What (or Who) Makes Good Writing?

Last Thursday night, my friend Kathleen and I attended a City Arts and Lectures program at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. It was a great evening for foodies: former editor of Bon Appetite Barbara Fairchild interviewed the venerable and very down to earth Jacques Pepin in conversation with Daniel Patterson, a Bay Area wunderkind chef. What a delight, especially listening to Pepin talk about his days cooking with Julia Child for the renowned PBS series. 


During filming both chefs worked in front of the camera without recipes, just cooking fresh ingredients without measuring or weighing anything. They didn't plan what they would cook or who would do what. 
After the episodes were filmed, PBS found viewers wanted recipes for every dish, something neither Pepin nor Child had any interest in determining. So PBS had to hire someone to watch each episode and decide the weights and measures of each dish, to make order and structure out of the great drama and spectacular chaos Pepin and Child had created. 


Sitting on the vast stage of the Beaux Arts designed building, wine glass at hand, Pepin explained what it takes to cook free-style, "It's a myth that you can learn to cook easily! It's not true. My cooking is idiosyncratic and not replicable outside my kitchen." He claimed the "bedrock quality" of a good cook is a solid foundation in technique--and years working as an apprentice, a job he started at age thirteen in his mother's restaurant. And, not surprisingly, he pointed out "the love" a cook needs to add to every dish. It has nothing to do with recipes. It's the Carnegie Hall method every time.


There is a parallel in writing. Sometimes writers want formulas, or "corrections," or they want to know the shortcuts to good writing. There are formulas and techniques and accuracies of grammar to learn. But these do not produce good writing any more than knowing how to measure dry versus wet ingredients produces tender and light creme anglaise. 


Here's an showing anecdote from the South African photographer Sam Haskins about the source of quality work: "A photographer went to a socialite party in New York. As he entered the front door, the host said, 'I love your pictures--they're wonderful. You must have a fantastic camera.' He said nothing until dinner was finished, then: 'That was a wonderful dinner. You must have a terrific stove."


It's not the Moleskine notebook, it's not the latest model Mac, not the pen nor the antique writing desk. It comes from inside the writer, honed with years of practice, practice, practice--spiced up with lots of failure. Those disasters--dropping the wet chicken or writing nonsense-- teach us how to measure success. 
                                             

A Connection to Place

I was invited this week to post a short essay, "The Possibility of Community" about my connection to Santo Stefano di Sessanio on Helen Free's blog, Hang on to the Vine.  An Italian-American living in Washington D. C., Helen writes about her ancestral home in the Abruzzo region of Italy.We have visited the region many times--Helen more than I, yet every time we approach the hill town of Santo Stefano di Sessanio, I feel somehow stealth-like, amazed at my opportunity to enter its still-ancient world. 

Field below Santo Stefano di Sessanio               photo: Dayle Fergusson

People of the Abruzzo are proud of the region's motto, "forte e gentile," and that strength and gentility shows everywhere. 
It's in the massive, steep slopes of the Gran Sasso mountains, rising abruptly from a road where horses graze freely,where the land looks newly created.
It shows in its people's kindness and rugged know-how, their sure competence for making flavorful mozzarella, for example, from the milk of smelly sheep, its twisted shapes displayed dramatically, yet without flourish. 
Far from the tourist spots of Rome and Florence, the Abruzzo is very close to the Italian heart, and can provide a restorative and, sometimes, life changing sojourn. And now especially--three years since the devastating earthquake--a visit is a gift of support to these gentle and strong people. 


Consider joining me in Italy this May 27--June 2, as a gift to yourself. It just could change your writing life and maybe more. I have room for another writer. Go to Italy, In Other Words for photos, endorsements and enrollment information. 

Showing Writing

We hear it all the time--"Show! Don't Tell," but what does it really mean? 


When you cut through the plod of telling, and show what you mean, the reader "gets" what you're saying at a visual or gut level. Showing reaches the reader's imagination much more quickly than the more cerebral telling. Showing eliminates a level of interpretation, a filtering through the intellect. Unless, of course, your aim is to slow down the process, to encourage the reader's contemplation...then it's time to do some telling or summarizing. 

In narrative nonfiction, we show in scenes--adding dialogue, place details, characters' action, and so forth. We show with selective reporting--foregrounding the details that serve our purpose.


Case in point: I've recently added the Longform app to my reader, and the top article when I opened it Saturday, the day following Thomas Kinkade's death, was a a great piece of journalism Susan Orlean had written in 2001, called, "Art for Everybody." (Orlean's title will sound comforting to some readers; worrisome to others.) In a nearly "aw shucks" tone, Orlean reports her interview with Kinkaid, her extensive field work, and his reaction to art critics.


It's straight-forward writing, its point communicated purely through showing writing.  She doesn't tell the reader what to think or how to view Kinkade's art--which is as fiercely derided by art critics as it is embraced by its consumers. 


Orlean reports the facts of her field work in what might seem like simple narrative. Her biting interpretation of Kinkade as a self-described "Artist of Light" and her arch evaluation of his claim to be the people's artist come through in details she reveals, scenes she recreates and in the juxtaposition of details in the content. She smiles politely to her reader as surely as she skewers Kinkade, nails him, strings him up and ties him down.


Of course, Orlean is a pro and smart--like a fox. It's a delightful and instructive read, a model of showing writing.

Intention, Intuition and Improvisation

A competent teacher bases lectures, reading and activities on the requirements of a final product of some sort--whether it's a test or an essay or a painting. Yet, there's abhorrence to "teaching to the test" because such teaching stifles creative and critical thinking. Managing that task--encouraging creative and critical thinking and testing it--characterizes competent teaching.


There's a parallel in writing. Writers can't help but to be conscious of their audience as they compose. And it's important they write to their audience, but do not let the audience determine their curriculum, so to speak. Writers of serious narrative nonfiction aren't slaves to formulas and mass-market buzz topics and treatments; instead, they strive to connect with an intelligent and thoughtful audience. 

Ocean Park #79, 1975 Richard Diebenkorn

On a recent rainy Sunday, I spent an afternoon at the Orange County Museum of Art in Southern California immersed in an extensive exhibit of Richard Diebenkorn's large abstract paintings. It was easy to lose myself in the complexity he painted into these works. Their depth grounds the paintings and holds the viewer's attention at an intellectual and emotional level.
      
Curator Sarah C. Bancroft explains, "The artist worked and reworked the canvases, scraping and repainting, building up layers as well as atmospheric fields and planes, finally arriving at a solution through a combination of intention, intuition and improvisation."
      
Diebenkorn's effort creating the work, his layering of "intention, intuition and improvisation" reaps an emotional connection that washes over the viewer encountering the paintings. We realize the skill intellectually as we slow down and reflect analytically.


There's a parallel in writing. In order to reach an audience at a sophisticated level, we build layers into our writing. Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight describes Diebenkorn's layering process: "The narrative in these paintings is a story of their making--of a vertical blue line that gains a violet-rose shadow as it tracks down the edge of a canvas, turning off at an angle like a refracted ray of light and then sliding beneath a wash of luminous gray, only to emerge at the other side as a little wedge of canary yellow. Or, of a field of brushy green that, the longer you look, slowly gives up layers of under-painting in hues you can't quite put your finger on."


Likewise, we layer our stories in multiple drafts and readings to create subtle turns and refracted understandings--with, for example, tense shifts, points of view, back story, foreshadowing, flashes back and forward. We follow Emily Dickinson's vision to "tell the truth, but tell it slant." We write as Diebenkorn painted--to integrate surprise, to turn the obvious on its head. And we know the more sophisticated the reader, the more we need to fight predictability in our writing, the more we need to "solve" the word problems in our stories.


Diebenkorn said it simply in the video at the museum: "I paint for an ideal viewer, not just for myself." And he said about the end product: "Now, the idea is to get everything right. It's not just color or form or space or line--it's everything at once." Effective narrative nonfiction likewise reveals complexity, all "at once," though the process comes from all the "scraping and repainting" and "building up layers."