As I finish writing and start editing my Seinfeld book, I’m re-reading Robert S. Boynton’s excellent The New New Journalism to get some ideas for what I still need to work on, how I want to edit, and so forth. As I cull some tips from some of my favorite nonfiction writers interviewed in the book, I figured I’d share a few of the tidbits that stuck out for me, starting today with one of my favorite authors, Newjack‘s Ted Conover. Some of his advice:
- “I pay a lot of attention to place in my writing, so when I arrive in a new town I try to do what Lawrence Durrell recommended in his essay “Spirit of Place,” which is to get still as a needle, as he puts it.”
- “I feel it’s important, in first-person nonfiction, to establish the narrator’s character as well as everyone else’s.”
- “My ideal day starts after a good night’s sleep. The first thing I do when I wake up is make sure to spend enough time in bed to figure out what I’m going to write that day. A lot of my ideas take shape before I get out of bed.”
- “I seldom spend more than a couple of hours at my desk without taking a walk or a run, doing errands, etc. In a productive day I may have three two-hour periods when I’m actually writing.”
- “At the end of each day I type myself a brief note at the end of the manuscript, using capital letters, describing what I want to do the next morning.”
- “I tend to get going in the late morning and am usually tired by late afternoon. I seldom write at night.”