Dogland Diaries: The Blurt

How I build a story, plus my weekly shareables: A fast car, running on empty, and charting a new course

The binder where I keep it. I call the look Ransom Note.

I’m still in the midst of stacking pages for my Westminster Dog Show book, tentatively called DOGLAND. A far-flung Shedhead, Jeff from Eagle River, Alaska (!), asked recently if I would share some more of my writing process. Today I want to talk about the quirky way I funnel ideas from my head (and my research) onto the page. I call it The Blurt.

I stumbled onto this method a few years ago, when I started writing feature-length magazine stories (5,000 words or so). When I was doing shorter pieces, I could often keep most of the material in my head—I’d just write it into the story and check my notes later to make sure I had it right. But on longer stories, my brain couldn’t handle it all. The problem is, I’ve never been good at outlines—I get bored with them, and I can’t decide whether something should be a Roman numeral or a capital letter or a lowercase number or whatever. I tend to think of a story in chunks—a few scenes arranged around a topic or a part of the narrative.

What ended up working for me was getting out a legal pad and doing a brain dump. I close my laptop and think about everything I want to put in the story. Then I start writing them down one by one by hand. Sometimes it’ll be just a couple of words (“quote about Super Bowl turf”); sometimes it’ll be the sketch of a scene; sometimes it’ll be a person or a thing or a sense memory. I try not to put any guardrails on it, and I try to work fast—this is sort of an organizational version of freewriting.

Here’s a few random lines from my DOGLAND Blurt so you can get the sense of it. (I picked a few that avoid any major spoilers.)

Joann’s Airedales

Backstage as a petting zoo

John Wick’s dog

Facebook gossip groups

I’ve probably got 400 or 500 items at this point, and I keep adding more every day as I think up more ideas, read more books, etc. I keep the legal pad in one of those pleather holders I picked up at a conference years ago, and I tote that with me wherever I write.

At some point along the way, I come up with a list of chunks for the story (for books, those are the chapters). Once I’m pretty happy with the chunks, I go back through the Blurt and assign each item to a chunk. In the case of a book, that means that maybe 47 items go with Chapter 1 and 33 items go with Chapter 2 and so on. I won’t necessarily use all the items in that chapter, and some of them might end up moving around. But as I start that assignment phase, the book starts to take a much firmer shape. I think one difference between this and a traditional outline is that the material determines the outline instead of the other way around.

If I realize down the road that I’ve got a big gap in my reporting—in other words, if there’s a new chunk that needs to go in there—I can make that adjustment and see if anything I’ve got in the Blurt might fit.

As you can tell from this, I am NOT a professional organizer. The nuance of story structure is not one of my sharpest skills. If you have tips that help, please drop them in the comments. You’ll be doing a service to all the storytellers here. Also, let me know any other writing stuff you’d like to know about and I’ll deal with those in weeks to come.

One last thing: Maybe my favorite part about this method is the name. “Blurt” is just a funny word.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. My earlier post this week was an essay on Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”—the latest in my Heaven is a Playlist series. If you haven’t looked, go check out the comments—they’re wonderful. Thank you, Shedheads. My bud David Hale checked in via text with a brilliant observation: “Fast Car” could be Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”—but from Mary’s point of view.

2. My weekly for WFAE was about the complicated legacy of Carolina Panthers founder Jerry Richardson, who died last week at 86.

3. I also enjoyed Jeremy Markovich’s thoughts about Richardson in his great Substack, North Carolina Rabbit Hole.

4. Jim Boeheim, the longtime men’s basketball coach at Syracuse, is leaving the job after 47 seasons. Talk about a complicated legacy. I spent some time with him back in 2015 for an ESPN story that we called “The Final Act of Jim Boeheim.” That title jumped the gun by almost eight years. But I feel like the story holds up. Boeheim was pleasant company as I hung out with him in Syracuse and played poker with him in Vegas. His wife was very kind. They apparently didn’t like the story I wrote. That’s the way it goes.

5. DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: The stray dogs of Chernobyl.

6. Isa Cueto—one of the smartest writers (and people) I know—has started a Substack called Rummaging, which has already delved into everything from the nature of time to the luxury of a good salad. It’s free to subscribe and you should do it. Her words will be worth your time.

7. One of my favorite stories in the last couple of years is how former NBA player J.R. Smith joined the golf team at North Carolina A&T. My bud Jonathan Abrams catches up with Smith, who is still out looking for himself, on the course and off it.

8. Another friend, Justin Heckert, has an amazing story about the middle-aged man who realized he owned a buried treasure—a pristine ticket from Michael Jordan’s first NBA game. (Quick rant: This is why I hate digital tickets. I love ticket stubs. They’re great souvenirs and incredible triggers of memory.)

9. RIP David Lindley, the brilliant musician who made so many other musicians’ records better. He’s the absolute MVP of one of the great albums of the ‘70s, Jackson Browne’s RUNNING ON EMPTY. Here he is on the title track, playing the hell out of a lap steel guitar.
   

   10. My favorite musical find this week is from Postmodern Jukebox, a collective that specializes in genre-bending covers of old hits. They give the KISS track “I Was Made For Loving You” the upgrade it was meant for all along.