Ben Casnocha: The Blog

Book Notes: Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer's Guide

Sometimes it's helpful to look to other fields and disciplines for insights you can apply to your own. Frans Johansson wrote a whole book called The Medici Effect on how to combine ideas from different fields.

I think businesspeople, for example, should study journalism to gain insights on how to conduct interviews (market research) and how to tell stories and create narratives (all marketing is storytelling).

I recently read the book Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer's Guide. It is the assorted wisdom from many long form non-fiction writers. Below are my notes.

In my notes you'll find out the best question to ask when interviewing someone (it's the same question you should ask after a long lunch with a mentor), why Malcolm Gladwell writes 10,000 word profiles after spending only a few hours with the person, why to embrace your writerly quirkiness at the outset, and Robert Frost's golden rule of writing.

All are direct quotes from various writers.

Profile Writing

After I have edited a profile, it must pass a test before I consider it finished. I ask the writer to give the piece to a reader who knows nothing about the subject. That new reader must be able to answer two questions, each in one sentence. First: How would you characterize this person? Second: At the end of the piece, do you know whether or not you like the person?

Often, I can get what I need in the first few hours I spend with the subject. Anything more than that is unnecessary and could even be harmful. I write ten-thousand-word profiles of people with whom I’ve spent only a few hours. - Malcolm Gladwell

Psychologists talk a lot about the difference between samples and signatures. For example, you would need only about five seconds of a Beatles’ song to identify it. Their music has a signature. With a very small slice you can know something profound about it.

I write profiles about ideas because I’m deeply skeptical of the legitimacy of writing only about the person. Profiles need to be more sociological and much less psychological. Many profiles that are written about individuals ought to be about subcultures. The individual is a means to examine another world—the world in which that person lives. When we limit ourselves to the individual’s personality, we miss the opportunity to consider larger questions about society and subcultures. - Malcolm Gladwell

Reporting

The best question a reporter can ask a source: "At the end of the interview always ask, ‘Who else should I see?'"

While reporting, you must lose control so you can accumulate the facts. While writing, you must exert maniacal control over those facts. You begin by being laid-back and hanging out. Take the great inhale so that when you exhale, you will have among your notebooks that detail that conveys so much, so economically. Weave that detail into the warp and weft of your hard facts.

"Curiosity is a muscle. The more you use it, the more it can do."

Observation, the art of watching, is one of the most underrated elements of reporting, especially in newspaper journalism. The natural impulse is to ask questions. Sometimes that is wrong. It makes the reporter the focus of attention. Be humble. It honors the person you’re trying to observe.

Non-Fiction Writing in General

Start with your quirks—the idiosyncrasies, stubborn tics, and antisocial mannerisms that set you apart from others. To establish credibility, resist coming across as absolutely average. Who wants to read about the regular Joe? Many beginning essayists try so hard to be likable and nice, to fit in, that the reader—craving stronger stuff, a tone of authority—gets bored.

"A hen would fall asleep in her hand as she drew the hatchet back to chop its neck." - Great description

The book’s language had to suit the occasion. You don’t “hype up” in the wake of tragedy. You underwrite, letting the events speak for themselves. You treat everyone with respect.

Read good detective fiction. I don’t think anybody does narrative structure better than good detective writers.

I wanted to spend more time with people who were not necessarily newsworthy. I believed then—and I believe now even more—that the role of the nonfiction writer should be with private people whose lives represent a larger significance.

This is the type of nonfiction that I indulge in, hanging around people. You don’t necessarily interview them, but you become part of the atmosphere.

Using Quotes

That’s my first rule about including a subject’s exact words: Do it sparingly. Using fewer quotes makes me a more disciplined and thoughtful writer. It forces me to think harder about my job and take better control of the story.

The best quotes, of course, aren’t stand-alone quotes at all, but dialogue. I try to include dialogue even in stories about the city council. Dialogue is easier for people to read than straight narrative, because that’s how we listen to the world and how we communicate. Dialogue opens up a bit of space on the page, gives the story some breathing room.

Voice

The way you tell a story over dinner is true to who you are, whether that is deeply analytical or extremely witty. At such moments you aren’t self-conscious, and you aren’t thinking about your editor. You can’t invent a voice. And you can’t imitate someone else’s voice, though trying to can be a good exercise.

Voice is—as the word itself tells us—the way a writer talks. You are speaking to your readers.

Inspiration

Joseph Conrad, a prolific writer, said there are only two difficult things about writing: starting and not stopping.

Robert Frost said it best: “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

Good writers are most often plain ol’ writers who go the extra mile and then a few more.

An Egg vs. Hard, High Wall

The noteworthy author Haruki Murakami recently gave a short speech when he received the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. Here's my favorite part:

If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.

Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals.

I have only one purpose in writing novels, that is to draw out the unique divinity of the individual. To gratify uniqueness. To keep the system from tangling us. So - I write stories of life, love. Make people laugh and cry.

(hat tip to the very smart John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla)

Highbrow Personal Praise and Description

Sophisticated eviscerations are always fun to read (the art of the take-down), but how about when one intellectual praises another? Or how about when a person tries to capture the essence of a smart, accomplished person in a paragraph? A few choice selections from recent readings.

Here's Michael Kinsley praising Christopher Hitchens:

Hitchens is the bohemian and the swell, the dashing foreign correspondent, the painstaking literary critic and the intellectual engagé. He charms Washington hostesses but will set off a stink bomb in the salon if the opportunity presents itself.

His conversation sparkles, not quite effortlessly, and if he is a bit too quick to resort to French in search of le mot juste, his jewels of erudition, though flashy, are real....

His enemies would like to believe he is a fraud. But he isn't, as the very existence of his many enemies tends to prove. He is self-styled, to be sure, but no more so than many others in Washington -- or even in New York or London -- who are not nearly as good at it. He is a principled dissolute, with the courage of his dissolution: he enjoys smoking and drinking, and not just the reputation for smoking and drinking -- although he enjoys that too. And through it all he is productive to an extent that seems like cheating: twenty-three books, pamphlets, collections, and collaborations so far; a long and often heavily-researched column every month in Vanity Fair; frequent fusillades in Slate and elsewhere; and speeches, debates, and other public spectacles whenever offered.

The biggest strategic challenge for a career like this is to remain interesting, and the easiest tactic for doing that is surprise. If they expect you to say X, you say minus X.

Consistency is foolish, as the man said. (Didn't he?) Under the unwritten and somewhat eccentric rules of American public discourse, a statement that contradicts everything you have ever said before is considered for that reason to be especially sincere, courageous, and dependable.

Here's Joseph Epstein describing John D. Rockefeller in the book Ambition, which I love for its clarity:

He was cautious but courageous -- a careful plunger. He took on loans of such size as to make his early partners tremble.... He had no known distractions. He found adventure in business, spiritual nourishment in his church, social life among his family. His life was organized for success. He tended to give off a somewhat chilling effect on people who met him. He commanded complete calm in crisis. He planned everything eight or nine moves ahead. He had the mind of a first-rate chess player: analytical, concentrated, monomaniacal. Of his inner life very little is known. Possibly he had none.

Here's Epstein on Mark Twain, the two final sentences are telling:

Mark Twain, the Lincoln of our literature, as William Dean Howells called him, landed not in the White House but in a white suit. He was the first American writer to attain national celebrity, to be everywhere read and recognized and to turn a big buck off literature, and the white suit was part of his act. He it was who affixed the great label Gilded Age to the time in which he flourished, and he not only labled it but lived it. He was brilliant at marketing, his product being himself, often first-class goods. But he was not much at detail. With one eye on literature and one eye on business, he developed a cross-eyed talent. To excoritate your time yet revel in its luxuries, to proclaim the virtues of the simple life yet complicate your own life beyond imagining -- you can't have it both ways, but neither can you blame a man for trying. Mark Twain tried, and failed.

Inspirational Figures, and Adam Gopnik on John Updike

Finding inspiration in other people is important but too often we look for this solely in the astronomically successful / famous / gifted.

While Steve Jobs may be an inspiration to some entrepreneurs or designers, I believe that his singular brilliance and one-of-a-kind approach makes the power of his example inspirational in only an abstract, limited sense. At times the mind-blowingly impressive people who go down in the history books can be anti-inspiring inasmuch as you (rightly or wrongly) attribute some of their success to natural talent, which -- as you compare their natural talent to your own -- makes you feel small and inadequate and hopeless.

The more actionable inspirational figures to me are 10-15 years ahead of me in life. Their lives I admire but also see within the realm of my own possibility if I work hard, keep learning, and get a few breaks along the way. And they're not overly famous; they're accessible.

The great American man-of-letters John Updike died recently, and he was surely in the former category of inspirational figures: someone who inspired me in the abstract sense but seemed so superhuman in his observational abilities, for example, that I walked away from reading him usually feeling down-on-my-genetic-lottery-luck rather than eager to take my own pass at arranging words into sentences.

But this doesn't mean you ignore the John Updikes or Steve Jobses, of course. It just means you should supplement their wondrous examples with inspirational role models within reach.

Perhaps the supremely erudite Adam Gopnik fits that second category for me. I'm not saying I'm on a trajectory to ever attain his level of worldliness or craftsmanship when it comes to writing, but it seems at least imaginable in a way Updike never was.

Last night Adam Gopnik was on Charlie Rose eulogizing John Updike. Here's the clip. The whole thing is worthwhile, but if you're short on time watch from minutes 17 to 25 and tell me if you've seen a man talk about a topic with such a winning combination of eloquence, authority, friendliness, and genuine passion.

Here's Gopnik's very worthwhile written essay on Updike in the latest New Yorker. Here's the somewhat famous David Foster Wallace review of Updike in 1997 where he refers to Updike as a "penis with a thesaurus." Here's Lee Siegel's recent defense of Updike from Wallace and others.

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On the News Hour, Jim Lehrer interviewed Michigan prof and novelist Nicholas Delbanco about Updike. There's this bizarre and interesting exchange near the end. Delbanco spoke warmly of Updike the whole way, and then Lehrer pops a question rarely asked about a person.

JIM LEHRER: Was he pleasant?

NICHOLAS DELBANCO: He was a tricky man. He wasn't -- he was very affable, very courtly, but there was always a fist within that glove, I thought, and once or twice I saw him use it.

A State of Tolerable Vapidity Overlaid with Entertainment

A wonderfully evocative character description:

In a sense, Harper (dressed in “Gap casuals”) stands for the hip, knowing, self-conscious, weary, ironied-out, so-like-over-it-and-two-steps-ahead-of-it West, whose empty, hedonistic way of living once plagued Rose. As a restaurateur, he “did nothing extraordinary, ran the business, watched TV, read the newspaper, surfed the Web, bought a new coat every now and then, dated women — black, brown, white — consumed pornography, smoked, met friends for dinner, dreamed, honed anecdotes, got minor ailments.” He experienced, in other words, “a state of tolerable vapidity overlaid with entertainment.”

It's from the always-worth-reading Lee Siegel, in this book review.

Quotes from Jonathan Franzen

A few weeks ago I re-read Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays titled How to Be Alone partly because I was feeling lonely at the time and partly because Franzen was best friends with David Foster Wallace and so it felt timely to think about Wallace through one of his influences.

I highly recommend this collection of essays especially if you're interested in issues of "self" and how literature / writing plays with that notion and the broader relevance of literature more generally. Franzen's prose reads effortlessly. He intersperses light thoughts with deeper philosophical ones. He's like Wallace in his interest in both the day-to-day absurdities of living life and the harder / impossible questions that some brave souls puzzle over. He's unlike Wallace in that he executes his writing in a comparatively conventional way -- linear sentences, no fracturing.

I've typed my favorite quotes and excerpts from the essays below. Some great lines. Enjoy.

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"One of the great adaptive virtues of our brains...is out ability to forget almost everything that has ever happened to us.

"One of the basic features of the mind is its keenness to construct wholes out of fragmentary parts."

"Americans care about privacy mainly in the abstract."

"The curious thing about privacy...is that simply by expecting it we can usually achieve it. One of my neighbors in the apartment building across the street spends a lot of time at her mirror examining her pores, and I can see her doing it, just as she can undoubtedly see me sometimes. But our respective privacies remian intact as long as neither of us feels seen. When I send a postcard through the U.S. mail, I'm aware in the abstract that mail handlers may be reading it, may be reading it aloud, may even be laughing at it, but I'm safe from all harm unelss, by sheer bad luck, the one handler in the country whom I actually know sees the postcard and slaps his forehead and sdays, "Oh, jeez, I know this guy."

Philip Roth described "American reality" as a thing that "stupefies...sickens...infuriates, and finally...is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents..."

"In Philadelphia I began to make unhelpful calculations, multiplying the number of books I'd read in the previous year by the number of years I might reasonably be expected to live, and perceiving the three-digit product not so much an intimation of mortality as a measure of the incompatibility of the slow work of reading and the hyperkinesis of modern life."

"Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them. If we see religion and art as the historically preferred methods of coming to terms with this Ache, then what happens to art when our technological and economic systems and even our commercialized religions become sufficiently sophisticated to make each of us the center of our own universe of choices and gratifications?"

"As the social stigma of depression dwindles, the aesthetic stigma increases. It's not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. It's the sense that we live in a reductively binary culture: you're either healthy or you're sick, you either function or you don't. And if that flattening of the field of possibilities is precisely what's depressing you, you're inclined to resist participating in the flattening by calling yourself depressed. You decide that it's the world that's sick, and that the resistance of refusing to function in such a world is healthy."

"Two quick generalizations about novelists: we don't like to poke too deeply into the question of audience, and we don't like the social sciences."

"What religion and good fiction have in common is that the answers aren't there, there isn't closure."

"Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it."

"Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness."

"Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals."

"To take control of their lives, people tell themselves stories about the person they want to be."

"New York is resented as an actual place -- for its rudeness, its arrogance, its crowds and dirt, its moral turpitude, and so forth. Global resentment is the highest compliment a city can receive, and by nurturing the notion of the Apple as the national Forbidden Fruit such resentment guarantees not only that ambitious souls of the "If I can make it there, I'd make it anywhere" variety will gravitate toward New York but that the heartland's most culturally rebellious young people will follow."

"The city, by its very nature, provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange. Familiarity, whether of chain stores or of cookie-cutter subdivisions, erodes the autonomous intelligence and, in a weird way, undermines privacy. In the suburbs, I'm the stranger; I feel exposed. Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself."

"One pretty good definition of college is that it's a place where people are made to read difficult books."

"The essence of postmodernism is an adolescent celebration of consciousness, an adolescent fear of getting taken in, an adolescent conviction that all systems are phony. The theory is compelling, but as a way of life it's a recipe for rage."

"In a sense, I'm proud of not being like everybody else. Like everybody else, though, I'm anxious about sex, and with sex the recognition that I'm not like everybody else leads directly to the worry that I'm not as good as -- or, at any rate, not having as much as -- everybody else. Sexual anxiety is primal; physical love has always carried the risk that one's most naked self will be rejected."

"This is the conundrum of the individual confronting masses about which he can't help knowing more than he'd like to know: I want to be alone, but not too alone. I want to be the same but different."

"When we make love, we forever have in our heads an image of ourselves making love."

"Few pleasures compare with that of riding on a bus after dark, hours behind schedule, with people you violently agree with."

Beware of Comparatives ("Than") Part Two

Few weeks ago I blogged the rule of thumb that compliments should never contain a comparative (e.g. "than"). Instead of saying, "You look much prettier than you did yesterday!" just say "You look pretty!".

Recently someone told me: "Traveling to that country is harder than you think."

My immediate reaction was: "No, it's not harder than I think. I know it's hard." I got hung up on the other person assessing my own assessment of hardness.

The more effective line from him would have been: "Traveling to that country is hard."

Bottom Line: Beware of "...than you think" when saying something. Beware of comparatives in general. Just say it!

A Close Reading of Prose

Wyatt Mason, over at the book blog of Harper's magazine, does a close, literary reading of a few sentences of a writer struggling with the impossibility of saying anything new about 9/11. The sentences and analysis are a pleasure to read. It's also a pleasure to discover the name of the author under the microscope, a man you've undoubtedly heard of. Writerly types should check it out.

"Tell Me a Story About How Things Will Get Better"

It's been almost a month since noted writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide. Here is the reflection I wrote the night I learned of his death and another post I did with links to remembrances and my analysis of his Kenyon College speech. My delicious page has a full listing of links.

A few days ago Pomona College hosted a memorial service for Wallace. Jonathan Franzen, himself one of the great American writers working today and a close friend of Wallace, relayed a tragic dialogue. LA Times reports:

"Tell me a story about how things will get better," David Foster Wallace asked his friend Jonathan Franzen last summer. It was a particularly dark summer for Wallace, mired in a depression that ended, on Sept. 12, in suicide....

"He was in a terrible and dangerous place as a man and a writer," Franzen told the writer's friends and family, colleagues and students. "I said I thought his best writing was ahead of him. He said, 'Tell me another one.' "

A month's time has turned raw sadness into more varied emotions. I'm wondering whether, as one friend put it to me, a brilliant mind knows that suicide is actually a rational option under certain circumstances. I'm wondering why his anti-depressants stopped working and about the pharmaceutical role in dealing with depression more generally. I'm wondering whether the death of a hero of sorts (I don't have many) has contributed to my own periodic light funks -- I have always had a high set point of happiness but the past few months have also included occasional dips that come and go but regardless are new for me.

Most of all, I have a big regret. The one class of his that I attended ended almost an hour early. A few students milled around to chat with him; most of us left. I left, thinking I'd have opportunities to chat with him more in the future one-on-one. Of course, that future is gone and I should have seized the opportunity when it was in front of me.

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I'm reading McCain's Promise -- the expanded version of the DFW essay on McCain from 2000 that appeared in Rolling Stone and Consider the Lobster. Will report more once I finish. It's obviously a pretty timely read.

DFW Tributes and My Essay on His Kenyon Speech

More literary reflections on David Wallace's life and contributions to the American scene are starting to roll in. I've linked to and excerpted a few below. Here is my spur of the moment reflection at 1 AM last night.

If you haven't read Wallace I would recommend not starting with Infinite Jest, but one of his non-fiction essay collections such as Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing That I'll Never Do Again. Here some favorite nuggets of mine from Infinite Jest. Here's my post on his Best Essays introduction.

Also, many of remembrances reference his 2005 Commencement Address at Kenyon College. It is indeed worth reading. Below the fold on this blog post I include portions of an essay I wrote a few months ago on the speech, summarizing and analyzing it.

To the remembrances....

Here's Michiko Kakutani in the NY Times:

For that matter, much of Mr. Wallace’s work...felt like outtakes from a continuing debate inside his head about the state of the world and the role of the writer in it, and the chasm between idealism and cynicism, aspirations and reality. The reader could not help but feel that Mr. Wallace had inhaled the muchness of contemporary America — a place besieged by too much data, too many video images, too many high-decibel sales pitches and disingenuous political ads — and had so many contradictory thoughts about it that he could only expel them in fat, prolix narratives filled with Möbius strip-like digressions, copious footnotes and looping philosophical asides.

Here's David Gates in Newsweek who spends a little more time on the suicide references in DFW's later writings. Elsewhere Gates writes:

True, Wallace was a head case, but in the sense that we're all head cases: encased in our skulls, and sealed off from our fellow humans, we have worlds upon worlds of teeming, unruly sensations, emotions, attitudes, opinions and-that chillingly neutral word-information. "What goes on inside," Wallace wrote in "Good Old Neon," is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at a given instant.

Here's Laura Miller in Salon who says Wallace made us feel a little less alone:

Every author wants to sell books, to please his or her publisher, to reap critical accolades and to bask in the admiration of colleagues, and Wallace did want those things, at the same time that he was more than a little embarrassed by such desires and acutely aware of the fact that none of it could make him happy. However, all great writers -- and I have no doubt that he was one -- have a preeminent purpose: to tell the truth. David Foster Wallace's particular vocation was to allow us to see just how fraught and complicated, how difficult yet how necessary, that telling had become -- not just for him, but for all of us. What will we do without him?

Here's Christopher Hayes in The Nation:

Wallace's project, which he lays out pretty clearly in this 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, was empathy. And as a hyper-brilliant mind, the path he took towards it, in his writing, was to use his raw intellectual horsepower to achieve a kind of moral enlightenment. There was, in this way, a merging of form and content: his writing worked because he was able to achieve this kind of brilliant, self-conscious, painfully self-aware, but nonetheless robust and heart-breaking empathy for his characters and subjects. And as a reader, the prose itself made one feel a similar kind of soul connection to both the writer and the people the writer described. He felt close. His characters felt close. And reading him I found that the prison bars of my own embedded subjectivity, my own selfish "default setting" was shaken, bent, expanded just enough to be able to glimpse something eternally, capital-T True. Something sublime.

Speaking of that speech, below the fold, a summary and analysis.

Remembering David Foster Wallace

The world has lost a spectacular writer. Already it seems as if some special portal of human intelligence has been closed off. -- John Seery, colleague and friend in HuffPost remembrance

David Foster Wallace, one of my heroes and inspirations, hanged himself Friday night here in Claremont. Considered among the greatest writers of his generation, and certainly a jewel on the Pomona faculty, I've been reading and following his work for years. His loss is crushing.

Virtually every time I read Wallace I feel inspired to want to be smarter. He inspires me with his range -- from the meaning of number zero to esoteric literary theory to talk radio to tennis to politics. He inspires me with his style -- surely not everyone's taste, but even his critics admire his courage to re-define his genre and challenge convention. He inspires me with his relentless humor -- even if his ideas were baseless (they're not) he would still be recognized as a world class humorist. He inspires me with his raw thought process -- how he arranged his verbs and nouns to produce an argument that was accessible and rational and entertaining all at once.

Wallace's suicide raises for me the question about the correlation between enlightenment and depression. How much truth is there to the phrase "ignorance is bliss"? How unbearable is genius?

It was not a question I discussed with his other readers. When marveling at Wallace's output, we always talked about its brio but we never seriously pondered whether the author was a happy man.

Discovering that somebody vigorously read (or tried to read!) Wallace became for me another one of those litmus tests when deciding whether to spend time with a person. To me it didn't matter so much that people liked him or agreed with him, but rather that they were disposed to be tickled by his intellect.

•••

There is sure to be a deluge of remembrances and obituaries about Wallace's life in the coming days. I thought I could contribute my part to this collection by relaying a quick story about meeting Wallace here in Claremont.

Since 2002 Wallace had taught a class a semester at Pomona College. His reputation as a teacher matched his reputation in the literary world. Students loved him. Far from adopting the pose of "famous professor who doesn't have time for his students," Wallace was known to offer excruciatingly detailed and personal critiques of students' work. (He also didn't need the money of an endowed professorship -- see his MacArthur genius grant, for example.)

When I arrived in Claremont in fall 2007, one of my goals was to take his class. As a student at Claremont McKenna, part of the consortium of colleges here which permit cross registration, it was going to be possible but difficult since for popular classes preference is given to seniors at the home college.

I looked up Wallace's course this past spring at Pomona and saw he was teaching "The Literary Essay," which was about the art of the imaginative non-fiction essay, a skill for which Wallace can comfortably claim expertise, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to register for it.

I showed up to his class anyway. At the least I just wanted to see him in person. I was terrified.

After going down the list of twelve and taking note of each student's name, major, and hometown, Wallace looked around to see if he missed anybody. Me. He asked who I was. I said I was a student who hoped to enroll in his class. He said it was full and there was a waiting list. I said I understood. He said I was welcome to leave. I asked if he wanted me to leave. He said it was going to be a boring day of reviewing the syllabus and he wouldn't want me to suffer through it if I were not going to actually be in the class. David Foster Wallace reviewing a syllabus on writing? People would pay money to be witness to that. I said I'd prefer to stay since I had walked all the way over, and he agreed.

His syllabus was wonderful -- and yes, it had footnotes. He seemed to be chewing tobacco and spitting it into a mug as he talked about why this was going to be a class where we as writers improve our ability to engage a reader who has zero interest in our opinions or emotions. He wore big black shoes, the laces seemed undone, and had a bandanna on his head.

To round out the syllabus, Wallace asked some kids to volunteer to turn in essays on certain days for group workshopping. No one volunteered. I looked around, incredulous. David Foster Wallace just asked for volunteers, and no one is volunteering?!?! He announced there would be a bathroom break and when class re-convened, somebody had better be ready to sign up.

Outside, in the bathroom, I smiled awkwardly to him and told him I was a huge fan of his work. I felt like just another fanboy. Even though this famous writer has heard much higher praise, he still smiled genuinely and thanked me for the kind words.

Using the email address he listed on the syllabus, I emailed Wallace after class to ask if I could meet with him one on one. To my astonishment he replied a few hours later and said I could come to his office hours and we'd chat. In his reply he also "beseeched" me not to share his email address with anyone. (He was notoriously difficult to access; he did not maintain a Pomona email address; phone calls to the English Dept were directed to his agent; he did very few interviews / media appearances for his books.)

A week later I went to his office hours. I showed up 20 minutes early and paced around the building, going over what I would ask him. I walked in right at 6pm, and saw him in the hallway. He gently remembered who I was, pointed to his office, and said he'd be in in a minute. I stood around in his large office alone, admiring the books lining the shelves and soaking up the reality of the situation.

We ended up talking for about 25 minutes before another student showed up. I asked him about editing the Best American Essays of 2007. I asked him how he crafts such vivid descriptions in his writing (his response was that good writers slave over their work and the brilliant description doesn't happen on the first try). I asked about the value of an education. He was gracious, kind, and interested.

This all happened just a few months ago. I must admit I harbored some fantasy of meeting him again, taking a full class, getting some tips, learning more about the man behind the prose. That possibility, no matter how remote, is now gone. All I have is the memory of sitting in his office.

More important, the world has lost one of its most distinctive and illuminating voices. A sad night.

Very Simple Writing Advice from James Wood

Judith Shulevitz at Slate reviews and summarizes James Wood's book How Fiction Works. Wood is the most influential book critic today. Some of his very easy-to-understand do's and dont's for writers:

• Writers should treat their fictions with the deference due something real; or, if they don't, they should show that they understand the consequences of not doing so.
• They should grant characters their measure of "metaphysical presence," not move them around like pawns in "metafictional games."
• Authors should be "gravely affirmative" before they give themselves license to be "gravely skeptical."
• They should "inhabit" their stories, rather than play with them.
• Details should be sprinkled with a light but deliberate touch (tact, of course, comes from the Latin for touch) and imbued with the weight of what the medieval theologian Duns Scotus called "thisness": "By thisness," Wood writes, "I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability."
• Dialogue should hold back as much as, if not more than, it says.
• A good metaphor does not just conform to a character's worldview; it "hovers around the character, and seems to emanate from that character's world."

Thisness? Gravely affirmative? Metaphysical presence? Deference due something real?

I guess this is why I'm a mere blogger and at times a wannabe non-fiction writer, not someone deep into the world of fiction and serious criticism.

Visualizing the Book Review Before Writing Your Book

Kind of a neat approach -- visualize the book review you want to read before writing your book:

Many years ago, David Allen shared with me that one of the first things he did when planning his first book, the best-selling, Getting Things Done, was to write the Wall Street Journal review of his book, first. He wrote the book review as he would like it to appear in print, even before writing the first chapters of his book.

Derek Scruggs adds:

An acquaintance of mine, a direct marketing guru, once told me that he writes the sales letter before he ever creates the product. Only after he’s explained exactly what you’ll get and why you need it does he set about creating the product. (And sometimes, if the sales letter isn’t compelling enough, he just abandons the product altogether, saving him a lot of time and effort.)

The GTD blog also has the helpful reminder that if you don't know what "done" looks like before starting a task, you won't know when you are done.

"Of Course" and "Obviously" In Writing

Even when I think it's unimportant....Even when I know I shouldn't judge....I always end up focusing on a person's choice of words and use of language in general.

Sometimes I read an essay where a person uses an interesting and pitch-perfect word, and then I see it show up again a few paragraphs later and it's a let down. Or I have two oral conversations with someone and very quickly pick up on a favorite word or construction. Examples. One friend loves to talk about "policy cleavages" in politics, another uses the word "dynamic" as an all-purpose noun to describe almost anything, another uses "amusing" as his choice humor superlative. Nothing wrong with this -- I just neurotically focus on it. I have my own go-to phrases and words such as the construction "so as to...".

Bryan Caplan today challenges conventional writing advice which says avoid the over-used phrases "of course" and "obviously." If it's obvious, the advice goes, why do you need to say it?!

Why is it so hard to surrender these words?  The main reasons: When you say "obviously," or "of course"...

1. ...listeners know not to waste time looking for a complicated rationale behind your statement. What they see is what they get.

2. ...listeners can identify your starting points. It may be obvious that X is true, and obvious that X-->Y, but if you just start with Y, people will be confused.

3. ...listeners find out what you take for granted.  If it's different from what they take for granted, that's news.

This is something I've thought about and notice very consciously when reading. In general, I dislike the phrases. I believe reason #3 above can be used condescendingly. People couch what is not an obvious point with the phrase "obviously" to indicate higher intelligence. Or people drop "of course" left and right because of their own intellectual insecurity -- they don't know what's obvious or not, so they insist that all is obvious to them. Of course, hard and fast rules about writing should never be followed, and obviously there's a time and place for everything.

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I feel less passionately than some about the semi-colon. I only know one proper way to use it (there are other ways). E.g.: "I wasn't sure if I was going to like the book; however, I read it anyway because Joe recommended it." Semi-colon followed by "however" or some other transitional phrase. Otherwise, I never use semi-colons. Here's Michael Kinsley from a long piece on semi-colons:

“The most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism,” explains Kinsley, “is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is. I suppose there are worse crimes in the world. (I don’t know if Osama bin Laden uses semicolons or not.) But Fred did have it right.”

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All this talk about phrases and semicolons distracts from a more pressing point: the world would be a much better place if a majority of people correctly used "it's" and "its."

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I'm far from a perfect writer or grammar-follower. Part of why I blog about this stuff is being public about it forces me to a high standard, and also invites readers to point out corrections in my prose.

Some Careers Are Better to Do Young

Some careers are better to do when you're young. Athletics is the most obvious example that springs to mind.

There are others. Compare my two main career interests: entrepreneurship/starting companies and writing/journalism. The start-up tech world seems to discriminate in favor of youth. That is, you don't see many 65 year-olds starting tech companies.

The writing world, however, seems age-agnostic or maybe even the opposite. There are many older writers who are still widely respected and prolific. More experience as a writer is almost always considered a plus, whereas in the start-up world too much experience can be seen as a negative.

Note that I'm talking specifically about the start-up tech world. Daniel Gross has a recent Slate piece titled How did America's business leaders get so old? where he discusses Buffett, Icahn, Soros, and other senior citizens who still dominate business.

All this to say, it seems to make more sense to start start-ups while I'm young, and pursue writing full-time later in life.

Related Posts:

• Does Experience Have a Negative Correlation With Success?
• Conceptual Breakthroughs: The Domain of the Young
  • In this post I say the ideal time to start a company is ~27 -- the idea being you want some experience but not too much experience.