Over the weekend, I re-read a book, "The Writing Trade: A Year in the Life," that I liked a lot when it first came out a dozen years ago. John Jerome, who wrote for a living for 40 years, books and magazine articles mostly, marked his 30th year as a freelancer by keeping a journal. The result is an enjoyably vicarious look at a writer trying to pay the bills while writing stories he wants to tell.
For anyone trying to follow the same path, or any creative venture, Jerome's story is inspiring, instructive and humbling.
"At age fifty-seven," writes Jerome, by then on his eighth book, "I find myself still learning to work."
In December, he sums up the year's key lesson in a letter to a poet friend who was trying to write a book about her great-grandfather.
"The daunting thing about these projects is that they get so large so fast they scare us off," Jerome told her.
Jerome offers up a tip--the "only writing secret I know"--for shrinking a project to manageable size . His approach--"trick" he calls it--brings to mind that old joke, "How do you eat an elephant?"
As every writer knows, a story idea balloons once reporting begins. Jerome learned to divide and conquer. His method: separate the project into "five categories of information that are critical to the project, and then...start filling up those files."
Why five? Jerome concedes it's an arbitrary number, the one "I usually come up with."
But he's encouraged by "Information Anxiety," by self-described "information architect" Richard Saul Wurman.
"Wurman," Jerome writes to his friend, "says that there are only five ways of organizing information (category, time, location, alphabet, or continuum, by which he means ordering by size, price, weight, or some other rankable characteristics.)"
Here are the five hoppers Jerome created for a story about a "little string of mountains" in New Hampshire he wrote for New England Monthly:”
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PUTTING IT TO THE TEST |
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When it came time to write this column, I decided to try John Jerome's "five category" approach."
I broke down the components into five categories—title, subtitle, body, kicker, question—and created five Word files as containers. Some parts were easier than others. I’m a sucker for allusion so the title of the 1970 Jack Nicholson movie came to mind immediately.
But the subtitle wasn’t as easy. I brainstormed a list but wasn’t satisfied. “How do you eat an elephant? kept coming to mind,” followed immediately by visions of angry emails from PETA members. Eventually I threw caution to the wind.
I moved on to the third category, the body of the column. There was more to work with here—excerpts from Jerome’s book, my own musings—so I followed his advice and started rewriting. When I got stuck, I just went to another file and kept telling myself, . “I’m just rewriting notes.” When the idea to ask readers for their own approaches, I went to the "question" file, plugged it in, and returned to the column body. When I looked up an hour had gone by and I had a first draft.
Dividing the piece up into categories helped me focus better. And the mantra, "I'm just rewriting notes" lowered my standards enough to produce a draft without the usual agonies.
I'm not sure a column meets Jerome's standards for a writing project. I'm looking forward to trying his method on a longer piece. If you give it a shot, I hope you'll let me know. | |
NOW (notes about our recent New Hampshire trip and subsequent visits)
PERS (personal memories of living in the area)
LORE (various New Hampshire legends, jokes, folk history)
SCI (the physical geography)
TXT (the piece itself)
Nor is he rigid about the container. Computers speed up the process, but file folders and "shoe boxes," for that matter, "will do as well."
What matters is what he does with his notes, the "very rough" contents of his five containers.
"I start to write them, to polish them, to rewrite them, to try to say them more effectively," he explains. "I try to turn them into nice little pieces of writing ahead of time, before I know where they go into the story, before I even know if they are useful."
That's because they provide a steady supply of raw material for the work that is at the heart of good writing. "The job of writing is in fact rewriting, which is the oldest cliché -- and the deepest truth -- in the business."
Jerome concedes he's playing a head game. "The ostensible reason is so I will only need to paste them in place later. That, however, is only to convince myself to keep working at them; the real reason for doing it is that working through them, again and again, develops the whole project...Rewriting the notes literally shapes the piece…Holes in the research become evident.. Narrative threads emerge: story lines, approaches, ways of saying things."
More important, it helps him break through the barrier of perfectionism that blocks so many writers. "Once I’ve begun to get material dumped into separate files, I am never again at a loss for how to proceed—and relieving that particular anxiety is, I think, the secret to happiness at the writing machine."
How often do writers find themselves at "a loss for how to proceed"? Probably as often as the feeling that you've lost whatever talent you had and that today is the day they find out. Someone once asked my wife when was the last time I thought I was going to be fired. "What time is it?" she replied.
Before lung cancer killed John Jerome in February, 2002, at 69, he had published 12 books and hundreds of magazine pieces. Family and friends contributed to a tribute page, which includes a bibliography. (I'm partial to "Stone Work," about building a stone wall on his farm in the same way that "Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance" is about riding a bike.)
But keeping the journal that became "The Writing Trade" taught him more about how to work "than anything else I've done," he concluded. By examining his working methods, he discovered how to be more productive and "therefore less frustrated."
And discovering how to transform a daunting project into five easy pieces was "the single most important thing" he learned about writing all year.
"If I get stuck...I can always go to any of the five files and start sharpening the paragraphs there….That process usually generates enough new thoughts to get me going again….I can always find someplace else to put my time until the next step makes itself clear. As a working method it is very self-protective, saving me from ever having to face a blank sheet of paper."
Who could ask for more?
[How do you eat an elephant? Share your tips for managing writing projects here.]
