1. Develop your own Voice
2. Tell a Story
3. Do your Homework
4. Avoid Cliches and Catch-all Adjectives
5. Revise
Inventive car and house metaphors to explain each of the above principles, notwithstanding, the two writers provided palatable morsels of how-to's for a packed room of would-be and practicing writers. For example, Wizenberg used Ira Glass, host and producer of This American Life, to illustrate "voice" in a literal way--how easily we can recognize his voice and rhythm when we hear him and that affects the way we hear the stories he tells. In essence, no one else could tell the same story like he does.
The "tell a story" principle in food was a tall order, I thought. That is, until they served us each a chunk of kimchi and a block of chocolate and asked us to freewrite. One woman wrote about a period of her childhood in Korea and still another described her love-hate relationship with five-star-spicy food. And I remembered I used kimchi to spice up salmon soup I used to make in Japan. Then it didn't seem so far off that writing about food were stories, too.
As a science writer, there is no article I write that doesn't involve copious research. It comes with the territory. But Amster-Burton's challenge to use the telephone hit home with me. He said, "When you bring someone else into your story, it gives the story a ring of truth that it would never have with only you and your paper." "Great writing sounds like truth," he added, and explained that someone said it but he couldn't remember their name.
Writers they recommended: Jonathan Gold, Francis Lam, Tad Friend, MFK Fisher, David Chang and Peter Meehan, Jeffrey Steingarten, and Frank Bruni
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