Chapter 178: Don’t Let ‘em See You Sweating

Chapter 178: Don’t Let ‘em See You Sweating

There are moments when I am working with my students on the final versions of their stories when I cannot help but wince. This is not a knock on them and their writing. Rather it is a reaction to memories of myself at the early stages of my career when, like them, I was trying so hard to write.

Often this comes when I suggest a cut; we work together on a single Google doc, each on our own screen, so they can see where I want to make a change, and more importantly why. Better, I believe, than getting back a story filled with the red marks of edits – a stark and unmistakable visual confirmation of very bad thoughts they harbor about their talent, skills, and prospects.

I will suggest – yes, suggest; they are welcome to push back and I will listen, and sometimes accede to their request in order to keep the story in their voice and avoid it sounding like mine – that an adjective can go, or a metaphor. Too much, I tell them, sometimes drawing on the onomatopoeic power of a Yiddishism: “it’s a little unga pachka, too much.

They will resist. I will read the sentence back without the ornamentation. They will say, “that’s boring.” They truly believe this. As I once did.

I do not recall a particular moment when it dawned on me that there was virtue in making my writing sound as if I had done it without breaking a sweat. Emphasis on sound. Of course I had sweated the writing; I still do, as does most every writer I know. The trick was not letting the reader see it.

Yet I believed, and would cling to this belief for years, that putting my effort on display somehow made my work more…writerly. Early on a colleague at the newspaper where I worked pointed this out to me – that it was clear how hard I was trying and that this was not necessarily a good thing. I nodded as I might when someone tried to tell me the moon was made of cream cheese.

Just as my students now tell me that my edits have drained the life from the snappy, lively prose.

Why do they think this way?

Why did I?

When you are new to writing for a living – I phrase this deliberately because most of us have been writing for years before we ever committed to doing it as a job – it is as if you have discovered a power you didn’t know you possessed and that you cannot wait to use. Think of your pre-adolescent self discovering profanity, and how you could not wait to repeat every f… word you’d learned.

We are learning to command our voices, to use words and sentences in ways that, we hope, will draw readers in and along, and maybe even move them to tears or, harder still, laughter. That is us on the page. Our work is a statement of achievement, of what we can do. And better still, people tell us they liked what we wrote. All life’s promise, distilled in the words “good story.”

There is no harm in this thrill, this delight. But it can work to our disadvantage – we try too hard to dazzle, to show off our burgeoning skills. We want to be seen, recognized, applauded. And what better way than to use words and phrases that serve like a big flashing light with an arrow pointed right at us.

How often did I ask colleagues: What did you think of that line? Good, huh? Let me show you another.

The habit of what’s called “writing for lines” is one I had long associated with sports writers who often find themselves needing to pump significance into arguably less than significant events (for the record, I have written a lot about sports) by embellishing wherever possible. But I was wrong; we are all prone to it, and how could we not be when the reward is the praise we want and need.

I discovered the power of writing with ease when I discovered Roger Angell,the storied baseball writer for The New Yorker. Angell became a habit for me, the twice-a-year companion during spring training and after the World Series when, to draw on the words of yet another masterful baseball storyteller, the broadcaster Vin Scully, I would pull up a chair and be pulled right in for, oh, maybe 10,000 words that I never wanted to end. The thing was: he accomplished this without seeming to be trying. Which of course he was.

Here he is, in April of 1981, at the dawn of another season (which was by now his sixtieth; he was born in September 1920 and died at the age of 101 in 2022):

“The flags are run up, the players are on the field. The early standings shift ridiculously from morning to morning in the papers, April weather is already messing up some pitching rotations, the first feats and shocks of the season appear in the late-night news and the next day’s box scores – the four authoritative victories (three of them shutouts) by the Dodgers’ portly twenty-year-old rookie southpaw, Fernando Valenzula, the Oakland A’s record-breaking bolt from the starting gate with eleven straight wins – and hope and attention stir again like seedlings in the south-facing beds of the mind. Baseball has begun, and surely we should all feel better for it. I feel terrible.”

One hundred eleven words. Two adjectives: authoritative and portly. One metaphor: the seedling. One adverb: ridiculously. One goal: to get us to those final three words: I feel terrible.

All that matters is nailing the punchline. Sticking the landing. Choose your metaphor. We cannot be made to stop because if we do there is every reason to believe we will be gone forever.

What took me entirely too long to see and appreciate was that I was working so hard to draw attention to myself, Angell was doing just that, but without looking like he was.

There is a word for what he was accomplishing and that word is cool.

Cool people do not show off. They do not say, have you noticed me. They just appear and do what they do and maybe offer a quick nod of appreciation when the applause begins.

I asked David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, and an admirer of Angell, whether, in fact, Angell sweated it, off stage, far from our view.

He replied: “Roger was one of those writers, like John McPhee and, in fact, most others, who talked a great deal about the difficulty of writing, the agony, the humbling. If Joe DiMaggio’s reputation was for ‘effortlessness,’ Roger made no pretense of that. He was capable of writing short things quickly occasionally—indeed he did that well into his nineties—but he took the time he needed and handed things in when they were ready. He sometimes would not even tell me he was writing something and spring it on me. This was the case with one thing in particular: One day I came back from lunch to find an envelope on my chair. It was the essay ‘This Old Man,’ his astonishing, lasting essay on aging. One of the best things he ever wrote. I immediately opened the envelope and devoured it. (Writers rightly demand of editors that they read things right away; editors who take their sweet fucking time should die of boils and locusts.) Anyway, reading that essay was one of life’s great pleasures. And so was telling Roger how much I loved it. He seemed pleased.”

So how to be cool, when in your heart of hearts you suspect you are not? Begin by thinking not in words, phrases, and sentences. Instead, think in paragraphs. Paragraphs, done right, should introduce, explain, illuminate, delineate – capture – an idea. Paragraphs have a life of their own, a trajectory, a pace that builds, all the while drawing in the telling details, essential facts, bits of necessary color, and insights that lead the reader along and along and along until, boom, you bring it to a close – to yes, the punchline. The landing. Which in its very satisfying way leads readers to the next paragraph, when the same wonderful thing happens all over again.

When you think in paragraphs you are taking the long view, certainly in relation to words and phrases. You are writing in a way that creates a flow from start to finish, as opposed to the herky-jerkiness of writing for lines.

If writing is at its core about making choices, when thinking and writing in paragraphs you are making a different set of choices than simply the well-turned phrase for its own artistic sake. You are thinking instead in more ambitious ways, in what you want this paragraph to achieve in the role it plays in your story.

So many things happen in those 111 words of Roger Angell’s. Which by the way, are not the entire paragraph; it goes on far longer. But even in this abbreviated version it serves a purpose.

It is not a story itself, but rather a beginning of a story. It establishes a pace and a feeling and it closes – even in my cut down version – with a sense of completion accompanied by the promise of more.

Done without apparent effort.

What could be cooler than that?

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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture