Writing education & wisdom

There's been a few great things to note here that I've seen recently that fall under the closely linked subjects of writing education and writing wisdom.

For his personal blog earlier this month, Tommy Tomlinson wrote "The Four Questions" about what he asks students in his writing workshops to help them guide what to write about. Really great things to think about from Tomlinson with the questions (written about more in his blog post) below along with a solid fifth question added by Chris Ballard:

1. What do you know about?
2. What do you care about?
3. What are you curious about?
4. What scares you?
5. What pisses you off?

Another great link around writing education and posted a few weeks ago to The First Bound was the syllabus for a narrative non-fiction course taught by Chris Jones. Included is a ton of interesting material from Jones with his thoughts on the course, resources in the form of published stories to review and weekly schedule. Some of the particular planned days that stood out to me as particularly interesting included the following:

9/21 - Your Ideas (Please come to class with three or four ideas for the "Best Story of Your Life So Far." The class will discuss the merits of each.)
9/28 - Reporting: Where to Begin?
10/05 - Cultivating Sources
10/07 - The Art of the Interview
10/21 - Reporting Finished (Please come to class with all of your reporting for your story, including transcripts. After this class, you should be able to begin writing in earnest.)
11/18 - First Drafts Due (During this class, you will submit a first draft of your story to me and exchange a second copy with a fellow student for peer review.)
12/07 - Final Edit Due

Also very much in the writing education area was a tweet sent out by Paige Williams about the upcoming Nov 8 deadline to apply for a Nieman Foundation Visiting Fellowship. Some of the details noted at the link include the following:

- The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard offers short-term visiting fellowships to individuals interested in working on special research projects designed to advance journalism.
- Applicants need not be practicing journalists, but must demonstrate the ways in which their work at Harvard and the Nieman Foundation may improve the prospects for journalism’s future.
- Successful applicants are invited to the Nieman Foundation for a period ranging from a few weeks to three months, depending on the scope of the project.

I hadn't heard before of the short-term Nieman Fellowships, but they're related to the 10 month long Nieman Fellowships which have had a number of well known writers participate in, including the aforementioned Tomlinson who was recently written about on Nieman Storyboard as a 2009 Nieman Fellow.


The last things around writing to mention on this post aren't necessarily as squarely in the category of journalism education, but definitely fall under the area of writing wisdom and start off with two posts to the writing site Gangrey. "Letter to a Young Journalist" was from Tampa Bay Times writer Lane DeGregory and features some great advice on thoughts on people entering the field. Additionally,"I'd Like To Have Everything, You Know, Nice" was a post about what stories writers on the site view as great pieces to aspire to the level of writing in them and there's now 20-25 different pieces linked in the comments.

Also of interest lately has been a few mentions of the Gangrey podcast series with interviews by Journalism professor and writer Matt Tullis. Podcast episodes range from 20 to 50 minutes and the 9 recorded so far feature the following writers: Luke Dittrich, Jason Fagone, Brian Mockenhaupt, Jesse Lichtenstein, Stephen Rodrick, Kelley Benham French, Pamela Colloff, Michael J. Mooney and Justin Heckert.

Lessons on writing - from Sager, Koppelman & Leonard

In the tradition of my ruminating on and linking to pieces on the subject of writing, there's a few great pieces to note here that contained lessons around writing well. Authors of the pieces were Esquire writer Mike Sager, screenwriter Brian Koppelman and novelist Elmore Leonard and each list of writing rules had some excellent things to keep in mind.

Posted to the media website The First Bound on September 9 was Sager's "53 Ways To Improve Your Reporting" and those that stood out to me the most were the following and seemed to all fall under the idea of being thorough and detailed in the information gathering portion of writing something:

#17 - It’s not about you (until the typing starts). 
#19 - Suspend disbelief during an interview. Reserve judgment for the keyboard. 
#20 - Tape interviews with a microcassette or digital recorder. Take pad and pen notes on specific and sensual details. Transcribe everything, time permitting. 
#30 - Don’t write your lede before you get there. 
#34 - Be present. Be in the moment. For the duration of the interview, it should feel like the universe consists only of you and your source.

The second piece of writing rules to note here came from the often-excellent website of Brandon Sneed as he earlier this month published "Brian Koppelman (writer of Rounders, Ocean's 13, The Illusionist, Runner Runner) gave some great screenwriting lessons on Twitter". It was solid advice that Koppelman provided via 13 extremely short video segments he tweeted out and then Sneed pulled together into a blog post. If the writing advice from Sager could be generalized to be about the importance of the up-front work, the stuff from Koppelman that struck me the most seemed to be about the idea of just putting pen to page consistently:

4. In what I thought was the beginning of a serious heartfelt convo, I told my dad I wanted to be a writer. He looked at me and said, "You want write? Write." 
5. Calculate less. Don't try to game the market. Write what you want to write. And drink plenty of coffee. 
6. Of the many supposedly bullshit rules of screenwriting, the only one that's legit is "write every day." 
8. The moment your screenplay leaves your hands, it becomes a commodity. So while it's with you, treat it like a piece of art. 
9. Instead of reading screenwriting books, read about your subject, the subject that fascinates, compels, and interests you.

The last piece to mention here with excellent writing advice was by Elmore Leonard for the New York Times in 2001 and then was tweeted out by many after Leonard's death last month. "WRITERS ON WRITING; Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle" featured 10 points from Leonard and the advice of his that resonated the most with me seemed related to the points from Sager I noted above. Sager wrote (among other things, of course) about up-front research and in the points from Leonard below, he covered putting details on the page without unnecessary flourishes or description:

3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. 
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said'' . . . . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ''full of rape and adverbs.'' 
 6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.'' This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ''suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

Related to Koppelman's point #9 above, someone interested in writing shouldn't spend time on writing lessons if that at the expense of time researching, reporting or producing actual writing, but that said, there were some really solid lessons from the three writers.