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.
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