Chip Scanlan: 'We have to write badly to write well'

Writer & writing coach Chip Scanlan wants you to embrace revising your stories, even if you don't think you have time. "You don't have the time not to revise," he said during a Newsu.org webinar.

And he wants you to understand that it's OK to write poor first draft. And editors, he said, "need to let reporters know -- you can write badly, because I know you're gonna write well." 

Chip was one of the faculty members at a writing/editing conference I went to at Poynter years ago, so I knew he was going to be good. I just love his attitude about writing and editing. He understands what's hard about it as well as what's great about it, and understands the work it takes to work through the hard stuff to get to the great stuff. He values the relationship between a reporter and an editor, and much of what he teaches revolves around those two people working together for the reader and for the story. 

A quote he put up at the end of the webinar captures that optimistic attitude: "Accept the flaws of your first draft to find the promise of the final story."

 He also offered fresh, concrete tips on how to do what you do better. Here are some other key points from his webinar:

To revise effectively (and there was more, I'm condensing here):

• Print out your story and read it. Mark each thing that strikes you as needing work; number each; write a note as to why you flagged it; then go back into your story and take on the changes one at a time.
• Do you have text-to-speech on your computer? Make it read your story to you. Revise what sounds off.
• Use 'find and replace' to scrub 'ly' adverbs from your copy.
• Check word counts of sentences, paragraphs and your lead.
• Keep quotes to somewhere around 6-20 words.
• Get rid of is/was/were verbs; they can reflect insufficient reporting. Replace with active constructions.
• Role-play the reader.
• Study others' work, dissect it, learn from mistakes (as well as what's good) and bring that to your own work.
• Find a co-reader who will help you work through your drafts.
• Budget time to revise early in the process.
• Never give up.

Here's more on revising, including a great story about Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. 

Zinsser: Believe in yourself and in your story

Amy passed on this "excellent link," and it's good stuff: via Poynter, William Zinsser, author of "On Writing Well," checks in with some advice for writers (and, perhaps not so unintentionally, editors).

One graf caught my attention: "It’s natural for writers to worry about how their editors and publishers will respond to their work. But this preoccupation can be crippling. When we focus on what our editors want, we tend to tell the story we think they want to hear rather than the story we want to tell."

That probably resonates with a lot of writers in here, and should with editors as well. But here's the thing: Editors are never not going to have ideas about how a story might be, could be or should be done. I'd encourage writers to do what Zinsser says -- fight for the story you discover and believe is important to tell. Any editor worth anything should recognize and welcome a better story idea, and should go about the job of helping you do that story as well as it can be done.

What good editors do, by Stephen King

Like so much of what we discuss in here, King is talking about fiction writing/editing (specifically, editor Gordon Lish and writer Raymond Carver), but what he says certainly applies to our newsroom, or any newsroom:

In King’s opinion, “a good editor should improve the writer’s work by doing a number of useful things: posing questions the writer should have answered and didn’t, suggesting places where thematic concerns can be reinforced to make a more pleasing whole, and pointing out (gently) infelicities of language. What an editor should never do is superimpose his or her own beliefs about style and story on the author’s work. An editor should be an expert midwife, not a surrogate parent.”