Liven up your words—and you liven up your life
An edited page from a draft of The Mike File: edit on the screen, edit on hard copy, read the draft aloud. Rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.
I’ve had lovely opportunities to ponder writing and editing recently. The website CanvasRebel asked me good questions about my work, and here’s what I said. (here’s a link to the full interview)
CR: If it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?
All of us need to know how to write with clarity and pithiness and color. Our lives and our work and our relationships all benefit from good writing. I’m kind of obsessed with this. Bad writing makes me crazy. It’s a teachable craft, and the educational system isn’t great at teaching us this universal skill. Science and tech and business are pushing aside the humanities, alas, and that’s a loss for us all.
I’m a writer. Have been for decades. But I didn’t learn the magic key to making my words sing until after high school, after college. Not until I worked for a U.S. Bureau of Land Management biologist who taught me to rewrite. And rewrite. And rewrite.
My assignment was to take wildlife research papers and summarize them for BLM managers in the field. Sounds boring, right? And my boss, John Crawford, was a low-key and rather phlegmatic guy. But he took my drafts and for the very first time in my life, edited me hard. And so the process became challenging and engaging.
John reordered my paragraphs to get the good stuff up front. He deleted all the unnecessary words. He demanded active voice. He did so, draft after draft, asking me to go back and improve the text—something no teacher had asked me to do in 16 years of school. In short, he taught me to write—and to keep at it until I had worked on every word and every sentence to make each one serve the story with strength and concision. In the process, I actually transformed the academic papers into reasonably lively pieces about prairie dogs and wolves, tundra swans and peregrine falcons.
I’ve made my living as a writer and photographer ever since. And I couldn’t have succeeded without that one government scientist marking up my drafts in a sea of red. Years later, I was able to tell him so.
CR: Have you ever had to pivot?
For decades, I made my living as a stock photographer. That income stream supported my book projects. But when the Internet flooded the world with images, many of them free, stock photography disappeared as a profession. My colleagues closed their studios and became car salesmen. I had always imagined that my tens of thousands of stock images, many from the days of shooting on film, would be my retirement income. Now, my filing cabinets full of 35 mm slides turn out to be unmarketable artifacts from the past.
I began casting around for ways to make my years of image-making continue to earn income. I worked with a friend who ran a speakers’ bureau, trying to turn myself into a corporate event keynoter. When he told me I sounded like the host of a PBS nature program, I was flattered. Alas, that soothing voice was not what he had in mind.
I ended up teaching writing at the University of Utah for ten years, and this has been enormously gratifying. Teaching didn’t replace the income from selling reproduction rights to my pictures for use in textbooks, guidebooks, and magazines. But I was able to push my students to strive to always get the facts straight, to never take no for an answer when trying to nail an interview. And to rewrite. And rewrite. And rewrite.
CR: Is there mission driving your creative journey?
That’s my goal, a journey through life to eliminate bad writing from the world. I’m an obsessive copy-editor. I find typos in menus, in ads, in billboards. Dull writing is everywhere. What a waste. There’s no excuse, just an explanation: laziness and sloppiness. And lack of a good teacher, a good editor.
Get rid of those bland and trite descriptions, those empty superlatives. Tighten your writing. It’s physical, visceral—like kneading bread, and just as nourishing.
Liven up your words—and you liven up your life.
