Writerland, Chapter 18: Helping to Raise Every Voice

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

Waiting to be discovered as a writer is like waiting for someone to fall in love with you: you imagine what it will feel like, the thrill, excitement and joy. But you wonder whether it will ever happen for you.

Friends and loved ones tell you not to despair, that you have so much to give and so much that is wonderful about you – and your writing. You write, and maybe send out a story or two, only to have an editor say no, leaving you to ask yourself, “when?”

Every writer has known the feeling of aspiring to be discovered in a world that ignores you. And truth be told, there are those for whom discovery has come more easily – whose position and standing puts them in the sights of those who decide who is chosen and who will have to wait. It has always been so, and it has always been unfair.

We would like to help remedy that. We would like to make good on our mission of helping writers and their work be discovered, in particular writers and voices that are too seldom heard.

We are launching a program that offers grants intended for writers who can bring new and diverse voices to a wider audience. The details come at the end of this newsletter.

But first, I asked my colleague, Jelani Cobb, about his own discovery, how it happened, and what that experience was like. Long before Jelani began writing for The New Yorker he was a young writer hoping to be read. The editor who discovered him was the late David Carr, then the editor of the Washington City Paper and later a celebrated reporter and columnist at The New York Times.

What Jelani learned was that being discovered was not simply a moment akin to a love song. It meant work.

“The biggest thing I took from my experience with David Carr at the Washington City Paper and a bit earlier at another DC publication called ONE, was the vote of confidence in my abilities as a young writer. By no means was I certain that I was talented enough or smart enough to write anything that people might actually want to read. But to have people who edited for a living say that my work, albeit with some serious revisions, was worth publishing was huge.

“The other thing I got from that experience was the importance of having an exacting standard for myself. Carr was particularly crucial here. He would go through drafts ripping out every weak supposition in sight -- "Do you know this or do you think this?" he would ask. To this day that voice in my head telling me to double and triple check something to make sure it's accurate sounds exactly like David Carr's.

“Finally, I got a valuable piece of advice early on from the late columnist and author Ralph Wiley who once told me "You won't get there overnight and believe me, you don't want to." I was in my mid-20s at the time and thought ‘That's weird. Why wouldn't I want to get there overnight?’ And of course, he was right. It's very important to give yourself time to cultivate your abilities and to be able to make mistakes without the glare of thousands of people looking at you. Overnight arrival is only a virtue for FedEx. Careers take time to build and it's important to learn everything you can each step of the way.” 

I also asked Jelani about what he sees now in his own students, aspiring to have their voices heard.

“One of the best pieces of advice I got about cultivating a voice was from a professor who told me to write lots of different things and to read even more widely than I wrote. The great playwright August Wilson started out as a poet only to find that theater was his calling. But poetry had already indelibly impacted his relationship to language and the economy of phrasing. Skills tend to translate across genre.

“A journalist I know won a Pulitzer Prize for a story that had gone through several terrible drafts until someone had the insight to pair him with a fiction editor who understood structure, character and form in a way that journalists typically don't. Also, read the way an engineer looks at a bridge. Most people will look at a bridge and think at best ‘Wow, that's beautiful’ and keep going. But an engineer looks at it as a series of decisions about structural cohesion, load-bearing capacities, tensile strength and design. By dissecting (good) writing you broaden your own sense of what's possible in your own.

“In sum: Read everything, write lots of things, digest all of it and your own voice is most likely to emerge.”

It is in that spirit that The Delacorte Review is offering three grants intended for candidates whose work will contribute to diversity and excellence. Each grant will pay $1000 and will run for five months. Our goal is to help each recipient work to bring their voice to life in a work of ambitious narrative nonfiction.

Each recipient will be assigned an editor who will work with them on every step of the process, from story inception, framing, reporting, to writing, with the goal of publication with the Review. The Review’s publishing partners include Granta, Scientific American, Longreads, Lithub, CrimeReads.com, and Digg.com.

We are committed to close working partnerships between writer and editor. Recipients should expect to file frequent memos and receive constant feedback. We do not believe that writers grow by sending a pitch, writing a first draft, having it kicked back for revisions until they get it right. We believe that writers grow when they have an editor at their side, pushing, cajoling, encouraging.

Applicants should send a CV, up to three samples of nonfiction writing they are most proud of – it need not have been published -- and a letter proposing an idea for a story they’d like to work on, and how they’d go about reporting it.

Please send applications to delacortereview@gmail.com with the subject line GRANT APPLICATION (all caps please, to ensure they are not lost).

Application deadline is December 1st. Grantees will be notified by January 15th. The program runs through May 15th.

We look forward to hearing from you. And if you know writers who might be interested, please spread the word.

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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.