{"id":1154,"date":"2014-02-21T16:32:57","date_gmt":"2014-02-21T16:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2014\/02\/21\/20-writing-and-editing-tips-from-tracy-kidder-richard-todd\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T19:22:47","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T19:22:47","slug":"20-writing-and-editing-tips-from-tracy-kidder-richard-todd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2014\/02\/21\/20-writing-and-editing-tips-from-tracy-kidder-richard-todd\/","title":{"rendered":"20 writing and editing tips from Tracy Kidder + Richard Todd"},"content":{"rendered":"    \n    <div class=\"  core-block\">\n        <div class=\"block block--core block--core-html mb-5   max-w-screen-full mx-auto\">\n            <em>In the book <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/news\/articles\/SB10001424127887324734904578241622235570966\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><strong>Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction<\/strong><\/a><em>, memorably instructive lines for\u00a0writers and editors appear on almost every page. The authors, the Pulitzer-winning nonfiction writer <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tracykidder.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><b>Tracy Kidder <\/b><\/a>and his longtime editor, <a href=\"http:\/\/thethingitselfbook.com\/author.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><b>Richard Todd<\/b><\/a>, broke the work into eight chapters \u2014 \u201cNarratives,\u201d \u201cBeing Edited and Editing,\u201d \u201cBeyond Accuracy\u201d \u2014<span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">\u00a0<\/span>and there is something useful, and even inspiring, in every one. <\/em><em>Kidder is the author of books that include <\/em>Mountains beyond Mountains<em>, <\/em>Among Schoolchildren<em>, and <\/em>The Soul of a New Machine<em>; Todd is the author of the exquisite book of essays\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.us.penguingroup.com\/nf\/Book\/BookDisplay\/0,,9781440638381,00.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity<\/a><em>. Their relationship began more than three decades ago, at <\/em>The Atlantic<em>, and <\/em>Good Prose<em> is as much a memoir of their collaboration as it is a guide to storytelling. <\/em><em>Here are 20 insightful lines and passages:\u00a0<\/em><br \/><br \/>\u201cEvery story has to be discovered twice, first in the world, and then in the author\u2019s study. One discovers a story the second time by constructing it.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cWriters want to be engaging, and it is easy to try to purchase charm at the expense of honesty, but the ultimate charm lies in getting the face more right than pretty.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cThe heart of the story is usually a place to arrive at, not a place to begin.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cThe wise writer, while striving to avoid self-consciousness, remains aware of the reader\u2019s probing eye.\u201d<br \/><br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/essay\/on-how-to-take-a-swing-good-prose-by-tracy-kidder-and-richard-todd#\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-24270\" src=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Good-Prose-cover.jpg\" alt=\"Good-Prose-cover\" width=\"270\" height=\"410\" \/><\/a>\u201c \u2018Play\u00a0it like you don\u2019t know how.\u2019 Cryptic advice, but a writer can make some sense of it: Don\u2019t concentrate on technique, which can be the same as concentrating on yourself. Give yourself to your story, or to your train of ideas, or to your memories. Don\u2019t be afraid to explore, even to hesitate. Be willing to surprise yourself.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cIt isn\u2019t always a bad sign when a story doesn\u2019t talk well.\u201d (Meaning don\u2019t worry about it if the idea doesn\u2019t pass the cocktail-party test.)<br \/><br \/>There are many archetypal stories: narratives of quest and trial, sin and redemption, identity and self-sacrifice; narratives of the chase, the mystery, the love triangle, the struggle between good and evil; narratives in which trouble is averted, escape is achieved, tragedy happens. Many, maybe most, nonfiction writers go looking for narratives with those silhouettes, and they feel lucky when they find the real thing, because stories out in the world don\u2019t usually turn out as expected. Even a story that has already happened, a story that a writer sets out to reconstruct, isn\u2019t always as dramatic as it first appears. The villain isn\u2019t quite as villainous as he looked in the photograph; the warring parties settle the lawsuit in midtrial; the murder wasn\u2019t a murder after all. Nonfiction writers, especially ones new to the factual narrative, are vulnerable to those sorts of disappointments. \u2018I don\u2019t have a book,\u2019 the young writer says when the events don\u2019t deliver the kind of obvious drama in which everyone recognizes a story. But what\u2019s usually missing isn\u2019t a story. What\u2019s missing is a broader way of thinking about what makes for a good story.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cThe most important conflict often happens within a character, or within the narrator.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cFor a story to have a chance to live, it is essential only that there be something important at stake.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cPoint of view is the place from which a writer listens in and watches. Choosing one place over another determines what can and can\u2019t be seen, what minds can and can\u2019t be entered. The choice also deeply affects the tone, the author\u2019s apparent attitude toward the events and people of a story.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cPoint of view is a place to stand, but more than that, a way to think and feel.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cAgainst a large background, \u2018I\u2019 can provide human scale. \u2026 As a rule, the smaller the canvas, the more intrusive the first person is likely to be.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cThe goal is to get the characters off the page and into the reader\u2019s imagination.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cWhat the imaginative reader wants is telling details. Characters can emerge in long descriptive passages, as in Tolstoy, but brevity can also work. Graham Greene rarely gives us more than a detail or two\u2014a face \u2018charred with a three days\u2019 beard\u2019 or a pair of \u2018bald pink knees\u2019\u2014and Jane Austen often gives us less than that, and yet the people those writers create have come alive for generations of readers.\u201d<span style=\"color: #3366ff;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/><br \/>\u201cWhat we want are essences, woven into a story in moments large and small.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cMinor characters encountered in the flow of a story can function as lenses on the main characters.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cAbove all, a setting tells what is at issue\u2014what a character is trying to do, what a character fears or is trying to hide, hopes to gain or stands to lose, what a character is up against.\u201d<span style=\"color: #3366ff;\"><br \/><\/span><br \/><br \/>\u201cThe honest nonfiction storyteller is a restrained illusionist.\u201d<br \/><br \/>\u201cIt is always a good idea to construct a detailed timeline and, for some, to write rough drafts chronologically. If you know the actual sequence of your story, all the details dated in relation to one another, you avoid muddle and misunderstanding, and can write with a feeling of authority, which tends to insinuate itself into prose.\u201d<br \/><br \/>F. Scott Fitzgerald \u201cknew that there are at least two kinds of rewriting. The first is trying to fix what you\u2019ve already written, but doing this can keep you from facing up to the second kind, from figuring out the essential thing you\u2019re trying to do and looking for better ways to tell your story.\u201d<br \/><br \/><em>Bonus: Watch Kidder and Todd talk about their relationship:<\/em>\n        <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the book Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, memorably instructive lines for\u00a0writers and editors appear on almost every page. The authors, the Pulitzer-winning nonfiction writer Tracy Kidder and his longtime editor, Richard Todd, broke the work into eight chapters \u2014 \u201cNarratives,\u201d \u201cBeing Edited and Editing,\u201d \u201cBeyond Accuracy\u201d \u2014\u00a0and there is something useful, and even [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4778,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[61],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays-on-craft","authors-paige-williams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>20 writing and editing tips from Tracy Kidder + Richard Todd - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2014\/02\/21\/20-writing-and-editing-tips-from-tracy-kidder-richard-todd\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"20 writing and editing tips from Tracy Kidder + Richard Todd - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the book Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, memorably instructive lines for\u00a0writers and editors appear on almost every page. 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