from an interview with Tony Earley conducted by Hattie Fletcher for Nidus “I can’t write any piece, fiction or nonfiction, until I come up with a metaphor. I hate the idea of writing on only one level. Often just walking around through the world, I’ll see something and think, damn, that is a great metaphor—for what? And so I have a metaphor, but I have no thing to hook it to. And so, a piece usually results when I find …
This is a guest post by Tom Gilbert, my son, a college sophomore majoring in philosophy and film. “To write a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme.” –Herman Melville, Moby-Dick “Everyone knows I’m not a folk singer,” says Jude Quinn/Cate Blanchett/Bob Dylan at the end of I’m Not There, and I might have taken that a little easier if it was said to a superimposed LBJ or questioning reporter. But as it stood, right into the camera, with …
From Michael Pollan’s comments in Nieman Narrative Digest: “Journalists often write as people who have mastered subjects and are telling you about them. That’s a real turn-off for readers. In my work I often begin as a naif. It’s a good place to start because it’s a lot closer to where your reader is. Instead of starting as someone who knows the answers, you begin as someone learning about something. That’s a good way to connect with readers. “I often …
I encountered Papa’s warning in my teens, reading everything by and about him. When I went to work in newspapers after college, his phrase haunted at odd moments. I’d just knocked out my fourth police brief of a morning, say, and realized I had another to go—on an epidemic of car-battery thefts—and it was six minutes before deadline. Usually it was satisfying, working each little story like a jigsaw puzzle, selecting pieces culled from the police blotter. But was this what he meant?
A roundup of battery thefts doesn’t bring to life the widow, outsourced by the textile mill, turning her ignition key to silence in the Wal-Mart lot as plastic bags blow past. But it doesn’t intend to. Is there anything inherent in journalism (or nonfiction generally) that bars it from doing everything fiction might do with her story, including rendering her point of view?
Not theoretically, no. It’s thrilling to realize that. There are only practical difficulties, but admittedly brutal ones. You need her story and permission to use it; you have to get her to talk—in detail; and essentially she must let you enter her mind. The sheer work and trust involved in this process—call it reporting—is staggering. Talented immersion journalists succeed, but the difficulty may be one reason fiction has been a historic default for writers.
from Letters to a Young Journalist by Samuel J. Freedman “You need to know that these techniques—identifying a single theme, outlining before writing—are not baby steps for beginners. The most accomplished nonfiction writers utilize them.” “Robert Caro has won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, among other honors, for his epic biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, each volume hundreds of thousands of words in length. Still, Caro once told a class of mine that he will not …
From “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow,” a chapter in Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction Writing— “According to [Virginia] Tufte [in Grammar as Style], ‘The better the writer . . . the more he tends to vary his sentence length. And he does it as dramatically as possible.’ Since variation of sentence length results from varying sentence structure, ultimately it’s our syntax that determines whether our prose flows …
Interviewed for The Paris Review, Fall 2008, by Sarah Fay. “I don’t try to teach technique, because frankly most technical problems go away when a writer realizes where the life of the story lies. I don’t see any reason for fine-tuning something that’s essentially not going anywhere anyway. What they have to do first is interact in a serious way with what they’re putting on a page. When people are fully engaged with what they’re writing, a striking change occurs, …