The Hack learns to write

Because of my lack of j-school education--or any real education at all--I constantly looked for ways to get better. When opportunities for training came along, I was always the first to sign up (and not just because sometimes they involved travel to warm places during chilly months).

One year a very talented Detroit Free Press writing coach named Susan A. came to town. Her workshop was terrific, two full days of talking about writing--how to structure long pieces, how to write narrative, how to report for detail, how to distinguish between random detail and telling detail...

That workshop carried with it the added bonus of friendship; during the course of her visit, Susan and I became good friends. One night we went out to dinner at the Pickwick, the famous journalist stomping ground I have written about before. And one night I invited her to my house, with only slightly tragic results.

At the time, Toby and I lived alone in a little white house on the top of the hill in Duluth. Toby, as I have no doubt mentioned before, could be a cranky dog, and he didn't much care for strangers. The way to his heart was pretty easy, though: toss him a tennis ball.

So I had developed a fairly cumbersome but effective ritual of inviting people over, asking them to wait outside, handing them a tennis ball, going and getting Toby, and then asking my guest to toss him the ball. After that, we could all go in the house with no problem. (I had a friend who used to do the same thing with cheese: Whenever someone came over, she met the guest at the door with a cube of cheese. "Thank you," they'd say, looking around for a glass of wine to go with it. And Anne would say, "It's not for you. It's for the dog.")

Anyway, I tried to go through the convoluted tennis ball exercise with Susan, but she stopped me. "Don't worry. It'll be fine." And she followed me into the house, sans tennis ball. She squatted down to pet Toby, and he--not recognizing her--leaped at her and barked. I grabbed him, she stood up, I threw him in the bedroom, she sat down and said, "No harm done."

(But later she told me she was afraid of dogs, and that made me feel even worse. If only we'd stuck to the tennis ball routine.... Or, better yet, if only I'd just trained him properly to begin with.)

One summer I went out to Wesleyan University on a journalism scholarship to attend a week-long writing conference. I took classes from Richard Bausch and Anne Bernays and David Slavitt and a whole bunch of other East Coast literati. At the time, I didn't think any of it was very helpful, and I wrote letters home mocking the whole thing and telling cruel, witty stories about some of the speakers and most of the participants.

But I found myself quoting their advice after I got home.

This was often the case when I went to writing workshops--and for a while, I went to quite a few. A week at Wildacres Writing Workshop, in the glorious mountains outside of Asheville, N.C. (We stayed in cabins with front porches that had rows of rocking chairs overlooking the hazy blue mountains.)

A week at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida. (In November! Every morning I brought my breakfast down to the dock and ate while watching the cormorants and the pelicans.)

A week in December at the American Press Institute in Pomona, California. (A very intense week, with long, serious workshops all day and lots of drinking at night and a half-day field trip to the Getty in L.A.)

A long, rainy weekend in New York City, studying again with the folks from Poynter. (I bought an umbrella, and walked and walked and walked.)

And each time I'd think, Huh, I already know all this. It's fun to be in Florida (or California, or New York, or North Carolina), but they're not telling me anything I don't already know.

But they were. They were often telling me things I knew instinctually, or things I had picked up through extensive reading but had never thought deeply about. These conferences gave me context and vocabulary and structure for what it was I was trying to do.

And each time I'd come home and try to put my new knowledge into practice, and each time I would find that all I had done was raise the stakes in my head, and made the writing process harder, and harder, and even harder.

A note on the photo: At Wildacres Writing Workshop, outside of Asheville, N.C., the summer of 1993. I'm with my friends Jan and Marjorie.