I’ve recently begun a book about writing. Now and then I’ll include a brief excerpt from this work in progress as a blog post.
These days, everybody is a writer. Several billion of us connect daily through a variety of social media platforms and email programs. For the first time in history, something you write today may, against all odds, go viral, filling your inbox with messages from faraway places such as Kazakhstan or Paraguay.
Once a respected profession, writing now seems more a hobby or pastime, with its own secret code of one-word sentences, flexible grammar, and cryptic abbreviations. As one who has made my living by writing for more than half a century, I’ve had to adapt. Applying for my first job, in 1971, I didn’t even know how to type, so I signed up for an Adult Education class at a local high school. Gradually I progressed from writing articles with a fountain pen on lined legal pads to clicking keys on a computer.
When personal computers first became available, I experimented on a book manuscript, writing odd-numbered chapters by hand and even-numbered chapters on a keyboard. At the end I couldn’t tell a noticeable difference, so I reluctantly surrendered to the more efficient method. I still worry over the words and phrases I’ve edited on a screen, now lost forever, and I miss seeing all the deletes and additions scrawled in the margins of my hand-written drafts.
“Did you always want to be a writer?” I get that question a lot, and the answer is No. I backed into the profession because I needed a part-time job to pay grad school bills. I went up and down the streets of Wheaton, Illinois, knocking on doors with no résumé to show apart from a few articles I wrote for a college newspaper. Miraculously, the publisher of a magazine for young adults, Campus Life, took a gamble on a skinny 21-year-old kid from Atlanta and gave me a chance.
“With a name like Campus Life, we could use a contributor who’s actually on a college campus,” said Harold Myra, the risk-taking publisher. I soon learned that I had been hired by a man with superb editing instincts, endless patience, and a fierce insistence on quality. Other staff members warned me: “He’ll call you into his office, begin by saying, ‘this article is about 80 percent of the way there. Let me just suggest a few minor changes.’ Then he’ll rip it to shreds.” Thin-skinned writers don’t last long.
Looking back, I cannot conceive of a better environment for a fledgling writer. Wheaton College had a proud literary history, and its students often won national awards for their articles, short stories, and poetry. Myra occasionally taught classes at Wheaton, but when he returned to the magazine office, he was all business. “The reader is the boss,” he would say. “You can produce the most stimulating, artful magazine in the world, but if the readers don’t like it, you’re out of work.”
Campus Life, you see, was a Christian magazine, and most of its subscriptions began as gifts from an adult to a kid. It worked like this: Aunt Gertrude heard that little Johnny had stopped going to church, so she signed him up for a Christian magazine. Surprised to get something in the mail with his name on it, he took it to his room and started reading. We had one word, one sentence, one page to win Johnny over. If something sounded like church talk, he might bail out at any moment.
I started working at Campus Life in the 1970s, just as the countercultural Sixties were having a belated impact on the church. Society was dividing over generational issues: “Don’t Trust Anybody Over Thirty,” read the t-shirts. School systems fought battles over facial hair and skirt lengths (tattoos had not yet arrived). Young revolutionaries disrupted political conventions and blew up university buildings in protest against the Vietnam war. Racism, global poverty, injustice—no youth magazine could ignore such dominant issues.
Our magazine walked a tightrope across the generational divide. We insisted that hair length was not a moral issue (right, Jesus?), and neither was rock music. I cringe now as I page through the archives from that era. For example, we ran a World War II photo of Nazis rounding up starving Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, with the headline, “Why are Jews so touchy?” We published a ten-page insert attempting to explain Dostoevsky to teenagers. And at a time when Playboy was the only porn most kids encountered, Harold Myra made the bold decision to commend masturbation as a way to deal with sexual frustration. Though we lost 3000 angry subscribers over that article, it led to Tim Stafford’s monthly column “Love, Sex, and the Whole Person,” which instantly became the most read part of the magazine.
We heeded Harold Myra’s mantra: in the world of magazines, the reader is the boss. Somehow we had to make our content rewarding enough to entice readers to keep reading and to renew their subscriptions. We hired survey companies to track how many people read each article, and we pored over these surveys. If we made a major blunder, oh well, there’s always next month. Magazines are forgiving, because after a few weeks or months of lying around the house, they end up in the recycle bin.
Under Harold Myra’s tutelage, I came to believe that good writing can be learned. “Start with sentences,” he advised, suggesting that I begin with Reader’s Digest, at the time the highest circulation magazine in the world. “They edit for readers at a fifth-grade level, but we can aim a little higher. After you master their simple sentences, you can move up to Time magazine, which is less formulaic. Read The New Yorker on the side and figure out what makes great writing, but don’t try to mimic them. Just absorb the way they structure an article and look for those rare phrases of startling beauty. Make a list: What makes words jump off the page?”
I dutifully followed his advice, filling notebooks with lists of words and phrases. I gave special attention to writers such as John McPhee, who could write about rocks, food trucks, or poisonous snakes with equal passion; Annie Dillard, an architect of the perfect sentence; and Frederick Buechner, who had a gentle, seamless way of writing about faith. Myra warned against relying on the static verb “to be,” urging me to find active verbs to enhance the flow of an article. For a solid year I tried to avoid any use of “is, am, are, will be,” even in letters to my friends or my mother.
On one of my visits to Myra’s office, he held up a draft I had written on a famine in Africa, based on my interviews with a teenage volunteer. “This is great,” Harold said, and my blood pressure dropped 30 points. “You’ve captured the teenager’s point of view, and the descriptions are excellent. Fine work.” I enjoyed five seconds of creative pride before he lowered the boom. “So, Philip, we’ll make this a cover story. Would you mind if I ask Hope [a staff writer] to run it through her typewriter? She’s a real writer, a wordsmith.”
As the newcomer on the team, I always tried to be accommodating. But this time, most uncharacteristically, I swallowed hard and replied, “I want to be a real writer too. Can you tell me what’s missing? I’ll do whatever it takes to fix it.” Harold stared at me for a second, then smiled. “OK, that’s fair. Then let’s go over it together. It’s 80 percent of the way there.”
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