Writing

Any time I finish the next day's column for THE WEEK before 10 pm, I feel pretty good about life. Except when I think of a better line at 1 am.

Writing after Trump

Donald Trump is leaving office tomorrow, and I'll admit to some personal nervousness. What's it going to be like to write opinion pieces in the post-Trump age? 

Over the last four years, there has been a certain clarity to writing left-of-center opinion. It's not that I wanted to reduce everything to "orange man bad" (as conservative commentators like to say) but the truth is that Trump wasn't just bad, but that he provided a prodigious supply of outrages. There was often fresh material, something new to illustrate his badness. 

But he is moving away from the very center of politics, and I fear that the muscles I use when NOT writing from a place of deserved moral outrage have grown atrophied over the last few years. I have criticized Trump for being a purveyor of "pure, refined grievance" but now I worry that I, too, am an addict. 

I'm sure that there will still be things to be mad about. Hunting for those things, seeking out the high of angry righteousness, would be a bad path to go down. 

Back in 2009, when Barack Obama took office, I feared I would run out of things to write about after George W. Bush's presidency so enraged me I made the jump from a straight-news newspaper career into opinion journalism. It turned out there was plenty to write about, even then. Probably, the same will be true now. 

We still have a pandemic to fight, an economy to write right, climate change to try to mitigate and other big issues. 

 And I will have to remind myself that some things are worth writing about even if they don't piss me off.

Personal note about the writing process

After 25-plus years in journalism, I can pretty easily write 700-1,000 words in one sitting -- sometimes, depending on the topic and how much reporting and research have been done ahead of time, I can hit 1,000 words in about an hour. And they're usually coherent! It's one skill I know I have.

The last few years, though, I've done a few more reported magazine-style pieces. Not terribly lengthy -- usually in the 2,500-word range -- and, hoo boy. It's a whole different process. It's not just longer. I have to think my way through the structure of a piece more. And I have to be willing not to do it in one setting -- the attempt can nearly destroy me. 

Instead, I have to break the work up -- writing for an hour here, an hour there, until I get my draft. I'm accustomed to a "see the assignment, write the assignment" kind of process, so slowing down and taking chunks is unfamiliar to me. It requires me to stretch my skills and even learn new ones. It is not in my comfort zone. But it seems worth doing. Not just because I get paid for it (though that's important) but because it helps me stay fresh. This is hard stuff. Which, in this case, means it's worth doing.

Grasping at truth: Three examples of good writing about difficult topics

One thing about quarantine: It has given me time to think about how I practice the craft of writing.

I'm lucky: I've been able to make a living at writing -- both reporting and opinion writing. For most of the last decade or more, I've had a regular outlet (newspaper syndication, PhillyMag, and The Week) to express my opinions before large audiences. I don't take it for granted.

But I always know I could do better. And I sometimes suspect I'm doing a two-dimensional version of something that might better contribute to the public conversation if I could somehow express it in three dimensions.

I want to point to three pieces of writing done in recent years that I take as a model -- not just for writing, but for thinking, and maybe even doing this job in a way I consider to be moral.

And here are the lessons I've learned from them:

In praise of distracted, Internet-addled writing

In his review of Freewrite's "Smart Typewriter," Ian Bogost offers praise for the pre-Internet era of writing, when one could set one's fingers to the keyboard and simply write, without all the distractions and bells and whistles that a wifi connection bring to the process.

There's more than a hint of protesting too much.

No one would reasonably dispute that writing tools affect the shape and content of both writing and the thought that goes into writing, but it's mistaken to suggest — as Bogost seems to — the the older, slower way was necessarily deeper. Here's an odd passage:

For Nietzsche, the typewriter offered a way to write despite his deteriorating vision (and sanity). He knew that tools changed their users; “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” Nietzsche aphorized. These are facts I happen to know just because they were memorable, not because I remember facts like these regularly anymore. I’ve long since outsourced such easily-rediscovered knowledge to the Internet.

Here's the thing: The human brain is at once both wondrous and limited. In writing this essay 30 or 40 years ago, Bogost might've dropped the exact same knowledge from memory — or, if he (as is often the case with this kind of learning) remembered-ish Nietzsche's comment, he would've gone into the stacks of books (his own, or perhaps a library's) to find the comment, quote it precisely, and cite it. Now, if he's unsure, he can Google it up. Good writing rarely stops and starts with the writer's brain and the writing tools; it's often augmented by reporting and research, knowledge of not just how to marshal facts in service of a story or argument, but how to marshal those facts. Forty years ago, Bogost might've written: "I've outsourced such easily-rediscovered knowledge to the encyclopedia," and it would've sounded silly as a lament. We writers use such tools to enlarge our understanding, and our craft.