It was a dark and stormy night.
No, that’s not right. It’s California and there’s a major drought.
Once upon a time in a far away place called Stanford, I fell in love with writing all over again.
I came to Stanford as a JSK Fellow to work with data. For over a decade, as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal based in Paris, I had told stories. I worked the old-fashioned way: pen and paper, Word documents. Narrative arcs and storytelling techniques were fine, but I felt a need to learn how to do my job using the tools that had emerged since I entered the workforce, to try to keep up with our interns. Being able to sort and analyze data more efficiently was the cornerstone of my journalism challenge.
But coming to Stanford was about more than just my journalism challenge. It was about facing my fears and insecurities. So I enrolled in a creative-writing class, English 90: Fiction Writing. Nothing was more intimidating to me than making up characters and dialogue, with plot lines and point of view.
No laptops?
On the first day of class, the teacher, Austin Smith, told the students to close their laptops, put away their phones. We would be using a pen and notebook. The slower process of writing by hand allows the mind to reflect and organize better, he argued, than when you catch up with the end of your thought when typing. It was about as far from crunching data as I could get.
Inventing new worlds — often drawing on strands of life I had reported on — was thrilling and terrifying. In 10 weeks I wrote more than 10,000 words.
In the winter quarter, I doubled down on creative writing, enrolling in the intermediate class taught by Anthony Marra. In studying texts from writers such as Adam Johnson and Edward P. Jones, I looked for the seams, the way a story is put together, like pieces of fabric, to try to understand how they honed their craft.
I took classes that had nothing to do with fiction, but they still tied in to my interest in writing. At the first lecture of “Germany and the World Wars,” professor Edith Sheffer told us that instead of writing term papers and regurgitating textbook information, each student had to invent a character. Throughout the quarter, the students write journal entries about how their characters experience the historical events of the class. She wanted to remind people that human experiences are what make history fascinating.
Solo no more
Many say that one of the drawbacks of writing is that it’s a solitary exercise. That doesn’t bother me. But I have also found inspiration in being part of a community of writers. So far this year I attended a lunch with Cheryl Strayed, have seen Dave Eggers and Molly Antopol speak, and gleaned wisdom from Tobias Wolff. To me, it is therapeutic to hear other writers talk about their love for writing and how and why they do it.
My fellow JSK Fellows have been just as instrumental in my writing journey. A few of us have formed a writers group. We meet once a month to workshop our submissions. We are journalists, we are writers.
I have been reminded time and again of something I already knew: the best journalism is about people. The data I have is worthless if I can’t tie it to human experience. Characters and narrative are as central to fiction writing as to journalistic writing.
