The Beauty of Free Writing

You’re absolutely right. There’s good reason Jerry and Mark blog instead of writing poetry.

That said, playing with words and their sounds, silly as it seems, has real purpose. It can help you cast aside the demons of writer’s block and, over the years, make sense of that elusive quality called voice that mystifies most beginners, causing them to overreach. Free writing can scale away the encrusted cadences of cliché, shed the empty calories of multisyllabic words that plod rather than gallop. And it can help you relax.

So from time to time, just let your words cascade. Riff a little. Write a little rap, as the title of this chapter suggests.

Jerry started playing with free writing when he was about 30. He was a young college professor, searching for some way to crash through his writer’s block and publish rather than perish. Following the published advice of author Peter Elbow, he began writing fast for a few minutes first thing each morning, never lifting his fingers from the keyboard. Jerry described his approach with this analogy in his book Writing for Others, Writing for Ourselves:

And that’s all it does. It’s not meant to produce coherence. It’s not meant to craft quality. It’s meant to free you from self-judgment and self-doubt, to get the writer in you moving.

Free writing takes little time. Sit down with a pad of paper or an iPad and accelerate. Write as fast as you can for 10 minutes, max. The rules are simple. You can’t stop. You can’t correct. You can’t pause to think. Just keep writing, even if it’s gibberish. Shape doesn’t matter. Form doesn’t count. Forget design (though it’s OK to rhyme). The one rule? Let things rip.

When you’re done, read what you wrote aloud. Then throw it out and start again fresh the next day.

Once again: this is like stretching at the gym. The heavy lifting of writing, carefully crafted, comes later. Right now, you just want to get your fingers—and your mind—loose.

Finding the Space, and Place, You Think Best

Where you write matters. We’re talking location here, not whether you’re a Mac or PC kind of person. To put it another way, some of the great thoughts of our time will not be conceived at a keyboard.

We know this statement contradicts much of the advice you’ll read out there. Most well-respected writers will tell you it’s essential to write every day, at the same time, for a set number of hours. The marvelous nonfiction author John McPhee tied himself to his chair while a student at Princeton to force himself to stick with his task.

We’re not dismissing this advice. We’re amending it. Writing does take discipline and structure. But when you get hopelessly stuck, it’s not worth having an aneurysm glowering at your computer screen.

Where do you think best? Seriously. Where do you think best? Odds are it’s not a keyboard. And odds are the place you think best is where you’ll best break down problems as you craft and draft. Spend more time there.

Jerry, for a couple of decades, has been asking participants in writing groups he’s coached where they think best. The answers typically follow one of these patterns:

• Moving (biking, jogging, walking, driving, exercising)
• In bed (before sleep, first thing in the morning, waking from a nap)
• Doing something relaxing (cooking, showering, gardening)

Very few people—and we’re talking professional journalists and writers here—believe they think best in front of a keyboard.

So what’s the point (and why should you care)?

Writing is hard work. If you’re anything like us (Jerry and Mark), sometimes when you try too hard, you lock up. Your brain shuts down. Your words turn as tense as the frown lines on your forehead. At such times, we believe, you’re more likely to succeed if you put a mental Gone Fishin’ sign out and give yourself the space to think. Take a walk. Get a cup of coffee. Look at a bulletin board. Chop vegetables. Not all writing problems get solved through conscious work. Give your subconscious some space and time to click in.

Jerry only began to overcome decades of dread of filling blank pages when he learned this about himself: he writes best moving, something his golden retriever begins to resent (and resist) after hours of walking around the neighborhood. Jerry (but not his dog) has learned to carry a pad and pencil on these walks just in case words or ideas pop into his head. That way, he won’t forget.

Fast Drafting

You’ve heard that in the world of love, opposites sometimes attract? So it is with writing. Let’s call it the union of two r’s, relax and revise. Relax is the free spirit of these lovebirds. At her best, she’s spontaneous and creative. She’s a free spirit who doesn’t spend much time second-guessing herself. Revise? He can be a bit uptight. But at his best, he’s precise and organized. He helps order the life of Relax while she infuses spontaneity and creativity into his orderly ways.

Relax and Revise are the perfect couple of the written world. Once we’ve outlined and organized a story, we need to seek out Relax to find the flow, the pace, the rhythm of our words. Once we’re done drafting, we need the help of Revise. He’ll demand that we circle back two and three or five times to pare unneeded words, clarify fuzzy phrases, sharpen images and analogies.

Enough about our couple. Keep in mind that revision demands precision. But a good revision needs something rich and flavorful to start with, preferably the work of someone relaxed enough to infuse his or her writing with color and animation.

Learning to relax when faced with a blank page can be daunting to many writers. Don Fry, formerly with the Poynter Institute, offered his students this advice: “Draft fast to block the internal censor.”

Fry knows that it’s impossible to get things right the first time. In fact, trying too much can be the kiss of death for a piece of written work. But let’s listen to Anne Lamott, author of the best-selling Bird by Bird, explain why. She says it colorfully:

So try drafting fast rather than painstakingly. Don’t check your notes before writing each paragraph. Don’t revise that paragraph multiple times before you move to the next.

Don’t, however, mistake drafting fast for free writing. Before you sit down to draft fast, you should have a plan, at least in your mind. Sometimes fast drafts can be used to capture a scene you’ve just witnessed or a dialogue you’ve just heard. That’s not really a draft, but a vignette you may stick somewhere in a blog post later on. If you’re drafting fast from start to finish, it helps to first look through your notes, links, and other research, and to jot down a few key points. Then put these props aside and write fast before the nag of perfectionism slams you to a stop.

Voice

Mark Leccese plays jazz trumpet; Jerry Lanson sings classical and folk. Maybe that’s why both tell students to listen to the words they write, to read them out loud. Some words fly past. Others snap, turn, or stop, steered or lassoed by punctuation.

If, as author William Zinsser suggests, writing is a conversation between writer and reader, we’d all better learn to be better conversationalists. That takes practice.

Fancy writers love the word “voice.” Young writers often fear it. It’s an elusive concept to define but teachers of writing keep trying. Here are a few attempts from some of the masters of nonfiction instruction.

Writes Zinsser in his classic, On Writing Well:

Donald Murray, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist called the father of writing coaches, wrote several marvelous books on writing during his life. Here is an excerpt from his book The Craft of Revision:

And lastly, here are the thoughts of Carl Sessions Stepp, professor, editor, and coach, in his lovely book Writing as Craft and Magic:

Voice, in other words, is little more than the real you, dressed simply if with a dash of elegance for a night on the town. It’s not something that can be conjured. It’s not something that’s slathered on top of your work, like blush or eyeliner or layers of cheap lacquer on the fine grain of an old table. To the contrary, it emerges once all the artificial layers are removed from your words.

How do you get there? Again, voice can’t be willed. But there are things you can do. Read good writing, lots of it. Write, often. Listen to your words. Out loud. Try, in fact, reading into a voice recorder and playing it back so you can hear the cadence. Be a critic, of your work and others. Imitate what you like. Something drew you to that writer. Ask yourself what.

And above all, don’t try to force things.

Let’s listen to Stepp again:

One other thing. No two voices are the same. As in gauging someone’s taste in clothing or interior design, we—the readers—know when someone has a voice that draws and know when someone lacks it. But none of us share identical tastes in clothing, music, or food. The same holds true of writing, and the writer’s voice.

If writing is a conversation, as Zinsser suggests, not everyone will partake. The writer’s task is to engage those who do.

Talia Ralph

“Blogs work best when readers are responding not just to the topic, but to the person writing”

Talia Ralph is a 20-something multimedia journalist working on a master’s degree in food systems at NYU. She earned a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism and design at Emerson College in Boston, where she also studied with the authors of this book. Montreal-born and bilingual, Ralph has kept her own blogs and currently blogs for the food blog The Sporkful at sporkful.com. She talked with the authors about blogging and the challenges of developing a distinctive voice.

Talia Ralph

(Credit: Sarah Jacobs)

In your view, just what is the difference between the blogs you write and other forms of journalistic work?

Blogs put a premium on personal voice and style, whereas traditional journalism leans towards a neutral voice that is focused on highlighting the voices of others. Blogs work best when readers are responding not just to the topic, but to the person writing. I’ve found that, especially in the realm of food blogs, readers want to feel like they can trust the blogger and that they know them. They’re looking for someone they’d want to cook alongside or ask for a restaurant recommendation in a new city. In light of this, my blogging style tends to be a bit looser, jokier, and more approachable. I feel like my voice is more relaxed, and I’m more willing to go out on linguistic limbs.

What first drew you to blogging?

I’ve been blogging since the good old days of LiveJournal—back then, my “blog” was a slightly edited diary that I assumed (probably accurately) no one wanted to read. As my blogging matured, and I started to get paid to write online, I really came to value the interactivity of blogs and the ability to engage in conversations with readers. Though the comments section of a piece can sometimes be a dark and scary place, it also offers a great opportunity to see how people respond to your work and even identify things you may have missed or flubbed. The rapid response time, both to discussing your work and to fixing errors when they do inevitably happen, is a huge advantage of blogging. You can also see your content being shared, referenced, and repurposed across the Web.

What kinds of blogging do you like to do?

Right now, I live in the world of food blogging, and it’s a great (and delicious) place to be. I was lucky enough to spend a summer as the editorial fellow at Food52, an amazing recipe resource for home cooks and a platform for some of the freshest, smartest, loveliest voices in online food writing. I also blog for The Sporkful, a podcast on WNYC that discusses the finer points of eating, cooking, and food culture. There’s just something about food that connects and excites people, so food blogs become these really vibrant online communities.

What does the nebulous concept of voice mean to you?

In its ideal form, voice is the vehicle by which you let readers know who you are and (hopefully!) earn their trust. It’s the perfect average of how you actually sound when you speak and how you wish you sounded … I was always drawn to writing because I seem to often find myself either freezing up or putting my foot in my mouth during conversations. Though I wouldn’t call myself shy by any stretch, writing (and by extension, my writing voice) gives me the chance to slow down, take a deep breath, think carefully and logically, and best of all, EDIT.

Do you notice any difference in your voice or style of writing when you move between audio and text blogs and more conventional journalism?

“Voice” … is one of the most elusive and terrifying things to me as a writer. However, if forced to describe my style of writing, I strive for a tone that’s natural, approachable, and highly respectful of my subject matter, no matter whether it’s a quick, personally driven blog post or a more conventional journalistic story. Though blogging and radio hosting have both allowed me to loosen up stylistically, I still hold the journalistic ideals of neutrality and making it about others.

Have you blogged strictly for yourself or have you placed your blogs at hub sites that take work from multiple bloggers?

I’ve done both. A lot of my work for GlobalPost, an online international news platform, was redistributed by both print and other online sources like Salon and Business Insider. Though I’ve had many iterations of personal blogs, from a fashion dictionary to a photo-driven food blog, none have ever taken off or become wildly successful. I think most were read by an audience roughly the size of my mother and a few kind friends.

[Still], the complete creative control you have over a personal blog is intoxicating, especially when you’ve been writing or shooting for outlets that have their own style, voice, aesthetics, and structure. However, people don’t realize how much work goes into a personal blog, and that is why so many of them shrivel up and die on the vine. You have to be as dedicated to your blog as you would be to training for a marathon or saving for a trip: it requires constant thought, sacrifices, and daily effort. It’s also incredibly hard to attract and grow your readership or become profitable. Without eyes on your blog, or a paycheck coming in, or even better, a BOOK DEAL, many writers get understandably discouraged.

What advice would you offer student bloggers trying to establish a foothold?

Learn to pitch, and pitch often. There are so many amazing opportunities to write online, and editors are ALWAYS open to new content. The Web is a great space to write because, well, it’s got no space constraints. That means you’re more likely to get a 1,000-word feature published there as a new writer than you would be in a traditional print magazine.

The Value of Analogy

Some concepts are complex or theoretical. They’re hard to translate into plain English in a clear, easily accessible way. Other concepts are clear enough, but dry as a sun-baked dishrag. They lack vitality. In describing either, it can help to use analogy, to compare what’s not well understood or is difficult to enliven to something that is clear, well understood, and sometimes more colorful.

Good analogy, in other words, gives writing clarity and energy. We tried to do that in the example earlier in this chapter that compared free writing to stretching exercises at the gym, a warm-up that prepares both gym rat and writer for the heavy lifting ahead. The title of this chapter, too, is an analogy that compares writing to a musical form.

If some analogies make things clearer, others merely confuse. Their comparison is flawed or doesn’t accurately reflect what the writer is trying to explain. Put another way, using an analogy doesn’t always accomplish what the writer wants it to.

One master of analogy was Lewis Thomas, author of Lives of the Cell and an essayist in the 1970s for the New England Journal of Medicine. He had a knack for bringing nature and biology to life with his ability to compare the unfamiliar to what we know well. Here, he compares the journey of viruses from organism to organism to the action of bees, flitting through the garden fertilizing flowers. It’s a strong and familiar visual image.

Analogy is a tool open to any writer, bloggers included. When Josh Rothman began a blog on ideas for the New Yorker in June 2014, a subject that can be difficult to discuss with specificity, he turned to analogy to make his point more clearly.

The analogy here—that ideas, like people, have social lives that take somewhat different shapes in different social settings—is grounded in Rothman’s memory of an interdisciplinary college class he took. It works well because, unlike the abstraction of ideas, the image of people in a college group setting (“more uncertain, more interesting, more surprising”) is concrete. It is easy to visualize and relate to. We’ve all been in similar situations.

Talk about easy-to-visualize analogies: David Carr, the late media critic for the New York Times, composed a beautifully written column following the death of Ben Bradlee, the larger-than-life editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate era, in which he offered up these delightful analogies:

Bradlee, he wrote, “had the attention span of a gnat—anecdotes of him walking away from a conversation he ceased to find interesting were common …”

And, Carr added, the hip, much-admired Style section Bradlee introduced to the Post in the late 1960s had an effect on the news business as “profound as if Chuck Berry had walked into a Glenn Miller show and started playing guitar.”

OK, students. A little music history might help you here. Berry played hard-edged R&B. Miller? He was the ultimate during his time in offering up happy, colorless elevator music.

Scenes and Images

Small scenes can help make big stories vivid.

The veteran writing coach Don Fry uses the analogy “gold coins” to capture these. They give a story glitter, draw the reader forward toward them, and cast a bright light on content by bringing it to life.

If Fry’s gold coins play the role of the morsels of bread dropped by Hansel and Gretel to mark the path they were taking, their meaning extends beyond that. They not only show the way, they illuminate and enhance it, help the reader sense it and see it, infuse it with images that make the story’s surroundings more vivid.

A gold coin can be many things. It can be a vignette, a small, sharp internal anecdote that shows what the writer has said. It can be a selective detail—words of a poem scribbled on a wall, the false teeth of an old-timer found in the rubble of a home wrecked by a tornado, a childhood photo of a person wrongly jailed for decades—that draws a sudden and powerful emotional connection. It can be a sensory example that makes things clear.

Be careful, though, in trying to spread the glitter. Not all coins are gold, and not all details or anecdotes or examples available to the blogger telling a story are germane to what the writer wants to say. Young writers have a hard time selecting among them.

Let’s try this example. Just because you know that someone is 5 feet, 8 inches and weighs 175 pounds doesn’t mean it belongs in a story. If it were to appear in a story about a football team’s smallest wide receiver, this detail would matter. If it was a detail in a story about Silicon Valley’s latest wonder boy, it wouldn’t.

Other available details, on the other hand, wouldn’t apply to the wide receiver but might to the business executive. Do I care that the football player, in a blog about his remarkable conditioning, has a penchant for wearing Levi blue jeans and flannel shirts? Probably not. But that detail might be germane in a piece about the casual atmosphere the Silicon Valley wonder boy fosters at his latest start-up.

Other details are absolutes. I’d certainly want to know that the wide receiver does 60 pushups immediately upon opening his eyes every morning. Or that his neck is so thick his most intimate friends call him turtle. And I’d want to know that wonder boy never finished high school because he hated taking orders.

Those are details the reader wants to know. They help the reader understand the subject. Because of this, they are “gold coins,” details and specific images that make a story more memorable and more likely to stick with a reader.