Jon Krakauer: Writing is like Rock Climbing

Fri, 04/27/2012 - 02:06 — Anonymous El Capitan, Yosemite. Photo by daveynin
via Flickr, (Creative Commons) This week I've been making my way through a
collection of interviews called The New New Journalism: Conversations with
America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft. It's an interesting
read. The writers—everyone from Gay Talese to Eric Schlosser and Susan
Orlean—describe how they work, from story idea through interviewing to
writing and editing. In one section, Jon Krakauer explains his use of
outlines. It involves a lot of hand-written scenes pinned to his office wall
in sequence. The book's author, Robert S. Boynton, asks him where he got
the technique. Here's Krakauer's reply: Rock climbing. When you embark on
a really big climb like, say, the Salathé wall of El Capitan, which rises
three thousand vertical feet from the floor of Yosemite Valley, the enormity
of the undertaking can be paralyzing. So a climber breaks down the ascent
into rope-lengths, or pitches. If you can think of the climb as a series of
twenty or thirty pitches, and focus on each of these pitches to the exclusion
of all the scary pitches that still lie above, climbing El Cap suddenly
isn't such an intimidating prospect. By following an outline I can focus on
the chapter that's in front of me… It makes writing a book much less
terrifying. World Hum