Author Joel M. Vance offers a tightly written essay on tips for writers — ones we shouldn’t forget when we are polishing our work and ones we should remember as we are focusing and developing it. Following the essay is writing by Joel that originally appeared in Wisconsin Trails. He says, “I cut the original in half to fit their length requirements and it is much better shorter than longer.” You will certainly see an example how specifics evoke the place and time of the author’s growing up and offer the energy that makes us feel like we are experiencing the happenings, tall tales or not.

I taught 15 years at a week-long writing workshop in Vermont called Wildbranch, named for a small trout stream that flows nearby. The scenery is right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, as is the little town, Craftsbury Common, where the workshop takes place. It’s tempting to go trout fishing or just sit and listen to the silence and gawk at the scenery. But we’re there to learn and to teach.

After all those years, I’ve boiled the writing part down to five principles:

1. Show, don’t tell.
2. Organize
3. Focus
4. Write tight
5. Remember people like to read about people

Ignoring number one is a common failing. “He was upset.” That’s telling the reader. “He picked up his tackle box and threw it against the wall, then grabbed his buddy by the throat and roared, ‘You lost my favorite lure, you jerk!'” That’s showing. Another example: “I got back to the truck dog tired.” That’s telling. “I staggered the last few steps to the truck and slumped down and the dog flopped down beside me, both dog tired.” That’s showing before telling.

 The final three points should be self-explanatory, but they aren’t so easy to accomplish. Organization of material means putting it in an order that makes sense. That varies according to the piece, but any piece should proceed logically, though that does not always equate with chronology. Sometimes it is effective to grab a lead from the most dramatic part of the story to entice the reader and set the scene, then go back to fill in the details. But the point should be to build to a climax.

As for focus, it is easy, especially with an interesting and complex subject, to get sidetracked and lose focus. Better to isolate what the writer wants to emphasize and discard anything that does not accentuate that thesis. Like climbing a tree. You don’t want to go out on a limb, as interesting as the leaves on that limb might be. If they’re that good, make them a separate article.

As for writing tight, watch Emeril’s cooking show on television and note how many times he says, “What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna….” The first five words are superfluous (or the last two are repetitive). Ruthlessly prune phrases, words, sentences, even paragraphs that are meaningless or repetitive.

Try an experiment: write something and then cut out half the words without re-writing. Just pencil out the redundancies, superfluous words and unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. I have a great example of such editing by Sparse Grey Hackle, a great outdoor writer. He savaged a sentence by somebody who wrote a long sentence about casting a fly “upon the water.” “Of course it was on the water unless he was fishing for trees,” Sparse growled. He finally chewed the sentence down to three words: “He cast again.”

Finally, a fifth precept and perhaps the most important: People like to read about people. You can make a strong argument about some environmental outrage by quoting statistics and experts, but if you take some poor soul who has been directly impacted by the outrage and bring that person to life through quotes and description, you’ll make a far greater impact on the reader. It’s good to tell folks how to shoot a trophy buck, but it’s even better to have them share the experience through the eyes of someone, a “people.” Shared experience always is more readable than dry description.

Care about your writing. Anyone can slop words on paper or screen but writers in the true sense of the word care about getting those words just right.

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Wisconsin Nights
By Joel M. Vance

It was a story told around the old kitchen table in the north woods cabin, the table covered by a red-and-white checkered oilcloth with cigarette burn scars in it. The story about the time that my Grandfather stuck his hand in the northern pike’s mouth.

My grandfather was an old time Missouri fisherman, but he’d never been farther north than Salisbury in Chariton County — ten miles from home. He’d never seen a pike and then my father invited him on a fishing trip to my mother’s home town, Birchwood, in northwest Wisconsin.

My grandfather had never seen water as clear as there was in Little Birch when he and my father launched an old wooden boat powered by a 3.5 horsepower Evinrude outboard motor. They fished off Snake Island in Big Birch, reached through a sinuous channel called The Narrows. A spidery trestle spanned The Narrows, carrying Soo Line freight trains. The weed beds around Snake Island were a hangout for lunker northerns.

Grandpa hooked and landed a 15-pound pike and did what he’d done all his 70 years in Missouri — he lipped the fish, the way he would have lipped a catfish or carp. This time, however, it was as if he’d stuck his hand in a working lawnmower. It took a while to stop the bleeding and he vowed to stay away from fish that could have you for supper.

My dad once hooked another enormous pike, fishing with my Aunt Vic. My father dragged the pike onto the deck-boarded bottom where there was the detritus of a hundred fishing trips sloshing around in an inch of filthy water. The pike thrashed violently, knocking over an open tackle box, scattering River Runts, Pikie Minnows and Johnson Silver Minnows in every direction.

My aunt let out a north woods whoop and leaped on the huge fish like a rodeo rider settling on a Brahma bull. It took a while to get all the hooks out of the two of them. The pike and the two bruised anglers went to Hud and Bud’s bar to brag to a more-or-less admiring crowd (more, when my father bought a round of Bruenig’s Lager, brewed in nearby Rice Lake).

Hud and Bud were my Aunt Vic’s brothers and Birchwood was pretty much operated by the Soper clan. My aunts, Vic and Mugs (Viola and Margaret), were photographed as teenage girls riding atop a load of logs of a size only seen in pioneer days. That’s because it was pioneer days when the photo was taken. My grandmother came overland in a covered wagon and opened a café to feed the loggers who were busy cutting the virgin forest. One uncle, Orville, brother of Vic, Hud and Bud, dropped a tree on his leg and the local sawbones lived up to his nickname by amputating the leg on the kitchen table while Aunt Vic watched with fascination. She later became a registered nurse.

When the first airplane landed in a cow pasture, the teenaged Vi Soper was first to go for a ride with Monk Morey (how could a barnstorming pilot be named anything else?) and she screamed with delight when he did aerobatics over the little north woods town.

My grandmother, the matriarch of the town, was the soul o rectitude…but her husband, who died before I was born, had been the town bootlegger. I was grown before I knew — a woman said she had been my grandfather’s lookout when she was a youngster. “If the revenue people came I’d run and warn him,” she said.

There was a Sinclair “filling station” on the corner of Main Street, run by a widow named Jane who looked tough enough to knock down full-grown Hereford steers with one punch. She was, however, a gentle giant, always with grease on her hands and blowsy blonde hair sticking out haphazardly from beneath a stained Sinclair cap. She looked tired and had sad eyes. I felt vaguely sorry for her, although at 10 years old, I was too young to know why.

The icehouse, filled with blocks of ice cut during the long winter from Little Birch and Big Birch Lakes, was a kid hangout, the kind of attractive nuisance that today results in negligence lawsuits when kids get injured (or suffer frostbit butts).

We kids perched on the sawdust-covered ice blocks, reveling in the chill while it was 90 degrees outside and the lake was busy manufacturing a dog days smell that permeated the town, along with the pungent scent of melting tar from the blacktop streets.

An old barn behind my Aunt Pill’s house had a haymow door 15 feet or so above a pile of moldering hay. We played War, getting shot and falling dramatically onto the pile of hay which, fortunately, didn’t have a rusty pitchfork hidden in it. Older cousins were getting shot at in obscure places like Saipan and Iwo Jima.

My cousin Pat stuck what he thought was a dormant firecracker in his mouth. “Look,” he said. “I’m smokin’!” A moment later he was — the firecracker exploded, burning his mouth and stopping up my ears. Kids got hurt. I tripped running in a cut-over pasture and jammed a weed stalk down my throat. I spit blood all the way home.

Even as I tell my own fish stories, I have a frisson of nostalgia over those long ago tales told around a battered kitchen table with the yeasty smell of Bruenig’s Lager hanging in the air. My uncle supposedly caught a 13-line ground squirrel and stuck it on a huge hook and lobbed it into Spider Lake (the statute of limitations on cruelty to animals has expired, as has the uncle). The frantic animal, swimming toward safety, never made it. There was a massive swirl and the squirrel disappeared in the mouth of an eight-pound largemouth bass.

Did it happen? Probably not, but who cares. It’s part of the family legend and that’s good enough.