The art or the mechanics of writing?

A Workshop About Writing?

A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine posted an announcement about a workshop on the mechanics of writing. That phrase gave me pause. What exactly do we mean by the mechanics of writing? Sentence construction? Organization? Grammar? Or the routines that help us produce manuscripts?

When I was still working at Georgetown University, I attended a weekly "writing workshop" that turned out to be something quite different. Every week, we announced what we planned to accomplish before the next meeting: outline a paper, draft an abstract, revise a chapter. The following week, we reported on our progress, or lack thereof. We could share manuscripts with other participants, but nobody was obliged to read or comment on them.

The workshop facilitator gave each of us a copy of Wendy Laura Belcher's Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success. I could see the value of such an approach for scholars who needed help organizing their time and meeting deadlines, but I was looking for something else. I stopped attending after one semester.

Looking for Something Else

I wanted books that approached writing as a craft rather than a series of tasks to complete.

My search led me to From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies That Everyone Can Read by Kristen Ghodsee, a book about turning ethnographic material into prose that people actually want to read. Next came Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov by Kirin Narayan, an invitation to learn from literature, particularly Chekhov, about observation, description, and the possibilities of ethnographic prose.

And finally, my all-time favorite, The Elements of Story by Francis Flaherty.

What I love about Flaherty is that he doesn't separate the mechanics of writing from the art of storytelling. He shows how the choice of a detail, the arrangement of a paragraph, or a few lines of dialogue can draw readers into a story and allow them to discover something the writer never explicitly tells them.

One example that has stayed with me involves two men having lunch in a tavern. A television weather forecast announces heavy rain. Both men put down their forks and reach for their phones. One calls his wife to ask her to bring the potted portulacas onto the porch. The other calls his bookmaker to place a $100 bet on a horse that performs well on wet tracks.

The two men hear the same forecast and respond in almost identical ways, but their telephone conversations reveal two very different people. Flaherty doesn't need to describe their personalities or explain their interests. He lets us discover something about them through their actions and words.

In just a few sentences, he demonstrates how carefully chosen details, parallel actions, and contrasting responses can bring characters to life. His examples help us understand not only how writing works, but also why some writing stays with us long after we have finished reading.

Learning to Read Like a Writer

The novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen advises aspiring writers to read both deeply and widely.

“Read widely. Genres and boundaries are artificial, and a writer should look everywhere for great writing and powerful ideas.”

Reading deeply within a particular genre helps us recognize clichés, distinguish good writing from bad, and understand what makes a work original. Reading widely, across genres and disciplines, exposes us to different ways of telling stories and expressing ideas. And, of course, he urges writers to write a great deal. No amount of reading or attending workshops can substitute for the practice of writing.

I have always been an avid reader, but over the years I have become increasingly attentive not only to what writers tell us, but also to how they tell it. A compelling plot does not necessarily mean memorable prose, just as meticulous research does not guarantee an engaging book.

Some of my favorite examples of ethnographic writing come from writers who are not anthropologists. Tracy Kidder's Among Schoolchildren is one of them. As readers, we come to know Mrs. Zajac and the children in her classroom much as a teacher does: gradually, through their everyday interactions, frustrations, discoveries, and small triumphs. Kidder does not simply tell us who these people are. He allows us to discover them.

Reading writers like Kidder makes me wonder how much attention we devote to developing these skills in our own students. We teach them how to conduct research and present their findings, but do we teach them how to tell a compelling story?

Beyond the Mechanics

Unfortunately, teaching the craft of writing often takes a back seat to the pressure to publish. In conversations with colleagues in Poland about doctoral students' writing, the emphasis is frequently on getting something written and published. I understand the pressure. Doctoral students need publications, and their supervisors want them to succeed. But I worry that we sometimes teach young scholars to follow the conventions of academic writing without encouraging them to think about what makes their prose effective, engaging, or distinctive. Knowing how to construct a journal article is important. Learning to write well is something more.

I don't mean to suggest that writing routines, deadlines, and publication strategies are unimportant. Writing requires discipline, and even the most talented writers need to sit down and do the work. But learning how to produce a manuscript is not quite the same as learning how to write one that people want to read.

What would a workshop devoted to the craft of writing look like? Perhaps we would spend less time reporting how many pages we had written and more time examining the pages themselves. We might read passages aloud, discuss why a particular description works, consider what a writer chooses to reveal or leave unsaid, or experiment with different ways of telling the same story. We could learn from novelists and journalists as well as from scholars in our own disciplines.

I am not suggesting that every academic article should read like a novel. Different kinds of writing serve different purposes. But even the most analytical scholarly writing benefits from attention to language, rhythm, clarity, and the reader's experience.

Perhaps the art and the mechanics of writing are not opposites after all. The more interesting question is what we choose to teach when we say we are teaching writing.