I could attribute it to the person who did.
00:52:44
Speaker
But think about writing a zero draft. A zero draft requires you to lower your standards at the beginning of the process. And that's what helps you overcome any writer's block or any resistance that you might feel. I tend to write my zero draft. Sometimes I type them in a computer, but very often they're on a yellow pad or in a spiral notebook.
00:53:14
Speaker
They're fast scribblings, which creates a positive momentum that I can build into a daily habit.
00:53:30
Speaker
Yeah, I love that idea of the zero draft lowering those standards and everything. And that gets to a question I wanted to ask you about, like the advice you might have for someone who has trouble starting. It's definitely lower those standards. I think something that piggybacks off that well for people too is those who might have trouble finishing books or manuscripts as well. So what would you say to someone who has trouble actually finishing this and not moving on to something that's a shiny new object?
00:53:59
Speaker
Once again, I can call upon my own experience to, I think to offer a strategy or two.
Concepts and Techniques in Writing
00:54:08
Speaker
And it gets back to murdering your darlings. All right, so let's go to the origin of that term. It's one of the more well-known sayings about writing among us word nerds. And it's attributed
00:54:28
Speaker
to a British scholar and author who was knighted about 100 years ago named Sir Arthur Quiller couch. Great name. Sounds like it's out of Harry Potter.
00:54:47
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And my friend says, my good friend Don Fry says, Roy says, I think it's actually Quiller Cooch. Which is silly and almost naughty. But his students at Cambridge called him Q, which, not to be confused with the quarter master Q in the James Bond movie. OK.
00:55:16
Speaker
His advice in a book he wrote was, look, student men, I think he was teaching men, he said, if you think of a very clever term of art, by all means, write it down. Don't hold back, write it down. But essentially, before you send it off to a publisher, take another look.
00:55:45
Speaker
Essentially, make sure that it contributes to your focus and is not just merely decoration. You have to be willing to murder your darlings. All right, so in my chapter, I tell the story of a wonderful honor I received.
00:56:12
Speaker
in 2017. I get a phone call from the president of Providence College, my alma mater, Dominican priest, Father Shanley, says he wants to bestow upon me an honorary degree, and he wants me to be the commencement speaker. And he wants me to be the commencement speaker for the college's centennial celebration.
00:56:42
Speaker
in a stadium in Providence, Rhode Island, the Dunkin' Donuts Center, known as the Dunk basketball arena, where I would be speaking in front of a mere 10,000 people. So this was the professional honor of my life.
00:57:09
Speaker
although I later found out that I wasn't the first choice, that the first choice was the Hamilton guy. There you go. What's Lin-Manuel Miranda? Yeah, Lin-Manuel Miranda. There you go.
00:57:29
Speaker
How does the bastard orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, drop in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence, the poverty squad grow up to be here when Scott, yeah, I learned that. So listen, I don't mind, I don't mind being a, what do you call that? Who's the actor who steps in the understudy? So I had three months.
00:58:00
Speaker
And I'm a putter inner, not a taker outer, which means that if I think of it, if it crosses my mind, if it bumps into me, I'm going to write it down. So I wound up with 8,000 words.
00:58:27
Speaker
Now, for a first draft, 8,000 words would take about two and a half hours to deliver. So I've got about 15 to 18 minutes at the end of a ceremony where people have already buttoned numb for sitting all that time. So basically the question is like, how do you get from 8,000 words to 2,000 words?
00:58:57
Speaker
You know you can't do it. You can't do it by word editing. You can't, there's a lot of words in an 8,000 word draft that don't do any work, but even if you get rid of all of them, I still have 4,000 words. So again, what do I do? Depend upon
00:59:23
Speaker
this idea of murdering your darlings, also hearing in my ear Don Murray saying essentially brevity comes from selection and not compression. So you can't squeeze that text down. You gotta lift things out of it. And I happen to have a series of anecdotes
00:59:48
Speaker
about my mother, who died at the age of 96, was a very colorful, very colorful, interesting personality, who loved Providence College, and loved my college roommates, who were there to hear me give the speech. I had this big emotional thing, and I just, so there were, in the original version, there were eight anecdotes about my mom. All of them,
01:00:17
Speaker
that I could put in a comedy routine that would be very entertaining. But as I started to edit, to select, eight anecdotes became five, five became three, three became one, one became zero. And as I say, let's say I want to find this in the first chapter of the book.
01:00:47
Speaker
My brothers, Ted and Vincent, offered their opinions on what mom would have thought about being elbowed out of the final draft of my speech. I should mention that Shirley Clark was very theatrical and wrote and directed many community variety shows. She may never have murdered a darling, but our best guess is that in some corner of heaven, she has Sir Arthur Quiller couch in a chokehold.
01:01:17
Speaker
so Yeah, that's and by the way that Murder your darlings, which I think is now about an 80,000 word text was a 130,000 word Manuscript Wow, so this is a pattern now Murder your darlings is is much too severe. You don't murder your darlings you
01:01:46
Speaker
I don't know, put them in daycare. Right. Just put them in a mason jar in the cupboard. It's like, well. No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. A comfortable space for them, you know, until you need them. So they're useful. So they grow up on the farm and can do some chores. They're dried beans. They just need a little soaking, maybe sometime in the future. Exactly. You know.
01:02:13
Speaker
And the good part of that from a book writing point of view, if you've got, let's say, a dozen extra chapters, you can generate individual essays in all different kinds of venues, which will help over the long run to support the book.
01:02:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think as we wind down here, Roy, just to be mindful of your time, of course, and as it kind of take this plane and lower the altitude. I love this one line from the book, and this might be a great place for people to jump off and run with it. Given that a lot of people have a bit more time or certainly less distraction in terms of what we're able to do given socially distancing and so forth, you write at one point in the book, of course not.
01:02:59
Speaker
referencing what we're going through, of course, but you say, like, I pass it along to you. Go ahead, write your book. Welcome to the club. So maybe now's a good time for anybody to take all these wonderful lessons that you've given us and put in our hands to go write that book, Rise the Tides, and be in this community of book writers. Brendan, thank you for sharing that because it captures very much the spirit, getting back to that word.
01:03:26
Speaker
which I didn't have until a few days ago, the spirit of what I think I was trying to accomplish.
01:03:34
Speaker
Perfect. That's awesome. Roy, thank you so much for the work, of course. I have so many other things I would always love to unpack with you. So maybe we can do this again when the paperback rolls out and we can unpack and tease out a few more of the lessons in this book that are just so valuable to everyone in the community of this podcast and certainly the community of writers at large. So yeah, thanks so much for the work and thanks for coming on the show again. Thank you, Brendan. You call me anytime, brother.
01:04:11
Speaker
Well, that was fun. I mean, it usually is, right? But damn, that was a good one. That was fun. Thanks to Roy for the time and the insights. And of course, thanks to Scrivener for the support. Make sure you're all subscribed up to the show and pinging the show, following the show on social media at cnfbot across all across the big three.
01:04:32
Speaker
and let me know what connected with you. Let's have that conversation that extends beyond just this podcast. Social media is lousy for promoting by and large, but it's nice for that interaction. I'd love to hear what's connecting with you. And maybe in some small way, I can help you in your writing journey. Of course, email me, creative, nonfiction podcast at gmail.com or Brendan at Brendan Amero.com. Either one, your choice. And we'll start a dialogue.
01:05:02
Speaker
That's gonna do it seeing efforts. I might be approaching a new decade in life in a couple weeks But one thing remains the same if you can do interview. See ya