Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

  Young writers are unlikely to possess the modicum of selflessness that a good editor must have, that makes it possible for one person to act in the best interests of another’s work. Young writers, I think, are more likely to envy their peers or to disdain them out of self-disdain, and, worst of all, to be unaware of what they’re doing. But I am speaking mainly for myself. In workshops I said harsh, dismissive things about other students’ stories, precisely because they were no worse than my own, and sometimes because they were better.

  I’m sure that for some of us young would-be writers the workshops were useful. Reactions varied. Some decided writing wasn’t worth the pain and went on to other professions. Some actively defended themselves. I remember a young woman who, after her story had been pummeled a while, stood up and declared to the class, “This is a story about a lot of beautiful people and a lot of beautiful things going down!” and stalked out of the room.

  The main lesson I absorbed had to do with standards for writing, especially for fiction. Mine had been both too high and too low. I had read great novelists and short-story writers, and imagined I would soon measure up to them. Now I realized I wasn’t measuring up to some of the writers on the other side of the table. My solution was to submit as little as possible to workshops, and, after a while, to try my hand at nonfiction. No other students I knew were writing factual stories. Locally, I seemed to have the field to myself. Did I also sense that reporting might be good for me? In college once I had set out to write a novel but managed only about thirty pages, which I decorated with marginal comments and little drawings for my biographer to find. Brief forays into journalism felt like an escape from the sound of my own mind. I was forced to listen to other voices and to think about other lives. And I got encouragement from some of the faculty, especially from Dan Wakefield, a distinguished journalist turned novelist who had come to teach for a semester. Dan was a contributing editor for The Atlantic, and he put in a good word for me with Bob Manning. He also told me there was a smart young editor at the magazine named Richard Todd. I should try to work with him.

  For months and months, Todd remained a voice on the phone, delivering bad news about my article on the mass murder case.

  It didn’t take me very long to fix the first problem, the problem of the opening sentence: “In the spring of 1971, someone went mad for blood in the Sacramento Valley.” After only a few revisions the sentence read: “In May of 1971, the police in Sutter County, California, began to find men buried in the ground outside the town of Yuba City, in the central Sacramento Valley.” Not a memorable sentence, but clear enough. And it no longer had the sound that I thought Todd meant by “melodramatic,” drama supplied by the author, not the facts.

  But Todd kept finding problems in my article. The largest ones lay in my attempts to describe the murderer’s trial, a long and tangled affair, most of which I had witnessed firsthand. How does one distill about a thousand pages of notes into a few pages of manuscript and manage to convey both the essential facts of an event like that and some of its flavor—its tedium, occasional drama, and weirdness? For starters, how to overcome the perfectly sensible conviction that this can’t be done? Time after time, I rewrote, sent Todd the draft, waited a few days, then called him up, only to hear that my account was still, at best, confusing.

  At first I felt like yelling at him: “Your reading is obtuse!” But of course I didn’t yell. For a while instead I tried to use the kind of strategy too pitiful to be acknowledged while one is employing it: to make talking about what I had written achieve what my writing hadn’t. Sometimes when he replied, there was a weary sound in his voice. Once or maybe twice, he made a short laugh, like a snort, to tell me, I sensed, that what I had just said was too preposterous for comment. But he never raised his voice. I would remember if he had.

  I didn’t keep the notes I made during those conversations or the many drafts I wrote of that article, drafts I never counted. No biographer sat beside me now. My adolescent dreams of writing something classic had turned into the necessity of writing something publishable. This was it for me. I really think I would have bought my own subscription to The Wall Street Journal if Todd had simply killed the article. As he should have done. As I would have done in his place. Months of reading the same old material from an all but unpublished writer, for an unimportant story. I never dared to ask Todd why he put up with it, but some years later, I raised the question with his wife, Susan, and she said, “He’s willing to work as hard as the writer is.”

  Some of us writers come into the world believing that we are bestowing favors when we ask others to read what we’ve written. I like to think that during those many phone calls I began to learn otherwise—that when someone takes the trouble to read and respond honestly, I ought to feel grateful, even if I don’t. But I did feel grateful, even jubilant, once the article was finally published, in a corner of The Atlantic called “Reports & Comment.” Bob Manning said he was impressed with the work I had put in. He did not say he was impressed with the article itself. This was honest, not unkind. At the time, I didn’t care. Publication was enough.

  •

  The kind of rewriting one learns, or used to learn, in high school or in a college freshman composition class, is a chore that mainly involves tinkering—moving sentences and paragraphs around, prettying up a phrase, crossing out words and substituting better ones. This is the kind of rewriting that the advent of word processing encouraged, by making it so easy. Not that finding the right word or eliminating the false note from a sentence isn’t important. Sometimes tinkering reveals larger problems in a draft, sometimes even suggests solutions, but only if you’re looking for larger problems and solutions.

  I remember in college reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon and studying a note that he left in the manuscript: “Rewrite from mood. Has become stilted with rewriting. Don’t look—rewrite from mood.” I reread those lines so often, trying to understand them, that they stuck in my memory. Fitzgerald knew that there are at least two kinds of rewriting. The first is trying to fix what you’ve already written, but doing this can keep you from facing up to the second kind, from figuring out the essential thing you’re trying to do and looking for better ways to tell your story. If Fitzgerald had been advising a young writer and not himself, he might have said, “Rewrite from principle,” or “Don’t just push the same old stuff around. Throw it away and start over.” In any case, a lot of learning how to be edited was for me learning the necessity of this second kind of rewriting, which was most of what Todd and I did together for the next forty years.

  On the phone he had become the voice that decreed failure or its opposite, which was publication. By the time I finally met him in person, he was authority for me. He could have been a giant or a dwarf, he could have worn a kilt or a pin-striped suit, and he still would have looked the part I had imagined for him—which is the reason, I suppose, that photographs of him from that time strike me as inaccurate. In fact, he was just a couple of inches below six feet, but I thought of him as small, because he was shorter than I. He looked like a prep school teacher or else a country squire, of the Protestant Irish type: ruddy skin, reddish sandy hair, khaki or gray flannel pants, a tweed sport coat, a functional necktie; all composed in varying degrees of rumpledness, which over the years came to seem admirably unself-conscious, because he clearly noticed the clothes that others wore, particularly women, whose dresses he referred to as “frocks.”

  I was twenty-seven and he was only thirty-two, but I recognized him as a member of an older generation, an older generation, that is, of Americans who went to college before the Vietnam War and the matriculation of the baby boomers, whom Todd once described as “a generation of twits.” He liked things that seemed to me old-fashioned, such as farms and, at least hypothetically, farming. He liked old buildings, bucolic landscapes, antiques, and realistic fiction. And it seemed as if a lot of what he liked he liked in opposition to what he didn’t like, and I lear
ned more about the things he didn’t like, many of which were things I did like, such as exercise for its own sake, unrealistic fiction, sunny climates, and cats. He was calm on the surface, and the surface was what he let most people see; whereas I tended to share my thoughts and especially complaints.

  For about five years I worked with him on articles for the magazine. I had only freelancer status, and I spent months researching and writing articles for which I was paid at most a few thousand dollars. I hadn’t married rich. (“The hours are too long at that business,” my father used to say.) My wife had a modest income, though, which allowed me the freedom to work under Todd’s tutelage. I didn’t feel especially privileged, but of course I was.

  I called him at least daily when I was in the middle of writing an article. On one of those occasions early on, I heard him clear his throat, which seemed to mean that I had been talking for too long. I hastened to explain that I wanted him to know as much about the subject as I did. “But, Kidder,” he replied, “I don’t want to know as much about it as you do.” That article was about the dumping of sewage sludge in the New York Bight, but I was pretty sure this was a general warning. I got it, I thought. Part of an article writer’s job was to distill a lot of information not just for the readers but for the editor, too.

  Often this was more than I could manage. Sometimes I came to Boston to finish articles, and Todd and Susan would put me up in their guest room—“the Ramada Room.” (One of their daughters was slow to start the day; they called her room “room 17,” as in, “There’s trouble in room 17.”) I spent two weeks at their place while working on my article about Vietnam combat veterans. According to Todd, I commandeered every evening, talking to him about something or other in that article: “I would be tired, I’d have to go to bed, and you would still be talking, and you would stay up God knows how much later, and the next morning I would be at the breakfast table, and you would come down the stairs still talking about that same thing in the article.”

  Being close by, getting glimpses of an editor’s life, can give one a sense of an editor’s problems and thus suggest ways to make oneself useful, and secure continuing attentions. But I suppose it could have worked the other way in my case. There were parties at The Atlantic and at Todd’s house where I got drunk and made a scene. I committed some offenses that, no doubt for the same reason, I promptly forgot. Susan had an antique Toby jug, an English drinking vessel with a face molded into its surface. She kept it out of harm’s way on a shelf in her kitchen. “You broke it,” Todd told me, long after the fact. “It wasn’t that you were looking at it. You were just … moving. And it fell. You as usual were frantically apologetic. ‘Oh God. Oh God. Is this valuable?’ Susan said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, Tracy. It’s priceless.’ That seemed to set you at your ease.”

  “Was I in my cups?” I asked Todd.

  “It’s not impossible.”

  Presumably, a writer and editor can work well together without sharing even so much as an occasional lunch, but I don’t think editing from a distance would have served me well. At first, and for some years, I needed too much help, including reassurance, and by the time I might have needed help less, I was comfortable with things as they were. One evening he called my house, got my wife, and asked for me by saying, “Frannie, is your eldest home?” I wasn’t offended, only amused, in part of course because I knew that amusement was his aim. He was playing the role of Todd. Ten years after we met, we were having dinner and I was lamenting that I was about to turn forty, saying how old it made me feel, and Todd looked up from his glass of cognac and said, “Kidder, I knew you in your thirties. And believe me, it is time for you to bid them adieu.” I felt comfortable, comfortable unto complacent. I thought, “I’ll remember that line.”

  By then we had many magazine articles and two books behind us. Habits, practices, principles, had accumulated into a small technology, our own peculiar ways of making articles and, especially by then, books.

  What had worked for one occasion, we would say, probably wouldn’t work for another. For instance, I wrote a magazine profile and later tried to use all of it in a book about the same person. The results were discouraging. After seeing a few revisions, Todd said, “You have to smash that article,” and I imagined a porcelain cup lying on the ground in shards and saw myself picking up some of them, the curved part of the handle, a piece of the rim.

  But in our practice, many general procedures have carried over from one project to the next. I confer with Todd from the start, right from the opening question: what should I write about? The ideas for two books were his, and the idea for another came from Susan. Wherever suggestions come from, I discuss them with him, often for months, once for about two years. When I finally make a choice and begin my research, I tell him how it’s going several times a week at least, unless the research takes me somewhere without phone service. His advice is a relief from the competing voices in my head, a place to begin or, once in a while, something tangible to argue with.

  In our practice every book has seasons. After research comes the rough draft, the season that I dread. Once long ago, I set out after dinner to begin an article for The Atlantic and looked up to see daylight moving across a floor littered with crumpled balls of paper, at least a hundred versions of the article’s opening sentence. For a time, I insisted that the first sentence be perfect before going on, and therefore spent whole days and nights getting nowhere. This sort of thing happened often enough to make me fear it. So I abandoned care entirely when writing rough drafts. Instead, I wrote fast. I would spend a day or two in reverie over my material, then scratch out a sort of plan, not even an outline but just a list of events, and then churn out pages as quickly as I could. Writing as fast as possible would prevent remorse for having written badly. I would take every path that looked interesting, and keep myself from going back and reading what I’d written, let alone trying to fix it. Meanwhile, I would try to forget the fate of previous rough drafts, the garbage bags full of paper, but of course I always remembered, so I’d tell myself that this time would be different, this time the rough draft would survive. But because I almost always lost faith in the draft long before I finished it, I would divide it into chunks. This also tended to foster speed, because the sooner I finished a chunk, the sooner I could apply for reassurance from Todd.

  The rationale for this approach is that when you go out reporting, you always want to collect more material than you can use—far more, ten times more, a hundred times more. And then you want to audition a lot of that material on the page. So if you want to write more than one book in your lifetime, you have to write your first draft quickly. And anything I wrote that way, I found, was easier to throw away than stuff I’d labored over. Even the material that I had gathered and summoned up when my research seemed to be going badly, material I thought of as “good stuff,” even that wasn’t very hard to part with once I had written it up and seen it fail.

  The cost of this approach is overstuffed, confusing first drafts, and, perhaps, an editor’s consternation. “It might help if you thought things through before you start to write,” Todd told me once, but only once, and then, I guess, he resigned himself to chaos. In the course of the immensely long first draft of my book Among Schoolchildren, I wrote the first few hundred pages in the first person, tried out an omniscient third person for the next five hundred or so, then went back to the first person for another long stretch, and wrote the last hundreds in something like the form of a play. Todd received photocopies of each chunk in turn. He let a few days pass each time, then said, as he always has, “It’s fine. Keep going.” And as always, I let myself imagine that he had actually read the pages, and also, so as not to feel I was a burden, that he hadn’t. I have never asked if he actually reads my rough drafts. I don’t want to know. The procedure works well enough. Why undermine its deep illogic?

  I learned to like rewriting, maybe too much, but really it is the writer’s special privilege. We rarely get the kind of chanc
e in life that rewriting offers, to revise our pasts, to take back what we’ve said and say it better before others hear it. I usually write about ten more or less complete drafts, each one usually though not always closer to the final thing, like golf shots. This phase goes on for at least a year. I write and Todd reads and then we meet and talk about the draft, and then we do it all over again, again and again. Todd used to jot comments in the margins of the manuscripts for our meetings, but he would end up staring at the page, saying, “What did I write here?” Soon I was more adept than he was at deciphering his comments. But his penmanship deteriorated, and finally he quit using it altogether. Since then, the most I’ve found on pages he’s returned are squiggly lines under sentences, which can mean any number of things, none of them good.

  We’ve gone over manuscripts in restaurants, but a large private room is best. Todd likes to pace. I know we’ve made progress, that I am getting good at my book, when he says before a meeting that he wants to see the manuscript divided into all its pieces, spread out on a surface. A floor served for a decade or so, but a time came when a table was required, as the natural evolution of knees and backs made floors less accessible. Todd paces around the table, one hand in his trousers pocket, the other lifting piles of manuscript, as if to weigh them, while I take notes and work on keeping quiet.

  Something is always wrong with a draft. I count on Todd to identify it. In the years of writing Atlantic articles, I sometimes felt that trusting him came at the expense of my independence, and back then I imagined that complete independence was a precondition for writing well, like getting drunk regularly and living in a garret. Sometimes I resented Todd’s telling me that a character or incident or sentence was getting in the way and should be jettisoned. I told him I was going to compile a list of all “the good stuff” he had told me to cut. I never made up that list. I got only as far as remembering a man named Morris Kramer, a beachcombing “environmental activist” whom I had met in the course of research for my story on sewage sludge.