Writerland Chapter 11: Failure to Launch

Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.

Every spring my students report, write, publish, and sell a book. It’s called The Memory Project, and the conceit is that each of them choose a photograph – it can be of anything or anyone, though not of themselves – and set about finding the story in that frozen moment.

They spend two months reporting, and each week file a memo distilling what they’ve learned and, as is often the case, the new and unanticipated twists their stories have taken. The trick, as happened with Yepoka Yeebo in her story about Accra, is that they’re writing the story even as they’re reporting it, so that by the time they’re ready to write they’ve already done much of it, without being self-conscious about the writing.

But then at the moment they have built toward and thought about – and have maybe 5000 words of memos on a single Google doc that they can look to as evidence of their command of the material, many will…sorry but there is no other way to say this...panic.

Instead of the swagger they’ve earned by virtue of all that reporting and thinking and willingness to follow the story wherever it led, they freeze. It’s as if they are convinced that those pages of memos are somehow the work of someone else, somehow wiser and more talented. Someone who, unlike them, is ready to leap in and wrestle the damn story to the ground.

It is hard to watch. You can see the confidence seep from them. The “tells” are there on the page: instead of paragraphs that build in complexity, their stories unfold as a series of herky-jerky one-sentence paragraphs, often interspersed with quotes; instead of selecting details that advance the narrative, they avoid choosing what to eliminate and instead put in everything; and, most tellingly, they resist committing to an animating question designed to grab readers and propel them into and through the story.

I know this because I spent years doing the same thing myself. And like a parent wanting only to shield a child from the same heartbreak and pain they once suffered, I feel helpless to stop them. All I can do is pick them up, dust them off, dry their eyes, and help them understand what went wrong.

In fairness, this does not happen to everyone. But it happens often enough – I am no statistician, but I do believe that one hundred times over the past few years indicates a pattern – that I was determined to identify what goes wrong, and if possible, to intercede before it does.

Why, I wondered, do stories poised to take off fail to launch?

The easy answer is that this takes time, that with the repetition that comes with experience, writers – like musicians, chefs and artists – develop their skills, and so are better able to achieve authority in their writing. But it is not fair to tell writers to wait. They are writers now. Their work will improve with time, but they have stories they need to tell now.

So how can writers get out of their own way?

There are, I believe, several forces at work, and what makes them hard to spot and resist is that, seen independently, they make sense. For instance, the idea that there is a reporting/research phase of a story, and only when that is done, comes the writing. Generally, especially in journalism, this is the way things work, and often work well. Journalists sit down with their notes and depending on how much time they have, review them, perhaps take notes on their notes, distill the information and then, after taking a breath, place their fingers on the keyboard and produce an opening, a lede.

There is also the time-honored journalistic imperative of forward motion. Consider the operative verb in reporting: to chase. That’s what gets rewarded – way to chase that one down, kid – and as a result, the idea of doing anything but moving relentlessly forward feels wrong, even lazy.

But those forces, while significant, pale in comparison to a far more powerful and crippling one: fear of commitment. At the risk of doubling down on the relationship metaphors, it’s important to remember that this, in fact, is about a relationship – ostensibly between writers and their stories, which are really about writers and themselves. Stories can feel like crucibles upon which a writers’ worth is judged. Fall short and you have failed. And if you failed, there is every reason to believe you will fail again. Then what? Law school?

Better to avoid the risk of failure by instead only approximating the experience of committing to that core question by being implicit, by hinting, by falling back on that journalistic trope of “leaving it to the reader decide.”

Except when you do that, you know you are doing it, which only makes it worse. Been there. Felt that. It’s awful.

So, what to do?

First, acknowledge just how frightening it is for so many of us – not all; I know those one percent of writers who make up their minds and just know they’re right – to state, clearly and without a comma to hide behind, this is what I have concluded. Because what if you’re wrong? You might be. In which case, I have come to believe, you need to fool yourself, to trick that demon with that dark, discouraging, and ever-present voice into turning away, if only for a moment, so you can write the words you know you can write. And when that demon, that “watcher at the gates” turns back to you, it’s too late. The words are there, on the page.

But how to get there? Don’t go forward. Forward is where that voice lurks. Go backwards. It will never notice you were away.

When I say go backwards, I mean literally go back to the beginning to the origins of your story, and ask yourself: what do I want to know? Just that. What do I want to know? Even if you asked yourself that when you set out, you have by now gathered fact and gained with it knowledge you had not previously possessed. Meaning, you are not posing this question in a vacuum. It is coming from a place of knowing, not assuming.

You can write yourself a letter. Dear _____, What do I want to know? I know X, and I know Y and along the way I realized that the key element in this story was not B but R, and so….by connecting R and F….

You see where I am going. Remember, the speed of thinking is infinitely, immeasurably faster than the speed of writing. Writing slows down your thinking so you can see your thoughts unspool on the page.

By doing this you will do exactly what your training, experience, and gut tells you not to do. But it is, ironically, the way forward. Because in answering that question, you will have distilled in no more than five words the core of your story. And once you have that core, once you’ve committed, once you’ve made that difficult but essential decision, all the decisions that follow – this detail, that graf next, this scene now – will be easier. They will make sense.

It is so often said that you need to work at relationships, and that is true. But you want to work at them when there is a rhythm to that relationship, a tempo between people. So too with a story. Once you commit there is no going back.

But first you need to take the leap.

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Once again, we wanted to offer you a story from our archives, this week a story that feels particularly resonant this week. The story of a woman who was warming some chicken for her nieces, took out the trash, and for whom everything changed. Trial by Fire, By Carol Mersch.

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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. The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.