On Writing Well - William Zinsser 2001

23 A Writer’s Decisions
Part IV Attitudes

This has been a book about decisions—the countless successive decisions that go into every act of writing. Some of the decisions are big (“What should I write about?”) and some are as small as the smallest word. But all of them are important.

The previous chapter was about big decisions: matters of shape, structure, compression, focus and intention. This chapter is about little decisions: the hundreds of choices that go into organizing a long article. I thought it might be helpful to show how some of those decisions get made, using one of my own pieces as the specimen being dissected.

Learning how to organize a long article is just as important as learning how to write a clear and pleasing sentence. All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don’t keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative—good old-fashioned storytelling—is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug. The only thing they should notice is that you have made a sensible plan for your journey. Every step should seem inevitable.

My article, called “The News From Timbuktu,” which ran in Conde Nast Traveler, is one writer’s solution to one problem, but it illustrates issues that apply to all extended tasks of nonfiction. I’ve annotated the piece, explaining the decisions I made along the way.

The hardest decision about any article is how to begin it. The lead must grab the reader with a provocative idea and continue with each paragraph to hold him or her in a tight grip, gradually adding information. The point of the information is to get readers so interested that they will stick around for the whole trip. The lead can be as short as one paragraph and as long as it needs to be. You’ll know it’s over when all the necessary work has been done and you can take a more relaxed tone and get on with your narrative. Here the first paragraph gives readers an arresting notion to think about—one that I hope has never occured to them before.

What struck me most powerfully when I got to Timbuktu was that the streets were of sand. I suddenly realized that sand is very different from dirt. Every town starts with dirt streets that eventually get paved as the inhabitants prosper and subdue their environment. But sand represents defeat. A city with streets of sand is a city at the edge.

Notice how simple those five sentences are: plain declarative sentences, not a comma in sight. Each sentence contains one thought—and only one. Readers can process only one idea at a time, and they do it in linear sequence. Much of the trouble that writers get into comes from trying to make one sentence do too much work. Never be afraid to break a long sentence into two short ones, or even three.

That, of course, is why I was there: Timbuktu is the ultimate destination for edge-seekers. Of the half-dozen places that have always lured travelers with the mere sound of their name—Bali and Tahiti, Samarkand and Fez, Mombasa and Macao—none can match Timbuktu for the remoteness it conveys. I was surprised by how many people, hearing of my trip, didn’t think Timbuktu was a real place, or, if it was, couldn’t think where in the world it might be. They knew it well as a word—the most vivid of all synonyms for the almost-unreachable, a God-given toy for songwriters stuck for an “oo” rhyme and a metaphor for how far a lovestruck boy would go to win the unwinnable girl. But as an actual place—surely Timbuktu was one of those “long-lost” African kingdoms like King Solomon’s Mines that turned out not to exist when the Victorian explorers went looking for them.

The first sentence of that paragraph grows out of the last sentence of the previous paragraph; the reader is given no chance to squirm away. After that the paragraph has one purpose: it acknowledges what the reader already knows—or half knows—about Timbuktu. It thereby welcomes him as a fellow traveler, someone who brings the same emotions to the trip as the writer himself. It also adds a certain kind of information— not hard facts, but enjoyable lore.

The following paragraph gets down to hard work—work that can’t be put off any longer. Notice how much information is crammed into these three sentences:

The long-lost Timbuktu, however, got found, though the men who finally found it after terrible ordeals—the Scotsman Gordon Laing in 1826 and the Frenchman Rene Caillie in 1828—must have felt cruelly mocked for their efforts. The legendary city of 100,000 people described by the 16th- century traveler Leo Africanus—a center of learning with 20,000 students and 180 Koranic schools—was a desolate settlement of mud buildings, its glory and its population long gone, surviving only because of its unique location as the junction of important camel caravan routes across the Sahara. Much of what got traded in Africa, especially salt from the north and gold from the south, got traded in Timbuktu.

So much for the history of Timbuktu and the reason for its fame. It’s all that a magazine reader needs to know about the city’s past and its significance. Don’t give readers of a magazine piece more information than they require; if you want to tell more, write a book or write for a scholarly journal.

Now, what do your readers want to know next? Ask yourself that question after every sentence. Here what they want to know is: why did I go to Timbuktu? What was the purpose of my trip? The following paragraph gets right to it—again, keeping the thread of the previous sentence taut:

It was to watch the arrival of one of those caravans that I had come to Timbuktu. I was one of six men and women bright enough or dumb enough—we didn’t yet know which— to sign up for a two-week tour we had seen announced in the Sunday New York Times, run by a small travel agency of French origins that specializes in West Africa. (Timbuktu is in Mali, the former French Sudan.) The agency’s office is in New York, and I had gone there first thing Monday morning to beat the crowd; I asked the usual questions and got the usual answers—yellow fever shots, cholera shots, malaria pills, don’t drink the water—and was given a brochure.

Besides explaining the genesis of the trip, that paragraph does one other job: it establishes the writers personality and voice. In travel writing you should never forget that you are the guide. It’s not enough just to take your readers on a trip; you must take them on your trip. Make them identify with you— with your hopes and apprehensions. This means giving them some idea of who you are. The phrase “bright enough or dumb enough” calls up a familiar figure in travel literature: the tourist as a possible patsy or buffoon. Another throwaway phrase is the line about beating the crowd. I put it in just to amuse myself. Strictly, that fourth paragraph is too late to say where Timbuktu is. But I couldn’t find a way to mention it earlier without pulling apart the fabric of the lead.

Here’s paragraph five:

“It’s your opportunity to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime extravaganza—the annual Azalai Salt Caravan to Timbuktu!” the brochure began. “Picture this: Hundreds of camels carrying huge slabs of precious salt (white gold’ to the natives of land-locked West Africa) make their triumphant entry into Timbuktu, an ancient and mystical part desert/part city of some 7,000 inhabitants. The colorful nomads who drive the caravans have traveled 1,000 miles across the Sahara to celebrate the end of their trek with outdoor feasts and traditional tribal dances. Spend the night in a desert tent as guest of the tribal chief.”

That’s a typical example of how a writer can get other people to do helpful work for him—in their words, which are usually more revealing than the writer’s words. In this case the brochure not only tells the reader what kind of trip has been promised; its language is an amusement in itself and a window into the grandiosity of the promoters. Be on the watch for funny or self-serving quotes and use them with gratitude. Here’s the last paragraph of the lead:

Well, that’s my kind of trip, if not necessarily my kind of prose, and it also turned out to be my wife’s kind of trip and four other people’s kind of trip. In years we ranged from late middle age to Medicare. Five of us were from mid-Manhattan, one was a widow from Maryland, and all of us had made a lifelong habit of traveling to places on the edge. Names like Venice and Versailles didn’t bob up in our accounts of earlier trips, or even Marrakech or Luxor or Chiang Mai. The talk was of Bhutan and Borneo, Tibet and Yemen and the Moluccas. Now—praise Allah!—we had made it to Timbuktu. Our camel caravan was about to come in.

That concludes the lead. Those six paragraphs took as long to write as the entire remainder of the piece. But when I finally wrestled them into place I felt confidently launched. Maybe someone else could write a better lead for that story, but I couldn’t. I felt that readers who were still with me would stay to the end.

No less important than decisions about structure are decisions about individual words. Banality is the enemy of good writing; the challenge is to not write like everybody else. One fact that had to be stated in the lead was how old the six of us were. Initially I wrote something serviceable like “we were in our fifties and sixties.” But the merely serviceable is a drag. Was there any way to state the fact with freshness? There didn’t seem to be. At last a merciful muse gave me Medicare—and thus the phrase “from late middle age to Medicare.” If you look long enough you can usually find a proper name or a metaphor that will bring those dull but necessary facts to life.

Even more time went into the sentence about Venice and Versailles. Originally I wrote, “Names like London and Paris didn’t turn up in our accounts of earlier trips.” Not much fun there. I tried to think of other popular capitals. Rome and Cairo? Athens and Bangkok? No better. Maybe alliteration would help—readers enjoy any effort to gratify their sense of rhythm and cadence. Madrid and Moscow? Tel Aviv and Tokyo? Too tricky. I stopped thinking of capitals and tried to think of tourist-infested cities. Venice popped into my head and I was glad to see it; everybody goes to Venice. Did any other cities begin with V? Only Vienna, which was too close to Venice in several respects. Finally I shifted my thinking from tourist cities to tourist sites, mentally fanning out from the major capitals, and it was on one of those excursions that I hit Versailles. It made my day.

Next I needed a fresher verb than “turn up.” I wanted an active verb that conveyed an image. None of the usual synonyms was quite right. Finally I thought of “bob”—a three-letter word, ludicrously simple. Yet it was the perfect word: it paints a picture of an object periodically rising to the surface of the water. That left just one decision: what slightly offbeat tourist sites would seem commonplace to six travelers who had signed up for Timbuktu? The three that I finally chose—Luxor, Marrakech and Chiang Mai—were quite exotic in the 1950s, when I first visited them. Today they’re not; the age of jet travel has made them almost as popular as London and Paris.

Altogether, the sentence took almost an hour. But I didn’t begrudge a minute of it. On the contrary, seeing it fall into place gave me great pleasure. No writing decision is too small to be worth a large expenditure of time. Both you and the reader know it when your finicky labor is rewarded by a sentence coming out right.

Notice that there’s an asterisk at the end of the lead. (It could also be a blank space.) That asterisk is a signpost. It announces to the reader that you have organized your article in a certain way and that a new phase is about to begin—perhaps a change of chronology, such as a flashback, or a change of subject, or emphasis, or tone. Here, after a highly compressed lead, the asterisk enables the writer to take a deep breath and start over, this time at the more leisurely gait of a storyteller:

We got to Timbuktu by flying from New York to Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast, and taking a plane from there to Bamako, capital of Mali, its neighbor to the north. Unlike the verdant Ivory Coast, Mali is dry, its southern half nourished mainly by the Niger River, its upper half pure desert; Timbuktu is literally the last stop for travelers going north across the Sahara, or the first stop for travelers coming south—a coveted speck on the horizon after weeks of heat and thirst.

None of us on the tour knew much about Mali or what to expect of it—our thoughts were fixed on our rendezvous with the salt caravan at Timbuktu, not on the country we would cross to get there. What we didn’t expect was that we would be so instantly taken with it. Mali was an immersion in color: handsome people wearing fabrics of intoxicating design, markets bright with fruits and vegetables, children whose smile was a routine miracle. Desperately poor, Mali was peoplerich. The tree-lined city of Bamako delighted us with its energy and confidence.

Up early the next morning, we drove for ten hours in a van that had seen better days, but not much better days, to reach the holy city of Djenne, a medieval center of trade and Islamic scholarship on the Niger that predated Timbuktu and rivaled it in luster. Today Djenne can only be reached by a small ferry, and as we bounced over unspeakable roads, hurrying to arrive before dark, the spires and turrets of its great clay mosque, looking like a distant sandcastle, taunted us by seeming to recede. When we finally got there the mosque still looked like a sandcastle—an elegant fortress that might have been built by children on a beach. Architecturally (I later learned) it was in the Sudanese style; all these years, children on beaches have been building in the Sudanese style. To Unger in Djenne’s ancient square at dusk was a high moment of our trip.

The next two days were no less rich. One was spent driving into—and back out of—Dogon country. The Dogon, who live on an escarpment not easily reached by outsiders, are prized by anthropologists for their animist culture and cosmology and by art collectors for their masks and statues, and the few hours that we spent climbing around their villages and watching a masked dance gave us too brief a glimpse of a society that was far from simple. The second day was spent in Mopte, a vibrant market town on the Niger that we liked enormously and also left too soon. But we had a date in Timbuktu and a chartered plane to take us there.

Obviously there’s far more to say about Mali than is jammed into those four paragraphs—many scholarly books have been written about the Dogon culture and the Niger River peoples. But this wasn’t an article about Mali; it was about a quest for a camel caravan. Therefore a decision had to made about the larger shape of the piece. My decision was to get across Mali as fast as possible—to explain in the barest number of sentences what route we took and what was important about the places where we stopped.

At such moments I ask myself one very helpful question: “What is the piece really about?” (Not just ’What is the piece about?”) Fondness for material you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to gather isn’t a good enough reason to include it if it’s not central to the story you’ve chosen to tell. Self-discipline bordering on masochism is required. The only consolation for the loss of so much material is that it isn’t totally lost; it remains in your writing as an intangible that the reader can sense. Readers should always feel that you know more about your subject than you’ve put in writing.

Back to “But we had a date in Timbuktu”:

The exactness of that date was what had worried me most when I visited the travel agency. I asked the head of the agency how she could be so sure the salt caravan would arrive on December 2; nomads leading camels aren’t my idea of people operating on a timetable. My wife, who isn’t cursed with my optimism about such life forces as camels and travel agents, was certain we would be told at Timbuktu that the salt caravan had come and gone, or, more probably, hadn’t been heard from at all. The travel agent scoffed at my question.

“We’re in close touch with the caravan,” she said. ’We send scouts into the desert. If they tell us the caravan is going to be a few days late we can juggle your itinerary in Mali.” That made sense to me—optimists can make sense of anything—and now I was in a plane not much bigger than Lindbergh’s, flying north toward Timbuktu over terrain so barren that I saw no sign of human habitation below. Simultaneously, however, hundreds of camels carrying huge slabs of salt were moving south to meet me. Even now tribal chiefs were turning their thoughts to how to entertain me in their desert tent.

Both of the preceding paragraphs contain touches of humor—tiny jokes. Again, they are efforts to keep myself amused. But they are also a deliberate attempt to maintain a persona. One of the oldest strains in travel writing and humor writing is the eternal credulity of the narrator. Used in moderation, making yourself gullible—or downright stupid—gives the reader the enormous pleasure of feeling superior.

Our pilot circled over Timbuktu to give us an aerial view of the city we had traveled so far to see. It was a large sprawl of mud buildings that looked long abandoned, as dead as Fort Zindemeuf at the end of Beau Geste; surely nobody was alive down there. The Sahara in its steady encroachment, which has created the drought belt across central Africa known as the Sahel, had long since pushed past Timbuktu and left it marooned. I felt a tremor of fear; I didn’t want to be put down in such a forsaken place.

The reference to Beau Geste is an effort to tap into associations that readers bring to the story. Much of what makes Timbuktu legendary was put there by Hollywood. By invoking the fate of Fort Zindemeuf—Brian Donlevy played a sadistic French Foreign Legion commandant who propped the dead bodies of his soldiers back into the niches of the fort—I’m revealing my own fondness for the genre and striking a bond with fellow movie buffs. What I’m after is resonance; it can do a great deal of emotional work that writers can’t achieve on their own.

Two words—“tremor” and “forsaken”—took a while to find. When I found “forsaken” in my Roget’s Thesaurus I was quite sure I had never used it before. I was glad to see it there among the synonyms. As one of Jesus’s last words (speaking of resonance), it could hardly convey more loneliness and abandonment.

At the airport we were met by our local guide, a Tuareg named Mohammed Ali. For a travel buff he was a consoling sight—if anybody can be said to own this part of the Sahara, it is the Tuareg, a race of proud Berbers who wouldn’t submit to the Arabs or the later French colonials who swept into North Africa, withdrawing instead into the desert and making it their preserve. Mohammed Ali, who was wearing the traditional blue robe of Tuareg men, had a dark, intelligent face, somewhat Arabic in the angularity of its features, and he moved with an assurance that was obviously part of his character. As a teen-ager, it turned out, he had gone with his father on the haj to Mecca (many Tuareg eventually converted to Islam) and had stayed for seven years in Arabia and Egypt to study English, French and Arabic. The Tuareg have a language of their own, with a complex written alphabet, called Tamashek.

Mohammed Ah said he had to take us first to the police station in Timbuktu to have our passports checked. I’ve seen too many movies to feel comfortable in this kind of interview situation, and as we sat in a dungeon-like room being interrogated by two armed policemen, not far from a jail cell where we could see a man and a boy sleeping, I had another flashback—this one to The Four Feathers and the scene of the British soldiers long imprisoned at Omdurman. The oppressiveness stayed with me when we got back out and Mohammed Ali walked us through the forlorn city, dutifully showing us its few “points of interest”: the Grand Mosque, the market, and three dilapidated houses, commemorated by plaques, where Laing, Caillie and the German explorer Heinrich Barth lived. We didn’t see any other tourists.

Again, the Four Feathers allusion, like the mention of Beau Geste, will bring a chill of recognition to anyone who knows the movie. The fact that the movie was based on a real campaign— Kitcheners expedition up the Nile to avenge the Mahdis defeat of General Gordon—gives the sentence an edge of fear. Obviously Arab justice in outposts of the Sahara is still far from merciful.

Once more the asterisk announces a change of mood. It says, in effect: “So much for Timbuktu itself. Now we’re going to get lown to the real business of the story: looking for a camel caravan.” Making these divisions in a long and complex article not only helps the reader to follow your road map. It also takes some of the anxiety out of the act of writing, enabling you to break your material into manageable chunks and to take one chunk at a time. The total task seems less formidable, and panic is staved off.

At the Azalai Hotel, where we appeared to be the only guests, we asked Mohammed Ali how many tourists were in Timbuktu to greet the salt caravan.

“Six,” he said. “The six of you.”

“But. . .” Something in me didn’t want to finish the sentence. I took a different approach. “I don’t understand what this word ’Azalai’ means. Why is it called the Azalai Salt Caravan?”

“That’s the word the French used,” he said, “when they organized the caravan and all the camels made the trip together once a year, around the beginning of December.”

“What do they do now?” several voices asked.

’Well, when Mali got its independence they decided to let the traders bring their salt caravans to Timbuktu whenever they wanted to.”

Mali got its independence in 1960. We were in Timbuktu for an event that hadn’t been held in 27 years.

The last sentence is a small bomb dropped into the story. But it is allowed to speak for itself—just the facts, please—without comment. I didn’t add an exclamation point to notify readers that it was an amazing moment. That would have spoiled their own pleasure of discovery. Trust your material.

My wife, among others, was not surprised. We took the news calmly: old travel hands who have faith that they will find their camel caravan one way or another. Mainly our reaction was one of amazement that the canons of truth-inadvertising had been so brazenly disregarded. Mohammed Ali knew nothing about the gaudy promises tendered by the brochure. He only knew he had been hired to take us to meet a salt caravan, and he told us that in the morning we would go looking for one and would spend the night in the Sahara. Early December, he said, was the usual time for caravans to start arriving. He didn’t say anything about a chieftain’s tent.

More carefully chosen words: “canons,” “brazenly,” “gaudy,” “tendered.” They’re vivid and precise, but not long or fancy. Best of all, they are words that readers probably weren’t expecting and that they therefore welcome. The sentence about the chieftain’s tent, referring back to a phrase in the brochure, is another tiny joke. These “snappers” at the end of a paragraph propel readers into the next paragraph and keep them in a good mood.

In the morning my wife—a voice of reason at the edge of infinity—said she wouldn’t go into the Sahara unless we went in two vehicles. I was therefore glad to see two Land Rovers awaiting us outside the hotel. One of them was having its front tire pumped up by a boy with a bicycle pump. Four of us squeezed into the back seat of one Land Rover; Mohammed Ali sat in front, next to the driver. The second Land Rover took our other two tour members and two boys who were described as “apprentices.” Nobody said what they were apprenticing for.

Another startling fact that needs no embellishment—the tire-pumping—and another small joke at the end.

We drove straight out into the Sahara. The desert was a brown blanket without any end and with no tracks of any kind; the next big town was Algiers. That was the moment when I felt most at the edge, when a small voice said, “This is crazy. Why are you doing this?” But I knew why; I was on a quest that I could trace back to my first encounters with the books by Britain’s “desert eccentrics”—solitaries such as Charles Doughty, Sir Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger, who lived among the Bedouin. I had always wondered what that austere existence was like. What was its hold over those obsessed Englishmen?

More resonance. The reference to Doughty and his compatriots is a reminder that the desert has a written literature no less powerful than its movie literature. It adds one more item to the emotional baggage that I was carrying and that the reader was entitled to know about.

The following sentence pursues the question that ended the previous paragraph:

Now I was starting to find out. As we drove over the sand, Mohammed Ah gave the driver an occasional gesture: a little more to the right, a little more to the left. We asked how he knew where he was going. He said he could tell by the dunes. The dunes, however, all looked alike. We asked how long we would have to drive to find a salt caravan. Mohammed Ali said he hoped it wouldn’t be more than three or four hours. We kept driving. To my object-oriented eye there was almost nothing to see. But after a while the almost-nothingness became an object in itself—the entire point of the desert. I tried to get that fact into my metabolism. It lulled me into a certain acceptance and I totally forgot why we were out there.

Suddenly the driver made a sharp left and came to a stop. “Camels,” he said. I strained my urban eyes and didn’t see anything. Then it came into focus, far away: a caravan of forty camels moving at a stately gait toward Timbuktu, as camel caravans have for a thousand years, bringing salt from the mines at Taoudenni, twenty days to the north. We drove to within a hundred yards of the caravan—no nearer, Mohammed Ah explained, because camels are nervous creatures, easily panicked by anything “strange.” (We were undeniably strange.) He said that the camels are always brought into Timbuktu to unload the salt late at night, when the city is empty of people. So much for the “triumphant entry.”

It was a thrilling sight, far more dramatic than an organized march would have been. The aloneness of the caravan was the aloneness of every caravan that had ever crossed the Sahara. The camels were hitched to each other and seemed to be walking in unison, as precise as Rockettes in their undulating rhythm. Each camel had two slabs of salt roped to each side. The salt looked like dirty white marble. The slabs (which I subsequently measured in the Timbuktu market) are 3 1/2 feet long, 1 1/2 feet high, and 3/4 inch thick—the maximum size and weight, presumably, that can be loaded onto a camel. We sat on the sand and watched the caravan until the last camel disappeared over a dune.

The tone has now settled into straight narrative—one declarative sentence after another. The only hard decision involved “aloneness,” which is not my kind of word—it’s too “poetic.” But I finally decided that there was no other word that could do the same job, and I reluctantly stayed with it.

By now it was midday and the sun was fiercely hot. We climbed back in our Land Rovers and drove farther into the desert until Mohammed Ah found a tree that cast a shadow just big enough for five New Yorkers and a widow from Maryland, and there we stayed until about 4, having a picnic lunch, gazing at the bleached-out landscape, dozing, moving our blanket periodically as our shadow moved with the sun. The two drivers spent the entire siesta tinkering with and seeming to dismantle the engine of one of the Land Rovers. A nomad appeared from nowhere and stopped to ask if we had any quinine. Another nomad appeared from nowhere and stopped briefly to talk. Later we saw two men walking toward us across the desert and beyond them... was it our first mirage? It was another salt caravan, this one fifty camels long, silhouetted against the sky. Spotting us from God knows how far away, the two men had left the caravan to come over for a visit. One of them was an old man, full of laughter. They sat down with Mohammed Ali and got the latest news of Timbuktu.

The hardest sentence there was the one about the drivers tinkering with the Land Rover. I wanted it to be as simple as all the other sentences and yet have a small surprise tucked into it—a wry touch of humor. Otherwise my purpose at this point was to tell the remainder of the story as simply as possible:

So the four hours passed before we knew they were gone, as if we had slipped into a different time zone, Sahara time, and in the late afternoon, when the sun’s heat had begun to ebb, we got back into our Land Rovers, which, to my surprise, still worked, and set out across the Sahara for what Mohammed Ali called our “encampment.” I pictured, if not a chieftains tent, at least a tent—something that announced itself as an encampment. When we finally did stop, it was at a spot that looked strikingly similar to what we had been driving over all day. It did, however, have one small tree. Some Bedouin women were crouched under it—black-garbed figures, their faces veiled—and Mohammed Ali put us down on the desert next to them.

The women shrank back at the sight of us—white aliens dumped abruptly in their midst. They were huddled so close together that they looked like a frieze. Obviously Mohammed Ali had just stopped at the first sight of “local color” that he happened to find for his tourists, counting on us to manage for ourselves after that. We could only sit and try to look friendly. But we were very conscious of being intruders, and we probably looked as uncomfortable as we felt. Only after we had sat there for a while did the black frieze slowly come apart and turn into four women, three children and two naked babies. Mohammed Ali had gone off somewhere, seemingly not wanting to have anything to do with the Bedouin; perhaps as a Tuareg he considered them desert riffraff.

But it was the Bedouin who had the grace to put us at ease. One of the women, lowering her veil and revealing a movie star’s smile—white teeth and shining black eyes in a beautiful face—rummaged in her belongings, pulled out a blanket and a straw mat, and brought them over for us to sit on. I remembered from all those books that in the desert there’s no such thing as an intruder; anyone who turns up is somehow expected. Soon after that, two Bedouin men came in from the desert, completing the family unit, which, we now saw, consisted of two men, two wives for each man, and their various children. The older husband, who had a strong and handsome face, greeted both of his wives with a gentle tap on the head, somewhat like a blessing, and then sat down not far from me. One of the women brought him his dinner—some millet in a bowl. He immediately offered the bowl to me. I declined, but the offer is one I won’t forget. We sat in companionable silence while he ate. The children came over to get acquainted. The sun went down and a full moon came up over the Sahara.

Meanwhile our drivers had spread some blankets next to the two Land Rovers and started a fire with desert wood. We regrouped on our own blankets, watched the stars coming out in the desert sky, had some kind of chicken for dinner, and got ready to turn in. Bathroom facilities were ad hoc—to each his own. We had been warned that Sahara nights were cold and had brought sweaters along. I put on my sweater, rolled up in a blanket, which slightly softened the hardness of the desert, and fell asleep surrounded by an immense stillness. An hour later I was awakened by an equally immense racket—our Bedouin family had brought in their herd of goats and their camels for the night. Then all was quiet again.

In the morning I noticed paw prints in the sand next to my blanket. Mohammed Ah said that a jackal had come by to clean up the leftovers from our dinner—of which, as I recalled the chicken, there must have been quite a few. But I didn’t hear a thing. I was too busy dreaming that I was Lawrence of Arabia.

[END]

A crucial decision about a piece of writing is where to end it. Often the story will tell you where it wants to stop. This ending was not the one I originally had in mind. Because the goal of our trip was to find a salt caravan I assumed that I would have to complete the ancient cycle of trade: to describe how we returned to Timbuktu and saw the salt being unloaded and bought and sold in the market. But the nearer I got to writing that final section, the more I didn’t want to write it. It loomed as drudgery, no fun for me or for the reader.

Suddenly I remembered that I was under no obligation to the actual shape of our trip. I didn’t have to reconstruct everything. The real climax of my story was not finding the salt caravan; it was finding the timeless hospitality of the people who live in the Sahara. Not many moments in my life have matched the one when a family of nomads with almost no possessions offered to share their dinner. Nor could any other moment distill more vividly what I had come to the desert to find and what all those Englishmen had written about—the nobility of living on the edge.

When you get such a message from your material—when your story tells you it’s over, regardless of what subsequently happened—look for the door. I got out fast, pausing only long enough to make sure that the unities were intact: that the writer-guide who started the trip was the same person who was ending it. The playful reference to Lawrence preserves the persona, wraps up a multitude of associations and brings the journey full circle. The realization that I could just stop was a terrific feeling, not only because my labors were over—the jigsaw puzzle solved—but because the ending felt right. It was the correct decision.

As a postscript, there’s one last decision I’d like to mention. It has to do with the nonfiction writer’s need to make his or her own luck. An exhortation I often use to keep myself going is “Get on the plane.” Two of the most emotional moments of my life came as a result of getting on the plane in connection with my book Willie and Dwike. First I went to Shanghai with the musicians Willie Ruff and Dwike Mitchell when they introduced jazz to China at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. A year later I went to Venice with Ruff to hear him play Gregorian chants on his French horn in St. Mark’s basilica at night, when nobody else was there, to test its unique acoustics. In both cases Ruff had no assurance that he would be allowed to play; I might have wasted my time and money by deciding to go along. But I got on the plane, and those two long pieces, which originally ran in The New Yorker, are probably my two best articles. I got on the plane to Timbuktu to look for a camel caravan that was an even bet not to materialize, and I got on the plane to Bradenton for spring training not knowing whether I would be welcomed or rebuffed. My book Writing to Learn was bom because of one phone call from a stranger. It raised an educational idea so interesting that I got on the plane to Minnesota to pursue it.

Getting on the plane has taken me to unusual stories all over the world and all over America, and it still does. That isn’t to say I’m not nervous when I leave for the airport; I always am—that’s part of the deal. (A little nervousness gives writing an edge.) But I’m always replenished when I get back home.

As a nonfiction writer you must get on the plane. If a subject interests you, go after it, even if it’s in the next county or the next state or the next country. It’s not going to come looking for you.

Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.