I’ve said often that figuring out what the sentences should say is an easier writing task than figuring out in what order the sentences should appear. Much of editing involves adjusting the sequence of paragraphs — as it is the order that contains/exhibits the logic structure of your argument.

In this brief profile of White House speechwriter Jon Favreau and his writing of Obama’s second inaugural, he says this:

Two Sundays before the speech, Favreau had a draft. From there, he and the president continued to exchange edits. Obama jotted down his thoughts — longhand and with small, neat penmanship — on a yellow notepad, a mild irritant for the speechwriting team, which remembered fondly how he would use track changes on his laptop during the 2008 campaign. It was impossible to recall how many actual drafts the two had gone through.

“[Obama's] known for his rhetoric, right?” said Favreau. “But he’s also got a very lawyerly, logical mind. And so the thing he always does best is putting every argument in order.”

A couple weeks ago, there was a terrific article in the New York Times Magazine about novelist George Saunders. Highly recommended for anyone interested in fiction, writing, or books generally. Some excerpts below.

Is he the writer for our time? An amazing paragraph:

It’s the trope of all tropes to say that a writer is “the writer for our time.” Still, if we were to define “our time” as a historical moment in which the country we live in is dropping bombs on people about whose lives we have the most abstracted and unnuanced ideas, and who have the most distorted notions of ours; or a time in which some of us are desperate simply for a job that would lead to the ability to purchase a few things that would make our kids happy and result in an uptick in self- and family esteem; or even just a time when a portion of the population occasionally feels scared out of its wits for reasons that are hard to name, or overcome with emotion when we see our children asleep, or happy when we risk revealing ourselves to someone and they respond with kindness — if we define “our time” in these ways, then George Saunders is the writer for our time.

On the value of trying to express yourself in writing:

Saunders defended the time spent in an M.F.A. program by saying, “The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.” But it’s a mistake, he added, to think of writing programs in terms that are “too narrowly careerist. . . . Even for those thousands of young people who don’t get something out there, the process is still a noble one — the process of trying to say something, of working through craft issues and the worldview issues and the ego issues — all of this is character-building, and, God forbid, everything we do should have concrete career results. I’ve seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.”

Some life wisdom:

That Dubai story ends with these lines, wisdom imparted from Saunders to himself: “Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”

A most elegant way to compliment someone, from Tobias Wolff on Saunders:

“He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.”

From a book review in this weekend’s WSJ about the writer/editor collaborative relationship:

One of the secrets of Mr. Kidder’s success is that he is not afraid of writing badly in front of his editor, which frees him from the paralysis of writer’s block. I’ve worked as a magazine editor for 20 years and done some writing on the side, and I’d say that the relationship you have with your editor should be like the one you have with your urologist—you should feel comfortable showing him unspeakable, embarrassing things and trust that he will not recoil but endeavor straightforwardly and discreetly to help. (The writer-editor relationship should also have a confidentiality akin to attorney-client privilege or, perhaps more aptly, to that of the psychiatric couch.)

It’s definitely true in writing: you always start with shitty first drafts and it’s critical to feel comfortable getting feedback on them from others, especially your editor.

It’s true more broadly as well, I’d argue. Important professional/personal growth happens when you feel totally comfortable saying something potentially wrong or unwise. To be precise, it’s usually when you feel confident in the fact that the other person’s impression of you (and your intelligence) is solid enough that that one or two a dozen off-base observations out of your mouth isn’t going to change that.

We’d grow faster if the “how am I coming off? am I going to sound stupid if I say this / ask that?” filter dissipated more often. In other words, we’d grow faster if we didn’t stop ourselves from sharing the draft or speaking up for fear of being held in lower esteem by the other person. But it’s not that you should share your shitty first draft with just anyone. Sometimes, you do not want to ask the dumb question; sometimes, you want to be attentive to projecting a certain impression of yourself. (“Better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and eliminate all doubt” is good advice in certain circumstances, like with your boss.)

But cherish those people and environments where it feels comfortable to do the equivalent of showing your shitty first draft. Keep those people close.

A follow up to my post about Jeff Bezos requiring his executive team to write full narrative memos (instead of PowerPoint presentations) when presenting proposals or initiatives. Bezos said this in explaining the approach:

 “Full sentences are harder to write,” he says. “They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

As I wrote in my essay “Behind the Book,” the hard part about writing is not which words to use; rather, it’s in what order paragraphs should appear. The order of paragraphs holds the logic of the points being argued. And so most of “editing” involves re-ordering paragraphs and fleshing out transitions to and from paragraphs, rather than tweaking sentences.

You could argue the order of the bullet point slides in a PowerPoint deck forces a presenter to similarly consider logic and flow, but since you can orally compensate for rough spots, the standard for crisp thinking while building a PowerPoint deck is lower. Hence, Bezos insists on full narrative written prose–or at least that’s my guess as to why.

###

One of my favorite Joan Didion quotes is “I don’t know what I think until I try to write it down.” Writing is thinking. A lot of busy people say they wish they had more time to “think” — to be proactively thoughtful rather than reactive. But “thought time” is a hard thing to actually schedule, let alone measure. Writing, on the other hand, is something you can schedule to do and then evaluate and measure the output (e.g. 700 words a day or a blog post a week). When someone tells me they don’t do much writing anymore, I sometimes wonder, When do you think deep-ish thoughts? And how do you ever know how coherent your thoughts actually are?

Jeff Bezos likes to read. That’s a dog-bites-man revelation if ever there was one, considering that Bezos is the cerebral founder and chief executive of a $100 billion empire built on books. More revealing is that the Amazon CEO’s fondness for the written word drives one of his primary, and peculiar, tools for managing his company: Meetings of his “S-team” of senior executives begin with participants quietly absorbing the written word. Specifically, before any discussion begins, members of the team — including Bezos — consume six-page printed memos in total silence for as long as 30 minutes. (Yes, the e-ink purveyor prefers paper. Ironic, no?) They scribble notes in the margins while the authors of the memos wait for Bezos and his minions to finish reading.

Amazon executives call these documents “narratives,” and even Bezos realizes that for the uninitiated — and fans of the PowerPoint presentation — the process is a bit odd. “For new employees, it’s a strange initial experience,” he tells Fortune. “They’re just not accustomed to sitting silently in a room and doing study hall with a bunch of executives.” Bezos says the act of communal reading guarantees the group’s undivided attention. Writing a memo is an even more important skill to master. “Full sentences are harder to write,” he says. “They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

From Fortune’s recent profile of Bezos.

(hat tip: Chris Yeh)

I’m reading D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace. Early in his writing career, Wallace was sent a galley of Jonathan Franzen’s first novel. He loved it, but he wrote back to Franzen’s editor:

I’m having a lot of trouble with my own stuff right now, and this book, a freaking first novel, seems so much more sophisticated than anything I could do plot-wise, so precocious in its marriage of theme and character and verisimilitude and phantasm, so simultaneously wild and controlled, that I found myself hugging criticisms of it to myself in unabashed self-defense (a subspecies of envy).

The trickiness of being inspired by others: the person needs to be better/faster/stronger than us in some way but not so much so that a) the chance of one day having that superior quality yourself seems utterly unrealistic or b) the person’s superior quality engenders an unproductive amount of envy and related depression.

In my essay Lessons Learned and Reflections on Publishing a Bestselling Business Book, I said I didn’t read many books outside the career field because I didn’t want to get depressed reading the prose of some world class novelist. It reminded me of a note I got from Cal Newport when he was writing his book: “I took a break from my manuscript writing and read a novel by a Nobel prize winner in literature. Remind me never to do that again.”

By the way, I love DFW’s use of “sub-species” as a phrase.

In my article on lessons learned from publishing a book, I write about the process of getting feedback on the manuscript:

Here’s my big lesson on how to get helpful help. Remember when Reid asked his friends whether the manuscript was great? The value judgment great / not great is helpful to know whether you are finished. We thought we were close to finished, but in fact we were not. That was a helpful part of the feedback process.

But once we realized we had more work to do, hearing whether someone thought it was great or not great – whether they liked it or didn’t like it – was not useful. What’s helpful is how you actually make the text better regardless of whether they like the current version or not. As Tim Harford suggested to me, if you know you have work to do on the manuscript, just ask someone for one or two tips to make it better. Focus their mind exclusively on practical, actionable specific changes you can make to improve it.

Tucker Max emailed in with the following observation about gathering editorial feedback: “When people say that something is wrong, they are almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” Exactly the case in our experience, and an excellent point in general.

Being able to identify that something’s not working — be it in writing or in any other context — is separate from identifying how to actually fix it. Problem vs. solution. To offer a good solution, you have to understand the problem. But just because you understand the problem does not mean you have a good solution.

 The plastic scoop lying in a can of weight-gain powder “like an abandoned beach toy.”

It’s quoted as a positive example in The Art of Fielding of good prose in this otherwise negative review of the book.

Those who effectively deploy metaphor and simile tend to be effective communicators overall.

I sometimes wonder about how one can become better at the art of metaphor…

From the fun blog Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, a letter from Norman Mailer to Salman Rushdie:

Dear Salman Rushdie,

I have thought of you often over the last few years. Many of us begin writing with the inner temerity that if we keep searching for the most dangerous of our voices, why then, sooner or later we will outrage something fundamental in the world and our lives will be in danger. That is what I thought when I started out, and so have many others, but you, however, are the only one of us who gave proof that this intimation was not ungrounded. Now you live what must be a living prison of contained paranoia, and the toughening of the will is imperative, no matter the cost to the poetry in yourself. It is no happy position for a serious and talented writer to become a living martyr. One does not need that. It is hard enough to write at one’s best without wearing a hundred pounds on one’s back each day, but such is your condition, and if I were a man who believed that prayer was productive of results, I might wish to send some sort of vigor and encouragement to you, for if you can transcend this situation, more difficult than any of us have known, if you can come up with a major piece of literary work, then you will rejuvenate all of us, and literature, to that degree, will flower.

So, my best to you, old man, wherever you are ensconced, and may the muses embrace you.

Cheers,

Norman Mailer

(h/t Tyler Willis)

A Tumblr post with life advice got sent around to several people I know, via retweets and shares. Key excerpts:

This is the thing: When you hit 28 or 30, everything begins to divide. You can see very clearly two kinds of people. On one side, people who have used their 20s to learn and grow, to find … themselves and their dreams, people who know what works and what doesn’t, who have pushed through to become real live adults. Then there’s the other kind, who are hanging onto college, or high school even, with all their might. They’ve stayed in jobs they hate, because they’re too scared to get another one. They’ve stayed with men or women who are good but not great, because they don’t want to be lonely. … they mean to develop intimate friendships, they mean to stop drinking like life is one big frat party. But they don’t do those things, so they live in an extended adolescence, no closer to adulthood than when they graduated. 

Don’t be like that. Don’t get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder either. Stop every once in a while and go out to coffee or climb in bed with your journal.

The advice is not bad — even if it succumbs to the "short. bursts. of advice. to do. something." formulation that peeves me — but I have two broader reactions.

First, "there are two types of people" is a smart, simple frame that plays on people's us vs. them instinct. It also enables subtle self-congratulation when someone shares the article online–you only share it if you are on the right side of the fence.

Second, and more interestingly, the original article from which the post excerpts actually appeared in a religious magazine called Relevant, which bills itself as about "God. Life. Progressive Culture." In fact, if you look at the original article, there are various religious references that got turned into ellipses in the excerpt.

Original:

On one side, people who have used their 20s to learn and grow, to find God and themselves and their dreams, people who know what works and what doesn’t, who have pushed through to become real live adults. 

Tumblr excerpt that got shared: 

On one side, people who have used their 20s to learn and grow, to find … themselves and their dreams, people who know what works and what doesn’t, who have pushed through to become real live adults.

Original:

Walk closely with people you love, and with people who believe God is good and life is a grand adventure.

Excerpt:

Walk closely with people you love, and with people who believe … life is a grand adventure. 

You could say the advice is just as valid with or without the God references. But it's interesting that whoever posted the excerpt decided to omit them. He must have figured he'd lose none of the religious readers by keeping the message secular (even if the connection with religious readers was made less intense), but that he stood to lose a lot of non-religious people were the God references kept. So he chose for the most universal excerpt.

It reminds me of the Insiders vs. Outsiders post I wrote the other week. When communicating to a group, you're always trying to decide whether to connect intensely with a small set of folks, or connect less intensely with a larger set.