“All of our problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter. The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter. If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.” — Russ Ackoff
Hiroshima (John Hersey)
Shockwave (Stephen Walker)
“Unacceptable Damage,” The New York Review of Books (Lewis Thomas)
A World Destroyed (Martin Sherwin)
The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Richard Rhodes)
Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Ronald Takaki)
Twilight in Italy (DH Lawrence)
Italian Hours (Henry James)
Italian Journey (Wolfgang van Goethe)
Pictures from Italy (Charles Dickens)
“Everybody says that you should write what you know about. But I’ve always believed that you [should] write about what you supposedly don’t know about, or you write towards what you supposedly don’t know. This sounds strange, of course. But in making these imaginative leaps you can sometimes find out what you knew, but weren’t aware that you knew. So in making these spectacular leaps to places that you shouldn’t really go, there’s a journey. You take the long road in order to find the short way. You learn these things that you weren’t aware of. If someone writes only about themselves, they have a book and a half in them, and that’s it. There’s a great book and then there’s this half book where they often get stuck.” — Colum McCann, Poets & Writers interview
“f you can raise up the individual voice in any small way, if you can go into the mythical room that has been swept clean by historians and cultural critics, by politicians and journalists, and find a small speck of dust still left there and raise it up into something human and good and valued, then I think you’ve done you’re job as a writer in a big way.” — Colum McCann, Powells interview
Bill Simmons has never met a paragraph he couldn’t lengthen.
ESPN.com’s star columnist may boast more than 900,000 followers on Twitter. But he has made his name—and his nickname, “The Sports Guy”—online by going long. Really long. He makes endless rankings of his most- and least-favorite players and teams. He displays a nearly infinite capacity for publishing answers to his fans’ mail. His podcasts can run the length of a feature film, spiked with deft jokes about American pop culture and delivered in the accent of a Boston sports nut.
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For “The Book of Basketball,” Mr. Simmons spent three years shortening his regular column-writing schedule to pore over the 82 books he cites. He also dug through countless periodicals and videos of old basketball games and did his own interviews with such NBA greats as Isiah Thomas and Bill Walton. He leans especially on the sportswriting of David Halberstam, Jack McCallum and Terry Pluto, as well as memoirs from hoops stars, including Bill Bradley and one of his Boston Celtics idols, Bill Russell.
Adam Thompson, “Taking Hoops into Overtime,” The Wall Street Journal
And the Montclair exhibit provides some surprises. For example, artists of the American West—Jozef Bakos and Willard Nash among them—demonstrate that they too are descended from Cézanne, even though they never traveled to Europe or to American art centers where the master’s works could be seen. They heard how Cézanne, instead of producing a naturalistic representation of his subject, analyzed and rebuilt it on canvas in a flattened perspective, using fractured, sculptural forms composed of patches of color instead of conventional light-and-shade modeling. They learned about his thinking—sometimes described as a fusion of intuition and intellect—from reproductions and from teachers such as Andrew Dasburg, one of the few Americans who exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, when he was just 26.
Dasburg had traveled to Paris a few years earlier and, upon discovering Cézanne’s work, divided his art into “before” and “after.” Here his charming “Floral Still Life,” from 1912, sharpens the angles on vibrant red flowers in a slightly off-kilter composition. His softer, earth-toned portrait “Judson Smith” (1923) also employs acute angles, flat planes and straight lines. By then, Dasburg was traveling to New Mexico, proselytizing for Cézanne and Cubism. Among his students was Nash, whose “Self-Portrait With Pipe,” from 1928, comes straight from Cézanne’s many man-with-pipe pictures, but Americanized, with a more casual pose and a striped shirt unlikely to be seen in Aix.
Likewise, it’s a revelation to see photographers Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen here. The works by Strand, such as “Pears and Bowls” (1916), and Steichen, such as “Three Pears and an Apple” (1921), are particularly convincing. Choosing subjects Cézanne painted again and again, these photographers did not ape him; they imbibed his use of space and light to create their own style.
“None of this has come easy for me. It’s stuff I’ve worked hard for, and a lot of it I just learned how to do this off-season. Seeing the standouts on this team studying film, working hard at practice, staying after practice to work, whether it’s the guys on the O-line working on the bags or the DBs catching deep balls. The little things really count in this league. That’s something I didn’t really realize until this past off-season. You have to work on the things you’re already good at as much as the things you’re not good at.” — Sidney Rice, NFL wide receiver
For more ideas on drafting, consider John McPhee’s process. His writing teacher in high school assigned three compositions a week, with an outline of its beginning, middle and end. His process of writing, as is his style, is taut, ordered, and disciplined. He gathers material from the people he interviews, or from research. He says he goes into the process with no preconceptions, preferring his mind to be as blank as the page. After he has taken notes, he retypes them, which gives him ideas about phrasing, order, analogies. It also lets him know what he needs to go back over or do more research on.
He writes the “lead” first, a journalism term. Then, he writes the rest of the topics on index cards, so he can see the possibilities of order and shuffle the cards. He tacks them on the wall so he can get a broad view. Then, he goes to the corresponding notes, cuts those up, and sorts them in some order and puts them in a file folder. He has a dart that he tacks up under the card he is working on. You might conduct a similar process with your annotations. Group them into topics, then decide on the order of those topics (parts), and them determine how they’ll fit into a larger whole.
He’s a craftsmen, and understands that the work must have a form (he once wrote a book about making a birchbark canoe). When McPhee writes a first draft, he spends twelve hour stints in his office, concentrating and distilling his research into prose.
As time went on, [John] McPhee began to focus more and more on the structure of a piece. Each article, he believes, has an organic shape. He finds it by sorting his ample research into subtopics, writing the name of each subtopic on an index card, and playing around with the cards till he finds the right order. To an outsider, the results of this search can seem specific to the point of absurdity. An introduction to the collection The Literary Journalists (1984) reports that the Hoving profile was shaped like a capital Y, in which “the descending branches finally joined at a moment of an epiphany during Hoving’s college career at Princeton, and then proceeded along the bottom stem in a single line.” In some sense that I struggled to understand but eventually gave up on, another famous piece, “Travels in Georgia,” was apparently shaped like a lower case e. “Like Water from a Stone,” Slate.
