Bad Writing

When he was a boy, Vernon Lott wanted to be the next great poet. Alas, no dice. Years later, he found a box of his genius and realized that it was horrible.

That set him on a quest for answers about writing — bad writing, good writing and the process in between (h/t Hank).

Bad Writing – Official Trailer from Morris Hill Pictures on Vimeo.

He talks to host of folks, including David Sedaris, Nick Flynn, Margaret Atwood and George Saunders, who says in Lott’s documentary:

My sense is that it has a lot more to do with the ways that someone is naturally charming. You know, so if you fall in love with somebody and they’re leaving town and you have two days to somehow change their mind, in that kind of life or death situation you bring forth certain traits of your personality. In my case, I would be telling jokes and I would be talking fast and I would be trying real hard to anticipate her reason for leaving and undercut them in a real energetic way. Those are all things that I would do in prose as well. I would definitely try to anticipate the reader’s objection to the story and build in a defense. I would try to be funny; I would try to be fast. So for me, the big breakthrough moment for me, was when I said to myself, ‘The reader is a person who you need to charm. You better bring your good shit. Because they don’t have time to wait around for you to work through your Hemingway phase.’

I tend to think Walt Harrington is right: “I don’t mean that you have to spend five years covering county board meetings. But I do mean covering all-night cops, investigating how housing and industrial developments works in communities and how power flows from real estate and business people into politics, reporting on the dramas of life and death with car accidents and suicides. Doing general assignment reporting, something you don’t get to do until after you’ve proven you can do news, feature and news feature reporting, is a wonderful way to become introduced to the huge range of stories and humanity that’s out there. Much of the finest intimate journalism is really a kind of journalistic anthropology, going into worlds from a typical high school to a garage rock band to an old folks home to a hospice to police precinct to a rug culture to a suburban housewife book club and understanding it in its own terms and making sense of the group’s value and beliefs while also learning to master the techniques of interviewing and observing and thinking critically on your feet and then mastering in small steps the ways of rendering all that material in a story. That means mastering the whole range of word and technique and structure skills. There is so much to learn that learning it in smaller pieces is, I think, really the only way to do it. That means that most people who do this work really well first became the best feature writers on their newspapers before they went on to become the best projects reporters on their newspapers.”

Is your early stuff lousy? Anybody want to offer an example?