The shoes are your lede

Thomas Jefferson, who used only 1,320 words in the Declaration of Independence to set the world afire, was no slouch when it came to concise writing. “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do,” he once advised. 

Mark Twain offered more caustic counsel. “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be,” he suggested.

”There is no rule on how to write,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, known for his punchy writing and macho lifestyle — or was it the other way around? W. Somerset Maugham disagreed. “There are three rules for writing a novel,” he insisted. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

Scott Fitzgerald hated exclamation points. Tom Wolfe loved them! Gabriel García Márquez’s prose is poetic and mystical. Raymond Carver’s is tight and spare. Harper Lee wrote two books. Barbara Cartland averaged two a month –– 723 in all –– although unlike the other authors named here, I haven’t read a single one.

You can find lots of conflicting advice on writing. And that’s how it should be. In my experience, every writer has to discover for himself or herself what works best.

As a newspaperman for 45 years, mostly for the Los Angeles Times, I wrote thousands of stories — breaking news, profiles, features, analysis, obituaries, op-eds, and more, usually on deadline. I wrote from 49 states (sorry, Oklahoma) and from six continents (next time, Antarctica). I scribbled while driving (not advised), on horseback, on a camel, and once while whitewater rafting (“I love danger,” then-presidential-candidate Gary Hart said, according to my soggy notebook). 

I wrote magazine cover stories under fire in Iraq and by candlelight in the Philippines. I was chased by a mob in India, shot at in Zaire, and shown great kindness in countless places. I wrote a nonfiction book, “Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Conman Who Caused a War,” about the faulty intelligence used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was widely praised, won two national awards, spawned an off-Broadway musical, and was published in 12 languages. As far as I know, it didn’t make money in any of them. 

The difference between a news story and a nonfiction book? The first, if written well, is like a trumpet blast that makes you spit out your coffee. The latter is like a Verdi opera, with swirling characters, elaborate scene changes, and marching elephants. Also you get a bigger byline on a book cover than on a front page. 

I took no English courses in college, and took exactly one creative writing course, decades later while on a journalism fellowship at Stanford. At lunch one day, I told the then-unpublished professor that except for letters to my mother, I didn’t normally write unless I was getting paid. He suggested I charge her. 

I took comfort in “The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft,” published in 2005. Other than deep immersion in their topics, the 19 writers profiled agreed on almost nothing about their craft. 

Gay Talese was especially memorable. He takes notes on narrow pieces of cardboard so that when he puts them in his pockets they won’t spoil the lines of his bespoke three-piece suit. He also pins printouts of sentences on the wall of his office to make sure the words are exactly right. It sometimes takes him a week to complete a single paragraph. I met him once, and when I asked about that, he said his eyesight had declined and so he needed binoculars to read the writing on the wall. That may be why his memoir, “A Writer’s Life,” took 14 years to finish. A good chunk focuses on writer’s block. 

I had only a year to write my book. So I secluded myself in a basement room without a phone and went to work. Months passed. I often wrote at night and slept in the day, showing up for dinner in a bathrobe, unshaved and unbidden. More months passed. I gained weight and looked jaundiced. One night, during a frenzied edit, I stole erasers from my 13-year-old daughter’s school backpack while she slept. I sent the manuscript to Random House on deadline, and when my editor there voiced enthusiastic approval, I was so upset that I snatched it back and cut 20,000 words. After it was published, my agent urged me to write another. My wife and two children unanimously vetoed the idea. 

Several years later, my daughter Caroline and I met Salman Rushdie. We were at Oberlin, on her college tour, and were invited to a small cocktail party before his speech. When Caroline asked him to autograph her dog-eared, scribbled-on copy of “Midnight’s Children,” he beamed with pleasure. He loved signing used books, he told her, because it meant they had been read. But when she added that her favorite English teacher had explained the Christian symbolism in the book, he bristled. “Tell your teacher I am a proud Muslim,” he growled. “I don’t use Christian symbolism.” Maybe so, but the book belongs to the reader, not the writer.

I got perhaps my best writing tips when I was still in college and was hired as the weekend police reporter at the Lorain Journal. Lorain was a dying Ohio steel town on the shores of Lake Erie. My first assignment was to cover a flooded neighborhood, and I soon banged out a story that quoted Yeats, or maybe Keats. A cigar-chomping editor took one look, threw it in the trash, and said, “This ain’t the fucking New York Times.” His point was, don’t try to show the reader how smart you are. 

A week later, I had to cover the drowning death of a young boy. I was unnerved. I’d never seen a dead body, and I froze over the keyboard. How do you describe an unfathomable tragedy? The same editor came over and gently asked me what I saw. I recounted the wailing mother and ashen-faced father, the hushed onlookers on the beach, the flashing lights on the ambulance, and the little leather shoes the boy had carefully left at the water’s edge. 

The shoes are your lede, he told me. He was right. Always look for the small details that tell the larger story. Make the reader see what you see, so they can feel what you feel. 

My only other advice is this: Just start writing, one word after another. You don’t have to start at the beginning. I wrote my first chapter last in “Curveball.” Writing is often a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes you don’t know the picture until you put pieces on the table. Focus on telling the story. Make your characters come alive. Find the moments of grace. If you cry or laugh, the reader should, too. Grab readers by the throat, or caress them softly in their beds. Write what’s in you, and what you don’t want others to forget. Life is made up of stories. Write yours.

Bob Drogin is a journalist, author and longtime summer resident of West Tisbury.