Are you writing this down?

Or what I got wrong last year

Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

Last year, I got myself into what I will politely describe as “a pickle” with my work. It was my first full year back at work after having a baby; because of childcare commitments I was working four days a week rather than five (and often shorter days than before, given the hard deadline of the nursery pick up); doing an editing job for two of those four days and consequently trying to cram all my reporting and writing into just two, shortened, days a week. Add in the biological warfare that is a child’s first winter in nursery, and you can see why I fell behind on some deadlines. At one point I joked to my friends that I was running a scam where I kept agreeing to write features without ever delivering any of them (a truly terrible scam, because if nothing gets finished, I don’t get paid). Over the course of the year, I quit the editing job, upped my daughter’s days in nursery, and belatedly delivered all the work I’d got behind on. It is now safely in the past and I can meet deadlines again.

During that period of overwhelm, I had been reporting multiple features at once, gathering lots of material, but struggling to find time to sit down with that material and actually write it up. I am using the term “write it up” expansively, since it involves so many crucial steps that aren’t actually writing - figuring out what you have and what’s missing, transcribing audio or correcting auto-transcriptions, making a series of logical decisions about what to include and in what order. When I finally did get to the stage of writing up various pieces that I’d been reporting on and off for weeks, sometimes even months, I realised that in this state of frenzy I hadn’t been doing some of the basic things that I find pretty essential: having some way of keeping track of audio files and documents (like a clear set up of folders and filenames) and, the one I want to talk about here, keeping notes as you go along.

I like to record audio of interviews, and simultaneously jot down my impressions of people while they’re talking - physical descriptions, observations about body language or moments that seem particularly emotional or important during a conversation - as well as descriptions of places, rooms, atmospheres. Most often I do this by hand in my notebook, but sometimes I might use my phone, and if for some reason I haven’t been able to make notes in the moment I usually sit down at my computer after an interview or a day of reporting and write a quick paragraph or a few bullet points about whatever struck me most about what I saw or heard. I’ve experimented with different ways of doing this over the years. When I was reporting a lot in Karachi for my book, a few friends told me they swore by photographing places they were writing about to help with writing descriptions later. I tried doing this, but sadly ended up with literally hundreds of photos that look like this:

Photography probably isn’t my medium. Instead I went back to my preferred method of writing down descriptions of what I could see, while I was still looking at it. I spent a lot of time driving around the city to the different locations I was writing about, and I jotted down observations in the notes app on my phone, many of which ended up almost word for word in the book. I don’t think I’d have been able to write such vivid descriptions after the fact - the small details you notice when you’re actually looking around at something aren’t the same as the broad brushstrokes you might remember weeks later.

Joan Didion, talking to the Paris Review about the difference between writing novels and writing nonfiction, described it like this:

In nonfiction the notes give you the piece. Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

This brings me back to last year’s pickle. I found myself in the unenviable position of realising that I was so frazzled that I’d written down nothing apart from “has a beard” and “friendly” to describe one man I’d interviewed. Great job! Turns out it’s quite difficult (though, thankfully, not impossible) to recall distinctive details about a place or a person or an interaction weeks after the event. I do not recommend it. I’m working on various things at the moment - some of which should be out soon - and have been making copious notes throughout (if anything, too many, which is definitely preferable).

Reading/listening

• This story by Patrick Radden Keefe, about a London teenager who died mysteriously after pretending to be an oligarch’s son, is just as good as everyone says it is.

• The FT’s short podcast series The Retreat tells stories of people who suffered catastrophic mental health breakdowns after silent meditation retreats. I found it fascinating.

• For obvious reasons, I was interested in this depressing Vox piece about how writers/artists have to engage in online content creation and essentially become experts in self-branding.

Thanks so much for reading! This newsletter is still brand new, so if you enjoyed it, please hit subscribe, share it online, or forward it to someone who might be interested. And if there are things you liked or didn’t like, reply to this and let me know, I am interested to hear feedback! I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.