Just Tell Them What Happened

By Michael Damiano

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

~W. Somerset Maugham

"You know, this is a for-credit option, Michael," Dr. John Glavin told me sternly. What he meant was clear: if he was going to pass me for three credits at the end of the semester — eight weeks away — I needed to start making progress.

I started my first book — a popular account of the life of Spanish painter Miquel Barceló — in college. I'd been meeting with Dr. Glavin — a strict English professor with a white goatee and a bowtie — for a weekly writing mentorship since the beginning of the fall semester of my senior year at Georgetown University. I had finished the two years of in-depth research by then. Now I had to turn the material into a compelling narrative.

Every Wednesday morning I brought Dr. Glavin two printed copies of what I'd produced in the last week, and read out loud as he followed along. The results had not been good. I'd tried beginning the book by narrating how I'd woken up startled from a dream I'd had about Barceló one night while visiting a friend in England. "Is there a good reason this book about a Spanish painter should begin in Leeds?" Dr. Glavin had deadpanned. Another week, I'd considered rendering a scene from the perspective of a pig Barceló was about to slaughter. This idea was met, mercifully, with silence.

That had been two or three weeks earlier and, since then, I'd basically stalled. I'd hardly ever written anything besides academic papers and I wondered, for the first time, if I just wasn't cut out for writing narrative. But now I had to figure something out. I had one week until my next meeting with Dr. Glavin, who had made it clear that I needed to show him something substantial — at least twenty pages or a complete chapter.

So I was back at my desk, looking at a blank screen and wondering what to do next. What was wrong with what I'd written so far? I'd been trying too hard to make the writing dramatic, I thought. The result had been melodramatic and contrived. Then, for some reason, I remembered an e-mail I'd written a year earlier, the night that I'd first met Barceló. I'd told a journalist friend about the meeting — which had occurred at a private party Barceló threw for his friends — and she'd asked me to tell her everything about it. Late one night I wrote her a long e-mail as quickly as possible. I used hardly any capital letters, I punctuated haphazardly and I made no considerations for style. I was just trying to tell her what happened at the party. She wrote back in the morning: "This is just extraordinary... I really enjoyed reading this... because it is so raw and alive."

At the time, I'd been pleased my friend enjoyed the e-mail, but I hadn't given her response much thought beyond that. Now I remembered those words: "raw and alive." What could be further from my assessment of the writing I'd produced recently: "melodramatic and contrived"? Something had worked in that e-mail that hadn't been working now that I was actually trying to write a book. And whatever it was, I needed to recreate it.

I went upstairs from my basement bedroom and took a Trader Joe's beer out of the fridge. Back at my desk I drank it too quickly, then opened a new e-mail window. I'd decided the first chapter of my book would be about Barceló's painting of a dome at the UN headquarters in Geneva. The project had been a calamity; it had nearly failed multiple times and caused a political scandal in Spain. I addressed the e-mail to my friend, noted the numbing buzz from the beer, and started to tell her what happened in Geneva, just like I'd done in the e-mail a year earlier. I wrote like that every day for a week. The writing was littered with sentences that began with "anyway," "so," or "the thing is." The tone was conversational, almost as if it were a transcript of me telling the story of the Geneva dome over dinner.

The following Wednesday morning, shortly before my meeting with Dr. Glavin, I finished telling the story in e-mail form. I copied the text into a Word document. I had twenty pages and no time to read them. I hit "print" and then flipped through the warm pages, horrified. There were no capital letters, the punctuation was haphazard and the language was, it seemed to me, exceedingly colloquial. My professor had asked me to get my act together and this was what I was going to bring him.

In his office, I slid his copy of the pages across his desk. He assayed the thickness of the stack approvingly, and I started reading. For forty minutes he said nothing and I didn't dare to raise my eyes from the pages. I cringed every time I had to read a sentence beginning with "anyway" or "the thing is," but I kept going. When I finished, I put my pages down and looked at him for the first time. He was grinning. "This is a triumph," he said. I was floored. "It has pace. It's visual. The voice is young, but once you clean it up..." He was still smiling, obviously pleased, so I smiled, too. He asked me for another fifteen pages for the following week. So, I went back to my basement bedroom and kept writing e-mails, just telling friends and family the story of Barceló's life.

A year later, I sold my book to one of Spain's most prestigious publishers and in May 2012, two years after I graduated from college, it was published throughout the Spanish-speaking world. I wrote much of the first draft in e-mail form but even when I was writing directly into Word, I always reminded myself to just tell the reader what happened.

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