On quotes and veracity
The next time you read a magazine article, ask yourself, “Do people really talk like this?”
I’m referring to the paragraph-long quotes in long pieces where the truth of the story matters even more than the nitty-gritty accuracies. If you’re going to keep your reader submerged in the narrative of your work, how can you serve them “uhs” and “ums?”
You can’t. Every writer makes his or her decision on how to shape quotes so they fit as seamlessly as possible into the larger tale. It might be harsh, even revolting, to accept at first. Big features? Well known authors? Massaging quotes to fit the piece? Oh, woe is me and my literary fondnesses! But no, I can’t agree with these imagined histrionics.
The fact is, long form journalism is has some art to it. You’ve got to keep your reader turning the pages, all the while remaining loyal to the truth, both observed and discerned. This is the challenge. When quoting sources, then, you’ve got to synthesize. Subtly notify the reader when you’ve condensed a quote. If you use two quotes sequentially, but your source said much in between them, break up those quotes with attribution.
And there are other methods too, of remaining true and accurate while not reproducing verbatim your sources’ speeches. These are the creative spots in journalism; this is where it gets fun. But underlying it all is that fealty to truth.
When you write a long journalistic piece, whether a profile or a feature or a narrative, the bottom line is truth. See and comprehend the truth of a story, use evidence to analyze those elements of human nature that bore the truth of a story.
To use a hackneyed expression, get to the heart of the matter. In all its triteness, this is the essence of good journalism.
On Narrative Nonfiction
This has to be brief.
Much like the real thing, the education of journalism in its later stages, piles deadlines upon deadlines, so there isn’t much time to opine on the philosophical underpinnings of pedagogy.
I am writing mostly narrative nonfiction these days. It is an exercise in psychology.
Narrative functions not on the level of events and factoids, but on the personal realities those things create, destroy, affect and inform. Narrative nonfiction writing is telling the story of your subject.
This is not to be confused with a short news story on an action. This is a longer, in-depth view of the motivations behind such action. Narrative, in short, takes the motives found in literature and applies it to real people in real situations.
It asks a lot of the journalist. The process is to locate the mind behind the news, to understand the “why.” It is an existential search, in a way, trying to find the authenticity behind the edifice.
The coursework at Columbia is overwhelming. Far more demanding than the first semester, the second delves into the elements of human nature, into the soul. It asks us, the writers, to search ourselves, bare our fears and desires, in search of those same things in our sources. And our fealty?
While we must remain accurate to our sources, our loyalty is to the story, to the theme, to the truth of situation that we discern, isolate and relate. We make the connections. We comprehend the reasons why.
In narrative nonfiction, the story is not simply retold or reformulated. It waits to be discovered. Where it goes from there will remain on the conscience of the author forever.
End of Days
The last threads of faith are scattering from my frayed talis. Slick-haired weatherman just told me tomorrow, mother nature’s gonna kick my ass. So I looked it up on weather.gov. 45 and breezy.
So let me get this straight….
a car barrels through scuffling pedestrians in Manhattan. A man breaks both kneecaps. The driver speeds away. Next up? Your favorite TV shows are coming back to air.
A movie critic cheerleads for a patently shitty new film; an MSNBC anchor uses a turn of phrase to pose a question, but because it’s politically incorrect, he’s suspended and has to tuck tail between legs in a disingenuous televised apology.
There’s so much more. So many reasons to look at broadcast news and wonder, is this really journalism? Or is this just a pile of shit, perfumed for viewing pleasure.
When it comes down to it, ’sex,’ ‘drugs,’ and ’scandal’ are what make you click on the link, or hold the remote just a little bit longer. These catchwords drive news more than events themselves. When the election is about a tanking economy and a failing war, the broadcast is about the word “pimp,” and how many 8-balls Barak blew up his nose thirty years ago.
Is there even a war anymore? I haven’t seen news on TV regarding Iraqin weeks. It’s as if, because there’s an election on the horizon, the lives lost, the lives of Americans lost, just don’t place high in the show anymore. And of course, there’s the ubiquitous household danger, waiting to kill you at any moment, sneaking surreptitiously behind you as we speak. What is it? We’ll tell you, after this message from our sponsors.
I can no longer regard television news as anything more than cheap entertainment. And the glibness with which anchors approach these issues is sickening. Print and broadcast are different worlds. And the more competition television gets from the internet, the more outlandish and irresponsible broadcast news will get.
Integrity is dead in pop culture. No one reads anymore. I persist in a profession better suited to the cemetery.
A Brief One
Keep your eyes open. This is the essence of journalistic preparedness. At Columbia News Service, a Spring-semester class that puts assignments on a news wire run under the auspices of the New York times, and which goes out to over 400 newspapers nationally, we have five articles to write over the course of the semester. So while working on my first story, I get a lead for another story. It is essential to pay attention to these leads. They can make or break the future.
And this goes for professional journalism as well. Stories are not hard to come by. They’re always out there, waiting in that ether to be discovered by sight, sound and thought.
In another class, the first assignment is to write a narrative about the theme “In Wartime.” A narrative is a story about change over time. This is one simple incarnation of it, anyway. And when writing a narrative, it’s not so much about quotes and hard facts. It’s more about atmosphere, about bringing the reader into the lives of the characters.
My first narrative is about a chili cook-off, an interesting and off-kilter riff on the theme. My second assignment is on the theme, “Ties That Bind.”
In an example of what I introduced above, I had the opportunity to interview a friend about a marriage that took place in an ancient Scottish castle, in which, on a glorious summer day, a trained owl brought the white gold rings of leaves and diamonds that signified their bond of matrimony. What a powerful image of connection! And all this, a week in advance, simply because I followed up on a thought with a phone call, then an interview, and then the writing.
This is how to stay ahead, here at Columbia, and out there, in the big, bad, professional world.
Starting Hard
February 7, 2008
Writing the long form is a different animal. Material is gathered in the same ways – conducting interviews, pounding the pavement in hope of the random pickup, doing historical research – but the process is entirely different.
Quotes are molded to fit the form, ideas are fleshed out in lengthy, luxurious strokes of thought. The honesty to the story goes far deeper than adherence to the facts. The story has to be retold, through the author, in the voice of the author, incorporating the truths of all the sources and resources, while creating a greater truth that comes from the author himself.
For feature pieces, this process can result in five thousand words. For a book it’s a hundred thousand. This week, David Maraniss, author of “They Marched Into Sunlight,” about an ambush in Vietnam in 1967 and a violent protest that occurred at the same time in Madison, Wisconsin, visited my book-writing class. For the book, he interviewed dozens upon dozens upon dozens of subjects, more than 180, I think (it says it somewhere in the book). He brought old soldiers to Vietnam to meet their former enemies. He used old letters, official documents, photographs and maps to reconstruct the war abroad and the war at home in great detail. While his writing is masterful and evocative, the power of his story comes from the information, the reporting.
That’s the bones of it, really. It’s the reporting. It’s a term I don’t much care for. I don’t know why. Something about the word, “report.” Reminds me too much of the rain-soaked antics of weathermen in hurricane season. Still, it is the backbone of all nonfiction writing.
Reporting yields material. Material yields story. And story is the essence of good writing.
Dispatch from an Interview
January 24, 2008
Ten minutes after a laughing conversation about experiences decapitating small mammals, the scientist and I entered into journalistic no-man’s land. He says to me that the university should be very proud about the research he’s been doing; and that I should write that.
Later in the day, walking in the blustery uptown winds across West End Avenue, a friend asks me what’s wrong with that? In longer pieces, he says, you should have the ability to get into things like that.
Like saying someone “should’’ do something?
There are key words that can tip you off. Should. What a troublesome little word. Should. It drips with anticipation. You shouldn’t have sex before marriage. You shouldn’t kill people. You shouldn’t do drugs. You shouldn’t go out on the hot summer street unless draped head to toe in black fabric. Should is a judgment word. The author is applying some external structure of value, within which the object ought to be compelled to commit to action.
In short, “should’’ equals editorial.
And this, I explained to my friend as we now boarded the 86th Street cross town bus, is why I can’t put it in my article.
It’s a funny thing, the way everything can change in an interview in a matter of a few words. For forty-five minutes I was making friends with this guy, sharing lab experiences, agreeing about science-y type things. And then, in a sentence, it’s shattered. That camaraderie, gone. Poof. It is the recognition that the line is still there, indelible, waiting to be approached, touched, punctured. The interview subject is, after all the chatter, acrimony, flirting, or sympathy, still a subject. Critical distance applies, perhaps more than ever. It is when the journalist is at once the most and least human; completely interested, entirely detached.
You can’t teach this shit.
Gonzo Soup, A Dweezil Halloween
January 17, 2008
gonzo : 1 : idiosyncratically subjective but engagé 2 : bizarre 3 : freewheeling or unconventional especially to the point of outrageousness
Wikipedia on the Origins of Gonzo: The term “gonzo” was first used by Boston Globe editor Bill Cardoso in 1970 when he described Hunter S. Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, which was written for the June 1970 Scanlan’s Monthly, as “pure gonzo journalism”[1]. Cardoso claimed that “gonzo” was South Boston Irish slang describing the last man standing after a drinking marathon[2]. Cardoso also claimed that it was a corruption of the French Canadian word “gonzeaux”, which means “shining path”; although, this is disputed[3]. The word may have been inspired by the 1960 hit song Gonzo by New Orleans R&B keyboardist James Booker.
Craig Rothstein on gonzo: Gonzo offers a creative method of writing nonfiction. By making the admission that the story is subjective, the journalist can use all the tools of perception in creating a truth of scene through text. By this, I mean there exists the unspeakable sum-that-is-greater-than-all-parts experience of a moment; something that cannot be translated by description, but only hinted at through intimate details. The functional truth melts in the heat of fear and thrill and sensuality. These exquisite bits of observation, when done properly, can reflect a personal moment that shares a truth beyond any purely accurate retelling of neatly spaced events. In this spirit, the following is my submission from Halloween, a piece I requested to do in the gonzo style because my subject was the Zappa Plays Zappa concert at the Beacon Theater on Broadway at W. 74th St. It is a pale effort in the shadow of the gonzo progenitor, Hunter S. Thompson, but it’s an attempt, nonetheless. I hope you like it.
The butterfly king spread his leopard-print wings and the lights went dim above him. Frank Zappa appeared behind Dweezil, who had assembled with the rest of the band, glittering like metal objects under the white stage lights. The acrid scent of cheap reefer drifted to the upper section of the Beacon Theater. A house full of silver-haired ghosts of a different age settled in for a three-hour show.
On Halloween, the boundary between reality and un-reality was breached here, in the famed concert venue on Broadway at West 74th St.
Outside the hall, the city was overrun with midget goblins and immature devils, scampering up and down brownstone staircases in search of candy, in sight of mom and dad. Vulgarity stripped of its malice; innocence in horns.
Inside, that distinction dissolved. In the bathroom on the top floor, where the urinals are flush with the wall and there are no courteous divisions, a disheveled fellow was self-ingratiating. I got the hell out of there.
In the theater, the edifice above the stage looked like wrought iron in the darkness. A dingy red glow came from behind. Then the senior Zappa appeared on stage, an analog projection of the ghost whose vocal track was set on top of live music. Old Zappa, young Zappa. Dead, un-dead.
Zappa’s music is precision off-kilter. Elevator xylophone melted into heavy-metal riffs. Adam Wallitt, sitting to the side, asked if he could sit on my left. “I’m a little deaf,” he said.
“At this moment,” I said after a thick rhythm crested, “so am I.”
Wallitt looked at me plainly. Either he didn’t hear or it wasn’t funny.
He could hear the high notes, he explained, but not the low ones. This seat, closer to the center section, was better. I heard, in the aural melee, the shuffling consonants of his speech.
Devon Stein moved into the seat next to Adam. Stein had gotten the tickets for tonight’s show, “Zappa Plays Zappa,” Dweezil’s musical project to cover his father’s original music. Stein gave two tickets to Josh Gould, who spared one for me.
The scenes behind Dweezil appeared to be from Zappa’s movie, “Baby Snakes,” according to Stein, a steadfast Zappa fan. “Baby Snakes” was filmed at Frank Zappa’s 1977 Halloween concert at the Palladium Theater in New York City.
Dweezil sank into a long groove. The guitar climbed high on a singular, twisting note. Tiny finger movements, invisible from up here, transgressed an unholy line between organic and unnatural. Wallitt whistled while he stood. It struck me, the dead playing with the living, the deaf hearing music, the un-vulgar goblins running amok outside and the horrific vulgarity of the third-floor men’s room. It came together during that long guitar scream. The silver students of the seventies music scene, smoking their last joints. This was a graveyard. A dying scene on the day of the dead - an entire culture on its way out.
After a couple of hours, a sonic landscape resolved: rectangular ships adrift on paper waves. The Beacon took on the appearance of a womb, a circular fold of smooth muscle encircling the ceiling, pulsing and erotic in the shifting dark. A hypodermic stalactite, ostensibly some sort of chandelier, hung down from the center of that fearsome, orgasmic roof. The air was thick with smoke and it was becoming easier to imagine that Frank had never died of prostate cancer in 1993.
After 11 p.m. the stentorian riffs neared their close. Frank appeared, after a long respite, on the screen again. Viscous guitar and scenes from twenty years ago, Dweezil playing dad’s music dressed in what appeared to be pajamas, Frank behind him in a billowing red blouse and tight red pants. Even from beyond the grave, Frank exuded a musky sexuality.
The band came to its close. The members, some from the original band, bowed and faded into backstage. I readied to leave.
“Frank’s been dead fifteen years already, “said Gould, standing above me.
“Not tonight,” I said, seeing that boundary crumble and dissolve. “Tonight, he’s alive again.”
Cold Shoulder
January 17, 2008
On Saturday, I am sitting in a very cold, very drafty room in upstate New York. The room is in a house which is rather cold and drafty all over. Outside, it is snowing and the sounds of college students on break splinters through the wet air. Inside, the shuffling steps of people just waking up rattles the thin wooden windowpanes.
I am here to interview an old friend of mine for a long feature piece on green roofing. A green roof is a planted section of a flat rooftop that offers myriad energy solutions for a structure. Given all indications, green roofing might just be the biggest single design factor that could mitigate the enormous energy waste from buildings – by far the greatest energy consumers in the land.
And, given that sustainability is the new sexiness in the eco-friendly set, the story has legs. Especially in light of Al Gore’s winning of the Nobel Prize, a story on sustainable living actually has a chance to make it into prime media.
My friend, who, as a preliminary source at the moment shall go nameless, received his graduate degree in horticulture from Cornell University. He moved to New York City, and then to Maryland, working for several different green roof and horticulture companies. Now he’s relocated to upstate New York with drams of opening his own nursery, designed after his own inimitable engineering fashion; a sure success given my undying faith that he’s something of a bizarre genius.
Given all this, as I interview him on my brand new voice recorder, I have in the back of my mind the notion that here, there be danger. And questions lurk. Must I include in the story that this source and I lived together in college? Or that we also shared an apartment on the Upper East Side of New York City? What about all our college exploits? Adventures in travel? Nights of profound intoxication? Existential vision quests of the sort undertaken only by twenty-year-old suburban New Yorkers?
All these questions must be answered, now and every time I use an associate or friend in a piece. And from what I can tell, it is not unlikely that a working journalist uses friends often. They make for trustworthy sources on a variety of issues, so why not make good use of them?
But beware! Trust issues are unavoidable. Information left out because of personal entanglements; a soft eye in criticism; a trusting subtext in the story where none should exist. These subconscious landmines loom in a piece like this, and since this is my first time dealing with such a problem, I don’t yet know how to handle them.
Respite
December 11, 2007
Twenty-four hours ago I wasn’t happy. Thick in the middle of an exam on law and journalism, my head was deep in supreme court rulings. NYT v. Sullivan, Cohen v. Cowles, Bartniki, Food Lion, Shulman, Sanders, the list goes on. These cases outline the borders of how press can function under the freedoms afforded by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. They parse the instances where the press can intrude upon privacy.
It is a state province, for example, as to how many participants in a conversation are needed to permit recording of that conversation.
In New York, only one party in a conversation, over the phone say, must be aware of the taping. In California, all parties must agree.
This and other types of cases, mostly on the rights of the press to publish particular information, and the rights of citizens in balance with the press, has been a riveting experience in furious constitutional law. And it all ended this weekend, today, in fact, when I emailed my final exam (a take home affair taking a dozen or so hours) to the vigilant teaching assistant.
In fact, the semester is pretty much over. RWI, the lifeblood of the first semester, ended with an in-depth profile of a real estate grand dame in the Bronx. Techniques of Feature Writing, which I thought had a light workload, but offered some valuable information on the business side of life as a journalist - like visits with editors from Esquire and and a writer from the New Yorker, ended a couple of weeks ago with a feature story on a zen beekeeper on City Island, a tiny place off the Bronx Shore in the Long Island Sound.
The last class to end will do so tomorrow, with another take home exam. Critical Issues, the ethics course at Columbia, comes to an end with a written exam taking material from the semester, material like the story of Nelliie Blythe, who feigned insanity to write an undercover story about asylums. Or the editor who made up a visit to a murder, or the photographer who offed himself after shooting a famous pic. We talked about George Bush and his historic ineptitude, Israel and the Palestinians, 9/11, Nazis, the Viet Cong, and countless other instances in which the ethics of the journalists whose work now informs history impacted the world, and the journalists.
Our last discussion in our Critical Issues class - the discussion section, which meets after the general lecture in the top floor of the journalism building, in an attic-shaped computer lab, at a long white table - regarded whether it was okay to buy a source drinks while working. The answer was surprisingly different. Well, let me be more precise. The question was, can you socialize with a source? Now, that is, yes, a bit different that the previous question. My answer would be maybe.
As to the beer-buying, I think it’s fine. Many did not. One astute young fellow said it was absolutely not right to let your guard down to a source, which did not necessarily preclude drinking or buying drinks. His point wasn’t well made, despite being a good point, and the next ten minutes consisted of the predictable grad school debate that started off missing the point.
But hey, people were talking.
In the end, ethics as we were taught at Columbia this, the first semester of the Master of Science program, are a personal thing. We’ve learned a lot about what not to do out there, in the field, in the action. but what to do is the far more important question. I’ve figured a little bit of that so far. I get the feeling, though, that it won’t be a finished process by graduation. Actually, it may never be finished at all.
Knuckling up for the new year
December 30, 2007
Things move fast at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
The first semester went by in a blur. Like some distorted bender upon which you find yourself trolling the late night cracks in the sidewalks, boarding the wrong subway and getting into a fist fight just blocks from home (an experience I’d rather not repeat), the first semester comes out of nowhere, hits hard, and leaves just as fast.
Yet, unlike that unfortunate run in with the Five Fingers of Death (or of Fat Lip, as was the case) the first semester at Columbia was undeniably enjoyable. Apart form the rush of assignments on deadline, the pressure of adhering to the ubiquitous style of the Associated Press, and the competition to get into highly coveted classes in the spring semester, such as Judith Crist’s Personal and Professional Style, or the journalism of religion class which visit Ireland this year as part of their workload, there was a sense of pure fun.
We are journalists. It is our job to go out into the world and watch it roll by, at unprecedented speeds, with glorious and terrifying stories to behold. The most powerful idea i took from my professors, in particular my professor for the centerpiece course: Reporting and Writing I, was: “this is fun.” Journalism is a good time, and the better one does it, the better a time can be had.
So it is in this spirit that I take up the new year. After a long, not-entirely-sober respite involving a flight to San Diego, well-drinks, close encounters of the strange kind, and a not-too-awful round of golf, I am ready to return to Columbia for the spring semester.
My courses are as follows: book Writing, Narrative Writing, the Columbia News Service, which is a real news wire feeding over 400 publications nationwide, and the continuing Master’s Project.
In the coming weeks, I’ll update as to the progress of that project, as well as the goings-on in my new classes. But for now, vacation continues. At least for a little while.