abuses the body’s stress response, while the traditional
writer’s death is to be found slumped over the keyboard.
Don’t you think there must be a connection? . . . which is
why I suggest that you not make a habit of the bash. I wish
I hadn’t.
Is the piece so rough that you cannot see what you have
beneath the surface jumble? This problem is familiar to ed-
itors, less so to writers. Still, you might see it if you tried to
write too early, by talking to a tape, or when very tired—a
text so garbled that you feel impelled to pitch it. For example,
here is a chemist talking about impediments to learning
chemistry:
The first one—I haven’t read anything about it, most of it
is intuitive—is how symbols become tyrannical and intim-
idating. I’ll move back and forth. I’d like to give you an ex-
ample of that. I’m going to start off with showing you a
few symbols to terrorize you. Then I’m going to show you
what the symbols mean. [Shows slide.] Here’s something
plus something else equals something or another. These
look pretty formidable, and they really are very simple.
This is the story of symbols: They really are very simple
ideas that just code for a very simple idea. Now what this
means is, this is Phoenician, this is hieroglyphic Egyptian.
But they both represent two apples plus two bananas equal
four fruit. But when you see the symbols, they are so in-
timidating. If I had written it this way: [2a + 2b = 4c.]
you might not have been so frightened.
Before we pitch this mess, why not see what we can salvage,
starting with a simple cleanup?
The first impediment to learning is that symbols become
tyrannical and intimidating. I’m going to start by showing

clapped his hands and plunged in with enthusiasm.
“Why are you so pleased?” asked his parents, surprised.
“Well!” said the boy, digging deeper. “Look at all this stuff!
There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”
As there frequently is.
Does the piece or some part of it have no apparent organ-
ization? Make a printout and go through it, paragraph by
paragraph, asking yourself what you meant to say.What is
the gist of each paragraph? Write a one- to three-word de-
scription beside each one.
You may find a few paragraphs with no gist; pitch them.
And you may find a few long paragraphs with three or four
topics; label each part.
Once you have each paragraph or group of paragraphs la-
beled, cut them apart and assign the chunks to categories in
whatever way makes sense. Ponder the categories. How are
they related? Should these two piles really be one? Should
this one really be two? How does the material want to be?
Do you have all the pieces? (You may need to skim through
your notes and look for some segment you forgot.) Do
things start to cohere once put in chronological order? Or is
there an overarching theme (that must be explicated first),
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which gives rise to A, B, and C (the delta)? Or do A, B, and C
arise separately and then converge (the watershed)? Do you
see one locus that can serve for both entry and exit, so that

Assessing the readers was discussed in chapter 4, begin-
ning on page 69.
Are you trying to write a term paper? The closer you are to
school, the more likely you are to be writing a term paper,
purely out of habit. I remember the first article I ever wrote:
It was about the campus cops of Cornell, and it went
through four separate, from-scratch drafts before I stopped
finding one more way to make it dull.
Ideas
into
Words
132
Fundamentally, in a term paper you tell. In professional
writing, you show. In a term paper, the reader is the teacher,
who by definition knows all and must read the paper any-
way. In professional writing, the reader knows nothing and
must be enticed to read.
So: Are you writing sections of plodding background,
stuff a teacher might want to see that you know? Are you
striving to be complete and to work in all the appropriate
general statements?
You are not in that universe anymore.
You must now aim for accurate but just enough (whatever
that means for the particular readers), placing evocative, in-
teresting, and newsy parts to the forefront. Leave out the
general statements so beloved by the teachers who taught
them to you; rather, build your writing like a sculpture, fit-
ting together chunks of solid observation, fact, and reason-
ing. Report phenomena—what you saw, heard, smelled, read
in a letter, felt in the air on your cheek, until no reader can

comfy Victorian, or a creaky fixer-upper? (Granted, we don’t
need to refer to body weight at all, but the mild taboo spices
the examples.) Use the more neutral words in these ranges
and let the facts speak. To me, a lap pool and Japanese garden
say “manse” more clearly than “manse.”
Look also at the facts and observations you are choosing to
use. The criterion should be,What do I have that will create
the richest, most accurate portrait of the person or situation
or idea? The result will probably include a few things the
person would just as soon you’d left out, along with a few
that he finds unexpected and flattering. Those reactions are
not a problem; the problem arises when you let them skew
your reporting.
So: Are you leaving out relevant material only because the
subject might find it embarrassing? At the other extreme, do
you find enjoyment, even just a tinge, in writing the unpleas-
ant? Look at the quotes: Are you cleaning them up to a high
gloss that verges on fiction, charm gleaming from every word?
Are you cleaning them up less than usual, virtuously remind-
ing yourself of your duty to report all the ums and uhs?
Head for the high ground of fact and normal practice.
Does the topic bore you? The best cure for boredom is to
find out more because, as discussed in chapter 1, anything is
interesting once you take the right approach.
Your best bet is to go back to the researchers and try to
elicit a story—an old-fashioned narrative, with a beginning,
a middle, and an end. Ask “Why this research in particular?
What caught your attention?” Unlike What’s-important-here,
which you have undoubtedly asked already (as you should),
“What caught your attention?” may give you the beginning

ble sidebars. No editor in his right mind will pass up a tasty
sidebar.
Have you written a lot of background working up to the
central topic? Drop it or condense it, taking only the key
portions. Imagine your reader running for a train while you
try to brief him on the first third of the piece—Quick, what
do you say? Yes. Keep that part.
A worst-case scenario: the piece is three times as long as
the space you have! Do not attempt to prune, as it cannot be
done without losing the inviting texture of the piece. (Who
cares if all the arguments remain, elegantly condensed into
single sentences? It will be so dense that the reader will
quit.) You have three choices: Look for some single piece of
the text that will stand on its own (and that the editor likes),
argue for more space, or find a market that wants the detail.
Do you have a story idea or only a topic? If you are wander-
ing around in a subject, either unable to put two paragraphs
together or unable to shake the feeling that you’re writing a
term paper, you may have a mere topic, a naked noun.
If your working head could be summarized as Everything
You Never Wanted to Know about Whatever, you definitely have
a mere topic. Look for its verb—something changing, some-
thing happening, some kind of action. Look for the story.
Chapter 2 discusses story ideas and how to find and de-
velop them.
When
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135

told Susan that anecdote, not the one you used in the opener.
Maybe you wrote up the wrong one.”
A professional conversation is different in kind from a so-
cial one:You are working, not entertaining.Your goal is to
see the story freshly, not to have a nice lunch.Your colleague
may have little to say but questions, and she is thinking with
you, not telling her own stories or sitting back in social
mode.You should come away refreshed, charged up, full of
new ideas, and eager to write.
It helps to take notes, because the conversation will often
ramble in ways that hinder memory.
Ideas
into
Words
136
When you feel stuck, you will seldom be ready to show
the manuscript. But perhaps you can show your list of major
items, several sets of head-and-subhead, or several alternative
openings. As you talk them over, one of them may grow legs
and start to run—aha! There’s the story!
Whatever you get from the session, you should use right
away. Short-term memory degrades by about 50 percent in
twenty-four hours, so at the least you’ll want to jot down your
new ideas immediately. Better yet, start to work with them
on the day of the talk, while you’re still excited. Otherwise
the new ideas will evanesce, cast off as wrong or irrelevant
by your older mindset, the one that had you feeling stuck.
Are you in a power struggle with your teacher or editor?
Don’t be. “The editor is always right.”
This arresting phrase comes from Rob Kanigel, who was a

Stuck
137
He knows that paragraph intimately, after all. It took two
hours to write, and to him everything about it now sounds
inevitable.
So fundamentally, the editor is a pair of fresh eyes. The
core of the job is diagnosis, as in the reactive readings you
learned to do in chapter 6.
Do you find it hard to see your own work freshly? Of
course you do (not impossible, but hard). Then you ought
to be grateful for that interfering editor who really does see
it freshly, and who can point out where confusion and bore-
dom invade your text.
If time allows, it works well for editors (and teachers, too)
not to correct so much as to react in detail—to do a reaction
read, at least on the first go-round. There will be time
enough later for major surgery, if needed. Chances are good,
however, that if the editor reacts in detail and the writer
takes it as help, the writer can find far better fixes than the
editor could devise. For while the editor may have fresh eyes,
the writer has her own unique asset—a head full of facts,
quotes, and stories that don’t yet appear in the manuscript.
Once she knows an example doesn’t work, pff! She can
bring out another. Can the editor do that? Not likely.
From the writer’s point of view, the beauty of Rob’s con-
cept is that it makes editing impersonal, therefore easier to
take. Edits are not criticisms.Writers don’t need editors be-
cause they have failed—writers need editors because that’s
the nature of writing. The issues are not “I’m right” versus
“No, I’m right.” Rather, writer and editor can talk about

• Do you have a nagging feeling that you really should
have called so-and-so or found reference this-and-that? Some
people never feel ready. After all, the H.M.S. Beagle came into
port in 1836; it took Darwin another twenty-three years to
write The Origin of Species. But if you are a perfectionist like
Darwin, you have long since learned at what point to ignore
your own perfectionism. For the rest of us, that nagging feel-
ing is the subconscious trying to help us out. Listen to it.
Call so-and-so.
• Have you started writing, but find yourself writing the
same few paragraphs over and over, refining them to a
Pulitzer-worthy polish? Rarely, those few paragraphs are in
fact all that should be written, in which case you should go
back to the assigning editor (or teacher) and say so. More
often, polishing one nugget means you don’t know enough.
You are huddling on an island of certainty in a sea of confu-
sion and must launch into immersion.
Are you acutely lost, in a state of total confusion and sink-
ing fast? Every once in a while, novice writers really do
tackle something that is beyond their abilities—at least, the
abilities they had when they started. Perhaps that is what has
happened to you now.You are growing, and a painful expe-
rience it is.
If you were sitting in my office today, asking for help, here
are the questions I would ask you. Perhaps you could find
someone to have the same kind of conversation with you.
First question:
When
You’re
Feeling