on-writing-well

A Writer's Decisions 273
been built by children on a beach. Architecturally (I later
learned) it was in the Sudanese style; all these years, children
on beaches have been building in the Sudanese style. To
linger in Djenné s ancient square at dusk was a high moment
of our trip.
The next two days were no less rich. One was spent driving
into—and back out of—Dogon country. The Dogon, who
live on an escarpment not easily reached by outsiders, are
prized by anthropologists for their animist culture and cosmology
and by art collectors for their masks and statues, and
the few hours that we spent climbing around their villages
and watching a masked dance gave us too brief a glimpse of a
society that was far from simple. The second day was spent in
Mopte, a vibrant market town on the Niger that we liked
enormously and also left too soon. But we had a date in Timbuktu
and a chartered plane to take us there.
Obviously there's far more to say about Mali than is jammed
into those four paragraphs—many scholarly books have been
written about the Dogon culture and the Niger River peoples.
But this wasn't an article about Mali; it was about a quest for a
camel caravan. Therefore a decision had to made about the
larger shape of the piece. My decision was to get across Mali as
fast as possible—to explain in the barest number of sentences
what route we took and what was important about the places
where we stopped.
At such moments I ask myself one very helpful question:
"What is the piece really about?" (Not just "What is the piece
about?") Fondness for material you've gone to a lot of trouble to
gather isn't a good enough reason to include it if it s not central
to the story you've chosen to tell. Self-discipline bordering on
masochism is required. The only consolation for the loss of so
much material is that it isn't totally lost; it remains in your writing
as an intangible that the reader can sense. Readers should