Andy shares what has helped him write better

I’d like to share a couple of simple practices that I think have benefited me as a budding writer.

The first practice is quite straightforward: keeping a journal. Anne Lamott (left) recommends doing so in her book about writing “Bird by Bird.” If you’re stuck for a topic, she advises that you try writing about something from your childhood, like family vacations.

I have tried to follow her advice. For the past six months, I have kept a journal, in which I make entries two or three times a week. I write about whatever comes into my mind. I haven’t written about vacations, but I have written about many other childhood experiences, as well as about many adult ones.

It is a good thing to get into the habit of writing this way. Like many other activities, writing is something that you improve at the more you do it. I find it easier to get started writing now than I did. Many times, my writing goes nowhere. But sometimes, it turns into a nice little story. One of my journal entries gave me the start for my personal essay for our writing course (parts of which were read in class Tuesday). Other entries have the potential for being turned into essays as well.

The second practice is to read an essay by a good writer and try to analyze what makes it a good essay. I got the idea from “The Situation and the Story,” by Vivian Gornick. Gornick (far left) takes personal essays and memoirs by different writers and analyzes their style and structure.

It turned out that another book I had, “The Art of the Personal Essay,” edited by Philip Lopate, contained most of the essays Gornick analyzed. So I decided to read each of the essays Gornick analyzed and try to do my own analysis before I read hers. For example, I read James Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son,” and was struck by his combination of very concrete descriptions of what he saw as the effects of racism on his father with his discussion of racism in general. (Roy Peter Clark refers to this as the juxtaposition of the concrete and the abstract in this manner as working the “ladder of abstraction.”)

I’d also like to repeat a recommendation I made earlier in the course: “Follow the Story” by James B. Stewart (below). Stewart, a former Wall Street Journal editor, has written several successful nonfiction books, including “Den of Thieves,” about Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and other 1980s Wall Street crooks, and “Blood Sport” about the Whitewater scandal. He devotes chapters to the following subjects:

· Curiosity · Ideas · Proposals
· Gathering Information
· Leads · Transitions · Structure
· Description
· Dialogue · Anecdotes · Humor and Pathos
· Endings

He gives detailed examples of his approach to each of these areas. In the chapter on dialogue, Stewart discusses the dilemma faced by a nonfiction writer in deciding how far he or she can go to create a compelling but accurate reconstruction of a conversation – something we discussed on our class last week.

-- Andy Seiple