What's Your Process for Writing New Yorker Articles?

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00:00:05.000 | Hi, Carl. First of all, I would like to say that I love all your books,

00:00:10.000 | the New Yorker articles and the podcasts. Your ideas change my life.

00:00:16.000 | Thank you. I'm Fabiana. I'm a teacher and a consultant.

00:00:20.000 | I've already written articles for Portuguese newspapers,

00:00:24.000 | but left it for lack of time.

00:00:27.000 | I would like to know what your process is for writing articles for The New Yorker.

00:00:32.000 | Do you follow the format for writing essays that you present in your book,

00:00:36.000 | "How to Become a Straight A Student"?

00:00:40.000 | Do you have days to research, hours to write?

00:00:44.000 | What times do you schedule for this job?

00:00:47.000 | Generally, what is your process? Thank you very much.

00:00:52.000 | Well, when it comes to my New Yorker writing, the process depends on what type of article we're talking about.

00:00:59.000 | So there's two categories here. There's the twice-a-month column I've been writing this fall,

00:01:05.000 | and then there is the less regular, longer-form pieces that I would write before this

00:01:11.000 | and return to at some point in the future.

00:01:14.000 | So I'll focus in on what I'm doing now, which is the twice-a-month column.

00:01:20.000 | And I'll tell you what the ideal process is, what I aim for,

00:01:25.000 | and then I'll talk briefly about how I sometimes fall off of it.

00:01:28.000 | But the ideal process I have for one of these columns is,

00:01:33.000 | first of all, the research is typically, you know, I have to pull from things I already know.

00:01:37.000 | There's not enough time for me to do a ton of original research.

00:01:40.000 | The primary research that happens for these columns will be if I need an interview.

00:01:44.000 | So a lot of them are interview-based. Those will get scheduled ahead of time.

00:01:48.000 | They might happen a few weeks at least before the columns come together.

00:01:52.000 | Sometimes I also have to read a book or two just to be up to speed on some things that might be relevant.

00:01:57.000 | And I'll do that in advance, and that's fine because we have these mapped out pretty far in advance

00:02:03.000 | because the art department needs to know farther in advance what the article topics are going to be.

00:02:09.000 | So that kind of happens just in advance. I schedule interviews, et cetera.

00:02:13.000 | When it comes to the writing process, I alternate between one week writing, one week production.

00:02:19.000 | One week writing, one week production. That's usually how it works.

00:02:22.000 | So an article that, let's say, appears on Monday would be something I would file the previous Tuesday.

00:02:30.000 | And then between Tuesday and the Monday when it comes out is production and editing and fact-checking, et cetera.

00:02:37.000 | So when I'm in a writing week that's leading up to, let's say, a Tuesday filing,

00:02:42.000 | the ideal thing I'll do is I'll first, step one, outline the article.

00:02:47.000 | And I'll figure that out on foot so it doesn't have a, if you'll excuse the double use of the word here,

00:02:52.000 | big footprint on my schedule.

00:02:54.000 | Typically walking back from dropping my two older boys off at the bus stop, I'll just work it through.

00:02:59.000 | All right, I know the topic. Maybe I've already done the interview. Let me work through the structure.

00:03:03.000 | And this is just practice. You write enough of these, you get a sense of the options.

00:03:06.000 | And I'll write down that outline. I'll jot down in Scrivener the outline.

00:03:11.000 | The next step is, you know, I will typically do what I call a happy hour writing session,

00:03:16.000 | which just refers to the time it happens.

00:03:18.000 | So it'll be at the end of a workday, kind of early in the week.

00:03:22.000 | I will stay at the HQ or sometimes I'll go to the coffee shop down the street.

00:03:28.000 | Shout out to Tacoma Bevco.

00:03:30.000 | And get started. But this is really more of a breaking the seal type thing.

00:03:35.000 | What I'm really doing during this session, and again, it's in the evening,

00:03:38.000 | so it doesn't have any footprint yet on anything else I'm doing.

00:03:41.000 | I start pulling in more sources. So finding relevant articles or things to quote.

00:03:47.000 | And I will put those all into Scrivener in the research folder.

00:03:50.000 | So I have everything there in the Scrivener project file for the article.

00:03:55.000 | And in a perfect world, I write the first paragraph.

00:03:58.000 | There is a huge break the seal effect to getting those first sentences down.

00:04:02.000 | It's very hard to open a New Yorker piece. And just in general, it's very hard to get things going.

00:04:06.000 | So that gives you a sense that there's momentum.

00:04:09.000 | My ideal schedule, I then do a morning writing session later in the week.

00:04:14.000 | So Thursday or Friday morning, where I try to get maybe half the article done.

00:04:21.000 | And then I do a Sunday morning session. And that's when I try to finish basically the article.

00:04:27.000 | And then there would be a polishing session on the following Monday or Tuesday morning

00:04:32.000 | to go through and polish it and get it ready to file.

00:04:35.000 | There's not a lot of time here and I have seven or eight other jobs.

00:04:38.000 | I can't spend too much time on this. You got to get in it and get it done.

00:04:41.000 | Nail the structure, write well, polish that up hard, get it out quick.

00:04:46.000 | That's the ideal structure. And then I'm filing on a Tuesday.

00:04:48.000 | And then there's stuff that happens. Copy edits come back and fact checking.

00:04:51.000 | And that just gets worked into the schedule.

00:04:53.000 | But otherwise, that's a breather until the writing starts again the next week.

00:04:56.000 | So that's the ideal schedule. I often fall off of that.

00:05:00.000 | Falling off of that means that I have to add one or two extra writing sessions.

00:05:03.000 | So I don't make the progress I think or my time is more limited than I think.

00:05:08.000 | I will use right now as an example. It's Friday and I have to file on Tuesday.

00:05:15.000 | And I have four sentences written. So I'm a little bit behind. I did that this morning.

00:05:20.000 | I just had other things going on this week. And for whatever reason, I couldn't get the traction going.

00:05:26.000 | So I have to alter my schedule. And so like this week, what I'm going to do is a Saturday morning

00:05:32.000 | and Sunday morning session. Morning with my first cup of coffee is my best writing time.

00:05:37.000 | My semester is over. This is why I'm not sweating. My semester is over.

00:05:42.000 | So typically Mondays, I'm on campus all day. I'm not this Monday.

00:05:47.000 | And so that's my savior. I can then put in a much longer block on Monday to really finish the article.

00:05:52.000 | So I'm doing something different this week. But that is my ideal schedule.

00:05:56.000 | For the long form pieces that have multiple interviews and I have to do a lot of original reporting,

00:06:01.000 | that's a whole different story. That takes place over months. I like that because I'm very good at non-urgent

00:06:07.000 | but important work like making steady progress on things is a lot less stressful, I think,

00:06:11.000 | than every other week something has to be filed. But that's the way I do it.

00:06:16.000 | And I will just say, because you said you ran out of time to write, this whole process was designed

00:06:21.000 | to have a minimal footprint on my schedule as a professor who works on other things.

00:06:27.000 | So you'll notice when this schedule works properly, there's a happy hour session,

00:06:32.000 | a weekday morning, and a Sunday morning. So in theory, when this schedule is operating at full pitch,

00:06:39.000 | there's a few hours of one weekday morning is the only part of my normal 9 to 5 workday

00:06:44.000 | that gets sacrificed to the New Yorker writing. Now, I don't always hit that,

00:06:49.000 | but at least it is feasible and maybe about 50% of the time I do. And that allows me to actually do

00:06:54.000 | a pretty large amount of productive writing here without it taking over all the other aspects of my life.

00:07:02.000 | So good question. And that's a good reminder for me that I am behind and I have to get back to writing.

00:07:08.000 | [MUSIC]

What's Your Process for Writing New Yorker Articles?

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