By Steve Werblow, Freelancer
Even on our dullest, most I’m-not-feeling-it days, those of us lucky enough to write for a living are surrounded by inspiration. It comes to our mailboxes and inboxes in torrents. I know I’m absolutely guaranteed to get a lesson in structure and tight writing as soon as I pick up a story by Gil Gullickson or Mike Wilson. Holly Spangler and Urban Lehner write with such true voice that it’s delightful and humbling to hear them talking through the screen. I’ve been watching Natalina Sents’ work because she’s great at coming up with just the right approach to deliver her stories—just watch her show us how busy Sonny Perdue is by keeping the clock ticking throughout a masterful account of a day with him. And just about anything Joe Link writes makes my day better and—I hope—maybe helps me find ways to kick my writing game up a notch.
There’s so much great work and so many great writers within our industry. It’s rare that I have a day when I don’t read something I love in our magazines and websites.
It’s not all reading. Inspiration comes through the car speakers in the artful prose behind Roman Mars’ and Avery Trufelman’s podcasts on 99 Percent Invisible, the way they weave their voices, or just moments of pause, around the sound bites at the hearts of their stories. It comes through the joy Sean Paul (and his toasting predecessors like Eek-A-Mouse or Yellowman) convey by just rolling words around in their mouths. I encounter it every few years when I rediscover Suzanne Vega’s first album and I’m reminded of how sublime writing can be when we take the time to shape and polish it. Every. Word. ‘Till you can no longer see the tool marks, and all that’s left is image and rhythm.
Some of my inspiration comes from digging back into musty archives, magazine articles as old as I am. There are two absolute masters from the New Journalism school of the ’60s and ’70s (yes, I enjoy the irony of the label, too) whose writing I keep on my shelves and iPad to go back to again and again. Their work still throws brilliant sparks even as the stories waft hints of dust from old pages and whiffs of martinis from expense account lunches gone by.
For anybody who has ever run up against the story that was absolutely snake-bit, the source who didn’t show and the angle that just wouldn’t fit, take heart in Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold,” from Esquire. In fact, don’t just take heart. Take an afternoon and read it.
Talese set out to profile Old Blue Eyes, only to learn that Sinatra WOULD NOT BE INTERVIEWED. Most of us would have gone home. Talese turned that setback into a 15,000-word observation of Sinatra in action and the people around him, from the bartender to the brain trust. Talese never actually got a quote from the singer himself, but we come away with his story, his voice and an indelible sense of his attitude, his moves and his swagger.
Talese’s career exploded a few years ago in a cautionary tale about journalistic ethics and deep insensitivity, but there’s no doubt in my mind that he has taught generations of magazine journalists how to write…and just as important, how to find stories.
John McPhee was a counterpart of Talese’s at the New Yorker who was another genius of the great story concept. To give readers a deep sense of Earth Island Institute founder David Brower and the emerging ecology movement, McPhee brought him on encounters with a mining company geologist, a land developer and the colorful head of the Bureau of Reclamation and reported on the conversations in Encounters with the Archdruid.
Imagine putting two cats in a sack, then climbing in. Three times.
What’s phenomenal about both of these writers is that they created these master works and then did it again and again. It’s like the great quote by Lincoln Lawyer author Michael Connelly in a cameo appearance in the TV show Castle: “You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote 23 more.”
That’s humbling. It’s also a heck of a line. And most of all, it’s a great reminder to open up to the inspiration that’s all around us and use it to propel yourself higher as you work to make your next 23 projects inspiring to your own readers.
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Just for fun, here’s some great reading:
- John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid
- Gay Talese, The High Notes: Selected Writings of Gay Talese
- Mark Bowden, The Three Battles of Wanat and Other True Stories
- Daniel Pearl, At Home in the World