The Writing Tip that the Greatest Magazine Writer Used on Every Story.
It’s one you can implement right now.
Last Sunday, Sports Illustrated posted a profile about Gary Smith, the magazine’s greatest writer, now retired, who’s teaching mindfulness to elementary kids in South Carolina.
Now, for those who know me, you know I love Gary Smith. You know a rule of his on story selection and story structure guides every piece I do, and should guide every story you write, too. It’s that powerful.
(It’s the rule of the lifelong conflict and its daily manifestation, and if you want to know more about it, click here.)
So this profile of Smith seemed a little kismet-y as I read it last weekend. The best part is Smith keeps giving advice.
His years of reading, writing and exploring were in the service of a goal: “To learn how to play this game most wisely, with the least amount of suffering and the most amount of enjoyment.”
Perhaps my favorite anecdote comes when Smith explains how exactly he told such complex stories. And what I mean by that is, How did he report pieces with such nuance? And then how did he relay them with such depth?
For Smith it’s about judgment. He didn’t bring any into his pieces. He didn’t write anything in his notebook under the banner of, This thought is wrong, or, This bad behavior will give my piece the veneer of complexity because it’ll show how the athlete is less than an idol.
No.
He wanted only to understand people as people, as they lived their lives. Then he wanted to write the stories with that level of care and that abdication of opinion.
Because Smith was obsessed with excavation, not exposure. “Judgment just closes off so many possibilities and doors and windows. So, the more you open to what created the human in any given moment, the richer the terrain you as a writer have to explore,” Smith says. “It’s in the ambiguities, the paradoxes of human beings, where truth lies.”
Good gawwwd I love that.
Especially today, especially in the age of hot takes and takedowns and The other side are idiots, here is Gary Smith reflecting in his work what Steinbeck wrote of his own: Your…
