narrative, stories

The power of chronological structure

August 22, 2009 | 4 Comments

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 …

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Narrative in the news

August 1, 2009 | No Comments

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 …

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Pitfalls of first-person

July 11, 2009 | 5 Comments

I’ve been struggling through Gilead this July, trying to ascertain why I’m lukewarm, at best, toward this acclaimed book so many have savored with such pleasure from an author I respect and admire. Marilynne Robinson’s novel won the Pulitzer and rave reviews from all the large-circulation review outlets that remain in America. Gilead has earned a raft of adoring reader reviews on Amazon—too many people to have been deceived by the superficiality and log-rolling of major book reviews. But there’s …

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The abomination of faked memoir

July 5, 2009 | One Comment

from “Fiction, Fact, and Faked Memoirs,” by Thomas Larson, author of The Memoir and the Memoirist, in New English Review “Writing a memoir, one is tormented less by the particular truth of a character’s emotion, as in fiction, and more by the emotional truth of one’s own experience. Both ‘emotional truths’ are valid; both fictionist and nonfictionist are after a similar truth—fully fleshing out the authenticity of the emotion. But now the integrity of the memoirist figures in. He must …

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A meditation upon ‘Infinite Jest’

June 28, 2009 | No Comments

This is a guest post by my son, Tom Gilbert, a college sophomore majoring in philosophy. David Foster Wallace expressed dissatisfaction with the reviews for his ambitious  Infinite Jest. The 1,104-page book is so expansive that any attempt at a plot synopsis is useless; any sweeping thematic summation seems to feel reductive.  However, the novel’s polyphonic structure and character voices are illuminating in its discussion. The novel bears numerous similarities to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in its character relationships.  Instead …

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Narrative’s evolutionary roots

June 18, 2009 | No Comments

from Origins of Human Communication, Chaper Six, “The Grammatical Dimension,” by Michael Tomasello “Why do people in all cultures tell stories in the first place? . . . Basically, such sharing is a way of expanding our common ground with others and so expanding our communicative opportunities, and, in the end, making us more like them and enhancing our chances of social acceptance (with conformity to the group playing a critical role in processes of cultural group selection). Telling narratives …

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Narrative Newsweek?

June 13, 2009 | 7 Comments

The newsmagazines’ having-it-both-ways blend of newspaper-style objective conventions and jarring rabbit-punch opinions in their news columns always made me queasy. As a friend said, “I feel like I need to take a shower after reading Time or Newsweek.” But I was a Newsweek man, and hung in there through frequent redesigns. Alarmed at first , I soon accepted the new layout and features because I valued the in-depth and reflective coverage, the trend stories, and some of the columnists. Now …

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