Simple and clear

Talking to kids about writing, plus Disney for rich people, musical brothers, and life inside the British Bake-Off

On Wednesday I had a blast doing a video chat with a classroom of high-school students at Innovation Academy just outside Atlanta. One of the teachers in the class is Jeremy Collins, an old friend and an excellent writer (his piece on Greg Maddux, and a friend who died too soon, is just tremendous). The students asked really good questions about my writing process, some of the stories I’ve done, and how to avoid cringe in your work. My response to that last one was, don’t be afraid of the cringe. Sometimes the cringe is the best part.

One piece of mine they read was something I hadn’t looked at in a while—it was an essay I wrote back in 2009 for Nieman Storyboard. It’s about why I try to avoid using fancy words or complicated sentences. I don’t always succeed. The other night, writing in my journal, I used the word “ennui” and immediately laughed because I would never say “ennui” in a conversation. I hope you won’t catch me trying to get away with it here.

Reading the essay again, I think it does a good job explaining not just how I write the way I write but where it comes from. We all have different styles, and it can be useful to figure out how your style emerged. So I thought I’d reprint the piece here in hopes y’all think some about your own creative lives.

I’ve tweaked it just a bit from the original to update various life events.

Making words work for a living

Back in the early 2000s, when I worked for the Charlotte Observer, an intern did a study of the writing that showed up in our newspaper. He ran our stories through a computer program that measured the reading level you would need to understand each piece. It turned out that my stories were written at a fifth-grade level. If I remember right, I was the simplest writer in the newsroom.

I caught some grief about that. But I was proud.

It can be harder to write a short story than a long one, and it can be much harder to write with simple words than with complicated ones. Most every good writer knows words that soar on silver wings. But sometimes those words fly off into the clouds and the reader loses track of the story. I like words that work for a living.

This goes straight back to my mom and dad. They grew up in sharecropping families a few miles apart in south Georgia. They picked cotton from the time they could walk. My dad had to quit school in the sixth grade, and my mom in the fourth, because they had to work. But by then they had learned to read and they never quit. My dad read the Bible most every night after supper. My mom read Harlequin romance novels. She bought them by the sackful at the used book store.

At our house the newspaper was a Christmas present six times a week. It was an afternoon paper, and it came about 4:30. We would listen for the thump in the front yard. I’d run out and get it, strip off the green rubber band – we saved them in a drawer – and we would split up the sections. The Brunswick News was as gray as fireplace ashes. It was all wire copy except for high-school sports, the police blotter, a piece or two on local politics, whose kids got married or made Eagle Scout, and the obits. We read every word.

What my mom and dad listened to was country music. Johnny Cash: Love is a burnin’ thing, and it makes a fiery ring. Hank Williams: Hear that lonesome whippoorwill, he sounds too blue to fly. The songs played with images in the same way a poet does. The words could tear you up, they were so powerful. But they were still simple and easy to understand.

When I started out writing for a living, I wanted to show off. I wrote stories that flashed back and flashed forward and might have flashed sideways. I wrote sentences that twirled like an Olympic figure skater. Sometimes I still do those things if I’m tired, or if I’m trying to write around a lack of reporting, or if I get the big head and start to believe that the world does not have the proper appreciation for my prose.

But one thing I learned from my mom and dad is that people can understand almost anything if you explain it in a simple and clear way. My mom didn’t know a thing about nuclear physics. But if you had sat down with her and explained in simple language what a supercollider does, and why, she would’ve gotten it.

The Observer, like most papers, had a lot of readers who weren’t well-educated or well-read. That doesn’t mean they weren’t smart. Writing in plain language is not dumbing down your story. It’s creating a map that all your readers can navigate. If your story is in plain language, feel free to let fly with complex ideas and literary devices. Your readers can handle it.

One of my favorite books is the 2001 novel JIM THE BOY by Tony Earley. I don’t know to this day if Earley meant the book for kids or adults. It doesn’t matter. He tells the story of a boy growing up in 1930s North Carolina, and he writes it in language just about anybody could understand. It is full of images that work deep down inside you and stay. Here is Jim’s mother, a widow:

Although she was not yet thirty years old, she wore a long, black skirt that had belonged to her mother. The skirt did not make her seem older, but rather made the people in the room around her feel odd, as if they had wandered into an old photograph, and did not know how to behave. On the days Mama wore her mother’s long clothes, Jim didn’t let the screen door slam.

The thing about writing a sentence a fifth-grader can read is that maybe a fifth-grader will read it. Or maybe somebody with a fifth-grade education will. And if that person understands what you’re saying – provided you have something to say – your sentence has made the world better. You have helped another human being make sense of things. That’s what a writer is supposed to do.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. My earlier post this week was the introduction of a recurring music feature: Old, New, Borrowed and Blue—four songs I’ve been enjoying lately.

2. I’ve been linking to a bunch of stuff lately from my friend Kim Cross, for good reason: She’s been busy! Now she has a brand-new newsletter called THE WATERPROOF NOTEBOOK, which combines her tips and thoughts on writing with stories from her outdoor adventures. And if you love to check out other people’s gear … go look at what she packed for a trip to Alaska.

3. College football has returned and that means my friend David Hale is back with his Sunday morning college football recap, one of my favorite things of the season. (ESPN)

4. My friend Jeremy Markovich chased a weird fact to the ends of the earth once again, and came up with a wild story that he sums up better than I ever could: “For almost eighty years, students and alumni of two universities have been joyfully and naively singing a catchy song that was born as a colonialist war chant and was popularized by two well-known students: one who explored sexuality by writing paperback novels and one who channeled his charisma into a successful career in business and in church.” LSD is also involved. (North Carolina Rabbit Hole)

5. Coming in a close second for wild sports story of the week: Pablo Torre’s investigation on how the billionaire owner of the LA Clippers might have funneled money to his star player in violation of NBA rules. I’m really not doing justice to the weirdness of the whole thing. (FYI, there have already been multiple follow-ups from Pablo and others.)

6. If you’re a fan of THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE-OFF, all I need to tell you is this: Ruby Tandoh from season 4 writes about what it’s like behind the scenes. But even if you’re just Bake-Off curious, it’s a good read. (New Yorker)

7. Hrishikesh Hirway on how to embrace your influences instead of trying to shed them. (Accept Cookies)

8. Disney World used to make a point of being the same for everybody. But now, like most everywhere else, it’s different if you’re rich. (NYT)

9. Euro mystery update: We binged all seven episodes of BODKIN in three nights and were cracking up the whole way. It’s got an Irish/British cast except for Will Forte, who plays an American podcaster looking to do a series on three people who disappeared from an Irish village 20 years before. The mystery is twisty, the characters are well-drawn, and the punch lines come at just the right moments. (Netflix)

10. Among the many items that fill the debut issue of THE WATERPROOF NOTEBOOK (#2 above) is a music recommendation from Kim: Hermanos Gutiérrez, a band comprised of two Ecuadorian-Swiss brothers. I am in love. Their music sounds like the soundtrack to a great lost spaghetti Western. They also remind me of Khruangbin, if you enjoy that vibe. Here’s “Low Sun.”

Upcoming events

Oct: 13: I’m interviewing John T. Edge about his memoir HOUSE OF SMOKE at Park Road Books

Have a great weekend, everybody…

—TT