Literary Journalism

As Promised: A Mandatory Assignment

Summarize in your own words Lee Gutkind's "Five R's for Literary Journalists" or Kramer's "Breakable Rules of Literary Journalism."  You must do so before Sunday at 11:59 p.m. to receive credit for the assignment.  Your summaries should be posted as comments to this entry.  Otherwise we'll have 23 new posts (all of which say one of two things).

I see many intellectually engaging comments posted and am resisting with all my might the urge to respond to them...because I'm afraid that my "teacherly" response will shut down the discussion.  I don't like having de facto fiat power, so I'll keep my mouth shut for now.  But know that I am reading and we will be addressing the issues raised in class.

Franklin on Foreshadowing (From Writer-L, 9/29/05)

Jon Franklin (the name should ring a bell) wrote a long and intelligent email yesterday to the Writer-L listserv.  In it he addresses many of the issues we'll be tackling when we read Barry's article tomorrow.  I recommend you read both before coming to class, since 1) there may be a quiz but 2) even if there isn't I'll be drawing on Franklin's email to discuss the structure of Barry's article.  That said, here's Franklin on foreshadowing:

Most journalists have trouble with foreshadowing.  One reason is that they are taught to relentlessly think in terms of fact.  Front-office types and theoreticians calling us "information gatherers" hasn't helped, either.  Factual thinking is good, but not if that's where it stops.  As a writer you have to think of other things, too.  A lot of other things.  I sometimes think of myself as a mental juggler.

In the case of foreshadowing, the first issue is that you have to think of your readers' levels of mind.  One thing Freud got right was the three levels of mind (the great neuroanatomist Paul MacLean established a similar paradigm, "the triune brain," in the '60s and '70s.)

Let me illustrate by writing the word "elephant."  You all recognize the word, but you weren't thinking about it at that particular instant.  As soon as you saw the word, your perception of elephant popped to the very top of your mind (where we think and, of course, read).  Some of you might perceive Dumbo, others a zoo elephant, still others among you might think pink elephants.  If you know anything about elephants, you will have associated smells and noises.  When I wrote "elephant" I evoked those things.  That what we mean by "to evoke" - to dredge up things below the surface of the reader's mind.

All of those elephant evocations had emotions attached.  More for some of you, less for others, but all evocable perceptions have emotions. 

True Detective Issues

I, personally, had no problem with the use of the exclamation point in that sentence. Of course, I love the overly dramatic, and I thought it *was* used with a touch of irony. Perhaps it's not blatantly ironic, but for V.I. to have promised people protection (as the nature of his very job), only to be the cause of their deaths...well, I think that's ironic. I did make note of other uses of exclamation points within the piece. For example, "'Ooohh, booooy!' says Mayberry." I might have been tempted to use a stronger attribution than "says" - though I think this proves Harrington is the better writer. He definitely has more control. Although...one might be tempted to ask how you might read that exclamation aloud.
I also have a question about a minor detail that runs throughout the piece. He uses numerals to express numbers, as with the now-famous "22 years." So, why did he not spell out the numbers in some places, but spelled out others, such as "Two years later..." or "nine men." I'm guessing that the clue is visual, that seeing those numerals repeat on the page catches the reader's eye and lends strength to the meaning. Any other suggestions?
Beth

True Detective

Not sure if there is a specific idea we are supposed to focus on for a posting on True Detective, although the Narrative was discussed/touched upon in class. I thought I would just share my thoughts on the piece and maybe hopefully offer something thoughtful or constructive or at the very least a not complete waste of the 5 or 6 minutes it might take for someone to read this.

I'm not shy: I really didn't enjoy reading True Detective. It started out compelling with the staging of what V.I. is all about, and then we get a sense of him, his workplace, his disillusionment. I was further intrigued by the introduction of Willis Fields (is Willis going to be a theme this quarter?) and his alleged murder. I also enjoyed the characterization of V.I., how he was known as the "Ghost." I was prepared to embark on some sort of journey with him, a 'ride along' of sorts, but I kept getting interrupted.

Is there such a thing as too much information? I'm the kind of reader that appreciates the "show don't tell" technique, and in this story there was too much telling for me. For example, couldn't there have been a more delicate way of saying the following:

"But that's not the worst of it: Worse yet is that V.I. has had witnesses he promised to protect get killed. After he promised! So, after 24 years of putting his honor and duty on the line at any time, night or day, V.I. Smith stopped promising. He began saying only that he would do what he could. He has been forced to make his own moral choices outside the expectations of the law: He has let murderers stay free rather than risk the lives of more witnesses."

Why the use of the exclamation mark with 'promised?' Why overstate at all?

I also was distracted by the incessant digressions and unnecessary physical descriptions. We go back and forth between cases and V.I.'s past too frequently, I already 'got him' and didn't need the jumping around; the story wasn't interesting enough to really make me want to keep reading, although I did. Did we really need to know that "Tony" was "wearing a white Champion T-shirt, bluejeans shorts and lavender Saucony running shoes..."? Or that "Kinzer" was "wearing yellow shorts, a white T-shirt, white socks and no shoes."? It just seemed slight and almost desperate to toss these details in, as if Harrington felt obligated to offer some sort of physical description. But why?

By the end, multiple cases have either been solved or are in the process of being solved and V.I has a sense of himself regained after finding a murder worth solving. This theme has been explored before (the disillusioned man at work) with better focus and I believe a stronger narrative. Maybe my reading skills aren't up to par as it's been a long summer, but this piece just lost my interest in the bouncing around to seemingly insignificant characters and, ultimately, a real lack of article prose.

Zach Sire

For Friday, 9/30/05

Read:

• Barry Siegel's "A Father's Pain, A Judge's Duty, and a Justice Beyond Their Reach"

How John McPhee Works, The Short Version

From this week's New Yorker online, an interview with John McPhee.  It begins with a discussion of his most recent series (to be collected in Uncommon Carriers), but quickly moves to his history with the New Yorker and the way he gathers and organizes his information.  Highlights:

These pieces you write contain a huge amount of information. Gathering it is one problem. I understand that you prefer a notebook to a tape recorder?

Prefer is the right word, because I always have a tape recorder. There are all kinds of situations that your notebook can’t cope with.

But once you have all the information, do you just crash through a first draft, or do you build a structure before you begin?       

I know where it’s going to end before I start. First of all, I can’t function very well leaving things to be done later. I assemble all my material first, travelling and interviewing, plus reading. And I get my notes into one lump, one computer file—this mass of notes. And I transcribe them in the order in which they came to me. As I go through that, I start to think of ideas for structure. And then comes the structuring of the piece, which is the part of it that most excites me, and has all the way through. It’s the shortest in time—no more than two weeks—and it’s the most interesting, because in nonfiction writing, when you’re trying to put things together, there are certain absolute constraints. You don’t monkey around with things because it’s factual writing, but you can use flashbacks, for example; you can do a lot of things. If, say, you’re describing a trip and at the same time you’re describing the biography of someone on the trip, the trip structure is pretty much dictated—you can use flashbacks, but you’re telling a story, a narrative; whereas that biography can be sprinkled around—you don’t have to start with birth and go to the present.

Do you do this on paper?       

I read the notes over and over again, and the notes break down in my mind, into components. Let’s say I’ve got three dozen components. I’ll code them with three-letter headings that look like airport codes—EWR, say—codes that mean something to me about these sections. I get that stuff out—if there are thirty-six of them, I get thirty-six three-by-five cards on a table in front of me, on a big surface, and I’m looking at them, looking for juxtapositions, looking for order, looking for where I can impose it.

So these components are themes?       

They’re thematic things, and they’re also parts of the journey. And then I organize them, before I’m into the writing. It’s all been subdivided into those parts from beginning to end, so when I face one of them, I’m not looking at the other thirty-three. This description can sound extremely mechanical, but its effect is just the opposite: it frees you—nothing’s between you and that blank screen.

You’re not carrying the weight of all the information at one time.       

You’re not worried about that at all. You know just where you’re going because you’ve subdivided everything first. And what enables that to a great extent is if you sit down and write a lead first, right out of your head, then when you go back and study the notes, you’ve got a real head start on that structure. But I get the whole structure put together, with a lead, for however long it is, and then I just start going through it, one thing at a time. But I’ve always known where a piece is going to end when I started it, so when I get there I know I’m there, and I can go out and do something else.                                                    

Natural Inherent Narrative

I'm sometimes really far off with my interpretations, but if the "natural, inherent narrative" within Franklin's "Mrs. Kelly's Monster" is humanity's struggle to outdue death with technogical and medical advances, I would say Yes it dominated the story. Except for the beginning (with Dr. Ducker and his wife, the fig newtons) and the end after the words "the retreat begins," there were no real digressions within the main section of the story until the climax. The doctors' struggle to change mother nature's natural course with the aid of technology that was probably advanced for 1978, but in the end, Mrs. Kelly succumbs and the monster wins. We learn (or I guess Mrs. Kelly learns) that if you try to f--- with mother nature's natural progression of things even if you are in pain, you may end up dying before it is necessary, if that makes sense.
I think that the natural narrative helped Franklin to tell the story because it provided him with what I felt was a very engaging scene that had me very interested in who would win: Mrs. Kelly or her monster. I'm glad there were no digressions during the main section of the story besides maybe the "pop, pop, pop," which I think was Not overused, it is simply used more as Franklin builds to his story climax in the operating room.
--Zach Gale

The Story & "Natural Narratives"

As we discussed the narrative structure of Jon Franklin's article today, I kept returning to the idea that there were multiple narratives (Mrs. Kelly's and Dr. Ducker's).  Walking home I realized that I never made a fairly crucial distinction: these multiple narrative strands aren't each their own story so much as the story itself.  The story's larger than Mrs. Kelly or Dr. Ducker.  It doesn't exist without Franklin's artful connection of their narratives.  William Langewiesche (who we'll be reading later in the quarter) says it best:

My subjects rarely have an inherent narrative, an obvious beginning, middle and end.  Rather, the narrative tension is usually something I have to create from scratch. 

The only stories that have had anything resembling a natural, inherent narrative have been my stories about airplane accidents.  You'd think that would make them easier to write.  But the narrative is just the starting point.  If there isn't much beyond the story of the accident, I'm not interested in writing about it.  I use those airline accident pieces to explore much larger questions: the phenomenon of the "normal accident," in the case of "The Lessons of ValuJet 592," of the relations of the first and the third world in the case of "The Crash of EgyptAir 990," or the failings of a bureaucracy and of the national space policy in "Columbia's Last Flight." (213)

While your articles won't necessarily address questions like "the relations of the first and the third world," you needn't think they will to see Langewiesche's point: the literary journalist knows the difference between the narrative and the story and exploits this difference for effect even when the story contains a "natural, inherent narrative."  "Mrs. Kelly's Monster" also contained a "natural narrative."  Did Franklin allow that narrative to dominate the story?  Did the "natural narrative" help or hinder Franklin's ability to tell the story?  What choices could Franklin have made in his treatment of the "natural narrative" that would've improved the story?

For Wednesday, 9/28/05

Read:

• Walt Harrington's "True Detective"
• Lee Gutkind's "The 5 R's of Literary Journalism"

Ponder:

• Would it entertain Scott to quiz his class on the assigned readings?
• How much would it entertain Scott to quiz his class on the assigned readings?
• What can I do to prevent to Scott from quizzing his class on the assigned readings?
• If I'm in the class but haven't filled out the mandatory questionnaire, do I know what "mandatory" means?  Have I confused it with "optional"? 

Didion's "After Life" from Today's New York Times

I take it back.  Don't read that Joan Didion article, read this one.  Not because it's assigned.  Not because it's recommended by your instructor.  But because you're a human being and some things are universal.  (I know how naive that sounds ... but read the article and you'll see how naive I'm not.  Didion laps whatever competition she has.)

If you're interested (and if you're in this class, you should be) in reading more about Didion, she is The New York Times' featured author this week.  It would behoove any aspiring literary journalist to read  reviews of her work.  And did I mention she was skinny?  (I wouldn't bring this up if it weren't actually important.  She discusses how she exploited her unimposing physical presence in interviews.  While other more, shall we say, "forthrightly masculine" authors imposed upon their subjects, interviewees found it difficult to believe that this slight slender lady was more dangerous than a dozen brawling Mailers.)