The New Yorker

Pieces go through many rounds with one editor, so writers arrive with late drafts. David Sedaris, who has written for the magazine for more than 30 years, says a piece sees about 17 drafts with his editor, and he hands her the 15th rather than the third.

Having worked a piece hard alone, he can also defend what matters, like his biggest laugh. Quote: "If they're going to be 17 drafts, I'd rather give her the 15th and then we go two more"

How I Write▶ 30:30

An absurd premise can run if worked until it is respectful. Sedaris's essay on the Anne Frank house started from catching himself mentally rearranging the kitchen as if house hunting. He worked out how to explain that mindset without belittling her death; it ran in The New Yorker and drew only two complaints.

Quote: "there has to be a way to make this work"

How I Write▶ 4:40

Feature pieces take months, and contributors fit them around other work. Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer for 20 years, says features take three months to a year or more. Gawande, as a surgical resident, managed one or two New Yorker pieces a year on a goal of 30 hours a month.

Gawande used the hour or more of turnover between operations to read and research, and weekends to get drafts down.

How I Write

Daniel Zalewski: cull the cast so readers aren't overloaded. When Keefe's Sister Ping piece had five or six FBI agents, Zalewski told him, "You have to cull the herd here." Keefe now treats each new person, place or scene as load on the reader's mental RAM.

He introduces fewer characters, does each one well, and lets minor figures just be another agent. That piece, his first for Zalewski, became his second book, The Snakehead. Zalewski shapes stories from the start.

How I Write▶ 57:25

Pitch the magazine in three tight paragraphs, not thousands of words. Keefe receives 5,000-word pitches for The New Yorker and asks whether the sender would enjoy getting that email. An editor gets a hundred emails a day, so leave them wanting more.

Its Tuesday ideas meetings float a Beyoncé profile about every six months. Quote: "You got to do it in three tight paragraphs."

How I Write▶ 1:04:44

House style serves the brand, and can flatten a writer's voice. Ocean Vuong says house styles at the New Yorker and the Times are also brands. Editing his 2018 piece there showed him what clarity can look like, but it did not feel like his voice.

He argues editors find it easier when everyone sounds alike, and readers eventually notice books edited into one style.

How I Write▶ 48:00

Atul Gawande's first piece took 22 back-and-forths and nine months. His first New Yorker piece, about 4,000 words, took 22 rounds, five complete rewrites and nine months. A typical piece now needs three or four revisions.

He treated the rewrites as training rather than punishment, a tolerance built earlier when a friend told him what he did well and badly. Each round taught him something that improved the piece.

How I Write▶ 8:40

Feature pieces take months, and contributors fit them around other work. Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer for 20 years, says features take three months to a year or more. Gawande, as a surgical resident, managed one or two New Yorker pieces a year on a goal of 30 hours a month.

Gawande used the hour or more of turnover between operations to read and research, and weekends to get drafts down.

How I Write▶ 11:17

Henry Finder: tell the story as if wearing a head-mounted camera. Gawande's first piece had strong data on diagnosing heart attacks from EKGs but never showed what an EKG looks like. Finder told him to imagine a GoPro on his head and show what is happening.

The fix was to let readers see what the cardiologist and the machine each see. Quote: "You're telling the story with a GoPro attached to your head and you need to show what's happening."

How I Write▶ 53:46

The magazine let reporting borrow fiction techniques and jokes. For 'The Itch', about a woman who scratched through her skull, Gawande aimed to tell a macabre story, explain how the brain handles sensation, and make the reader physically itchy. The magazine allowed fiction techniques and jokes in a reporting piece.

Quote: "I wanted to make you itchy."

How I Write▶ 16:03

Susan Orlean's editor gave her a daily word quota. When she did not know how to write something book length, her New Yorker editor suggested a quota. She writes about a thousand words a day, five days a week, six if behind.

She says it turns an overwhelming book into a task and never removed the poetry, leaving her relaxed enough to play with sentences.

How I Write▶ 53:31

Cut the habitual 'would' and write plain past tense. A New Yorker editor caught Orlean writing 'I would go to the store and buy candy' when she meant 'I went to the store'. Removing it almost always makes a stronger sentence.

Keep it only for the truly deep past. Quote: "much more powerful to not use the word would"

How I Write▶ 37:46

Editors court writers directly, but not every writer wants in. The magazine's editor phoned Dana Gioia to ask why he hadn't submitted poems. Gioia later turned down its poetry editorship because the job would have owned him.

How I Write

The New Yorker's style grew from years of yes and no, not a guide. Harold Ross had no style guide. He held the voice through maniacal editing, a quick yes-or-no filter on pitches and heavy fact checking, and the style emerged from him saying what he disliked over time.

Brie Wolfson draws from this that a quiet sense that something is off should be named rather than silenced, and that pinning a style to terms too early can lose the magic.

How I Write▶ 49:11

Ross was a demanding editor who celebrated work when it was right. In the weekly ideas meeting Ross said no again and again but got excited when he saw the right thing. Wolfson holds him up as a critic who appreciates, as opposed to a curmudgeon for whom nothing is ever good enough.

Her ideal editor looks for the spark and pulls it out, which a good writer takes as a no to the rest. Quote: "What we do need is critics, people who are great appreciators."

How I Write▶ 54:02

Profiles trade completeness for the best few anecdotes. Ross gave up biographical completeness in New Yorker profiles for humor and intrigue. A profile of 5,000 to 10,000 words forces the writer to find three great anecdotes rather than tell a whole life story.

Profiles also rely on exclusives and a chain of obsession between writer and subject. Quote: "We don't need to know everything. We just need to know the best bits."

How I Write▶ 10:40

The look came first, so readers arrive in the right mood. Ross got the look of the magazine right before the content, and Tina Brown later obsessed over covers. Her test: throw the magazine on the floor, let it open to a random page, and you should still know which magazine it is.

Wolfson contrasts this with Substack publications that all look alike. Quote: "The packaging of it really matters."

How I Write▶ 22:56