But we wrote three pieces a week most weeks for three years. McKee made us do three pieces of writing a week. In my first three years at Princeton High School, in the late nineteen-forties, my English teacher was Olive McKee, whose self-chosen ratio of writing assignments to reading assignments seems extraordinary in retrospect and certainly differed from the syllabus of the guy who taught us in senior year. As hour followed hour toward an absolute writing deadline (a condition I’ve never had to deal with in fifty years at The New Yorker), I was able to produce only one sentence: “The citizen has certain misgivings.” So did this citizen, and from all the material piled around me I could not imagine what scribbled note to take up next or-if I figured that out-where in the mess the note might be. With only a few days to listen to recordings, make notes, digest files from Time correspondents, read morgue clippings, and skim through several books, I was soon sprawled on the floor at home, surrounded by drifts of undifferentiated paper, and near tears in a catatonic swivet. It was meant to be only five thousand words and a straightforward biographical sketch, appearing during the Kennedy-Nixon Presidential campaigns, but the five thousand words seemed formidable to me then. It reminded me of Mort Sahl, the political comedian, about whom, six years earlier, I had written my first cover story at Time. I had never tried to put so many different components-characters, description, dialogue, narrative, set pieces, humor, history, science, and so forth-into a single package. If I was blocked by fear, I was also stymied by inexperience. The piece would ultimately consist of some five thousand sentences, but for those two weeks I couldn’t write even one. I had assembled enough material to fill a silo, and now I had no idea what to do with it. I had read all the books I was going to read, and scientific papers, and a doctoral dissertation. I had done all the research I was going to do-had interviewed woodlanders, fire watchers, forest rangers, botanists, cranberry growers, blueberry pickers, keepers of a general store. I had spent about eight months driving down from Princeton day after day, or taking a sleeping bag and a small tent. The subject was the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. I went inside for lunch, surely, and at night, of course, but otherwise remained flat on my back on the table. At the end of summer, 1966, I lay down on it for nearly two weeks, staring up into branches and leaves, fighting fear and panic, because I had no idea where or how to begin a piece of writing for The New Yorker. Out the back door and under the big ash was a picnic table. Construction by Stephen Doyle / Photograph by Grant Cornett And now I had no idea what to do with it. I had done all the research I was going to do, assembled enough material to fill a silo.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |