Building on Roy Peter Clark's Thirty Tools for Writers, Chip Scanlan crams 10 more unconventional tools into the box.

Chip Scanlan performs at Poynter-upon-Tampa Bay.

In the time of Shakespeare, actors used to carry bags that contained tools of their art -- scraps of costume, props, jars of paint -- that they used to change into a new role.

Here are the tools I think writers need: a tightrope, a net, a pair of shoes, a loom, a bible, a zoom lens, six words, an accelerator pedal, a scissors and a trashcan.

1. A tightrope

If you're going to be a writer, you need to take risks. You can always tell safe stories, and there are safe stories all over the paper and all over the broadcasts. The best advice I ever got as a journalism student was a throwaway line from a teacher who said, "If you're going to be a journalist, you have to be counter-phobic." Meaning, do what you're afraid to do.

Think of the tightrope, and every day walk across it. Walk across it as a reporter. Who's the one person you're afraid to call? Where is the one place in town you've never been, perhaps because you're afraid to go there? It may be a housing project or it may be the top floor of the big bank. Force yourself to take risks as a reporter. And ask yourself every day, "Have I taken a risk?"

2. A net.

The best writers cast trawler's nets on stories. And they cast them wide and deep. They'll interview ten people to get the one quote that sums up the theme. They'll spend a half a day mining interviews for the anecdote that reveals the story. They'll hunt through records and reports, looking for the one specific that explains the universal or the detail that captures the person. Anne Hull of The Washington Post once described a female police officer in Tampa as, "a brown-haired woman in a police uniform and size 4 steel-toe boots." A telling detail "can help explain the sum of a person," Hull says. In this case, it was "the Terminator meets a ballerina."

3. A pair of shoes.

Every journalist is equipped with this tool already but it's surprising how few use them on a daily basis. I'm not talking just about shoe leather reporting (although more reporters need to march out of the newsroom and into the communities they cover), but it's also about empathy. Empathy -- an attempt to understand what another experiences -- is the writer's greatest gift, and perhaps the most important tool. Richard Ben Cramer, talking about the reporting he did in the Middle East in the late '70s, says he tried to give readers a sense of what it is like to be living in a situation of terror, of life on the edge: "It's very hard to know what someone would feel in a situation unless you at least feel something of it yourself."

4. A loom.

What do journalists do? We make connections for people. We connect the police report at the station house to the red bungalow in the neighborhood on the other side of town. We connect city hall with the sewage project that's been delayed for months, tying up traffic and disrupting lives. Raymond Carver, the writer, said for him "writing is just a process of connections. Things begin to connect up. A line here, a word here." Are you weaving the connections in your stories? In your reading? In your life? Ask yourself what lines connect. Turn your computer into a loom that weaves stories.

5. A bible.

Joan Beck, the late Chicago Tribune columnist, said she "always read a couple of chapters in the Bible every morning. Whether I'm working or not. Those cadences get imprinted in your brain. When you write, you tend to write in those kinds of patterns and rhythms. The cadences -- but only in the King James Version -- are so effective. You use them as sort of a touchstone."

But look for bibles -- lower-case b -- sacred writing texts you read for guidance or inspiration. Keep sources of inspiration -- books, stories, columns, tapes-handy. When stumped, take inspiration from them.

6. A zoom lens.

David Finkel, of The Washington Post, once said he tries "to look at any site that will be the focus of a narrative passage as if I were a photographer. I not only stand near something, I move away. For the long view. I crouch down, I move left and right. I try to view it from every angle possible to see what might be revealed."

Writers need to go in very close and catch the barely noticed. There's a famous passage in a column by Jimmy Breslin about the light coming in and glinting off a mobster's pinkie ring.

But, at the same time, we need to back up, frame a wide shot, see the whole scene, and understand the context. We need to see the universal as well as the specific.

Think about jewelers, too. Jewelers use the loupe to distinguish the true diamond from the cubic zirconium. We need to be like a jeweler, looking for the quality and the flaws in our stories.

7. Six words.

"Tell your story in six words," is advice offered by Tad Bartimus, syndicated columnist and former award-winning Associated Press feature writer. By reducing it to the single phrase, to almost a line of poetry, you can capture the tension of the story. And make it six words, not four or nine, for no other reason than in discipline there is freedom.

One classic example, perhaps the shortest short story ever written, "For Sale: Baby shoes, Never used." Six words. (With deference to our downsized economy, I've recently whittled this down to one word, but the philosophy is the same.)

8. An accelerator pedal.

"There are some kinds of writing," William Faulkner said, "that you have to do very fast. Like riding a bicycle on a tightrope." Race past your internal censor. Gail Godwin called it "the watcher at the gates." This is the voice that says, "You're an incompetent. You can't write. That thing you did yesterday? You've lost it. You didn't do the reporting. You're an idiot." So you have to trick the watcher at the gates. And the way you do that is through speed. My colleague, Roy Peter Clark, put it in three words. "Write like hell."

9. A scissors.

Or its electronic equivalent, the delete key. Truman Capote said, "I believe more in the scissors than I do the pencil." William Strunk said, "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short or that he avoid all detail and treat the subject only in outline, but that every word tell." Less is more. How many gallons of maple sap does it take to make a gallon of maple syrup? Forty.

10. A trash can.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the novelist and Nobel laureate, said, "The main rule of the writer is never to pity your manuscript. If you see something is no good, throw it away and begin again. A lot of writers have failed because they have too much pity."

Journalists have little compassion for sources, but we will pity the weakest prose because it flows from our keyboard: "Hey, I spent two hours on that lead." We can't throw it away. But remember Singer: "I say that a wastepaper basket is a writer's best friend. My wastepaper basket is on a steady diet."

So there you have it, one writer's list of indispensable tools. Scrounge around, dust off one of your unused tools. Try a new one. Writing is a craft you can never perfect. That's the bad news. The good news, in newsrooms, is that you get another crack at it tomorrow.