from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s interview with James Norton for Flak Magazine “I believe in the glory of nonfiction. I don’t believe in the hierarchy of genres that seems to prevail in the United States. Is the novel the higher calling, or is poetry the higher calling? Frankly I think nonfiction is equally great and equally profound—and often gloriously better. I’m a convert to my own genre, is the way I’d say it. You meet a lot of nonfiction writers who feel …
Amidst a gripping account of his gig as a $90,000-a-year staff writer at The New Yorker, freelance writer Dan Baum discusses the magazine’s views on narrative nonfiction structure, as codified by a longtime articles editor there, John Bennett. In talking with Baum early in his relationship with the magazine about finding and writing a story from the Iraq war, Bennett advised him to make it a “process” story: “ ‘It’s a New Yorker standard,’ he went on. ‘You simply deconstruct …
“Dialogue for me is the most effective and most interesting way of defining character, making it unnecessary for the writer to intrude with any song-and-dance routine of his own,” explains literary journalist Lillian Ross in Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism. “Moreover, as in a play or movie, dialogue moves the action along. That is why so many readers write to me and say that they felt, while reading a piece, that they were right there, with me.” “A tape recorder …
from Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg: “A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander. The fly on the table might be part of the whole description of a restaurant. It might be appropriate to tell precisely the sandwich that it just walked over, but there is a fine line between precision and self-indulgence. “Stay on the side of precision; know your …
Reading an elegant memoir this week, I became annoyed with the dingbats the publisher inserted in the author’s line breaks, the white spaces he used as transitions between sections in chapters. A dingbat, in this case a set of three square blocks, is “an ornamental piece of type for borders, separators, decorations,” says Dictionary.com. That’s the third definition—the first is “an eccentric, silly, or empty-headed person” and the second is “dingus,” a “gadget, device, or object whose name is unknown …
Brian Spadora interviewed Norman Sims for the Poynter Center, a progressive independent journalism education foundation. Sims is a scholar of literary journalism and the occasion was the release of his latest book, True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism. Some excerpts from their discussion: “On the journalistic roller-coaster ride of the 20th century, the major styles, such as muckraking, interpretative reporting, and even investigative journalism, did not remove the reporter from the text, but objectivity did.” “Done right, public affairs …