Good Prose (18 page)

I was twenty-seven and he was only thirty-two, but I recognized
him as a member of an older generation, an older generation, that is, of Americans who went to college before the Vietnam War and the matriculation of the baby boomers, whom Todd once described as “a generation of twits.” He liked things that seemed to me old-fashioned, such as farms and, at least hypothetically, farming. He liked old buildings, bucolic landscapes, antiques, and realistic fiction. And it seemed as if a lot of what he liked he liked in opposition to what he didn’t like, and I learned more about the things he didn’t like, many of which were things I did like, such as exercise for its own sake, unrealistic fiction, sunny climates, and cats. He was calm on the surface, and the surface was what he let most people see; whereas I tended to share my thoughts and especially complaints.

For about five years I worked with him on articles for the magazine. I had only freelancer status, and I spent months researching and writing articles for which I was paid at most a few thousand dollars. I hadn’t married rich. (“The hours are too long at that business,” my father used to say.) My wife had a modest income, though, which allowed me the freedom to work under Todd’s tutelage. I didn’t feel especially privileged, but of course I was.

I called him at least daily when I was in the middle of writing an article. On one of those occasions early on, I heard him clear his throat, which seemed to mean that I had been talking for too long. I hastened to explain that I wanted him to know as much about the subject as I did. “But, Kidder,” he replied, “I don’t
want
to know as much about it as you do.” That article was about the dumping of sewage sludge in the New York Bight, but I was pretty sure this was a general warning. I got it, I thought. Part
of an article writer’s job was to distill a lot of information not just for the readers but for the editor, too.

Often this was more than I could manage. Sometimes I came to Boston to finish articles, and Todd and Susan would put me up in their guest room—“the Ramada Room.” (One of their daughters was slow to start the day; they called her room “room 17,” as in, “There’s trouble in room 17.”) I spent two weeks at their place while working on my article about Vietnam combat veterans. According to Todd, I commandeered every evening, talking to him about something or other in that article: “I would be tired, I’d have to go to bed, and you would still be talking, and you would stay up God knows how much later, and the next morning I would be at the breakfast table, and you would come down the stairs still talking about that same thing in the article.”

Being close by, getting glimpses of an editor’s life, can give one a sense of an editor’s problems and thus suggest ways to make oneself useful, and secure continuing attentions. But I suppose it could have worked the other way in my case. There were parties at
The Atlantic
and at Todd’s house where I got drunk and made a scene. I committed some offenses that, no doubt for the same reason, I promptly forgot. Susan had an antique Toby jug, an English drinking vessel with a face molded into its surface. She kept it out of harm’s way on a shelf in her kitchen. “You broke it,” Todd told me, long after the fact. “It wasn’t that you were looking at it. You were just … moving. And it fell. You as usual were frantically apologetic. ‘Oh God. Oh God. Is this valuable?’ Susan said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, Tracy. It’s priceless.’ That seemed to set you at your ease.”

“Was I in my cups?” I asked Todd.

“It’s not impossible.”

Presumably, a writer and editor can work well together without sharing even so much as an occasional lunch, but I don’t think editing from a distance would have served me well. At first, and for some years, I needed too much help, including reassurance, and by the time I might have needed help less, I was comfortable with things as they were. One evening he called my house, got my wife, and asked for me by saying, “Frannie, is your eldest home?” I wasn’t offended, only amused, in part of course because I knew that amusement was his aim. He was playing the role of Todd. Ten years after we met, we were having dinner and I was lamenting that I was about to turn forty, saying how old it made me feel, and Todd looked up from his glass of cognac and said, “Kidder, I knew you in your thirties. And believe me, it is time for you to bid them adieu.” I felt comfortable, comfortable unto complacent. I thought, “I’ll remember that line.”

By then we had many magazine articles and two books behind us. Habits, practices, principles, had accumulated into a small technology, our own peculiar ways of making articles and, especially by then, books.

What had worked for one occasion, we would say, probably wouldn’t work for another. For instance, I wrote a magazine profile and later tried to use all of it in a book about the same person. The results were discouraging. After seeing a few revisions, Todd said, “You have to smash that article,” and I imagined a porcelain cup lying on the ground in shards and saw myself picking up some of them, the curved part of the handle, a piece of the rim.

But in our practice, many general procedures have carried
over from one project to the next. I confer with Todd from the start, right from the opening question: what should I write about? The ideas for two books were his, and the idea for another came from Susan. Wherever suggestions come from, I discuss them with him, often for months, once for about two years. When I finally make a choice and begin my research, I tell him how it’s going several times a week at least, unless the research takes me somewhere without phone service. His advice is a relief from the competing voices in my head, a place to begin or, once in a while, something tangible to argue with.

In our practice every book has seasons. After research comes the rough draft, the season that I dread. Once long ago, I set out after dinner to begin an article for
The Atlantic
and looked up to see daylight moving across a floor littered with crumpled balls of paper, at least a hundred versions of the article’s opening sentence. For a time, I insisted that the first sentence be perfect before going on, and therefore spent whole days and nights getting nowhere. This sort of thing happened often enough to make me fear it. So I abandoned care entirely when writing rough drafts. Instead, I wrote fast. I would spend a day or two in reverie over my material, then scratch out a sort of plan, not even an outline but just a list of events, and then churn out pages as quickly as I could. Writing as fast as possible would prevent remorse for having written badly. I would take every path that looked interesting, and keep myself from going back and reading what I’d written, let alone trying to fix it. Meanwhile, I would try to forget the fate of previous rough drafts, the garbage bags full of paper, but of course I always remembered, so I’d tell myself that this time would be different, this time the
rough draft would survive. But because I almost always lost faith in the draft long before I finished it, I would divide it into chunks. This also tended to foster speed, because the sooner I finished a chunk, the sooner I could apply for reassurance from Todd.

The rationale for this approach is that when you go out reporting, you always want to collect more material than you can use—far more, ten times more, a hundred times more. And then you want to audition a lot of that material on the page. So if you want to write more than one book in your lifetime, you have to write your first draft quickly. And anything I wrote that way, I found, was easier to throw away than stuff I’d labored over. Even the material that I had gathered and summoned up when my research seemed to be going badly, material I thought of as “good stuff,” even that wasn’t very hard to part with once I had written it up and seen it fail.

The cost of this approach is overstuffed, confusing first drafts, and, perhaps, an editor’s consternation. “It might help if you thought things through before you start to write,” Todd told me once, but only once, and then, I guess, he resigned himself to chaos. In the course of the immensely long first draft of my book
Among Schoolchildren
, I wrote the first few hundred pages in the first person, tried out an omniscient third person for the next five hundred or so, then went back to the first person for another long stretch, and wrote the last hundreds in something like the form of a play. Todd received photocopies of each chunk in turn. He let a few days pass each time, then said, as he always has, “It’s fine. Keep going.” And as always, I let myself imagine that he had actually read the pages, and also, so as not to feel I was a
burden, that he hadn’t. I have never asked if he actually reads my rough drafts. I don’t want to know. The procedure works well enough. Why undermine its deep illogic?

I learned to like rewriting, maybe too much, but really it is the writer’s special privilege. We rarely get the kind of chance in life that rewriting offers, to revise our pasts, to take back what we’ve said and say it better before others hear it. I usually write about ten more or less complete drafts, each one usually though not always closer to the final thing, like golf shots. This phase goes on for at least a year. I write and Todd reads and then we meet and talk about the draft, and then we do it all over again, again and again. Todd used to jot comments in the margins of the manuscripts for our meetings, but he would end up staring at the page, saying, “What did I write here?” Soon I was more adept than he was at deciphering his comments. But his penmanship deteriorated, and finally he quit using it altogether. Since then, the most I’ve found on pages he’s returned are squiggly lines under sentences, which can mean any number of things, none of them good.

We’ve gone over manuscripts in restaurants, but a large private room is best. Todd likes to pace. I know we’ve made progress, that I am getting good at my book, when he says before a meeting that he wants to see the manuscript divided into all its pieces, spread out on a surface. A floor served for a decade or so, but a time came when a table was required, as the natural evolution of knees and backs made floors less accessible. Todd paces around the table, one hand in his trousers pocket, the other lifting piles of manuscript, as if to weigh them, while I take notes and work on keeping quiet.

Something is always wrong with a draft. I count on Todd to identify it. In the years of writing
Atlantic
articles, I sometimes felt that trusting him came at the expense of my independence, and back then I imagined that complete independence was a precondition for writing well, like getting drunk regularly and living in a garret. Sometimes I resented Todd’s telling me that a character or incident or sentence was getting in the way and should be jettisoned. I told him I was going to compile a list of all “the good stuff” he had told me to cut. I never made up that list. I got only as far as remembering a man named Morris Kramer, a beachcombing “environmental activist” whom I had met in the course of research for my story on sewage sludge.

“You were completely fascinated by this guy,” Todd reminded me. “But the guy really didn’t have anything to do with the story.”

I replied that the man was colorful.

“Yes,” Todd said. “You had an interest in the colorful figure.” My interest was enough of a problem for Todd to name it: “the Morris Kramer Problem.” It’s the problem of the irrelevant character, a dull cousin of the problem of the too-compelling minor character, the Mercutio Problem.

For the autopsy of a draft, we use the standard literary terms, such as “point of view” or “tone,” and also terms of our own. “Exteriors” refers to anything that lies outside the story, anything that isn’t direct observation of the characters and events. While doing my research for what became
House
, I found myself wondering where the lumber in the frame of the building came from. I followed it back, as it were, to the Big Woods of Maine: the logging camp where the trees had been felled and the mill
where they were sawn. This was an exterior that seemed to fit within the narrative, and it survived. Most exteriors get cut, but they never feel like a waste of time. Not that this kind of research amounts to scholarship, but to write with confidence about a computer engineer’s life for
The Soul of a New Machine
, I felt I had to learn a lot more than I would ever write about the history of computers, about the industry in general, about what was inside those devices. To write about Dr. Paul Farmer’s work in
Mountains Beyond Mountains
, I had to understand, among other things, antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis. I read about it in medical texts, interviewed several specialists and a microbiologist, wrote and rewrote lengthy explanations, bored Todd and my household repeatedly with verbal explanations, and in the end Todd convinced me to boil it all down to a few sentences. The long versions got in the way of the main story I was telling, which was complicated enough: Farmer’s discovery that poor patients in a Peruvian slum were being treated for drug-resistant tuberculosis in such a way as to induce further resistance to treatment. As for the full-blown exteriors that survive, the trick, we say, is to serve them up when a reader can be expected to want texture and context, or a break from the main story—that is, when the story would otherwise take on the tiresomeness of an excessively linear, one-thing-after-another narrative. An exterior should of course be interesting in itself. Like everything in a book of narrative nonfiction, it ought to serve at least two purposes, preferably unstated.

Sometimes parts of a story have to be “floated.” This is short for “floated in time.” You want, for instance, to describe the daily routine of a teacher, but you want to draw on observations that
you made over many days. Perhaps many parts of many days were boring, but you never want to commit the imitative fallacy. You can certainly let the reader know a day was boring, but the last thing you want to do is bore the reader. You don’t mislead the reader, though you may count on the reader’s discernment. Sometimes signaling that a passage is being floated is as simple as moving from the past to the present tense, or using a phrase such as “day after day.”

Floated things often serve as “timepassers.” The term only sounds dismissive. “We need a timepasser here” is Todd’s way of saying that the story needs to be slowed down or speeded up. It took the carpenters weeks to build the frame of the house that I wrote about in
House
, a period I especially enjoyed because the carpenters seemed to enjoy it so much and because the work site became so fragrant with freshly sawn wood. In the end, I described most of the framing in brief scenes interspersed with pertinent history, all meant to suggest the passage of time without replicating it. A timepasser is one possible means of “making some things big and other things little”—perhaps the most important phrase in our private lexicon. A timepasser can be a means of creating pleasing proportionality, of conveying, for instance, the essence of a weeks-long process like framing a house in fewer pages than you might give to describing a heated argument that lasted only minutes.