Reforming my Writing, Part 1

As I've mentioned, writing for magazines and newspapers is different from writing academic papers. In the process of writing for magazine and newspapers, I've had to make two large changes to my style of writing. Part one:

Academic papers emphasize analysis, accuracy, and completeness. That is, academic papers are supposed to analyze all the aspects of arguments, qualify statements, avoid conclusions without a clear demonstration of evidence, and raise possible questions and concerns.

I was used to doing this at the University of Michigan in classes for paper and in the psychology research papers I wrote. The problem is that this doesn't make for captivating and efficient reading. Academic writing is comprehensive, but it can also be a waste of time. Academic writing requires you to consider alternative hypotheses and explanations, most of which are unlikely. People reading newspapers and magazines don't have the time or patience for such detail.

Thus, one of the most important skills of writing for magazines and newspapers is to pull out the most important threads and take-home points of a story, a trip, or a location, and come up with the most interesting conclusion about it.

My first encounter with the importance of focus was when I wanted to write up a trip I took to Emei Shan, a sacred Buddhist mountain in Sichuan province. My trip was really interesting--a true adventure--and there were a lot of things I wanted to touch upon in the article: the amazing peak of the mountain, with large stupas shrouded in clouds so high people would get light headed; the history, where in the past monks jumped to their deaths from the cliff because they believed they could see the Buddha's image in the light reflecting in the mist enveloping the peak; the wooden temples on the way that hikers could stay in; and the monkeys that help make the mountain famous that have now developed their thuggery into true mafia-esque extortion.

I wrote the article with a lot of the elements in it, and the first correction I got back from a friend of my sister who works in journalism was that I had "buried the lead." In other words, I failed to dig through the experience for the most important element and push it in the front. That is, the most fascinating element was the monkey thuggery (especially since I could write a lot more about that than the peak-top activities), and I had failed to put it in the first paragraphs.

Journalistic writing is not about subtlety and patience; it's about being punchy and to-the-point, doing the work for the reader. It's been hard to change this. It felt (and still feels) a bit phony and reductionistic. It doesn't feel as true to my experience to pick out the most interesting portions and describe them in the most exciting way possible. I still struggle with this question, but I've also come to see that highlighting certain parts is not necessarily misleading.

Constantly trying to pick out a theme and an important thread (i.e., a way to pitch) has changed the way I perceive the world, especially in travel writing. I now start to see things in terms of "that's a story" or "I might be able to learn more about that and make it a story."

I remember reading several autobiographical essays and books by normal individuals and then one day realizing that my experiences were no more special than theirs. Instead, the difference lay in these writer's abilities to pick out the important elements of their experiences and communicate them effectively and entertainingly in words. That's all. Same thing, different eyes (and perhaps pen).

Writing--freelance writing in particular, where you get a large say in what you want to write, rather than being on, say, the business beat--involves just as much a change of eye prescription as much as it does learning how to write. And with this change in what you're looking for, changes in writing come naturally.