“Think of your pension” — and other writing tips from esteemed China hands
Peking Hotel interviewees talk about how to become a better writer, how to write a book, and how not to go broke doing it.
China hands are often writers. They are foreign correspondents racing to send drafts via telegram, economists launching one of the earliest email newsletters, intelligence officers preparing reports for D.C. policymakers, and others. So with hundreds of hours of tapes under our belt, we made a compilation of writing tips from our fellow China hands.
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Not everyone has an innate way with words. The veteran journalist Orville Schell says that, as a student, he was a terrible writer:
I’m living proof that the craft of writing is like any craft. Some people are just naturally gifted, but very few. You have to learn. You have to learn how to think, how to write. And to write well, you have to know how to edit well. And just keep at it.
For Schell, it helps to know whom you’re writing for:
I didn’t actually begin to learn how to write until I was writing for someone — not just some stupid professor. [...] The added awareness of writing for an audience always made it different from academic writing, where you’re basically writing for no one.
As he’s more experienced and, in his own words, ‘older’, he began to write for an audience of one: himself.
The older I get, the more I want to write to be truthful and to not please anybody. I try to figure out what I want to say that’s worth saying — and maybe, at least for me, worth putting out there.
Sticking to a formula - or not?
In the 1960s, Fox Butterfield — who would later become the first post-1949 China correspondent for The New York Times — got a fellowship in Taiwan to work on his dissertation. He was interested in writing about the place but had zero journalistic experience at the time.
All he had were two books on journalism that helped him with the basics of daily news-writing:
I had some understanding of what the media was, but I realized I didn’t know anything about how to write a newspaper story. So I went to the United States Information Service Library in Taipei. They had English-language books. It was mostly for students in Taiwan. I asked them if they had any books on how to be a journalist. And they said, “We have one. It’s an elementary book written by some American journalist on how to write a story for a newspaper.” I immediately took it out and memorized it. It said how to write the lede on a story, how to write the main paragraph, and how to pick the subjects.
In a bookstore in Taiwan, I found a collection of dispatches by American journalists, mostly from during World War II. And it showed what a newspaper story should look like.
I had these two models. When I came to write my first story, I was just using the formula that I found in the textbook. I had very little journalistic training.
The news article formula can help, but for Wall Street Journal and New York Times China correspondent Ian Johnson, it can also bury your own voice:
It’s like if you spend your whole time learning to paint by numbers, and on some level you learn what colors work together well, but you never learn to paint for yourself. You can learn different techniques for writing, but you don’t have your own voice.
When he wanted to switch from news articles to books, Johnson realised his writer’s voice was already buried too deep:
There’s almost no long-term professional journalist who’s also a legendary nonfiction writer. If you think of the legendary narrative nonfiction writers, they are not daily journalists. And I was already too far gone. I’d already spent the first 20 years of my career in daily journalism, so I was never going to have my own voice as much as somebody like Peter Hessler did.
News-writing can be formulaic, and that can be limiting, but when you’re a young reporter, it’s still nice to have something to hold onto. Butterfield’s first story for The New York Times, on the potential successor to Chiang Kai-shek, was published on the front page.
Before the first word of a book
Before anyone starts putting words together for a book, there are plenty of administrative steps, such as finding an agent, securing a publisher, and sometimes even obtaining approval from a vetting committee.
Professor and Political scientist Susan Shirk and her husband once spent a year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. There, she decided to write a book on domestic politics and foreign policy in China, her first book for a broader audience, which brought new experiences. It began with persuading an agent:
You have to write a prospectus for the agent, persuade a good agent to take you on, then the agent has to try to get a publisher for you.
I organized a little group with other fellows at the center. And the group had a very good editor. We met to try to help one another write a prospectus, so we could get a contract for a book for the general audience. [...]
You have to develop an argument. The more personal you can make the book, the more anecdotes make it vivid. Narrative is very important, to have a story to tell.
Economist Stephen Roach went in-depth on his book proposal writing process:
I start with a structural outline and then I write a fairly detailed proposal that I will submit to the publisher, editor, whoever, to see if it’s worth pursuing. So, my typical book proposal is maybe a 3,000 or 5,000-word essay in terms of overview, then a one-pager on each of the chapters that fit into that structure, and then a long essay drawing it together.
Different publishing houses will have different approval procedures, as Roach says:
If you use a university press, especially one of the caliber of Yale, there’s a pretty formal submission process. The editor can’t just say, “Yeah, it’s great, get to work.” It’s got to be approved by a vetting committee of academics. So, they’ll review that and give you comments and sometimes you’ll make changes. Sometimes your submission will get rejected.
One of the hardest parts of a book can be its structure. If you struggle to envision it, learn from the work of others. Ian Johnson created a case study for himself:
That’s something I got from reading John McPhee. He’s a well-known nonfiction writer, maybe one of the greatest. I would dissect his books. I would write out the structure on the inside of the cover. So page one to three is the introductory scene. Page three to four is a background thing, and so on. I could see how he did it.
You want to give the reader [a story that’s] a bit like a novel: you have an opening scene with something still to come. And then you can get in the background information, and then go back to the narrative later.
Day in the life of a book writer
When all preliminary steps are sorted, the actual writing begins. Persistence is key, Ian Johnson explains his daily routines:
Ideally, I wouldn’t even look at my email. I would often turn off the router in the room, and I would go to a sofa, sit there with my laptop, and write. And I wouldn’t let myself take a break until I had my 500 to 1,000 words down.
The best thing is to do it when you’re fresh. For me, I’m a morning person. Probably most people, their mind is fresher in the morning. Don’t waste your time on email and all that shit.
And so, you want to get your 500 words of new, fresh material when your mind is fresh. It’s the hardest stuff to write. Then you can go back and re-read and edit and correct. But what I would normally do is: I’m working on a chapter. I would get up. I would then read the chapter through to where I am and just start writing, and try to not fixate on, do I have the source? Do I have the quote right? Just put in, “quote by so-and-so saying blah, blah, blah.”
Keep writing. You want to keep going. It’s like you’re a scout in a military unit, and you’re supposed to be scouting out the territory ahead of the main army. You don’t want to stop.
And then I would go swimming around 11:00. Come back, have lunch, take a nap for 15 minutes or something like that, drink some tea, and then I would go back, do one little bit more just to make sure, “Oh, I forgot to put that in.” And then I would do all the bullshit stuff, answering all the emails and all the other stuff and you’re a little bit tired anyways. Mid-afternoon and stuff like that. So that would be like an ideal day for me.
Professor Roach would meticulously prepare every chapter:
I usually aim for a first draft manuscript that maybe has between 130,000 and 150,000 words. I’m pretty obsessed about sitting down and writing a chapter straight through, rather than writing a word and trying to think about it.
By the time I’m ready to write a chapter, I will have done all the research and stashed all the sources in a chapter file, absorbed the research, have an understanding of where I want to go in the chapter, and then I will just write the chapter.
A typical chapter can take me just a week to write. A chapter has, for me, 7,500 to 10,000 words. I can write pretty fast. I can write 3,000 words a day, sometimes more. I’ll write the chapter, and then I’ll go back and revise the chapter and annotate it with footnotes or endnotes.
But even with the best preparation, new insights can require a significant rethink, Roach says:
Most of the time I write chapters sequentially in order that are tied to the structure of the proposal. But sometimes I’ll get into it and I will find that the structure is not holding up as strongly as I envisioned, and I’ll make some big changes.
The last book, Accidental Conflict, is an example of that. I probably wrote four or five chapters on America’s false narratives of China. And I just said, “This isn’t going to work, unless I have a sort of a companion section that says China does the same thing, if not even more, through a system of censorship.”
I researched the history of censorship in China and how the role of the propaganda department has changed and, in particular, how it’s changed under Xi Jinping. I wrote about the profusion of false narratives that exist in China with respect to America. And then added a few more about the fact that the leadership, especially Xi Jinping, now believes that America is in decline.
I took that apart and, as I was doing this, came up with the idea that, okay, you’ve got four or five chapters on America’s false narratives of China, an equal amount of material on China’s false narratives of the U.S. How does it work together? That’s when it struck me that these two great superpowers, through different values but increasingly focused on paranoia over national security, have concocted these politically expedient fables about each other that, you put them together, they’re high octane fuel — very combustible.
After writing comes editing. Ernest Hemingway once referred to the editing process as killing your babies, something Ian Johnson cannot agree with:
In other words, you have to be willing to sacrifice your best stuff. That’s stupid advice. You don’t sacrifice your best stuff. You have to be willing to sacrifice. You should sacrifice your worst stuff though, right?
The truth is that you have to be willing to cut, you have to be willing to say, “I wrote that, I thought it was good, but actually, you know what? It’s not anything near.”
“Think of your pension”
Writing a book takes great sacrifice. Once you weigh the publishing advance against the cost of time and efficiency, it becomes clear: you can’t afford to spend too long on a single book.
Ian Johnson left his fulltime job so he would have the time for writing books. It was a decision with consequences:
My agent at the time, when I told him I wanted to quit The Wall Street Journal, he said to me, “Ian, don’t you have a corporate Amex card from Dow Jones?” I said, “Yeah, I do. I have a car…” He says, “You can take me out to lunch and no one will know.” He said, “They’re not going to question a $50 or $60 lunch, right?” I said, “Yeah, that’s probably true.” He said, “You’ll never have that again if you quit.” He says, “Think of your pension, think of your health insurance. How are you going to do all this stuff? You’ll never make this.”
“You want to know how people make their money? Let me tell you.” And then he went through like all the names of the people at The New Yorker. It was like 20 names. And he said, “That person is independently wealthy. That person is married to somebody who has a really great job. That person is independently wealthy. That person is married to somebody who has a really good job.” Either they’re independently wealthy or a few of them, like Peter Hessler, just write really bestselling books. But almost nobody does it like that.
So if you really want to write a book, you need to be independently wealthy. That’s my advice to you. Win the lottery.
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About us
The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are digital publications in which Liu He interviews China specialists about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of Liu’s research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.
We also have a Chinese-language Substack. We hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!
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