What makes good writing?
There is something sweet about drawing a vivid picture in words
I write lazy now.
I tell myself that writing is a hobby now and I don’t have time to agonize over every word.
It made my living for 26 years and, even then, I took the road more traveled a good bit.
I now have two jobs that take about 60 hours of my week or more. I have another hobby on the side — disc golf — that steals more time away from this writing hobby.
Plus, a man has to eat and sleep, so my Substack posts are usually knocked out in 15-30 minutes unless I get a mad-on for something.
Oh, and I read too. I love to read good writing more than I love to write good writing because it takes less time and effort and I tend to appreciate someone else’s writing more than mine.
I also tell myself that most of my writing is in essay form now and needs to be more conversational.
Another excuse for writing lazy.
There is something sweet, however, about drawing a vivid picture in words. There is something exhilarating about being able to drop a reader perfectly into a scene that they didn’t experience first-hand, yet when finished reading, felt as if they were there.
And, since most of my career was spent reporting, there is something satisfying about writing the truth, regardless of whether the reader likes it or not.
So what makes a particular story good? What elevates it above the millions of words published every day?
There is no actual formula, but a few things take a normal piece of writing and make it heavenly.
Detail
I can still hear my journalism professor, Dr. Riffe, hammer this point over and over again in his lectures.
“Get the dog’s name.”
Sure, you can write about the young teenager who survived the tornado. You can tell the reader that, with tears, he held his lifeless pet dog in his arms as he tiptoed through what used to be his bedroom.
That’s powerful, but not as powerful as telling them he carried Mopsy around as he walked through the broken pieces of a bedboard, with exposed coil springs holding drops of rain, the last remnant of a storm system that took away the tangible part of memories he’d built for 13 years. It’s not as powerful as telling them Mopsy was the second dog he ever had, and the only one he really remembers. It’s not as powerful as telling them Mopsy got him through those painful toddler moments when his mom wouldn’t let him have a snack before dinner, or his dad wouldn’t let his friend come over to play because he hadn’t cleaned up his room. Mopsy was his best friend. Mopsy understood when nobody else did and now the wind took Mopsy.
Details convey moments the way general description can’t.
Details draw contrasts that make the reader want to stay with a story.
You can tell the reader that it would be hard to believe a young boy with autism could survive four days in a Florida swamp, or you could write this opening paragraph from Rick Bragg’s New York Times story from August 17, 1996:
Taylor Touchstone, a 10-year-old autistic boy who takes along a stuffed leopard and pink blanket when he goes to visit his grandmother, somehow survived for four days lost and alone in a swamp acrawl with poisonous snakes and alligators.
Tell the Bigger Story
Outside of one angry homeowner, maybe a neighbor or two, and that poor city worker who has to grab a lawn mower and get the job done, nobody really cares about the dispute between the homeowner and the town about its weed ordinance.
But that single dispute represents a whole lot of things. It is democracy in action, pitting the right of a landowner to do as he pleases, the right of a neighboring landowner not to see his property value go down because the lazy man next door refuses to cut his grass, and the right of a city to enforce laws.
Now that simple weed story is about how far the government can go, and whose interests it represents.
It may be slightly amusing to read about a swanky Florida golf course and subdivison at odds with the nearby landowner who happens to be a pig farmer and loud country music fan, but it’s incredibly interesting when framed as a fight between old Florida and new Florida.
Again, Rick Bragg in the New York Times, April 11, 1999:
Two worlds collide, on the 15th tee.
On one side of the skinny blacktop road, the manicured fairways of the Florida Club golf course meander through the Palmetto scrub, where a solitary golfer with a retirement tan hacks hard at the ball and then chases it down in his golf cart, like a duck after a June bug.
On the other side, 165 mud-spattered pigs wallow, grunt, scratch and squeal under the skimp shade of the same southeast Florida scrub, and the stench, from the animals, the manure and the mounds of rotting lettuce, tomatoes and moldy bread that they consume, hits the people who turn in to the sandy driveway like a punch in the nose.
…
The pigs’ owner, a big, ruddy-faced, white-haired, sunburned man named Paul Thompson, sits in the shade beside the fly-blown pens and shakes his head.
“Now who,” Mr. Thompson said, “would choose to build a golf course next to a pig farm? Didn’t they read the sign? It says ‘pig farm,’ not ‘rose garden.’”
“And they say I’m crazy.”
The Ladder of Abstraction
Good writing skillfully combines both things mentioned above: detail and big-picturism.
Well-written stories go up and down this ladder throughout the piece: Go down the ladder to capture a moment in detail, go back up the ladder to tell us the big picture.
Down, up … down, up.
From Bragg, who wrote about the United States (or maybe even the world) sweet tea brewing contest right here in Alabama, again for the New York Times July 4, 1997:
Down:
They put sweet iced tea in a can now. Stores sell it in the soft drink section, beside 7-Up and Diet Coke and Evian. People pop the top and savor the brisk chemical bite and the imitation lemon aftertaste.
Up:
But now, say true believers in sweet iced tea, this most Southern of delicacies might be in its last generation, as younger people turn more to soft drinks and many of them do not even know how to make it. In time, it may go the way of poke salad and moonshine, a thing of museums and memory.
Down:
First prize is a handsome pewter pitcher.
“I’ve got my game face on,” said Jean DeShriver of Fairhope, who has tried every year and lost.
“I am the Susan Lucci of iced tea contests.”
Up:
Sweet iced tea spanned race and class; it was one thing Southerners had in common, besides mosquitoes and creeping mildew.
Back when people sat on their porches and talked, back when they knew their neighbors’ names, they did so with iced tea, in Mason jars, in antique leaded crystal, in Flintstones’ jelly glasses.
“It is a civilizing force in our society,” said the contest creator, who happens to be from Marianna, Fla. “I love to sit and talk and drink tea.”
It takes a lot of … something to tie sweet tea to the breakdown of society, but I’m here for it.
Some days I miss actual writing. Some days I just want to grab a pen and a notebook and go out somewhere and bring a story back to my laptop.
But that’s the hard part. And I remember that I don’t like writing as much as I like having written, so my occasional posts scratch that itch — most of the time.
If All Else Fails
If all else fails, you can always just make the reader cry.
And Bragg can do that too with this piece about the old stray dog that stole his heart and then ripped it out.
The other stories mentioned above were part of his book Somebody Told Me, a compilation of some of his best newspaper stories.
Excellent post, Lance. Great advice.