I learned to write as a journalist researching nonfiction about current events. Since then I have applied what I learned about writing to my award-winning novels. It has been a while since I wrote nonfiction, so I decided to go back and look at some of the basic rules I figured out for avoiding cliched thinking and finding the heart of something through my writing.
1. Cliché is about how you think, not just how you write.
In his famous essay on writing, George Orwell wrote that if you see a combination of words or a phrase that you’ve heard before, it’s probably a cliché and don’t use it. That’s a very good, basic rule for our writing.
But there are other ways cliché can affect your work as a writer.
That’s what I want to talk about here: the ways in which formulas can affect our thinking, not just our writing but our thinking. Once your thinking is dominated by the formulas of journalism, then you cannot
produce good writing. No matter how good your writing tools, your thinking will be clichéd and you’ll have
nothing to say.
2. Grasp their minds.
Homer said of Odysseus that he traveled in many lands and knew the minds of many men. That is the role of the nonfiction writer today, whether as a journalist or not. That’s what you need to look for: grasping the minds of other people.
In most cities you have certainly many people who didn’t grow up the way you grew up. If you enter their minds you’ll find something that’s beyond the clichés of what you might expect about their culture or about someone from their socio-economic background.
So if you think of Odysseus and George Orwell then you have two very good bases to get going.
In some respects when you work as a journalist or when you produce nonfiction writing your boss may actually want you to write in a formulaic way. You need to work against those formulas without breaking them apart completely, because then you won’t get published.
It is a difficult thing to do, but I’m going to try to help you with a few ideas on how to do it.
3. Stories of Ordinary People
Go to the places on the fringe of historic events. That’s where you get the context and the heartbeat of
ordinary people.
A lot of people tend to write about what the leaders are doing, the big guys. That’s how we view history. But in contemporary nonfiction, it’s actually the smaller stories that tell us something more compelling about the subject and about ourselves. You’ll see a lot of the books on nonfiction shelves are not biographies of leaders any more. Those have been written.
Now you get books that are about small segments of events. Ordinary people’s responses to big events.
4. Don’t just write down what they say…
Some time ago I was in a Palestinian prison. Everyone in the cell block was a killer. Some of them
made excuses for it. Others were unapologetic. As I talked to one of these guys, I realized that a man has to
create a world for himself—whether built from ideology or hate—it’s a world that enables him to kill. This man sent a young woman to Jerusalem with a bomb that she used to kill a dozen Israelis. He was without remorse and at a certain point was chatting with me about it as though she were an old schoolmate of ours whose progress in life we were discussing, rather than a killer who was now dead.
There was an almost indefinable flash in his eye and an inflection in his speech that you would never really
notice unless you were focused on understanding not just what he said (and writing it into your notebook), but trying to understand that world he created for himself. That’s something that with the best writing of
nonfiction, including in newspapers, can be done. Certainly you should strive for it.
5. Resist career limitations; make your own path.
What are the limitations? Journalists who become foreign correspondents tend to work for three to five
years in a given posting. The first year they repeat the stories their predecessor wrote the previous year. By the fourth year, they’re getting prepared for their next posting. Their editor already told them now it’s time for them to go to Moscow.
Those career limitations are ultimately limitations on a writer’s ability. By all means, you need to be a
quick study. But that doesn’t mean you should stop studying after the quick bit…
I was in Jerusalem twenty years and I wrote my first book about the place after eight years. I know that I couldn’t have written that book after three or four years. Yet when you talk to foreign correspondents they say that after three to five years they still have a fresh eye but have been around long enough to be authoritative. It’s one of the clichés of the business.
The longer you can be focused on something, the better your work on it will be. It’s as simple as that.
6. Cliches highlight the limitation of knowledge.
Cliches cover up the limits of your knowledge. Clichés give the impression that a correspondent has authority beyond the limits of their knowledge. But when you resist cliché you actually can go beyond those limits. You won’t need to use clichés to hold your story together.
The lack of depth in a reporter’s knowledge leads to the acceptance of other people’s clichés and they go
straight into your stories. That’s the most pathetic manifestation of brain-dead journalism you could imagine, and it happens every day.
For a foreign correspondent, it would mean the acceptance of diplomatic speak as an interpretive tool
for the conflict. People started to talk about the “Road Map” and the peace process. How many times have you listened to CNN and they talk about hopes that such and such an event will put peace back on track. I can’t tell you how many times and how many months into the violence of the Palestinian intifada editors would ask me “What does this latest event mean for the peace process?”
Well, there wasn’t a peace process. It was simple as that. I had told them that for months, but they naturally gravitated toward a formula within which to interpret events. You as a writer have to think beyond that formula. You have to build the next formula by understanding what’s happening in reality.
7. Real stories, not war stories.
If you question the formulas you won’t overlook reality in favor of the story. A lot of journalists write
a story and ignore reality. They want a certain number of quotes for the third and fifth paragraphs, a contrarian quote for the seventh paragraph, etc. They aren’t looking for reality behind that superficial formula, and it’s a big fault.
As a professional journalist you often meet journalists at their worst—telling stories about their
work. An example: a Canadian tv reporter who described to me a particularly moving moment in his time covering the Rwandan genocide said, “Those were great pictures.” He didn’t say, “From this event I learned such and such about humanity and the people of Rwanda.” No, he said, “Great pictures.”
At the end of that man’s career, he’ll have a collection of war stories to tell other journalists. But he won’t understand a damned thing about the people he covered.
What we should strive for is to think not in terms of clichés to swap in the hotel bar, but the reality of the people that we’re writing about.
8. Don’t look at the sparks.
Many people talk about bias in journalism. Political journalism is biased, sure. But most of what people see
as bias is actually the formulas and clichés of journalism at work. Without thinking about it—because of
course if you use a cliché you aren’t thinking—they force journalists to leave certain things out, because they don’t fit the formula.
When something important gets left out, people who know the reality of what’s going on can see it as bias. One element of my nonfiction book Cain’s Field was my desire to look at the reality that was ignored by most journalists. I thought of the problem in terms of this image: back in high school you probably did physics experiments with a Van der Graf generator. It has two electrodes that send a spark from one to the other. Most journalists look at the spark and write about it.
Let’s say one electrode is the Palestinians, the other electrode is the Israelis. All you ever see in the
coverage in the U.S. is the spark. You have no idea about the mechanism in the generator that creates the spark.
What I tried to do was look at the electrodes and trace back into the mechanism of the generator; trace back from the Israeli electrode into Israeli society, the complex machinery of Israeli society. I took the Palestinian electrode and traced back to the internal working of Palestinian society. From that I could understand what creates the spark.
The spark itself tells us nothing.
That’s why most journalism about conflicts tells us nothing. It just leaves us shaking our heads and thinking “Well, those guys are in an intractable (to use a clichéd word) conflict which will go on forever.” If we go back from the electrodes into the mechanism we’ll understand better. That’s something you can do with any story.
9. Always empathize.
A book can tell the interior story of a character much better than most writing, certainly better than a
basic news story. This is one of the problems of news writing: it’s all exterior–this guy says this, that guy
says that. It doesn’t tell you much about the reality of why those things are said. The challenge for a journalist is to have the knowledge to go beyond those clichés and to explain “why” in an authoritative way.
Most journalists do this by posturing as well-informed people insulated from mistaken judgments by the
formulaic hints of journalistic writing that whatever is being said is based on the assertions of certain sources.
Try to go about it differently. Avoid easy terminology—“this guy is a hardliner, this one is an
extremist”—and instead show empathy for people who might usually be portrayed as extremists or hardliners.
Not sympathy. Empathy.
Empathy is the key to understanding how you can write better, to go beyond clichés. If you empathize,
then you will, as Homer put it, understand what’s going on in the minds of men.
When you do that, you can employ your basic writing tools. You’ll have genuine insight and wisdom to process through those tools. The cliché, if you write one, will jump up and hit you in the face, and you’ll say to yourself, “I need to think more clearly about what I’m saying and what I believe is going on here. I mustn’t cover up for lazy thinking with a cliché.”
Fear the monster in China Strike