Category Archives: Writing

It’s hard to physically describe someone in a way that’s vivid and interesting. Tired descriptions like "Tall, well-built, and blond hair" do nothing for the reader. Stephen King, in his essential guide On Writing, advises writers to pick a single distinctive physical trait, preferably one that in some way illuminates the character’s personality or message.

I always enjoy seeing how writers describe their subject and whether they listen to King. Atul Gawande, in his otherwise excellent article on how ICU doctors use checklists to reduce infections, describes one of his characters thusly:

Forty-two years old, with cropped light-brown hair, tenth-grader looks, and a fluttering, finchlike energy, he is an odd mixture of the nerdy and the messianic.

This doesn’t generate any kind of image in my mind. What are tenth-grader looks? What exactly is "fluttering, finchlike energy"? And when I try to call to mind a mix of nerdy and messianic, I come up blank. For me, the one sentence devoted to physically describing the guy fails to do the job.

By contrast, here’s Nick Paumgarten describing Eliot Spitzer:

Spitzer, who is forty-eight, has a prominent nose, chin, and forehead, a hard jawline, and deep-set eyes whose intensity can give the extremely mistaken impression that he wears eyeliner. When he smiles or gets angry, his jaw juts out, underbitishly. The vigor in his features and in his manner, and his lean frame, tend to inspire descriptions of a man tilting into the wind.

This does more for me. The eyeliner image is effective.

One of my favorite descriptions — I have many — is this David Foster Wallace line:

A slim calm kindly lady of maybe 45 who wears dark tights, pointy boots, a black sweater that looks home-crocheted and a perpetual look of concerned puzzlement, as if life were one long request for clarification.

Any favorites of yours?

Nick Owchar of the LA Times book blog has a good post on the best opening sentences in book reviews from the past few weeks. My favorites:

Benjamin Jacob Hollars, on Ryan Boudinot’s "The Littlest Hitler," for Bookslut:

"Reading Ryan Boudinot’s short story collection, ‘The Littlest Hitler,’ is a little like stuffing your mouth with Pop Rocks and waiting for the explosion. It’s a little like dismantling a bomb. It’s like inhabiting a world where your brain is in your foot, your heart in your elbow, and yet you remain confident that you are anatomically correct while the world around you is horribly deformed."

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Lewis Macadams, on the poets Philip Whalen and Joanne Kyger, appearing in this Sunday’s L.A. Times Book Review:

"Philip Whalen and Joanne Kyger are often viewed as ‘poets’ poets’–a kiss of death that generally implies their music is out of most people’s range. But really, what this means is they’re the types of poets to whom other poets turn for their perfect pitch, to proclaim who they are….Whalen and Kyger are essentially School of Backyard poets, who look out their kitchen windows and see the universe."

I’ve written a bunch of book reviews on this blog and frequently read others’ reviews of books in various magazines and blogs. I love reviews. For whatever reason, there’s some hysteria in literary circles that America has a book review crisis. Here’s James Wolcott in TNR – just one take among many.

I also love tracking cool book blurbs. I’ve blogged about the absurd world of blurbs — I’m always on the look out for outrageous back-cover quotes. My friend David told me the other week that the key to a good blurb is "to sound flattering about the book so most people think you love it but people who know you realize you actually think it’s a piece of shit."

Ira Glass ("This American Life") is editor of a recently-published book called The New Kings of Nonfiction, which has essays from writers like M. Gladwell, M. Lewis, D. Wallace – writers who immerse themselves in their subjects, write entertaining stories about the environment they find themselves in, and then, crucially, draw greater meaning out of the experience. It’s what Robert Boyton calls "New New Journalism" (a worthwhile book, by the way). I love this kind of essay: informed by true reporting, delivered with the energy and entertainment value of good fiction. I find a certain amount of recklessness endearing – I like people who put themselves out there and try to figure stuff out, people who involve themselves in a way that destroys the idea of objectivity. Under the banner of infinite curiosity, they sympathize, they criticize, they call bullshit on questionable claims, they never stop digging.

Glass’s introduction to the book is on the Penguin web site. Very much worth reading for anyone interested in writing.

On the transparency of the reporting and the excitement of trying to make sense of things, via Bill Buford:

Part of what’s exciting about Among the Thugs is that Buford is so honest about what happens between him and his interviewees, especially the awkwardness he feels as an outsider in the midst of this tribe of drunk, violent men. They hate him, and they don’t trust him, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. There’s a transparency to the reporting. Most of the book is Buford putting himself into one situation after another, and simply describing all the chance encounters he has along the way. It’s an inspiring book to read if you want to try your hand at reporting, because it makes the job seem so damned straightforward, and I can’t count the number of copies I’ve given away over the years to beginning journalists. Buford makes it clear how much of reporting is simply wandering from one place to another, talking to people and writing down what they say and trying to think of something, anything, that’ll shed some light on what’s happening in front of your face.

On the components of this kind of writing:

When you’re writing stories like these, I think you’ve really only got two basic building blocks. You’ve got the plot of the story, and you’ve got the ideas the story is driving at. Usually the plot is the easy part. You do whatever research you can, you talk to lots of people, and you figure out what happened. It’s the ideas that kill you. What’s the story mean? What bigger truth about all of us does it point to? You can knock your head against a wall for days thinking that through.

Glass excerpts several awesome paragraphs. I just loved this from Susan Orlean, italics are Glass:

She tries to think through what it means to be ten years old. She’s profiling a random suburban kid named Colin Duffy. I could almost pick any three sentences from the story at random and they’ll make my point, but this passage just kills me:

The girls in Colin’s class are named Cortnerd, Terror, Spacey, Lizard, Maggot, and Diarrhea. “They do have other names, but that’s what we call them,” Colin told me. “The girls aren’t very popular.”

“They are about as popular as a piece of dirt,” Japeth [Colin’s friend] said. “Or you know that couch in the classroom? That couch is more popular than any girl. A thousand times more.”

That is a very efficient way to explain a ten-year-old boy’s attitude toward girls. I love the overall tone she invents to write this story. It’s a voice that’s halfway between hers and his.

If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. . . We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn’t have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home. We would win the lottery and then buy land in Wyoming, where we would have one of every kind of cute animal. All the while, Colin would be working in law enforcement—probably the FBI. Our favorite movie star, Morgan Freeman, would visit us occasionally. We would listen to the same Eurythmics song (“Here Comes the Rain Again”) over and over again and watch two hours of television every Friday night. We would both be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive; we would cure AIDS and the garbage problem and everything that hurts animals. We would hang out a lot with Colin’s dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.

OK, that is a fucking brilliant way to describe her relationship with a ten year old. I’m definitely going to pick up the book and chew my way through more of these kinds of excerpts.

Since my book came out, I’ve talked to dozens of people about the book writing process. Everybody and their brother wants to write a book. 81% of Americans think they have a book in them. The first question I ask when somebody tells me their idea is, "Why a book?" A book, compared to other formats, is a rather clumsy way to spread an idea. Why not just an article? Why not a blog? Why not an e-book? Why not a series of emails? Why not an online community?

Playing down the glories of writing and publishing a book through the traditional process at times feels hypocritical — in the same way that MBAs love to bash the value of an MBA — but I think the industry is so backwards, and people’s perceptions of how it will all work usually so off-the-mark, I feel I must.

Perhaps I’ll do a series of posts expanding on the above thoughts. In the meantime, if you are interested in writing in a book in 2008, I want to alert to you a wonderful opportunity from my friend Peter Economy. Peter helped edit My Start-Up Life; I have warm memories of Skyping with him from Kyoto, Japan and debating the titles of my chapters.

Peter has written more than 30 books. He’s a terrific non-fiction writer with deep ties in the publishing industry. And now he wants to give back. He plans to co-author a book a year for free and donate all the proceeds to a charity of his co-author’s choice. That co-author could be you!

All you need to do is submit (by Dec. 31st) a one page summary of your book idea. Peter and his team will review and select one to work on. If you’re the lucky one, you’ll work with Peter to write it. With his experience and connections, I’m sure its publication will soon follow.

Feel free to send me an email with your book idea and bio and I’ll make sure it gets to Peter.

John Updike on Proust:

"[Proust’s oeuvre] is as inviting as a feather bed, a nearly infinite mass of prose gently sighing up and down like a calm sea glinting with myriad coins of moonlight."

Beautiful. Found in Tim Parks’ review of Updike’s new anthology of essays in this weekend’s Financial Times.