Stein - Stein on writing: a master editor of some of the most successful writers of our century shares his craft techniques and strategies

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Contents

For Liz,

who knows better,

with love

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the experienced advice on this book, as on many of my other books, from Patricia Day and Elizabeth Day Stein. My editors at St. Martins Press, Tom McCormack and Marian Lizzi, provided me with both encouragement and thoughtful suggestions, as did Loretta Hudson.

For their insights, I am indebted beyond easy measure to the writers famous, infamous, and not-yet-known, as well as the teachers, readers, and students with whom I shared a life of editorial work and joy, and from whom I learned much of what is between these covers.

Preface

Some years ago I addressed the Southern California Chapter of the National Writers Club on a day when a rowboat might have been more appropriate than a car for getting to the meeting. The torrential rain seemed determined to widen the Pacific Ocean at the expense of a state that was once described to me as mostly desert. I managed the few hundred feet between the parking lot and the hotel without drowning. Once inside, I expected to find the meeting room deserted. Instead I happily discovered a full house, eighty-eight professional nonfiction writers and journalists come to hear me talk about fiction. I asked these weatherproof stalwarts, How many of you want to write the Great American Novel? and eighty-eight hands shot up.

If there are writers in America who do not have several hundred pages of a would-be novel in a drawer or at least in mind, I have not met them. Conversely, every novelist Ive known has occasion to write nonfiction. For those writers who, at least initially, want to read only about fiction or nonfiction, I offer a road map to this book.

The Contents page provides an overview of the main subjects covered. Part I, The Essentials, is for all writers. Part II concerns the craft of fiction. Eavesdropping by nonfiction writers is permitted. Part III deals with subjects of interest to all writers. Part IV deals mainly with the application of fictional techniques for the enhancement of nonfiction. Part V, Literary Values, deals with upscale writing, both fiction and nonfiction. Part VI, Revision, has separate chapters for fiction and nonfiction. Part VII contains a chapter on where to get help, a final word, and a glossary of terms used by writers and editors.

The reader will find that I frequently use examples from writers I have known or worked with because their material is familiar to me. From time to time I also quote from my own work, allegedly for copyright reasons and convenience, but perhaps also to underscore that I practice what I teach. If I quote often from the New York Times, it is convenience as well as merit that guides me; it is the newspaper I read every day. The Times has also been in the vanguard of publications using the techniques of fiction to enhance journalism.

Women usually outnumber men among my students, readers, and friends, and I trust they will forgive me for using a male pronoun to stand for both genders. Saying he or she repeatedly is a distraction to both writer and reader.

I once went to a convention in Seattle, and three people gave me gifts of an umbrella for the trip. It didnt rain. I hope this book has a few surprises for you.

Sol Stein

Scarborough, New York

May 1995

I

The Essentials

The Writers Job May Be Different Than You Think

This is not a book of theory. It is a book of usable solutionshow to fix writing that is flawed, how to improve writing that is good, how to create interesting writing in the first place.

For thirty-six years I worked one-on-one with writers who had contract deadlines. My primary interest was to provide them with the techniques for solving editorial problems and improving their work in time to meet their deadlines. I could not provide writers with new genes, an ear, or talent. What I passed on was the craft other writers had developed to get their manuscripts in shape for publication.

As an editor and publisher, I frequently heard that an editors job was to help the writer realize his intentions. That is true except for the fact that many writers have inappropriate intentions. The four most common Ive heard are I am expressing myself; I have something to say; I want to be loved by readers; and I need money. Those are all occasional outcomes of the correct intention, which is to provide the reader with an experience that is superior to the experiences the reader encounters in everyday life. If the reader is also rewarded with insights, it is not always the result of the writers wisdom but of the writers ability to create the conditions that enable pleasure to edify.

The writer comes to the editor bearing his talent, experience, and hope for his manuscript. The editor provides distance, experience with other writers, and the tools of craft that are efficient substitutes for trial and error. I have had the good fortune to work with some of the most successful writers of our time. They had much to teach me. What they taught and what they may have learned is in this book.

As a young writer brimming with hope and arrogance, I was subjected, luckily, to the wisdom and tyranny of several extraordinary teachers of writing: Wilmer Stone, Theodore Goodman, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, and Thornton Wilder. I would like to convey the most important thing I learned from each.

Wilmer Stone was faculty advisor to The Magpie, the literary magazine of DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, New York, then one of the best-known public secondary schools in the United States. In those remarkable days, DeWitt Clinton served not only its neighborhood but qualified students from anywhere else in the vastness of New York City. One of them was James Baldwin, who, each school day, took the long subway ride from Harlem in Manhattan to DeWitt Clinton at the topmost part of the Bronx. Out of our adolescent camaraderie came his most extraordinary book, Notes of a Native Son, which he much later would claim I compelled him to publish.

Each Friday afternoon at three, while other students decamped for their homes, the lights were on in the Magpie tower high above the rectangle of the school. There Wilmer Stone met with Richard Avedon, then a poet, who became one of the most famous photographers in the world, the editor Emile Capouya, Jimmy Baldwin, myself, and a few others whose names hide behind the scrim of time. What went on in that tower was excruciatingly painful. Wilmer Stone read our stories to us in a monotone as if he were reading from the pages of a phone directory. What we learned with each stab of pain was that the words themselves and not the inflections supplied by the reader had to carry the emotion of the story.

Today I still hear the metronome of Wilmer Stones voice, and counsel my students to have their drafts read to them by the friend who has the least talent for acting and is capable of reading words as if they had no meaning.

My family was depression-poor, and the only college I could try for was one whose expense would be as close to zero as possible. In those days the College of the City of New York, better known as CCNY, took in the top fifteen percent of New York City high school graduates, whose only expense would be secondhand books and subway fare. There Theodore Goodmans reputation was such that all who had a craving to write gravitated toward his classes. To teach short story writing, he had us read James Joyces The Dead over and over. It was from this practice that I learned the value of dissecting a piece of writing repeatedly until it surrendered its secrets.