Scott Russell Sanders on Essays

"For me the writing of a personal essay is like finding my way through a forest without being quite sure what game I am chasing, what landmark I am seeking. I sniff down one path until some heady smell tugs me in a new direction, and then off I go, dodging and circling, lured on by the calls of unfamiliar birds, puzzled by the tracks of strange beasts, leaping from stone to stone across rivers, barking up one tree after another. The pleasure in writing an essay--and, when the writing is any good, the pleasure of reading it--comes from this dodging and leaping, this movement of the mind.
"It must not be idle movement, however, if the essay is to hold up; it must yield a pattern, draw a map of experience, be driven by deep concerns. The surface of a river is alive with lights and reflections, the breaking of foam over rocks, but underneath that dazzle it is going somewhere. We should expect as much from an essay: the shimmer and play of mind on the surface and in the depths a strong current." - Scott Russell Sanders in Introduction to The Paradise of Bombs

John McPhee on Leads

Here are 2 brief articles on writing leads by John McPhee.

Story Lab

Writing a Strong Lead is Half the Battle

-Steve Griggs

Passion, death, and great writing

By JoAnne Tompkins

A while back I was listening to NPR and heard an interview of Gene Weingarten, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for Feature Writing. He spoke with such clarity about the basis of great writing that I immediately purchased The Fiddler on the Subway, a collection of his feature stories. In the introduction, Weingarten tells of being a young reporter spending weeks hanging out at a seriously mismanaged sewage treatment plant, excited and disgusted by what he was seeing. Yet when he turned in his piece, his editor was quietly contemptuous, accusing him of losing his passion. He went home and got drunk.

That night, I’d learned two lessons. The first is that without passion, you have nothing. The second is that the most important words in your story are the ones you didn’t write. They’re the ones you imply—the one that you cause to pop into the reader’s mind and get her to think. “Aha!” That’s how you transform her from a passive observer into an ally.

Weingarten quit writing for many years, choosing instead to earn a steady income as an editor. In an effort to draw the best work from his writers, he developed an approach he called “the Talk.”

The script seldom varied: The writer would tell me what his story was going to be about, and then I would explain to him, patiently, why he was wrong. Your story, I would say, is going to be about the meaning of life. . . .

. . . A feature story will never be better than pedestrian unless it can use the subject at hand to address a more universal truth. And, as it happens, big truths usually contain somewhere within them the specter of death. Death informs virtually all of literature. We lust and love so we can feel more alive. We build families so we can be immortal. We crave fame, and do good works, so both will outlive us. The Gods of our choosing promise eternity.

This is the big mystery of life, and any good narrative can be made to grapple with some piece of it, large or small.

In Weingarten’s stories, we feel the longing of each of his subjects whether a clown, a cartoonist or an executive director of a small town chamber of commerce. Weingarten digs deep to find the drivers behind their passions. He reveals them fully, neither avoiding nor exploiting their quirks and failings. As a result we identify with and care about the people that populate his work.

Using Metaphors - Scott Russell Sanders

"The essay has also taken over some of the territory abdicated by contemporary fiction. Whittled down to the bare bones of plot, camouflaged with irony, muttering in brief sentences and grade-school vocabulary, peopled with characters who stumble like sleepwalkers through numb lives, today's fashionable fiction avoides disclosing where the author stands on anything. In the essay, you had better speak from a region pretty close to the heart or the reader will detect the wind of phoniness whistling through your hollow phrases. In the essay you my be caught with your pants down, your ignorance and sentimentality showing, while you trot recklessly about on one of your hobbyhorses. You cannot stand back from the action, as Joyce instructed us to do, and pare your fingernails. You cannot palm off your cockamamie notions on some hapless character.
"To our list of the essay's contemporary attractions we should add the perennial ones of verbal play, mental adventure, and sheer anarchic high spirits. To see how the capricious mind can be led astray, consider the foregoing paragraph, which drags in metaphors from the realms of toys, clothing, weather, and biology, among others. That is bad enough; but it could have been worse. For example, I began to draft a sentence in that paragraph with the following words: 'More than once, in sitting down to beaver away at a narrative, felling trees of memory and hauling brush to build a dam that might slow down the waters of time....' I had set out to make some innocent remark,, and here I was gnawing down trees and building dams, all because I had let that beaver slip in. On this occasion I had the good sense to throw out the unruly word. I don't always, as no doubt you will have noticed. Whatever its more visible subject, an essay is also about the way a mind moves, the links and leaps and jigs of thought. I might as well drag in another metaphor--and another unoffending animal--by saying that each doggy sentence, as it noses forward into the underbrush of thought, scatters a bunch of rabbits that go bounding off in all directions. The essayist can afford to chase more of those rabbits than the fiction writer can, but fewer than the poet. If you refuse to chase any of them, and keep plodding along in a straight line, you and your reader will have a dull outing. If you chase too many, you will soon wind up lost in a thicket of confusion with your tongue hanging out."
The Singular First Person - Scott Russell Sanders

"From Where You Dream"

By JoAnne Tompkins

A writer friend tipped me off to a book on the writing process by Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler. From Where You Dream compiles a series of lectures Butler gave to graduate writing students in the fall of 2001. Though aimed at fiction writers, his lectures offer guidance to any writer seeking to increase vividness and deepen meaning, any writer who desires to create art.

I always begin with something the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa once said. He said, “To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.” To be an artist means never to avert your eyes—this is the absolute essential truth here. . . .

. . . Artists are intensely aware of the chaos implied by the moment-to-moment sensual experience of human beings on this planet. But they also, paradoxically, have an intuition that behind the chaos there is meaning: behind the flux of moment-to-moment experience there is a deep and abiding order.

In From Where You Dream, Butler encourages, guides and cajoles his graduate students to search for the details that accumulate around a moment in which “the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth. “ He takes his students through exercises that require them to experience the world with sensuality and openness, that create pathways to unexpected meaning.

There are many things to worry about in non-fiction writing: accuracy of details and quotes, structure and voice, grammar and punctuation, finding the arc and finding a market. Often, these concerns make me feel constricted and it shows in my writing. Recently, I reread Butler’s book and found myself wondering if perhaps even in non-fiction, the greatest truths come From Where You Dream.

Going Negative

By JoAnne Tompkins

In our last class Amanda broached the topic of negativity in writing. Do we always have to be “nice” as writers? Can there be value in exposing negative aspects of people or places even if some are hurt or offended? I don’t have any answers but I did find a couple of examples of “going negative” by a master writer.

In “The Great Zucchini,” an essay by Gene Weingarten, he profiles Eric Knaus, “Washington’s preeminent pre-school entertainer.” Weingarten attends The Great Zucchini’s performances, hangs out with him on guys’ nights out, picks him up for a court appearance and ends up with him in Atlantic City where The Great Zucchini pulls an all-nighter playing craps. In his piece, Weingarten exposes a man he has befriended—a man who makes his living entertaining small children—as a disgusting slob, a gambling addict and a man prone to minor scraps with the law. Yet, he also captures his subject’s deep rapport with kids, his strange innocence and his ability to consistently send kids “into hysterics.” In The Fiddler in the Subway, in which this piece appears, Weingarten adds a postscript:

Eric Knaus feared this story would end his career. It didn’t. He had underestimated the willingness of parents to forgive the personal flaws of a man who loved their children, and whom their children loved. The Great Zucchini has more business than ever.

In “The Armpit of America” Weingarten takes on Battle Mountain, Nevada, a town Weingarten and The Washington Post conclude is “the One True Armpit” of America, a place that announces its presence with the giant letters BM on a hill at the edge of town. Not surprisingly, some in town resisted the armpit label. The piece is no hatchet job but it doesn’t pull punches either: “You don’t need to be an economist, or a sociologist, or an architect or a land-use planner, to understand that this place is in trouble. It’s got almost nothing going for it.” Again Weingarten adds a postscript:

First came the billboards on Interstate 80, bragging about the town’s new axillary distinction. One read

BATTLE MOUNTAIN—VOTED THE ARMPIT OF AMERICA BY THE WASHINGTON POST. MAKE US YOUR PIT STOP!

Next came the Festival of the Pit, an annual town fair and carnival, sponsored by Old Spice, that drew visitors from all over the state.

Eventually, the financial anxiety caused by the recession of 2008 turned Battle Mountain’s gold mines into . . . gold mines. Property values soared, jobs flowered and the New York Times gave the Armpit a shave, declaring it, at least for the moment, America’s boomtown.

Weingarten may not be telling us of other pieces where the exposure of his subject’s dark side resulted in destroyed lives or relationships. But these two examples suggest that if the writer succeeds in making the subject flawed yet understandable, a bit vulnerable, readers, townsfolk, employers and perhaps even the subject may be more forgiving than we’d ever expect.

Legends

by Sturgis...

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!”

Dutton Peabody, Editor; The Shinbone Star to Senator Rance Stoddard; from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” Directed by John Ford

Spring Break in the early Seventies, J--- and some cronies were planning to climb a major peak in Canada or South American, depending on which version of the story you hear, but the expedition fell through at the last minute. Perhaps everyone sobered up. In any case, driving into Los Angeles in a fog of disappointment, J--- came up with an alternative plan: he would go to Disneyland and surreptitiously climb the enormous hollow pile of plaster and scaffolding painted to look like an Alpine peak known as “The Matterhorn”.

J--- bought his entry ticket and looked for a possible route to the summit. A roller coaster snaked in and out of the mountain past plastic boulders and fake glaciers. Two actors dressed as Victorian alpinists in wool, hobnail boots and knickers labored up and down the mountain, dripping sweat in the Southern California heat. But security was too tight. As a civilian he would never break through the sturdy barriers the Disney Company had erected between tourist and employee, between fantasy and reality. So J--- refined his plan. He found somewhere to hide and he waited until the park closed.

Nowadays there are night watchmen, cameras and motion detectors all over the park, the result, J--- says, of the legendary week he spent as the Phantom of Disneyland. But back then he was alone. He discovered a network of underground tunnels and secret passageways that linked all the attractions, another world entirely, filled with opportunities for adventure and mischief. He climbed the Matterhorn the next morning after spending the night hidden in a souvenir stand. The actor-alpinists turned out to be actual climbers just earning a living, scaling and descending the Matterhorn again and again like Sisyphus and yodeling their brains out for the amusement of the tourists when the roller coaster cars went by until the weekend when they could get themselves to the High Sierra for some real climbing. They were congenial companions; no one noticed the third mountaineer in blue jeans and they smoked a joint at the summit, looking out over the “happiest place on earth.” With the clear vision of the very stoned, J--- decided to stay in the park a few more nights. The climbers thought this a great joke on their employers. They gave him tips on navigating the park and promised not to rat him out.

The Phantom first came to the attention of the authorities in “Adventure Land,” a water ride sedate enough for the little ones and the elderly and slow enough to give J---- opportunities to join in the fun. The boats are done up like the African Queen and glide through an approximation of a jungle, the passengers periodically menaced by various creatures but protected by a guide dressed as a great white hunter in a khaki shirt, jodhpurs and a sidearm. J--- appeared alongside three animatronic Hottentots that brandished spears and chanted “Ugga Bugga.” His hair was teased out into a Jew ‘fro and he was smeared with mud to match the tribal war paint of his puppet compatriots. His little spear appeared to be the kind sold at the gift shop but he chanted as enthusiastically as any other electronic savage. A startled passenger screamed, “That one’s real!” When the distraught guide attempted to report this anomaly in the tightly scripted Disney universe, his superiors didn’t believe him.

J--- liked Adventure Land. Not only were the people in charge slow to realize they had a problem, but J--- could cling to the back of an animatronic hippo, breathing through a straw, until the beast rose out of the water to threaten the boats, with J--- naked on top bucking and rearing and whooping it up like a rodeo cowboy and scaring the crap out of everyone.

The Phantom made several appearances as a not-so-cute, not-so-diminutive singer in “It’s a Small World After All” and he spent a night or two in the elaborate tree house of The Swiss Family Robinson, thereby realizing the dreams of a million American children. He flirted with Cinderella and Tinkerbelle. He fed himself from the unattended concession stands. There were lots of places to hide and Disneyland is nothing if not a great place to wear a disguise. J--- says those costumes are diabolically uncomfortable, particularly Goofy. No wonder the employees he met gave him a wink and a nod. Stick it to the man, Phantom!

J--- was finally caught after a roof top chase along Main Street USA. J--- didn’t really care. Spring Break was almost over and he was sick of park food. Unamused security personnel escorted him out of the park past crowds of tourists on Main Street USA. He managed to extract from his clothing, despite the handcuffs, a little American flag that he vigorously waved. The crowd burst into applause, thinking it all part of the show.

Ever conscious of their public image and loathe to give the Phantom story any legs, the Disney Company did not press charges, although J--- is banned from all Disney Company properties in perpetuity.

J---- has built a successful career out of this and his many subsequent adventures as a traveler, author and anthropologist. He is a motivational speaker, exhorting corporate clients to break out of their humdrum lives and follow the “way of adventure” a phrase that J---has trademarked. The pictures of him dressed up as Indiana Jones on his marketing material always make me laugh. You see, I know the grand and hilarious tale of the Phantom of Disneyland is a complete fabrication, the origin myth and the warrior legend of a tribe of one from the country of J---.

Here is one of my legends. My name is Henry Sturgis Grew Robinson, but I have always been known as Sturgis. It is a very good name for an adult, but the best that can be said of it during one’s middle school years is that it built character. Even my friends called me by the obvious nickname for some one named Sturgis. Need a hint? Larry, Moe and Curly. The first girl I ever kissed, after our lips separated, fluttered her eye lids, heaved a great bosomy sigh and said “Oh...Stooge!”

But that kissing part is a true story. Here is the legend. One day in my teens I went to the town hall to get a birth certificate so that I could apply for a passport. To my amazement, the document revealed my legal first name to be Henry. I confronted my mother. Because I was certain to be her last child she had demanded that I be named after her beloved and dying father, Henry Sturgis Grew. But my father hated everyone in my mother’s tribe who, he felt, had condescended to him as a social inferior throughout his courtship of and marriage to my mother. He particularly disliked his father-in-law and in my father’s defense, my mother is the only person I ever heard say anything nice about Henry Sturgis Grew, a pompous, philandering and arrogant mediocrity soon to be unmourned even by his wife. But my mother felt strongly about this and after what can only have been weeks of phlegmatic Episcopalian disagreement, they reached a compromise: I would indeed become Henry Sturgis Grew Robinson but no one would ever, ever call me Henry.

Having revealed the dreaded family secret, my mother then looked around furtively, put her finger to her lips and said: “Shush, dear, don’t let your father hear...”

I have told this story or variations of it as long as I can remember. People often ask how I came to have a name like Sturgis and I tell them this story. It gives me a chance to make fun of my parents and their stolid New England-ness and it segues nicely into the story of my first kiss. It’s a good story and it is a total and utter lie, made up by me God knows when or why and grafted onto me as permanently as my own right arm. My real first name is not Henry.

Are we liars, J--- and I? Have we pulled something over on the world? J--- has made story-telling his career and does it well. Some of his stories are even true, I suppose. What is the harm if he has embellished a few things here or there? I really am Sturgis Grew Robinson and I really do come from a stuffy New England family. Why shouldn’t I illustrate my life with a fable or two?

J--- is a tribe of one in his own country and I am the prophet, the pope and the congregation of the church of Sturgis. We have our creation myths, our origin stories; we are legends in our own minds. Life is hard enough without imagining yourself just a little more interesting, a little more funny, maybe a little more immortal than you really are.