Housekeeping:
There will be a reader meetup in SF on December 10: RSVP here.
I’ll be in Stockholm on November 26 and made a Luma event if someone wants to meet up. You can also dm me on Substack.
If you read writing advice, you’ll often stumble upon all of these rather abstract rules, such as “show, don’t tell,” “open the essay with a concrete story to engage people,” and so on. I don’t find advice like that useful at all. These sorts of maxims remind me of the small notes I might jot down to myself to remember the directions to a friend’s house—“left, right, past the oak tree, right.” Well, that might describe the right way, but it is a very rough map of the terrain, and if it turns out that the person who wrote the notes forgot to mention something—or perhaps was going somewhere other than you—their advice will lead you completely astray.
To develop a good toolbox, I find it much more fruitful to take the texts that I feel do whatever I want to learn best and read them slowly, repeatedly, with a pencil in hand. It’s like taking a slow, attentive walk around the neighborhood, getting a deep feeling for the landscape, for what it means to write at the highest levels. I will usually form a few theories about why the text is so powerful and I might spot a few techniques I can put into my toolbox, but these theories and techniques will be much more idiosyncratic and tentative than the ones I get from consuming writing advice: I will create tools that are meaningful to my projects, and my taste, and I will hold the tools with a light hand, knowing full well that they are just a rough guess, derived from a limited reading.
Last weekend, I did such a close reading of the piece that David Foster Wallace wrote about John McCain’s failed campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000—the one that was originally published as “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub,” a sprawling ~15,700-word essay in the April 13 issue of Rolling Stone, and later republished in a three-times-as-long “director’s cut” ebook called, first, Up, Simba, and later, McCain’s Promise. It is a New Journalism-derived sort of essay-reportage hybrid, where DFW travels around with the McCain campaign’s press bus, fails to interview any of the main players, and instead hangs around with the cameramen and sound technicians, but does little of the standard journalistic scene-setting and interview-quoting, in favor of a kind of writing that is a crossover between diary and essay.
I have read the book-length version of McCain’s Promise four times, I think, and the short version, once or twice. The immediate excuse for the last two + one rereads was that I wanted to understand how DFW integrates interviews and scene-setting into his essayistic reflections (and for the answer to that see this footnote1), but what I ended up focusing most on during the actual reading was the question: how on earth does he manage to make the reading so engaging and have such strong narrative momentum when most of it is just very long and detailed descriptions of the interior of a bus and the different kinds of phones people use on the bus and so on?