on-writing-well

258 ON WRITING WELL
write. She said she might interview the minister, or the organist,
or the firemen, or maybe the sexton, or the choirmaster.
"You've given us five good pieces by Francis X. Clines," I
told her, referring to a New York Times reporter who writes local
features warmly and well. "But they're not good enough for you,
or for me, or for this course. I want you to go deeper. I want you
to find some connection between yourself and the place you're
writing about."
The woman asked what sort of piece I had in mind. I said I
was reluctant to suggest one because the idea of the course was
to think our way collectively to possible solutions. But since she
was our first guinea pig I would give it a try. "When you go to
church in the next few weeks," I said, "just sit there and think
about the fire. After three or four Sundays the church is going
to tell you what that fire means." Then I said: "God is going to
tell that church to tell you what the fire means."
There was a small gasp in the classroom; Americans get
squeamish at any mention of religion. But the students saw that
I was serious, and from that moment they took my idea seriously,
inviting the rest of us into their lives each week, telling us
about some place that touched their interests or their emotions
and trying to decide how to write about it. I would spend the
first half of each class period teaching the craft and reading passages
by nonfiction writers who had solved issues that the students
were struggling with. The other half was our lab: a dissecting
table of writers' organizational problems.
By far the biggest problem was compression: how to distill a
coherent narrative from a tangled mass of facts and feelings and
memories. "I want to write an article about the disappearance of
small towns in Iowa," one woman told us, describing how the
fabric of life in the Midwest had frayed since she was a girl on
her grandparents' farm. It was a good American subject, valuable
as social history. But nobody can write an article about the
disappearance of small towns in Iowa; it would be all generaliza-