Tweaks

Compiled by John Sweeney, Dick Thien and Bruce Murray

First you have to know the subject. Then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn.
-- Ernest Hemingway

The best journalists today are the best lie detectors. Not just the relentless skeptics who sort of automatically disbelieve everything, but the reporters who instinctively are alert to the possibility that their sources don't know what they are talking about, who are leaving out vital details that would tend to discredit their stories or they are deliberately lying.
-- Ben Bradlee

We are part of the knowledge industry. We can't be a mere diversion from the realities of the world; we must help people to understand the world. Few of us are presumptuous enough to believe that we are offering the readers the gift of wisdom. But without knowledge, wisdom is impossible.
-- Pete Hamill

That's the simultaneous joy and torment of writing or editing news for a living. There's always another story, another edition, another broadcast. Yesterday's achievement won't last, but neither will yesterday's lapse.
-- Walter R. Mears

Why do we look for the drama in the news?
Proably to avoid what one editor, Edward Kosner, of New York magazine, calls "mushball journalism." That's journalism that concentrates on facts -- perhaps a whole reservoir of facts -- but lacks thematic direction, lacks life, lacks dramatic impact. Some of our most memorable literature tells us more about life through storytelling than a thousand purely factual reports ever could. We don't recall the factual details of the Great Depression of the 1930s so much as we remember one family coping with the crises of migrants seeking a new life in California in John Steinbeck's classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath.
-- Ken Metzler

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
-- Mark Twain

The trick is leaving out everything but the essential.
-- David Mamet

You cannot be a good writer if you don't read. Read great stuff. Read awful stuff. Read classics. Read trash. And think about the writing that you're reading. Why did he say it that way? Why did she put it this way? What is that so awful? Why is this so good?
-- Michael Gartner

The only really interesting questions involve the difference between Wrong and Fun.
-- P.J. O'Rourke

Action! Action! Action!
-- Arnold

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
What am I trying to say?
What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
-- George Orwell

When the reporting is done, the drudge work of organizing your notes into an index is as important as either the writing or reporting. Going through the notes and documents and indexing these allows you to master the material. It allows you to structure the trees (index) into a forest (table of contents). The process helps locate a natural lead that flows into the body of the piece, and to pinpoint holes.
-- Ken Auletta

In this business you're going to take bumps. Hard, hard bumps. This is a business where you're constantly reminded of how little you know. And the sad part is in most cases you're reminded by someone who has no clue about what you do. But they are in the power to make you feel that way. In all of the creative fields this is going to be the same. My experience with young people is that they take rejection very personally. If you die a little for everything which is not accepted you will not live long. I have lived through tons of rejection and it's never easy. You have to get used to rejection. You have to be used to taking it, and not taking it personally.
-- Mario Garcia

"Write what you know." I write partly to discover, and to discover what I don't know I already know.
-- Steven Bach

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in
trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
-- Raymond Chandler

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective.
-- Ernest Hemingway

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth."
-- Melvin Maddocks

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively 14-year-old: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth."
-- Kurt Vonnegut

To maintain a sense of surprise, you cannot treat your beat as if on safari. Go to church, eat in local greasy spoons, shop at the nearby Kmart. Chat, spend time with sources. Show them you care about their story, that you're curious about them as people.
Source: Pete Weitzel, former Miami Herald managing editor

The argument is sometimes advanced, "What difference does the length of the sentence make so long as it is clear?" But clarity is not the sole criterion; the important thing is ease of comprehension. And small blocks of meaning are more easily comprehended than large ones. After all, a quart of gin is perfectly clear, but you wouldn't try to drink it all in one draught.
Source: Theodore Bernstein, "Watch Your Language"

Cultivate how to say no gracefully.
-- Mercedes Lackey

Generally speaking, if he can't see it, hear it, feel it and smell it, he can't write it.
-- William Burroughs

What Impels the Writer . . .

There's a common notion that self-discipline is a freakish peculiarity of writers -- that writers differ from other people by possessing enormous and equal portions of talent and willpower. They grit their powerful teeth and go into their little rooms. I think that's a bad misunderstanding of what impels the writer. What impels the writer is a deep love for and respect for language, for literary forms, for books. It's a privilege to muck about in sentences all morning. It's a challenge to bring off a powerful effect. You don't do it from willpower; you do it from an abiding passion for the field. I'm sure it's the same in every other field.
Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong. You don't have to scourge yourself with cat-o'-nine tails to go to the baby. You go to the baby out of love for that particular baby. That's the same way you go to your desk. There's nothing freakish about it. Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
-- Annie Dillard
____________

Imagine your reader asking for clarifications, objecting reasonably, objecting wrongly, wanting to know the point of it all, where it is all leading. Live this experience on the page as you rewrite, answering the audience's requests for direction and clarification as you go: How does this connect to that? What do you mean by this?
Source: V.A. Howard and J.H. Barton, "Thinking on Paper"

Cultivate steady work habits: a schedule that contemplates either regular work hours every week or a certain number of pages. Artistic inspiration is one of the most overrated premises for a writing schedule; a writer should try to get pages done on a regular basis, then work to improve them. If one waits for inspiration, rather than treating writing like a serious task, it becomes much harder to ever finish a book.
Source: Richard North Patterson, novelist

Stop saying "un huh" when you don't know. Ask questions.
Source: Richard Saul Wurman, author of "Information Anxiety"

Think of words such as "prison," "sidewalk," or "shark." These are sometimes called "banana words" because like the word banana, they conjure up specific, shared images for most of us. By contrast, consider words such as "proposal," "facility," and "problem." These are sometimes called "fuzz words," "blob words," or "second-degree words" because they convey only abstractions. Readers can understand banana words standing alone, but fuzz words require other words before making sense. Especially in the first few sentences of an article, strive for the highest possible percentage of banana words and images.
-- Carl Sessions Stepp

That I understood very little of what I read did not matter much to me. I was caught by the passion for print as an alcoholic is caught by the bottle.
-- V.S. Pritchett

Notice the women eating alone at night, the people without friends.
-- Jimmy Breslin

As a general proposition, use familiar words. Be precise; but first be understood. Search for the solid nouns that bear the weight of thought. Use active verbs that hit an object and do not glance off.
-- James J. Kilpatrick

I tend to think sometimes we forget the human aspect. You can write a lot of stories about how awful the problem is, but when you actually find someone whom it affects, you can get that message across so much better by just focusing on what that one person goes through, and showing that the issue does make an impact on someone's life.
Source: Terri Claflin, Medford (Ore.) Mail Tribune

I never presume to give advice on writing. I think the best way to learn to write is to read books and stories by good writers. It's a hard thing to preach about. As Thelonious Monk once said about his field, 'Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.'"
-- Maureen Dowd

Journalists should not be so distant that all they can hear are shouts, nor so close that they become more conspirators than critics.
-- Garry Wills

The good writer develops his own voice, her own voice. You just can't do that if you don't listen to yourself. And the best way to listen to yourself is to read to yourself -- out loud. Listen for the cadence -- or the discordance. Listen for the beat -- and the offbeat. Listen for the rhyme and the reason. Sometimes, you'll hear the jarring word, the awkward phrase -- the word that looked just fine but sounded junky, the phrase that typed nice but sounded clunky. So, talk.
-- Michael Gartner

You can't tell or show everything within the compass of a book. If you try to tell or show everything, your reader will die of boredom before the end of the first page. You must, therefore, ask yourself what is the core of the matter you wish to communicate to your reader? Having decided on the core of the matter, all that you tell him must relate to it and illustrate it more and more vividly.
-- Morris L. West

I don't know anything about fingerprinting or ballistics or any of that stuff, and if you're any good you can fake most of that.
-- Robert B. Parker

Rules in art are made to be broken.
-- Jane Yolen

There is no such thing as a dirty theme. There are only dirty writers.
-- George Jean Nathan

By writing you learn to write.
-- Latin proverb

Be adventurous, courageous and provocative.
-- Sandra Brown

The setting of standards in language is a contentious business, but somebody has to do it. Without standards, without definitions, without structural law, we lapse into linguistic anarchy. In such a barren land, there is no difference between "may" and "might," between "may" and "can," between "we have gone" and "we had gone." No one flinches at "he gave the luncheon for John and I." Subjects become strangers to verbs. If all words are socially acceptable, then no words are vulgar, tasteless or obscene. In such a society, communication is ruled by the one great lexicographer of them all, the Hon. H. Dumpty of Wonderland fame.
-- James J. Kilpatrick

I think the scoop of the future will be the best interpretation, the best written account, the most descriptive account, but most of all the one that explains to you why you need to know it and what it means.
Source: Daniel Schorr, NPR

Your reader and your subject deserve the very best you have to give, every day, every paragraph, sentence and word.
-- Steven Bach

You must believe in yourself. If you don't believe in yourself and in your ability to succeed, then you can't expect others to believe in you.
-- Joan Lowery Nixon

Words not only mean what you want them to mean; words mean what they mean to most people who understand them.
-- William Safire

Dreams are the stuff that make life worth living. Give them up, and you give up all that truly matters. Write for yourself, not for recognition or success. If those fruits are to come, they will come. But the work itself must be the primary and major satisfaction.
-- William Heffernan

Editorial excellence is not a goal to be sought and one day acquired and then retired to the trophy case. It is instead an ambition that must be pursued each day, never ending, never totally achieved. That striving, that ambition is an essential part of our newspapers, a cornerstone of what we have been, what we are, and what we will be.
-- Lee Hills, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Knight Ridder chief executive

Democracy moves into the forefront with the start of the 2004
presidential campaign-the longest job interview in the world, in which each applicant is asked the same questions two-thousand, five-hundred times, and they're expected to look like they're having a great time. It's a sort of make-work program for journalists, who follow a well-known principle in journalism. And the principle is that if you get someone talking long enough they will eventually say something truly stupid.
-- Garrison Keillor

Here is the advice I try to follow: Show, don't tell.
-- Henry James

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.
-- Ford Maddox Ford

Any work of art must first of all tell a story.
-- Robert Frost

The good writer develops his own voice, her own voice. You just can't do that if you don't listen to yourself. And the best way to listen to yourself is to read to yourself - out loud. Listen for the cadence - or the discordance. Listen for the beat - and the offbeat. Listen for the rhyme and the reason. Sometimes, you'll hear the jarring word, the awkward phrase - the word that looked just fine but sounded junky, the phrase that typed nice but sounded clunky. So, talk.
Source: Michael Gartner, former editor Des Moines Register and former president NBC News

You don't hear roil a lot in everyday conversation. It isn't really a word of American English at all - it belongs to the patois of that exotic alter-America that we read about in the newspapers, a world populated by strongmen, fugitive financiers, and troubled teens, where ire is always being fueled until violence flares, spawning hatred and stirring fears until hopes are dashed.
Source: Geoffrey Nunberg, NPR commentator

Cultivate the willingness to listen to good editorial advice and to rewrite.
-- James Lee Burke

If you want to give up, then perhaps you should give up. The real writer doesn't consider that an option. Courage matters as much as talent.
-- Marianne Williamson

Cultivate honesty about oneself and the quality of one's work. Over self-criticism can be debilitating, but insufficient self-criticism is the handmaiden of mediocrity and, often, failure.
-- Nigel Hamilton

You cannot be a good writer if you don't read. Read great stuff. Read awful stuff. Read classics. Read trash. And think about the writing that you're reading. Why did he say it that way? Why did she put it this way? What is that so awful? Why is this so good?
-- Michael Gartner

You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do.
-- Henry Ford
____________________

Gene Autry's Cowboy Code
1. The cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.
2. He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.
3. He must always tell the truth.
4. He must be gentle with children, the elderly and animals.
5. He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.
6. He must help people in distress.
7. He must be a good worker.
8. He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action and personal habits.
9. He must respect women, parents and his nation's laws.
10. The cowboy is a patriot.
--

Anyone who will struggle to reduce his hundred words to fifty without losing meaning will see looseness, inconsistency, and aberration vanish.
Source: Wilson Follett, "Modern American Usage"

When people show up in a Numbers Story or a Policy Story, it is usually as a three-paragraph anecdote leading off the piece or one of its subsections. The idea is to use a bit of pungent humanity to lure readers into the hard stuff. This sort of journalistic bait-and-switch is cheap and cynical. Readers deserve more respect. They care about issues but are impatient with abstraction. They want to see problems and conflicts in the flesh. They want to make a personal connection, to imagine how this outrage would feel to them.
-- Ron Meador

Close the door. Unplug the phone. Cheat, lie, disappoint your pals, if necessary, but get your work done.
-- Garrison Keillor

Be afraid that people will turn you off. Walk people through stories. Important points can -- and should -- be repeated.
-- Philip Lerman

It is a damned poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.
-- Andrew Jackson

Be careful that you write accurately rather than much.
-- Erasmus

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language that will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

Tell almost the whole story.
-- Anne Sexton

The single most important factor is "focus."
Every successful story makes a single, central point and the writer needs to know what it is. (A lot of writers skip this step. They just dump their notes into their computer and think they've written a story.)
Unless you know the focus, you can't make a single intelligent decision about the piece. You can't know if you are done reporting if you don't know what you are trying to say. And, for course, you also can't make an intelligent decision about what to use and what to leave out.
-- Bruce DeSilva

Sweet words are like honey: a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach.
-- Anne Bradstreet

I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild - "timidity" is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline - a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample - that fear may be intense. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him.
Source: Stephen King

Before anything else, we must be writers. We may be known as reporters, or critics, or columnists, or reviewers, or editorialists. We may specialize in news of business or labor or politics or sports. No matter. First of all, we are writers. This is how we make our living: We write. We put words together. In the end, the test of how well we do our jobs is not in how well we cover the news, or review the movies, or chide a president, or criticize an actor, but in how well we write.
-- James J. Kilpatrick

Some writers think language is all they need. They mistake it for subject matter.
-- Bernard Malamud

The best stories may seem to turn on wonderful writing, but if you look closely enough you'll discover the true strength of these stories is that every sentence reports some specific piece of information. Maybe it's a fact that gives context. Maybe it's a quote that establishes tone. Maybe it's a description that defines the background. Whatever it is, it provides some kind of essential detail, and when all the details are added together, the result is a story that takes a reader to a particular time and makes it so real it's as if the reader is his own witness.
Source: David Finkel, Washington Post

The better you understand something yourself, the better able you will be able to write your story. One of the techniques I find most effective to help me understand new information I call the echo interview. This technique is nothing more than basic feedback. By repeating in your own words key points that a scientist has made and asking him or her if your interpretation is correct, you get an immediate check on how well you are grasping the material. If your paraphrase is incorrect, ask him or her to explain the point in simpler terms.
-- Ronald Kotulak, Chicago Tribune

First you have to know the subject. Then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn.
-- Ernest Hemingway

Another cause of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not, either from lack of mental power or from laziness, exactly formulated it in his mind, and it is natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused idea.
-- W. Somerset Maugham

If I get on to something, I then write down everything I can imagine on the subject. I let myself go; I let myself run off at the mouth as freely as possible without self-criticism.
-- David Wagoner

Try not to be too miserable if your first efforts aren't very good.
That's the only way to learn -- keep at it and keep reading and keep getting better and better at what you're doing.
-- Alexandra Ripley

I write easily, and that is no accident. I remind myself that John
Jerome said "Perfect is the enemy of good" and follow William Stafford's advice that "one should lower his standards." I write fast to outrace the censor and cause the instructive failures that are essential to effective writing.
-- Don Murray