Wyzga On Words

Q&A Tuesday: How Do You Become A Writer? Read & Write.

Q:    How do you become a writer?

A:    You read books.  You act like a writer by writing.

One the one hand I am posting an article by and an interview with Molly Ringwald for my brother who found her then as now heart-thumpingly, breathtakingly stunning.

On the other hand I am writing this post because it has valuable tips on how to write.

Start here: click here to read John Williams interview with Ringwald on the subject of her newest novel, "When It Happens To You."  Highlights:

1. Writing and acting require an ability to understand a character.
2. Our human flaws make us human and create the good/evil duality.
3. Universal values speak to all of us.
4. While mothering may give a writer an edge on parenthood, note all the successful authors who never personally experienced their characters' lives.
5. Which writers have influenced you?

Then, click here to read Ringwald's Opinion piece, Act Like a Writer, with tips and exercises on finding and developing your character.  Excerpt.

"Our job, as the cast [of The Breakfast Club], was to find the humanity in the stereotypes that we had been assigned, to show that we were all suffering in our own way and searching for our way out. In the end, that way out is through connection, another lesson I’ve carried through my life and in what I have chosen to explore in fiction."

 

What We Will Miss With The Demise Of Written Letters. UVA Captures The Civil War Online.

I was going through a cardboard box the other day. It's one of many on the top shelf of a closet in my home.  It holds written notes and letters that date back 40 years.  Opening envelopes, visiting places and people, and reading long departed handwriting is more than a comfort.  The written word sets a moment in time.  I am reminded of who I was when, what I thought was important, who colored my life, and so on.

On February 20 2011, my friend and colleague Stephanie West Allen blogged about the importance of letter writing: Notes and letters - Long may they live!

She followed up that post with another on April 11, 2011, Writing Letters to the Future.

Ours are not frivolous gestures.  Or a nod to a quaint notion.  I wonder who will recall us, say 150 years from now just as we are able to recall the lives of those who lived life during the Civil War. 

Life During Wartime recounts the efforts of

"A team at U.Va.'s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library has been posting on "150 Years Ago Today," an online blog started in 2009 that features transcribed Civil War letters and diaries. Now that the nation is in the midst of the Civil War sesquicentennial, which runs until 2015, there's renewed interest in the bloody conflict. And reading the words of the participants themselves provides a new, more intimate level of understanding.

Accessible from the Special Collections home page and fully searchable by name or date, the blog features correspondence by such Confederate notables as Robert E. Lee and Gen. Elisha F. "Bull" Paxton, who briefly commanded the Stonewall Brigade. But it also includes the words of the everyday people who shouldered muskets on the battlefield, suffered deprivations on the homefront and struggled to grasp the equality promised them in the Declaration of Independence. By posting these primary source documents online, the Special Collections Library is presenting the war's daily triumphs and tragedies to the world.

This enormous project started fairly simply. "Twelve years ago, Mary Roy Edwards volunteered to start transcribing our Civil War letters and diaries," says Ann Southwell (Grad '73), a Special Collections' manuscript cataloger who heads the effort. "After a while we decided we should put them up on a blog. Then we got the idea that we could do the entire war day by day." Edwards, the wife of former U.Va. architecture professor Charles R. Edwards, eventually transliterated more than 3,000 pages from the items at Special Collections. Another volunteer, John P. Mann IV, has been diligently working on letters written by Col. Edward T. Warren of the 10th Virginia Infantry. Southwell herself works on the project every evening after work."

As you are drawn into the entries that recount the lives of those who lived life during wartime, one thing is striking: not much has changed when we go to war.  What matters most is still faith, family, friends, and the girls we left behind.

My hope is that as more of us read about the terrors and losses of war, we may shed some of our "rock logic' that makes Us right and Them wrong. Perhaps we can adopt a more fluid frame of mind that allows for more commonality, understanding and grace under fire.

The article reports on the interest generated in other countries:

"Nonetheless, the blog is attracting attention—it's received more than 20,000 hits as of early May. "We're getting a lot of hits from people in Russia, Ukraine and India," says Southwell. "I hope they're not using these letters to learn English!"" 

I hope we and they are using the letters to learn peace in our time.

 

Anne Lamott Has Words For Writers & Lawyers.

I am a card-carrying member of the Anne Lamott fan club.

No question about it.

I have been insanely intimate with her books: Traveling Mercies, Bird By Bird, Plan B, and Rosie, among others.  The margins are filled with notes, the words are underlined and re-underlined.  I, like so many others, are convinced that Lamott wrote a particular book just for the reader. 

Something Lamott said rings true for all writers, and especially for lawyers who write their opening statement or closing argument but so rarely read what they've written aloud.  There's a big difference hearing with the ear:

"Nothing can break the mood of a piece of writing like bad dialogue. My students are miserable when they are reading an otherwise terrific story to the class and then hit a patch of dialogue that is so purple and expositional that it reads like something from a childhood play by the Gabor sisters. ... I can see the surprise on my students' faces, because the dialogue looked okay on paper, yet now it sounds as if it were poorly translated from their native Hindi."

TIP:     Any time you have something to say aloud, speak out loud what you've written to hear how it sounds before you have to stand and deliver your words to the decision-maker or listener.

A Plethora Of Story Influences.

I am delighted to have been invited to join Kathy Hansen's blog, A Storied Career!

Just in case you missed us, over the next several days I'll be re-posting the interview she conducted with me and began publishing on April 9th.

Click here for Question #5.

 

Metaphors Rouse The Sensory Cortex.

By now you might have come across Annie Murphy Paul's NYTimes Opinion piece, "Your Brain on Fiction."  Why bring it up again?  I am curious to know whether hearing the spoken word works the same way as reading fiction.  My sense is that there are parallels.

The upshot of the article is that brain science has revealed what we intuitively know: "Stories stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life."  How does it happen?  Metaphors - and the more sensory the better.  Words describing how something looks, tastes, smells, feels and sounds stimulate brain areas which respond to the images as if they were real.  The brain is an equal opportunity organ.  Excerpt.

"The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings."

What got me thinking about listening to sensory rich metaphors versus reading them in fiction is something I wrote in 2003 that I had inscribed on bookmarks I gave away to clients.

"Storytelling thrives on imagination.  Images touch the heart and become sensations, sensations trigger memories, memories create meaning annd meaning leads to listener action."

With this discovery in mind I subsequently wrote and taught law students and lawyers (among others) about the primal importance of incorporating the five senses in oral presentations to inform and persuade.  The guidance changed the speaker and the listener both.  You could feel trial stories vividly come to life.

I am convinced that we "homo narrans" use stories to navigate the social realm, to understand feelings, desires and motivations of our fellow global inhabitants, comprehend lessons, make sense of mistakes, and the like.  Metaphors smooth our efforts to translate by showing us show how "this is like that."  Apparently, the more sensory our metaphors the more easily we connect and relate with one another.  And that's not fiction.

Which Is The Better Story? History Or Theater? It May Be History.

Wow!  What a story!

Dan Barry writing for the NYTimes, "Read All About It! Kids Vex Titans!", reviews "Newsies the Musical" on Broadway.  It's a great read about a story on stage.  And how facts are not drama. Excerpt.

Naturally, “Newsies the Musical” — which begins previews on March 15 at the Nederlander Theater — has taken liberties with the facts of the Newsboy Strike of 1899, as did “Newsies,” the Movie Flop of 1992 on which it is based. Pulitzer was in Maine, not Manhattan, when the newsboys struck. One of his daughters was not a muckraking reporter who fell for a newsie. And while Theodore Roosevelt was the governor of New York at the time, he had no bully-bully role in the episode.

“But facts are not what drama is,” explained the actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book, based on the Disney film by Bob Tzudiker and Noni White. “I don’t care that Pulitzer was in Maine.” Mr. Fierstein is right, of course. Having won four Tonys in four separate categories, he has more than a passing knowledge of what works in theater. In the case of “Newsies the Musical,” which had a successful run last year at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., he said that he wanted to plumb the historical event for art, entertainment and essential truths, as when these striving children come to a liberating realization: “That they matter.”

But the truth of it is, I find the story of "what brung it all about" to be far more engaging.  It's real life drama.  Yes, facts can be drama.

As posted by Andrew Giddings on September 5, 2010, "Kid Blink and the Newsboys Strike," here's how the newspaper titans grew circulation and wealth:

"In the late 1800s, the two most powerful men in the newspaper industry were Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The USA was the cultural and commercial centre of the world, and it was through newspapers that Americans watched their country flourish.

New York City was the gateway to this New World; a seething, tumultuous melting pot where people of wealth and poverty, of hundreds of different and languages and cultures, having poured in from the docks, were crammed into the town.

Pulitzer and Hearst simplified the language in their papers and added more pictures, so that they could be read by the foreigners and the uneducated. Tactics such as these saw their sales rise to unprecedented numbers; Pulitzer’s New York World reaching seeing circulation figures of around 360,000. Most of these papers were distributed by ‘newsies’."

Who were the "newsies"? Ragamuffin, homeless, starving kids who bought a bundle of 100 newspapers for 50 cents to resell on the streets for a meager profit. What the kids did not sell worked against them - the titans would not buy back the unsold copies.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 increased the need for news.  And then as today, demand increased prices.  A bundle of papers cost the newsies 60 cents a bundle.  Sure, they probably made a slightly better profit measured in pennies.  But here's the rub: after the war the other papers returned to their pre-war prices.  Not Pulitzer and Hearst.  

"Their greed sparked a week-long strike that destroyed their profits and brought New York City to a standstill.

The Newsboys Strike of 1899  was headed by Kid Blink, an eyepatch-sporting boy in his early teens. “I’m trying to figure how ten cents on a hundred papers can mean more to a millionaire than it does to newsboys, an’ I can’t see it,” he said, “If they can’t spare it, how can we?”

Click here to listen to a podcast about the newsboys strike of 1899.

I love the theater!  But I gotta tell ya: The Newsboys Strike makes one riveting story.

TIPS:

1. When you are faced with a question about how to tell a story in a way that will grab the reader or listener by her lapels remember this: your facts take place in a context that carries emotional meaning when underpinned by a value. 
2. For example, a sketch for the newsies story could sound like this: "Newspaper titans' greed makes another dime off the backs of street kids."
3. It's as simple as what I've been teaching, writing and saying for almost two decades: "Storytelling thrives on imagination.  Images touch the heart and become sensations, sensations trigger memories, memories create meaning and meaning leads to listener action." [Diane F. Wyzga]
4. Start here. 

Samuarai Lawyer And The Book Of Wind.

Patrick Trudell writing as Zen Lawyer Seattle (patrick@ktbllaw.com) posted "Lessons from Musashi - The Book of Wind" on 24 February 2012.  This post was preceded by “Lessons from Musashi-The Book of Water, Lessons from Musashi - The Book of Earth, and Lessons from Musashi - The Book of Fire.

For those of you who followed this blog's posts entitled Samuarai Lawyers (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) you know that Eric Wagner, a longtime friend who is also a fellow lawyer and life observer in Canada, commented on the Book of Water post.  Wagner spent a number of years living in Japan and practicing Aikido. 

I asked him for his thoughts on the Book of Wind post.  Why?  Because I am fascinated by the practice of law as between these two lawyers living in adjacent countries.  Things are not so same-same as we might think.  I am curious to know what others think and how they practice.

Excerpts from Zen Lawyer Seattle will appear indented and italicized as befits quoting from a source.  Wagner's comments follow each excerpt.

"In his Fourth Book, The Book of Wind, Musashi concludes by stressing the traits of a warrior. Applied to the trial lawyer these traits are:

Lack of Pretense. The trial lawyer is without pretense. The trial lawyer is engaged in a career long quest to develop his spirit in the proper manner. Musashi’s, Book of Five Rings (Translated by Stephen Kaufman, Hanish 10th Dan) (1994) at 83-84.  His commitment is to his cause rather than to himself. The trial lawyer “does not go around telling everyone he is a great [trial lawyer]. He permits his actions to govern others’ responses.” Id. at 92."

Lack of pretense -- I agree.  Lawyers should not be pretentious. 

"Study Others-Be Yourself. Musashi teaches the importance of understanding the “reasons and philosophies of other systems” to benefit from our own. “Without comparison you have no reference point with which to judge for yourself and decide how to properly develop your own self.” Id. at 84. We should study other trial masters to reinforce our understanding of ourself. In this way we constantly reevaluate ourself.  Remember though to be yourself. When we change our methodology because of others we lose ourself. “Eventually you are going to have to come back to your natural state. So why leave it in the first place?” Id. at 96."

Study others and be yourself -- I agree.  It is especially important to study witnesses and judges so we can understand what they are thinking, despite the masks they may try to erect.  With our own witnesses, we have to realize that no matter what we do interms of preparation, they will "revert to type" after a while.  It is better to go with the "type" from the get go than to fight against it. 

"The Big Picture. Always take the broader view of the situation. “Do not concentrate on details. Keep only one thing in mind: that thing is to beat your enemy. In this way your spirit will continue to grow and you will always be conscious of your surroundings and the situations that appear.” Id. at 95. When we are aware of all possible outcomes we “may not even have to do battle because of superior intelligence based on perception and intuition. It is possible to win a fight without ever having to go into combat.” Id at 93. This occurs when the trial lawyer knows the strengths and weaknesses of her case and is known by the opposition to try her cases."

The big picture -- We get back to my earlier-stated objections to seeing the other lawyer as the enemy.  However, (at least in the context of civil litigation) if we see the conflict between the parties as the enemy, then things improve and we understand the proper way to focus on the situation.  The advice not to focus on details is a recipe for disaster, since that is often where the strengths and weaknesses of a case lie.  Try doing a fraud claim without questioning every detail!  I prefer to say that one should be aware of the details, but do not get bogged down in them so that one is distracted from the main goals.  Try this visual -- the guy running point on a patrol is so concerned with trip wires that he keeps looking at the ground and fails to see the enemy patrol standing in the middle of the trail in front of him!

"Quickness over Speed. Trials are competitions. In any competition rhythm and timing are essential. Musashi recognizes this and stress quickness over speed. “Quickness gets inside of speed and enables you to control the situation… . When you advance, … advance quickly and get immediately to the point. Your speed is dependent on the speed of your [opponent]. … [A]djust yourself  accordingly and do not think in terms of being faster and slower. … [I]f you are constantly moving fast you will have no time to maintain your poise and timing.” Id. at 97. “Always move naturally and calmly… .” Id. at 98. Quickness in trial happens when we focus on the present as in the words and body language of the jury in jury selection and the witness during testimony. Rather then concentrating on prepared notes live in the moment of the trial."

 Quickness over speed -- Again, I agree.  However, we should add to this what one of my sensei said.  "To be fast, go slow."  By this, he meant to take the time to do things perfectly and in a smooth, fluid manner rather than rushing around and doing things that need to be corrected.

 

"Trial Lawyer as Warrior. In today’s legal climate the Jerry Spence metaphor of the trial lawyer as a warrior is apropos. Insurance companies rely on lawyers unwilling to try their cases. Insurance companies base low offers on this reliance. In Musashi’s time it took a warrior to get justice for the weak. In today’s economic climate it takes a lawyer willing to file his case and prosecute it through a jury trial to get justice for the injured. When the insurance company sees such a lawyer they often pay fair value “because they would prefer to fight someone else.”

Comments on insurance lawyers -- As a defence lawyer, I must say that I have almost never been given unreasonable instructions.  If anything, the insurers have been willing to pay what I feel are dubious claims when the cost of defending them is too high.  We do take the personalities of plaintiff counsel into consideration, but I have never backed off of a trial because of who was on the other side.  I have backed off of settlement, though, when counsel is known for advancing untenable positions.  I have worked hard to build a reputation as someone who is always thoroughly prepared and who does not take "wing and a prayer" positions.  If I say or do something, it is because I believe in it.  My offers are not unreasonably low or unreasonably high, since such offers serve only to inflame the situation.  When I encounter counsel who are similarly minded, we have in virtually every case been able to reach a negotiated resolution. 

What do you think?

How do you practice?

What do you want others to know about the way in which you practice?

What Do You Really Know About Your Family? What Do You Know About Anyone?

It all started at The Corner Perk, a small, locally owned coffee shop in Bluffton, South Carolina.  As the story goes, one day a customer paid her bill and left $100 extra to pay for everyone who ordered after her. One by one the food and coffee orders were filled.  Every few months the same woman has returned to leave another donation with the same request.

But it doesn't stop there.  Other customers have been leaving money to pay for others' food. Some people don't even buy anything when they come in; they just stop to donate and head right back out.  In this day and age the kindness of strangers trumps the greed of Wall Street. 

What does this story have to do with a battered suitcase? Ted Gup, a former investigative reporter for The Washington Post and TIME magazine is handed a suitcase which has laid undisturbed in his mother's attic for some 70 years.  Folded inside the suitcase are hand-written letters sent to a man Gup comes to learn is his grandfather.  The letters are responses to a tiny newspaper ad that promises a $5.00 Christmas donation to be given to folks in Canton, Ohio in 1933 who request such aid - and both the giver and recipient to remain anonymous.   

To us that $5.00 might just buy a coffee drink and muffin at The Corner Perk.  In 1933 - during the Great Depression - if you had the coins you could buy a loaf of bread for seven cents, a pound of hamburger for eleven cents, a dozen egs for twenty-nine cents, and a gallon of gas for eighteen cents.  $5.00 would be the Christmas miracle.

Gup's book, "A Secret Gift," is a time travel back to the Great Depression; a trip eerily reminiscent of the past few years of financial crisis to which he makes frequent reference.  His investigation uncovers intimate layers of community, generosity, and family secrets.  What is heartening is the message of endurance and recovery in the face of a stranger's kindness.

What do you really know about your family?  What do you really know of compassion, suffering, community, loss, humility, resilience, gratitude, perseverance, joy, sharing, inspiration?  Ask for one story - be prepared to receive a treasure trove.

Q&A Tuesday: How Is Framing Your Story Like Building A House?

Q:    How is framing my story like building a house?

A:    Each needs a foundation, direction, and clear decisions.

Wandering through my files looking for an item I came across a piece I had squirrelled away in 2001.  The date may be old but the advice is still fresh.  While the audience news writers, the tips can be employed by anyone who needs to write well right now:

Lessons from the National Writers Workshop
Story Framing: Four Vital Ingredients
By MICHAEL ROBERTS
Training editor, The Cincinnati Enquirer

Synopsis by FREDA FREEMAN

Waving his daughter's yellow plastic wrench, Michael Roberts gave fellow journalists and journalism students a "tool" they can use: four vital ingredients every story should have.

Framing a story is like building a house. Just as you determine how many rooms the house should have, you focus on the main idea of your story and what you want to say. A poorly framed story is vague and pointless, and your writing suffers. Good adjectives cannot make up for a bad story or bad idea.

"This is a tool (not a rule) to get a handle on the story and break it down," Roberts said. "Framing makes the story easier to write. If you lay the foundation, you're free to be a much better writer."

One of the leaders in the training movement across the country, Roberts had conference participants pick a story and find ways to make it better. Focus the story by deciding the main idea and, after reporting, run the information through this checklist: news, context, impact and human dimension.

1. News is the event, new information, basic facts; it tells the reader what happened.
2. Context is the story's background and history, its relationship to things around the news, the bigger picture; it tells readers what's normal, surprising or how similar things are dealt with elsewhere.
3. Impact tells readers what the news affects or changes, now and in the future; it tells readers who benefits, who suffers and what they can do about it.
4. Human dimension illustrates or portrays how the story effects the lives of real people; it provides details, textures, emotions, colors to convey experience.

According to Roberts, Gannett pushes the "five-graph" rule. The four ingredients should be in the first five paragraphs. Let readers know what the four ingredients are and develop them later in the story.

Roberts said the story should focus on the news. Of course, the news is relative, depending on what paper you work for.

If you are writing a 20-inch story, think in terms of an outline and break it into four parts. Pick the news, put it in context, be clear on its impact, and put it in human dimension.

For example, when covering a city council, the news is not the council meeting. The news is that the council is looking for $1 million to build a skateboard park.

Readers will want to know where the money is going to come from, if taxes will rise, where the park will be built – in their back yards? – and whether it will be safe.

"You shouldn't be sitting in a meeting," Roberts said. "You should be telling the impact on people. Writers should make a case for 'doing this instead of that.'"

Of the four ingredients, Roberts is on a personal crusade to have writers lead with impact. Say what the story is about as quickly as you can, he said.

"Lead with impact," Roberts urged. "It will change the way you think and write. It will change the way your story sounds."

Impact is the best of the four ingredients because it has immediacy; it lets the reader know what the news is. Impact leads to a fully realized story that has all four components.

Roberts said it is not a good idea to begin a story with context because readers won't know what you are talking about.

Human dimension is present in the anecdotal lead, which Roberts doesn't like. Anecdotal leads are tricky unless you can get the news near the top instead of having it buried five paragraphs into the story.

Impact is also anecdotal, but the key is that the writer must be absolute, giving precise terms of the news event.

"If the writer can't figure out the impact, how is the reader going to?" Roberts asked. The bottom line is to answer readers' main question: "What does this mean to me?"

Q&A Tuesday: How Do I Get Down The Story?

Q:    "I have so many details, so many facts, so much information....How do I get down the story?"

A:    Sentence by sentence, using index cards.

When I work with lawyers and others who need to tell a story, I am fond of the compression exercise I learned from Jay O'Callahan.  The trick is to get your whole story down to 15 seconds.  It works.  And then you can put down the paper and no one gets hurt.

Here are two more techniques you can use.

This first one comes from a favorite author, Anne Lamott, who wrote "Bird By Bird - Some Instructions on Writing and Life."  I am charmed by the little story that gives us a clue to the treasures her book will hold, as follows:

"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write.  [It] was due the next day.  We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, ans he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.  Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy.  Just take it bird by bird.'"

That is the very same advice I give those with whom I am working. 

Imagine that you are walking in a great swirl of papers.  Each sheet of paper is an item of information for the story.  No wonder you feel lost.  Grab one paper and begin there.  Then take it piece by piece or, bird by bird.

This last tip came to me this morning.  A high school senior by the name of Ben Breedlove wrote his story early last month before he died from a longstanding heart condition. His technique is profoundly stirring.  Words written on index cards, no sound, only the expression in his eyes and the occasional grin.  He was gorgeous.  In his memory I would like to share the technique with you in the expectation that it will be another tool for you to get down the story.

Click here to access  This Is My Story (Part I) and Part II.

Imagine having your clients do the same work.

It's as simple as that.  And if you're still perplexed, call me and we will create the story together.