Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays with Story
May 28, 2015

He said it . . .

“If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!”
– Fred East (1889-1981), writer of westerns

Who’s up next . . .

June 2 : Pat Edwards (???), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Cindi Dyke (chapter, North Road), Millie Mader (chapter, Life on Hold), Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapters 20-21, Coastie Girl), and Andy Brown (chapters, The Last Library).

June 9:

June 19: Lisa McDougal (chapter, Tebow Family Secret), Amber Boudreau (chapter, Stone), Mo Bebow-Reinhard (???), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Bob Kralapp (???), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 9-12, Killing Ham).

Our June editor . . .

Kashmira Sheth takes over next week as editor for Writers Mail. If you have good stuff you would like included in next week’s issue, please send it to her.

Historian David McCullough on writing . . .

McCullough, whose new book, The Wright Brothers, came out this month, took part in a Q&A in this month’s issue of Goodrads’ newsletter. Here are some excerpts:

GR: Goodreads member Kaylene Coleman asks which of your books moved you to be better, wiser, kinder?

DM: They all did. Each in its way. I’ve learned enormous amounts from the people I’ve come to know. In a way, you get to know these people you’re writing about from other times…you get to know them as well or even better than people in your own real life. For one thing, in real life you don’t get to read other people’s mail. And when you’re working on these characters of the past, that’s really what you’re depending on. The fact that I can get inside the house on Hawthorne Street, in Dayton….To get inside dinner table conversations, or the worries they had…because they wrote it all down, in over a thousand private letters. Think of that! Over a thousand. And none of them was capable of writing a short letter or a boring letter. They’re just [a] terrific source…. And we don’t write letters [anymore]. So I’m not sure how future biographers and historians are going to be able to write about us.

GR: Goodreads member Scott Berghoff says, “Deciphering thought and intent must be extremely difficult, especially when writing about historical figures…. How do you pull that intimacy out of the immense amount of data…even though we already know how the story ends?”

DM: A historian can’t make anything up the way a novelist can. A historian can’t change facts or figures or say what somebody’s thinking as they’re walking down the street. You can’t do that. And you have to play it straight. You have to have a source for anything actual or descriptive detail…. But it’s amazing how much you can find if you know how to look for it.

And one of the [things] many historians neglect is to go where these events happened and to soak it up. Don’t just go by in your car and look and keep driving. Stay there for a couple of weeks! Walk the walk. Go out at night; smell the coal smoke in the air…. Empathy is what a historian needs: the capacity to put yourself in the other person’s place. One of my favorite historians, a man named J.H. Plumb, said once that “what we need are more heart-wise historians.”

GR: Goodreads member Andrew asks if you have ever encountered a subject you [wanted to] write about—but the historical detail [was] too thin?

DM: Oh yes, very often. I’ve often thought somebody should write a wonderful biography about Martha Washington. And there isn’t one. And the reason there isn’t one is that there’s very little to go on. She destroyed all her letters, he destroyed letters he had from her, and what he wrote to her. There’s just nothing there of substance with which to shape the biography. Same for Jefferson’s wife. We don’t even know what she looked like. He destroyed everything she ever wrote to him. And exactly why they did that is not clear. There are a lot of theories… But when those letters survive as they did with Abigail and John Adams, oh boy, it’s pure gold.

GR: You are the envy of many a writer for your writing shed, or “bookshop.” Can you talk about any routines that you have related to writing?

DM: Well, with some exceptions, I try to write every day, and it’s easier that way…. And I try to stop—to end the day, knowing where I am going to pick up. So when I come back to sit down at my desk again, I don’t think, “Oh, now, what the devil do I do next?”

I work on a typewriter. Many people find that hilarious and hard to believe. But I work on a manual typewriter, a Royal Standard typewriter, and it’s the same typewriter I’ve written all my books on, and there’s never been anything wrong with it. So I never saw any reason to change the tool…. People say to me, “Don’t you realize how much faster you could go if you’d use a word processor?” and of course I know. But I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I’d rather go more slowly.

GR: I’m also interested, kind of related to that last question, what your reading process is like. Do you have routines that relate to reading? It could be reading for pleasure [or] reading for research? Anything.

DM: Well, when I’m in a book, really thick in the middle of it, I have no time or even any particular desire to read anything but what I need for what I’m writing. So very often at the end, after the book’s finished, it’s as if I can now start eating whatever I want. I can start reading whatever I want. I read a lot of fiction, and I particularly love good detective stories, and I try to read as many new writers as possible, but I also go back and read more of a lot of old favorites, too.

GR: Do you have any recommendations, or any books that you feel were an influence to you as a writer?

DM: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style…is a book I turn to every now and then just to refresh what’s important. It’s like an aid to navigation. I’m very fond of some of what Robert MacNeil has written about in his book called Wordstruck. The old novelist Conrad Richter wrote a terrific book about his way of writing, I love it. [W.] Somerset Maugham also wrote wonderfully about being an author and writing books. And [William] Zinsser’s book, On Writing Well, superb book! As good as it gets.

Great phrase . . .

From Word Spy Paul McFedreis:

meat in a seat
Meaning: (noun) A customer or employee who is unappreciated or viewed only as a source of revenue; an unskilled person who is just along for the ride.

Examples:
“In the airlines industry, the success of Spirit has helped to legitimize practices that treat passengers, in the words of one consumer watchdog, like ‘meat in a seat.’ When a carrier assumes the moral status of its customers to be different from an ATM only in respect to daily limits, monetizing the mistakes of first-time flyers can be a lucrative business.”
– John Paul Rollert, Dispirited, New Republic, April 16, 2015

“In the wake of the tragic crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo during a test flight, much discussion has centered around the celebrities – such as Justin Bieber and William Shatner – who have purchased tickets to ride into space once commercial flights begin. The media is referring to them as astronauts, but Jerry Doyle takes a different view. ‘Really? Is that what you’re going to call Justin Bieber? An astronaut?’ asks Jerry on his national talk radio show. ‘No. Basically what they are is meat in the seat.’”
– Jerry Doyle, In the wake of the Virgin Galactic tragedy, what does it mean to be a real astronaut?, Epic Times, November 3, 2014

“Research how many people they run through their schools, how many trucks they run and what their turn-over is. Simple math, not rocket science. They profit from churning people through their school. They need to get meat in a seat.”
– Blood, Stevens Transport (reply), The Truckers Forum, March 8, 2013

Earliest:
“I had a job once where the penalties for not staffing the position I was in (and by extension violating SLAs) would cost far more in a single 10-hour shift than my annual salary. We referred to ourselves as ‘meat in a seat’ since it cost them less to pay us than the penalties for not slapping someone in a chair.”
– zennoshinjou, I.T. Lingo (reply), Ask MetaFilter, July 23, 2009