journalism

David Foster Wallace on nonfiction

February 18, 2009 | 2 Comments

The late novelist and journalist was interviewed by Becky Bradway for Creating Nonfiction: A Guide and Anthology by Bradway and Doug Hesse: “The reader’s pre-suspension of disbelief gives nonfiction a particular kind of power, but it also seems to encumber the nonfiction with a kind of moral obligation fiction doesn’t have. If a piece of fiction is markedly implausible or ‘untrue’ in some way, the reader feels a certain bored distaste, or maybe disappointment. If a piece of nonfiction, though, …

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Truth and beauty

January 20, 2009 | No Comments

I’ve touched before on the issue of truth in nonfiction, but the latest scandal, involving a fictionalized Holocaust memoir, impels me to return. (Oprah keeps falling for these stories that are too good to be true. Truth often is stranger than fiction but it’s seldom as shapely.) I tell students these are three reasons for honesty: • Practical: A nonfiction writer will destroy his credibility and career by lying. This is an embarrassing reason, as it’s so utilitarian, but perhaps …

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Michael Pollan on narrative journalism

November 28, 2008 | 4 Comments

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 …

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Chuck Klosterman on scene, essentially

November 22, 2008 | 5 Comments

from Klosterman’s interview with Michael Piafsky in The Missouri Review, Fall 2008 “In essay writing you can’t explain things enough. The better you explain something, the more detailed the argument is structured, the better it is. But in a novel, you are better off underexplaining things. You can have two characters having a conversation, and it doesn’t matter if the tangible interaction is technically unclear; you can still get a sense or a feeling from it, and you can somehow …

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Between self and story

November 16, 2008 | 7 Comments

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.

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Noted: Samuel J. Freedman

November 7, 2008 | One Comment

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 …

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Review: ‘The Thing Itself’

November 1, 2008 | 3 Comments

The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity by Richard Todd. Riverhead. 272 pages. &16.47 Probing inner truth in this edgy moment, Richard Todd finds much that feels inauthentic, empty, drained of meaning. Once executive editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Todd’s been paying attention a long time and he lives in a place reeking with history, western Massachusetts. He wants to know the source of this malaise and why we hunger after authenticity—and what is that, anyway? In our neighborhoods …

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