Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Let It Fly

 (NOTE: I first published a version of this piece 17 years ago.)

“How do we become better writers?”

It's been just over a year since I taught my last course on reporting and writing at Stanford, and I miss teaching. Throughout the 20 or so years I taught journalism at U-C, Berkeley, SFSU, down on The Farm, by far the question posted above was the one most asked by students.

One of the answers I gave might surprise you:

”Email.”

Writers need to exercise, much like athletes. An extended email exchange with the right recipient on a regular basis is the perfect way to improve your writing voice. The reason lies at the intersection between the nature of email itself and the core of the writing process.

When I first started emailing, I called it "talk-writing" or "write-talking." It was a new communication form, combining elements of the arts of conversation and letter-writing. Living somewhere around the midpoint of an imaginary spectrum connecting those two ancient forms, email reopened an ancient struggle for hegemony between them.

Since Gutenberg, the printed word has held the balance of power over the more ancient oral tradition, although the latter has persisted in a few communities.

Suddenly in the 1990’s, came email, which re-righted the balance between the two forms. It's less formal, more spontaneous, and much more interactive than publishing or letter writing. It's also less intimate than conversation face to face.

(IM and chat represent email on steroids. I'll get to them another time.)

Last week, a friend used email to produce the first draft of a piece we were coauthoring about the ongoing FEMA scandals in post-Katrina Mississippi. She sent it in chunks, in between reading my responses. Here is how she described our process when we started:

"So... I'll try to write what I think, then if you want you can edit it etc. I'm going to just write it like an email to you. This is complete stream of consciousness, so have fun with it..."

Most people feel more comfortable just letting it go in email, whereas they might freeze up when they try to write in a more formal way. For me, as an editor, it is easier to pull good writing out of an inexperienced writer via email than to deal with an awkwardly structured draft.

My goal is to help the writer develop a narrative voice, probably based on visual cues and other descriptive triggers. By using email, she will be more relaxed, and send me information in a form that includes explaining to me what she thinks it means. She's not worrying about an audience larger than one. So she just lets it fly.

That’s one essence of what good writers eventually learn to do -- let it fly.

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