Draft Four: Writing advice from the master
What Jacqui Banaszynski taught us about craft and construction.
This was a rare week of learning, writing, and conversing about narrative nonfiction and storytelling. Much of it was spent in the beautiful oasis of Albastru și Origini, a cozy retreat in Vâlcea, where a couple from Bucharest brought four century-old houses, plus converted a stable into “the village hub” (BTW, the food is divine). I was there alongside 10 other journalists and storytellers, all under the guidance of my longtime friend and mentor, Jacqui Banaszynski.
I mentioned Jacqui before in these letters – in May I spent a week with her in Seattle and in the mountains of Washington state. It’s 20 years that I’ve known Jacqui, and we met while I was a student at the Missouri School of Journalism, where she taught reporting and writing. By then she had already travelled the world and wrote about “corruption and crime, beauty pageants and popes, AIDS and the Olympics, dogsled expeditions and refugee camps, labor strikes and political strife, traffic fatalities and family tragedies”. One of her family stories – about a gay farm couple dying of AIDS – won her a Pulitzer Prize.
Most of what I know about nonfiction narrative I’ve learned from her – in terms of the craft, in how she generously offers her time and knowledge to others, and how she uses frameworks and blueprints to teach others. (Many of these I’ve shamelessly borrowed). She has been coming to Romania since 2009 almost yearly (mostly for the storytelling conference we used to organize), and this 2023 trip is the start of her teaching a third generation of local journalists, which is such a blessing.
This letter is crafted from the some of the lessons she imparted during our five-day writing retreat, where we covered the elements of good nonfiction storytelling, talked about reporting and interviewing, and the place of narrative journalism in media.
I’ll start with something that Jacqui, who insists she’s a way better reporter than a writer, often reminds me of: “Writing is not magic. But done with equal measures of discipline and passion, it can be magical.”
Free write. Put pen to paper and go. Don’t stop, don’t think too much, keep writing. Five minutes, three minutes, whatever. Just keep going. Free writing is supposed to be freeing. If you use the editing brain, that won’t happen. Don’t judge yourself. Give yourself permission to suck, so you can then be good.
Writing is a physical act. If you don’t sit down to do it, you’re not writing.
All great writing is great reporting. Gather the details; you’ll decide later which are important. When you use your notebook, use it as a camera: is the scene close enough, can you see? Can you also zoom out to show the larger picture? Whatever you describe, make it precise, so the reader sees the dog you want them to see, not the one in their head (unless you want them to bring their own reference). The flipside: don’t over describe – if you show me too much, I won’t know what to pay attention to.
Good stories are journeys. Openings are contracts for these journeys. What are you promising? What are you signaling? How do you imbue meaning / refer to the center?
Use the “ladder of abstraction”, with the specific at the bottom, and the abstract at the top. Good stories are told at the bottom but illustrate a universal them at the top. There is a physics to this kind of storytelling: the more specific and unique, the more universal and revelatory. (More on the ladder.)
Don’t tinker too much with chronology. You can bend time in a story, but you have to know time.
Write to someone. To avoid being paralyzed by an imagined large audience, pick a sample of five-seven different types of people your public is made of. Then think of people in your life that fit those characteristics. Write for them.
Keep it simple, stupid. The more complex a story, the simpler your writing and structure should be.
Go deep. Most journalism is wide and shallow. Good storytelling is narrow and deep.
All reporting is foreign reporting. Everyone’s world is different. Don’t assume you know about others, how they see the world, and what they think about it. Report it out. Be interested and interesting when you interview others. Make people be into their lives and stories. Remember that listening to people is a gift that is given less and less. Be a person who gives it.
There are four kinds of people when it comes to being curios about the world and asking questions. The first one walks down the street and notices nothing. The second, walks down the street, sees construction happening, exclaims „oh, construction!” and then keeps going. The third person notices things, such as the construction site, and has opinions and judgments about it. The fourth walks down the street, notices things – construction included – and is curious: what are they building, what’ll cost, what’ll happen to this and that after. This last person will make for a good journalist.
Careful with “why” questions – they might make people feel defensive. Try “how” and “what” questions – they convey curiosity better. Just beware of “how did it feel?” – it’s sometimes the most useless question you can ask.
Develop reader-think. Plug in to when a reader needs to know something in a story, and don’t make them wait too long for the answer.
Writing nonfiction is a process. Think of it like construction – it follows a series of steps.
Conceive. This is the idea phase.
Collect. This is the reporting needed to tell the story.
Focus. Finding the meaning of the story.
Organize. Outline or sketch the order of your story.
Draft. Get a first version out.
Revise. Good writing is rewriting.
Usually, if you feel stuck at one of these steps it’s because you’ve not done enough work in one of the previous steps. This often happens with focusing: to focus a story you need the necessary information to be able to answer the question: what is this story about?
I’ll end with a quote from an essay Jacqui wrote about what she said was her first major crisis of confidence in the work, and in the place of journalism and stories in a world filled with tragedy. It happened as she reported on famine on the border of Ethiopia, and during this terrible time, with people dying all around, she kept hearing singing. It turns out the singing were stories one generation was passing along to the next.
So, years later, she wrote this reminder of why we do what we do:
Stories are our prayers. Write and edit them with due reverence, even when the stories themselves are irreverent.
Stories are parables. Write and edit and tell yours with meaning, so each tale stands in for a larger message, each story a guidepost on our collective journey.
Stories are history. Write and edit and tell yours with accuracy and understanding and context and with unwavering devotion to the truth.
Stories are music. Write and edit and tell yours with pace and rhythm and flow. Throw in the dips and twirls that make them exciting, but stay true to the core beat.
Stories are our soul. Write and edit and tell yours with your whole selves. Tell them as if they are all that matters. It matters that you do it as if that’s all there is.
SIDE DISHES:
If you want more lessons from Jacqui, here she is at The Power of Storytelling: talking about what place means to us as storytellers, and on how our work reaches (and touches) people.
I’ve bookmarked these 10 resolutions for editors at the start of the year because I loved them. Among them: “Remember that positive direction is often more productive than negative”. And of course: “Read every word of a draft before making changes. (Yes, this is hard. But if time permits, a good practice.)”
Lavinia and Mili work in learning and development, and co-host Offbeat On Air. They were kind enough to have me on to talk about journalism, storytelling, and learning. (It’s in English).
A week of writing and thinking about writing always begs a question: is that who I am? Here is the wonderful way Oliver Burkeman answers the question in a newsletter essay on becoming who you are.
Go see Killers of the Flowers Moon – both because it’s a good movie, but also because it’s based on a tremendous book by one of the all-time greats: David Grann of The New Yorker.
Thanks for sharing these ideas, Cristi 🙏
"Write to someone" resonates a lot - will use it more often when writing 💡