Just over 40 years ago, a dandified New York reporter named Truman Capote traveled to Kansas to investigate the shotgun murder of a farm family. The result changed journalism forever.
By Amy Standen
Jan 22, 2002 | "In Cold Blood" began, as the story goes, when Truman Capote came across a 300-word article in the back of the New York Times describing the unexplained murder of a family of four in rural Kansas.
"Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI) -- A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged ... There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut."
Capote seized on the grisly story and went down to Kansas to turn it into a book. He spent six years researching "In Cold Blood," and claimed to have invented a genre, the nonfiction novel; later, Tom Wolfe and others would include "In Cold Blood" in their own movement, known as New Journalism.
Both inventions are old hat now, and, more than 35 years after its publication, "In Cold Blood's" radicalism is a lot less apparent. But still the book stands out as a masterfully controlled recounting of murder and its aftermath and the people involved.
Gossip-slinging and accusations swirled about Capote in the sensational months after the book's publication in late 1965, all of it a mere harbinger of the even nastier gossip and accusations that would cloud his later life. But there's no hint of that in Capote's best novel. His meticulous, even obsessive reporting allowed his characters to tell the story, and the result is the best true-crime novel you ever couldn't put down.
Herbert Clutter was a successful farmer and community leader, a man known for his fairness, his loyalty to his invalid wife and his aversion to dealing in cash. (That was a fact that, had it been known to his future assailants, might have kept all four Clutters alive.) The family is almost too much of a 1950s fantasy to be believed. Nancy, a straight-A student and award-winning pie-maker, was dating a high school basketball star.
Kenyon, the bookish youngest Clutter, was building a cedar chest to give to his oldest sister, Beverly, on her wedding. They were regular churchgoers, active in the 4-H. As Holcomb residents would later tell detectives, there was no one who didn't like the Clutters.
Their killers came from as different a world as you could find in rural America at the time. Perry Smith's family was broken and violent. He'd lost two siblings to suicide, and a parent to alcoholism. Half-Cherokee, half-Irish, Smith had a "runty" build, thanks to a motorcycle accident that left him with disfigured legs and an addiction to aspirin and glorified daydreams. It was one of those daydreams that sent him out to the Clutter place: Perry's favorite movie was "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," and he was certain that if he could only get to Mexico, he'd find treasure of his own there.
Dick Hickock's ambitions were slightly less delusional; he just wanted to take the money and run off somewhere he wouldn't be found. Hickock was also scarred; a car accident had put an unnerving asymmetry into his otherwise handsome face. Hickock's family was poor but relatively stable. He had a penchant for passing bad checks, but the Clutter murders left his family confounded. Where did such an ordinary boy muster up so much evil?
Hickock had learned about the Clutter family from a jail mate, an ex-employee of Herb Clutter's named Floyd Wells. In prison, Wells had casually mentioned how his former boss spent $10,000 a week to keep his farm going, and speculated that there must be a safe somewhere on Clutter's considerable spread. Hickock took this wishful information and recruited Smith, a man he figured to be a natural-born killer. (This, too, was somewhat divorced from reality: Smith bragged about having once killed a man just because he felt like it, but it was a lie.)
After the two got out of prison, they drove 400 miles out to the Clutter ranch, hogtied the family members in separate rooms and demanded to know where the safe was. There was none. Hickock and Smith shot each of the four Clutters in the head and left the ranch with $40, a radio and a pair of binoculars. Two months later, Wells' information led the police to Hickock and Smith as the two pulled into Las Vegas, broke and on the run. Five years after that, both men died on the same night on the gallows of the Kansas state prison. Finally, the story had an ending. Capote could finish his book.
After "In Cold Blood" was published, Capote's friends and detractors (and he had plenty of both) would remark on the parallels between the author and Perry Smith, the more sensitive and guilt-ridden of the two killers. Possibly, Capote felt a physical kinship to Smith: His body, as one of his "swans" would later recount in George Plimpton's "Truman Capote," combined a boyish face and torso with "the legs of a truck driver." More likely he simply understood that what separated him from Smith, more than anything, was luck.
Capote, like Smith, had been born to absent, unreliable parents. Both had suicide and alcoholism in the family. Both were desperate for acceptance, but they also had ironclad estimations of their own importance -- Perry, in his words, was "special"; Capote, in his own, "a genius." Were it not for his mother's second marriage and his own considerable charms and angelic good looks (and his keen ability to ingratiate himself to his benefactors), Capote might have ended up as alone and desperate as Smith did. Like Smith, Capote knew exactly what he wanted to be, and he constructed himself accordingly. Capote's ambitions were realized; Smith's weren't.
Another claim, this one circulated by one of the detectives Capote interviewed in Kansas, had Capote involved in a sexual affair with Smith, carried out during Capote's visits to the penitentiary. That one's pretty dubious, but Capote's sympathies are clear, and his ear for Smith, and for all the disappointments of Smith's life, are part of what make the book work so well. Through Capote, we hear of Smith's studious attempts at self-improvement, his handwritten vocabulary lists full of words like "ostensibly" and "depredate."
We hear how the elementary school dropout taught himself beautiful handwriting, and an appreciation of Thoreau. This is where Capote's journalism -- not his writing, but his reporting -- comes alive: when we hear Perry Smith remembering what it was like to be reunited with his itinerant, absent father, "like when the ball hits the bat really solid. Di Maggio."
Capote knew how gut-clenchingly suspenseful dialogue could be. "In Cold Blood" recounts the scene at the Clutter house twice: first in a quote that spans six pages, delivered by Nancy and Kenyon Clutter's English teacher, Larry Hendricks, one of the first people to find the bodies.
Then, 200 pages later, from Smith's taped confession, another quote spanning several pages, broken only by the interrogator's questions. In both of these crucial chapters, Capote restrains himself to only the barest of observations, as in this part, just as Smith begins to describe the first of the murders: "Perry frowns, rubs his knees with his manacled hands. 'Let me think a minute. Because along in here, things begin to get a little complicated. I remember. Yes, yes.'" You brace yourself for what comes next.
Of course, keeping that degree of aloofness meant that Capote had to leave a lot out of the story -- for instance, the awe and resentment the residents of the small Kansas town of Holcomb felt at the appearance of a high-flying reporter. Capote was smart to bring his childhood friend Harper Lee with him to help gain the confidence of the locals. But that didn't make them like him any more when "In Cold Blood" came out.
It wasn't until Plimpton did his own Kansas reporting for his biography of Capote that we hear Harold Nye, a Kansas Bureau of Information agent, describe visiting Capote and Lee in their hotel room and finding Capote lounging around in a "pink negligee, silk with lace." Quite possibly this is made up, but it goes to show how dramatic the culture shock was for everyone involved, and how it was all the more remarkable, then, that Capote came out of Kansas with so much story to tell.
Capote was a good listener. It's what earned him the confidence of the society ladies in Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan, and it's what made him a good reporter. His accounts of Smith's small, paradoxical kindnesses to the doomed Clutters, like when he places a pillow under Kenyon's head before putting a gun to his temple, are a hundred times more effective in describing the tumult of emotions in a criminal's mind than an expert's analysis could ever have been.
Smith's divided conscience, what allows him to stop Hickock from raping Nancy Clutter, then go on to kill her anyway, and then, later, his infamous recollection of that night, "I really admired Mr. Clutter, right up until the moment I slit his throat," could be no starker from any mouth but Smith's own.
Today, it's hard to imagine what journalism was like before Capote and the others started looking closely at "ordinary" people, before they began making an earnest effort to, as Wolfe puts it, "deliver this felt sense of the quality of life at a particular time and place." At the time, though, a lot of other people in the literary world were dubious. New Yorker critic Renata Adler snottily summed up New Journalism as "zippy prose about inconsequential people," and it's a charge that most New Journalists, and Capote certainly, wouldn't have gone too far out of their way to deny. The lives of "inconsequential people," especially those caught in consequential events, have been fascinating readers for years -- both before Capote and the New Journalists and after.
Most recently, it's what drove so many people each day to the Portraits of Grief section in the New York Times. And it's part of the reason we continue to try to make sense of the psychology of crime -- even crime on such a horrific scale as the Sept. 11 attacks. And as for "zippy prose," as Wolfe pointed out in "The New Journalism," one need only try to imagine its opposite.
Source: http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/masterpiece/2002/01/22/cold_blood/index2.html
Monday, December 31, 2007
"In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote
The Armies of the Night
by Norman Mailer
Novel 1968
approx. 135,000 words,
386 pages
"New journalism" is old hat now
If you've heard that the highlight of 1967 was the Summer of Love, check out The Armies of the Night to discover that summer was followed by the Autumn of Confrontation. At least in the United States. The growing protest against the Vietnam War was joining with the "Make Love Not War" counterculture and swelling into a movement that would soon engulf all America and much the rest of the western world. In October 1967 a massive demonstration marched on the Pentagon in Washington. Norman Mailer was there and was arrested, and wrote this very subjective account of his experience.
The book is subtitled somewhat pretentiously History as a Novel, The Novel as History, signalling this is a new art form. Or just another example of the "New Journalism" of the day giving itself airs.
When you read this work today, it seems quite dated. To wit, Mailer's observation of how the New Left (everything was "new" then, it seems) took its esthetic from revolutionary Cuba. His descriptions of forgotten literary and political figures involved in the protests. Even Mailer's kaleidoscopic collision of insights into the war machine, the tactics of protest and the psyche of America seem somewhat overheated and naive now. But others were impressed at the time, as the book won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1968.
Armies of the Night really is two accounts of the same event — one subjective as narrated by a participant and one more objective, based on third-party reports.
But if this is a "novel" it does have one intriguing central character, namely Mailer. As usual, the author places himself front and centre. We keep reading, especially the subjective first half, because we enjoy seeing everything from his eyes. We even enjoy the side trips into Mailer's own peccadilloes that have little to do with the protest movement he is supposedly reporting on. Critics may complain the writer is verbose and self-obsessed, but it is this main character with his avalanche of observations who makes it work at all.
Many other books were published during that period, written by members of the "flower power" generation, but they are virtually unreadable today. As part of an older generation, who nevertheless sympathized with the cause, Mailer had both the objectivity and the passion to create one of the more interesting portraits of that time.
Whether Armies of the Night will endure as a work of art though is doubtful. Read it for a glimpse of the thinking of that time. [source: http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/books/Armies.html ]
The 6th annual Northeast Media Literacy Conference
Start: 2008-04-11 00:00
End: 2008-04-11 12:00
Timezone: Etc/GMT-5
Courtesy of the NEMLC:
The 6th annual
Northeast Media Literacy Conference
April 11, 2008
University of Connecticut, Storrs
The New Media Literacies for Today’s
Plugged-In Generation!
Whether you are a teacher, parent, counselor, or others who work directly or indirectly with young people, the upcoming 6th annual Northeast Media Literacy Conference should be of great and timely interest.
The Conference on April 11, 2008 again features an unusually diverse group of innovative leaders and topics in the study of the mass media and its great impact upon today’s young people and their thinking, priorities, decisions, actions, and their values.
For our 6th annual conference, we are focusing on some of the new media literacies and their needs and realities in light of today’s rapidly changing technologies and their impact upon and growing involvement by our children and youth.
Featured are two outstanding, innovative leaders as keynote speakers, providing up-to-date, fresh approaches and perspectives to the growing media literacy field:
Dr. Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist and digital enthnographer from Kansas State University, recently uploaded a short video to YouTube called Web 2.0, the Machine is Using Us. The video dramatically demonstrates how the Web is changing how we communicate and how fast. This production quickly became the most viewed video on YouTube, watched by over 3 million people. He is also author of a new film, A Vision of Students Today, and a timely blog, Digital Ethnography. Wesch is a true activist for media literacy. He teaches teachers how to use the Web, because, he believes, students are good at being entertained by technology, but they're not particularly good at using it to locate, identify, and sort valuable information.
Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired – What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online, has great insight into how being a teen today is very different from what it used to be and what teens are really doing on the Internet and with technology today, including such timely activities as social networking, blogging, and cyberbullying.
What are LiveJournal, Xanga, Facebook, and MySpace and how have they become so much a key part of young people’s lives? Why is it critically important for parents, teachers, and other adults to be knowledgeable about and better understand these expanding, ever-present media forms? Goodstein examines the threats of today’s technology to young people, but also provides “fresh insights into the positive ways young people use the wired world in their lives.”
In addition, the full day’s conference program includes twenty timely workshops based on key media literacy related areas – The Role of Today’s Advancing Technology, Mass Media’s Depiction of Today’s Culture and Values, Philosophy and Theory, Standards and Curriculum, Classroom Activities, Research and Evaluation, Teacher Education, and Media Production.
Please mark your calendar - Friday, April 11, 2008.
Proposals for Workshops will be accepted until December 15, 2007. (A proposal will be considered after this date only if there is room in the program and the topic will add balance and/or diversity to the workshop offerings.)
Access the Proposal Form at our conference website at http://medialiteracy.education.uconn.edu
Check our website periodically for conference updates.
We hope you will join us!
Dr. Thomas B. Goodkind, Conference Coordinator
Northeast Media Literacy Conference 2008
Neag School of Education
University of Connecticut 2033
Storrs, Conn. 06269
t.goodkind@uconn.edu
tbgoodkind@snet.net
860-486-0290 office
860-974-1814
2008 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism
Start: 2008-03-14 13:30
End: 2008-03-16 13:00
Timezone: Etc/GMT-5
From the Nieman site:
The 2008 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism will continue to explore the dimensions of literary journalism:
• How to gather rich material through deep reporting.
• How to structure fluent accounts.
• How to flesh out stories with flesh-and-blood characters.
But, given the changes in the way that stories are being told online as well as in print, we will incorporate a new focus on multimedia storytelling, adding journalists from the creative edge of radio, documentary, and the Web to our renowned all-star cast of writers and editors.
The Nieman Narrative Conference is open to all writers wishing to sharpen their reporting skills, write with flair and learn from experts in the field, including award-winning journalists, authors, and broadcasters.
To explore the many ways in which journalists report stories today, we are adding new workshops on multimedia storytelling.
Keynote speakers include:
John Hockenberry: Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist and commentator known for his work on Dateline NBC and NPR’s "The Infinite Mind."
Dana Priest and Anne Hull: Washington Post investigative journalists who exposed the mistreatment of Iraq War veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Sherry Turkle: Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and a clinical psychologist who researches and writes on people’s relationship with technology.
Sam Pollard: Film director, producer and editor recognized for his work on Eyes on the Prize, and his collaboration with filmmaker Spike Lee on Mo’ Better Blues, Girl 6, Crooklyn, Clockers and When the Levees Broke.
Other presenters include returning favorites Roy Peter Clark and Adam Hochschild and new speakers Elizabeth Farnsworth, Mark Leibovich, Russell Contreras, and Peggy Orenstein. Details and Registration
Narrative Journalism
Generations ago, narrative journalism was the rule in reporting and not the exception. Stories (sometimes rather subjectively reported and quite long by today's standards) in magazines and newspapers led the reader through a gripping tale told entirely from the view and experiences of the author. However, times have definitely changed.
Today, narrative journalism is not commonly used by most mainstream media outlets. In fact, many journalists stick with very basic formulas or utilize the "inverted pyramid" style of reporting in an effort to keep their writing concise and easy to edit. Some may even be unfamiliar with the technique, having never learned it throughout their careers as "beat" reporters.
Yet there is still room for narrative journalism in today's global marketplace where the Internet is available 24-hours a day, and authors eager to test their competence using a new technique may truly enjoy writing a news report that reads much more like a story than a series of objectively written paragraphs.
A Little About Narrative Journalism
The narrative journalism style requires that the author put him - or herself into the article; thus, the piece may be written from a first-person perspective. However, it may also be told from a third-person viewpoint but with subjective nuances in the text.
Of course, it's tricky to write a true narrative if you're accustomed to sticking to "just the facts" and not adding any extraneous adjectives or adverbs to the mix, let alone personal opinions. You really have to let yourself "loose"; in fact, you may want to seek out some articles in the narrative journalism style to give you hints. (The New Yorker magazine is an excellent resource for narrative journalism examples.)
Some Narrative Journalism Concerns
One of the biggest worries editors and publishers have about narrative journalism is that because it's a blend of facts and feelings, problems can occur. Recently, many authors have been nabbed for stating mistruths in their pieces. Though some of the journalists accused of making up details were in fact guilty, others claimed to have simply misinterpreted situations. Because narrative journalism makes fact-checking challenging, it is still considered taboo in most news rooms.
Thus, if you're planning on trying out narrative journalism, talk to your editor first (if applicable.) Find out if he or she has any concerns regarding the technique, and try to hash out a plan so you'll both be comfortable with the outcome. That way, you won't be nailed when you turn in an assignment that isn't acceptable to your editor or his or her publication.
Gearing up to be a Narrative Journalist
Again, this art form hasn't been lost; it's simply been "on holiday" for a while. If you want to be one of the few journalists known for writing exceptional stories in a narrative journalism style, you'll need to practice.
A good way is to take an existing story from a newspaper and re-write it from a narrative viewpoint. At first, this exercise might feel awkward, especially if you're accustomed to working with "inverted pyramids". However, after some time, you'll begin to understand how to put together a narrative piece that is provocative and, above all else, truthful.
A second method of learning more about narrative journalism is to actively seek out stories written using the technique. Contrast them with other nonfiction articles you've read (or written).
Enjoy yourself as you learn this craft; after all, educating yourself in the various methods of writing will only make you a stronger, more well-rounded journalist.
Source: www.explorewriting.co.uk
The Man in White
When American culture seems to go haywire, Tom Wolfe is usually there to tell us about it.
love Tom Wolfe. Maybe too much. Whenever some big bizarro thing happens in what he calls ''the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000,'' I want him to give it his electric Kool-Aid acid test. I want the man in the white suit to do his usual exhaustive reporting, turn the labels inside out and the hypocrites upside down, skewer the puffed-up phonies and pruned-down lemon tarts, and tell me what's what in one of those jittering, dazzling riffs of his.
I am dying to know, as the Time Warner-AOL merger careers along, how he would satirize the fascinating Henry James collision of the old print world and the new dot-com world, the anxious wriggling food chain of Bob Pittman, Steve Case, Gerald Levin and Ted Turner. How would he limn all these awful dinner parties where Old Media kisses up to New Media, with Old Media desperately trying to be more casual by casting off its tie, and more hip by droning on in tiresome digibabble? What would Wolfe make of the dread synergy, the bumper-car game of Disney values and ABC values and Leonardo DiCaprio's star turn as ABC White House correspondent? And how gleefully the Wolfe-man could have carved up the chundering, blundering parade of House Torquemadas in the risible and overblown impeachment scandal, and the bevy of leech women, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp.
When Wolfe wrote ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' in the mid-1980's as a column for Rolling Stone, he had a hard time getting in front of his satire. He couldn't mock the masters of the universe as fast as they could make mockeries of themselves on the front page. By the time we got to the Molière bedroom farce of Clinton and Lewinsky, America had grown so wacky and gossipy and shameless and solipsistic and materialistic, satire was simply redundant. ''Saturday Night Live'' struggles weekly to parody pols like George W. Bush. But how can you write mordant material better than W.'s own, like his irritated response to Gail Sheehy's claim in Vanity Fair that he is dyslexic: ''The woman who knew that I had dyslexia -- I never interviewed her.''
Jacques Lowe/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Tom Wolfe
# Related Articles Featured Author: Tom Wolfe
Unfortunately, ''Hooking Up'' has hardly any new Wolfe, and even the new tidbits feel reheated, being mostly arguments about why he was right about this or that, and iterations of his exhortations to wade out into the human beast and report. The title piece, published in The Tatler last year, is a millennial survey, Wolfe crying wolf about our monetary and sexual excesses. The tone is oddly unpleasant, churlish and stuffy, and the info not particularly fresh.
''In the year 2000,'' he writes, ''it was standard practice for the successful chief executive officer of a corporation to shuck his wife of two to three decades' standing for the simple reason that her subcutaneous packing was deteriorating, her shoulders and upper back were thickening like a shot-putter's -- in short, she was no longer sexy.'' Actually, that has been standard practice for a few decades now. And Wolfe already spent a lot of pages in his 1998 best seller, ''A Man in Full,'' obsessing on first wives with thick backs getting discarded. That stuff about subcutaneous packing gives me the creeps.
He has a few paragraphs on teenagers hooking up, as in getting down, and then concludes that ''the continuing vogue of feminism had made sexual life easier, even insouciant, for men.'' That is another big ''Duh.''
His vintage pieces include the saga of the guys who invented the Internet (Al Gore is not included, for some reason), the Ayn Rand-like struggle of the late sculptor Frederick Hart and ''Tiny Mummies!,'' Wolfe's hilarious 1965 slam dance on the mummified New Yorker, in which William Shawn is presented as his own Mini-Me, or ''mini-momaniac,'' turning Harold Ross's witty, vibrant magazine into an eccentric and pretentious glass menagerie. (Long after Wolfe's piece, it turned out that the amber atmosphere nurtured by Mr. Shawn -- always whispered, reverentially -- bred some writers so Olympian that they no longer felt required to observe the niceties of nonfiction in nonfiction writing.) ''Humility has come to be a very important thing here,'' Wolfe wrote, ''and lately The New Yorker has settled upon small people, small physically, that is, who can preserve through quite a number of years the tweedy, thatchy, humble style of dress they had in college. After the age of 40, one is encouraged, by tacit example, to switch to hard-finished worsteds.''
Even after the cascade of bitter and nostalgic books written about the magazine by Shawn protégés, Wolfe's sendup is still a scaldingly funny, perceptive portrait of the weirdo Whisper Zone, horsehair-stuffing days of Shawn. Fury over the piece, which ran in New York, The Herald Tribune's magazine, reached from Walter Lippmann to President Johnson's aide Richard Goodwin to J. D. Salinger, who burst out of his reclusiveness to send a furious telegram to Jock Whitney, The Trib's owner and publisher, but Wolfe weathered it because he was lucky enough to work for an editor whom I was once lucky enough to work for at The Washington Star -- James Bellows, a newspaperman with verve and bravery in equal measures, who always backed up his reporters and who loved nothing better than to do a joyous rain dance in a hail of criticism.
In an afterword written for this book, Wolfe speculates that New Yorker acolytes freaked out at his piece because he said how close Shawn was to his star writer, Lillian Ross. In her 1998 memoir, ''Here but Not Here,'' Ross wrote about her 40-year affair with Shawn and described in rapturous detail the sexual charms and sensual tastes of the Little One we had presumed to be so ascetic. (He lusted for Whoopi Goldberg, Madonna and fat, busty women, ''the fatter the better.'')
BOOK EXCERPT
"By the year 2000, the term 'working class' had fallen into disuse in the United States, and 'proletariat' was so obsolete it was known only to a few bitter old Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of their ears. The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink. He spent his vacations in Puerto Vallarta, Barbados, or St. Kitts. Before dinner he would be out on the terrace of some resort hotel with his third wife, wearing his Ricky Martin cane-cutter shirt open down to the sternum, the better to allow his gold chains to twinkle in his chest hairs. The two of them would have just ordered a round of Quibel sparkling water, from the state of West Virginia, because by 2000 the once-favored European sparkling waters Perrier and San Pellegrino seemed so tacky."
-- from the first chapter of 'Hooking Up'
Wolfe calls Ross's offering ''embarrassing,'' and says it never occurred to him, back in '65, that the relationship was more than editor-protégée. ''If someone had come to me back then and shown me chapter and verse of their 'affair' -- I wouldn't have believed it,'' he writes. ''I'm sorry, but they weren't affair material.''
''Hooking Up'' has only one previously unpublished essay, ''My Three Stooges.'' Not since Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman have we had such an amusing literary catfight as the one that began when John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving trashed ''A Man in Full.'' Wolfe bites back, calling Updike and Mailer ''two old piles of bones,'' ''two old codgers'' and ''exhausted carcasses.'' ''I was 68,'' he writes, venomously, recalling the Grumpy Old Men spleenfest that his book sparked. ''I knew how it must have drained them. . . . In interviews Updike was already complaining about his aging bladder. Mailer, I noticed, was appearing in newspaper photographs supporting himself with two canes, one for each rusted-out hip.''
He says his three attackers were ''encapsulated in their neurasthenia,'' and had ''wasted their careers by not engaging the life around them,'' by ''turning their backs on the rich material of an amazing country at a fabulous moment in history.''
IN defending his own brand of reported novels, which he says are in the tradition of Dickens, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Balzac and Zola, Wolfe -- who probably could have predicted the new rage for ''Survivor''-style reality programming -- offers this polemic: ''Instead of striding out with a Dionysian yea-saying, as Nietzsche would have put it, into the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up octophonic tympanum all around them, our old lions had withdrawn, retreated, shielding their eyes against the light, and turned inward to such subject matter as their own little crevice, i.e., 'the literary world,' or such wholly ghostly stuff as the presumed thoughts of Jesus.''
''The American novel is dying, not of obsolescence but of anorexia,'' he declares. ''It needs . . . food. . . . It needs novelists with the energy and the verve to approach America the way her moviemakers do, which is to say, with a ravenous curiosity and an urge to go out among her 270 million souls and talk to them and look them in the eye.'' I'm not sure we should be aiming to achieve the artistry of moviemakers, since Hollywood can barely seem to turn out any movies anyone wants to see. But I agree with the general pulse-of-the-beast idea. And any time Tom Wolfe wants to take a fresh bite of our lurid carnival, I'll be there.
Maureen Dowd is an Op-Ed page columnist for The Times.
Source: http://partners.nytimes.com
Reply to Tom Wolfe
The Chronicle of Higher Education
To the Editor:
It seems that Tom Wolfe is a victim of identity theft.
Someone using his name published a letter ("Tom Wolfe Replies to Robert S. Boynton on 'The New New Journalism,'" The Chronicle Review, April 15) responding to an article I wrote ("Drilling Into the Bedrock of Ordinary Experience," The Chronicle Review, March 4). In short, "Tom Wolfe" wrote a parody, deftly employing some of the signature stylistic flourishes of the real Tom Wolfe: hysterical narration, outlandish hyperbole, deliberate misreading, false rhetorical questions, baseless hypotheticals, etc. In fact, "Tom Wolfe" did such a good job that he had me going for a while. Until, that is, I realized that "Wolfe" had made so many errors that the letter couldn't possibly have been crafted by the famously fastidious writer.
The first clue to this deception is that in his search for anything that might discredit my argument, "Tom Wolfe" distorts the meaning of the last line of a long paragraph introducing a few of the writers I discuss in my book, The New New Journalism. He reads the line "Michael Lewis --Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (W.W. Norton, 2003) --chronicles big business" to mean that I am identifying Lewis's most recent book, rather than its author, with the subject of "big business."(Moneyball is, however, a book about the business of a game, the business of baseball -- and Lewis is a writer who has, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to the baseball diamond, chronicled the world of American business.) Whoever this "Wolfe" is, his reading skills are abysmal. It isn't an enormous error, but poor "Tom Wolfe" prattles on about it for four paragraphs, slipping in an obvious parody of the real Wolfe's style -- "gibber-gibber ape-shrieking" -- so dated and awkward that it couldn't possibly have been written by him.
It gets worse. "Tom Wolfe" continues in this vein, screeching about the way "he" uses Weber's notion of "status," when it would be clear to any reader -- even the addled, fictional graduate student "Wolfe" employs as a rhetorical device -- that it is not Tom Wolfe's definition of status I take issue with, but the way he employs it in his work. Of course, status can mean "the entire range of ways in which human beings rank one another," as he puts it, but my point is that Wolfe (and here I mean the real Tom Wolfe) tends to focus his considerable reporting skills only on the status details of those who are wealthy and white (ethnic minorities and the poor are usually relegated to caricatures).
Finally, "Tom Wolfe" makes an elementary factual error when he questions my statement that Wolfe considers "ethnic and ideological subcultures" to be "terra incognita" -- an assertion I drew directly from a 1974 interview with the real Tom Wolfe ("I've completely relished this terra incognita, these subcultures, these areas of life that nobody wanted to write about," Conversations With Tom Wolfe, Page 39). For reasons known only to him, "Wolfe" then launches into a free-associating discussion of neuroscience ("Whose hookah has the elf been smoking?"). Perhaps a CAT scan is in order.
And on it goes. Anyway, as you can see from the above, there is little danger that any student of Wolfe’s would mistake the letter for his work. Tom Wolfe couldn’t possibly have written such an unworthy epistle. Could he?
Sincerely,
Robert S. Boynton New York University
Source: www.newnewjournalism.com
Wolfe on The New New Journalism
Tom Wolfe Speaks in Tongues
Remember Doctor Rammer Doc Doc? No? Then you must not've read Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full, which featured the improbably named rapper's threat to "peel yo cap."
Well, Wolfe is back, speaking tongues yet again, holding forth on "gibber-gibber" and other things. After the jump, a letter Wolfe wrote to The Chronicle of Higher Education about Robert S. Boynton's new book, The New New Journalism.
To the Editor:
Is it really true that due to the sheer enormity of the task, college department heads today no longer read books--and instead rely on "book briefings" by graduate students? When that rumor began circulating four years ago, I dismissed it as absurd. But recent events have caused me to pause, and ponder.
For example, in The Chronicle Review's March 4 issue, writing about what he calls "the New New Journalism," Robert S. Boynton, director of New York University's magazine-journalism program, states that the book Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, "chronicles big business" ("Drilling Into the Bedrock of Ordinary Experience"). Inexplicably, the director's statement is not merely inaccurate. It is wildly gibber-gibber ape-shrieking off the wall.
Moneyball is about playing a game on the field, baseball. Specifically, it is about how one Billy Beane, office-bound general manager of a woebegone team, the Oakland Athletics, used the findings of a string of baseball-happy amateur statisticians to make a completely objective analysis of which player skills and field strategies work best in that game. The figures showed, for example, that the stolen base, the sacrifice bunt, and the hit and run actually reduce a team's chances of winning at that game. They showed that the hitter who has the knack of forcing the pitcher to a long count, say, 3-1 or 3-2, and then drawing a walk is a team's great invisible batting power, and that a hitter's on-base percentage was more important than his batting average in that game.
By using the blind stats and ignoring conventional baseball savvy, over a four year stretch (1999-2002) the Athletics won more regular season games than any other team in the Major Leagues aside from the Atlanta Braves, made the play offs three times, and in 2002 won the toughest of the Major League divisions, the American League West, with 103 wins, including a record-breaking 20 straight in September--despite being so strapped for money, they could afford only two types of players: has -beens and not-yets of that game. In other words, Moneyball is a book about a radical mathematical science for playing a particular game. It is a book about a game.
How could Director Boynton get the very subject of a book he cites as evidence supporting his thesis so completely wrong? Could it have possibly been a bungled briefing by some underpaid, overworked graduate student who himself couldn't find time to read the book? It is very hard to believe such a thing. But I challenge anyone to come up with a more logical explanation.
Or how could Director Boynton be not merely incorrect but, again, astonishingly, brain-numbingly wrong about an essay he chooses to make central to his argument, "The New Journalism" (1973) by Tom Wolfe? According to Director Boynton--or some grad student who hasn't slept for three days??--"Wolfe's New Journalism" involved such "avant-garde" devices as "placing the author at the center of the story" and "exploding traditional narrative." In fact, ego-centered narration is as old as journalism itself, and Wolfe warns against its pitfalls. And far from "exploding traditional narrative," Wolfe recommends the opposite: bringing into nonfiction the traditional structure and narrative of the novel or short story.
Director Boynton--or the voice at ear?--says Wolfe uses the sociological term "status" to refer to cosmetic matters, "how one dresses, where one lives," and overlooks the more profound matters of "class and race." In fact, Wolfe uses the term "status" in precisely the way Max Weber, who introduced it to sociology, did; i.e., to refer to the entire range of ways in which human beings rank one another, class and race being two of them--and he underlines that point in his essay.
Not incidentally, the essay served as the introduction to an anthology that included excerpts from two of the most vivid and best-known nonfiction stories ever written about class and race: "Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case," by Garry Wills, and "Radical Chic & Maumauing the Flak Catchers," the only chronicle of the thousands of racial "confrontations" minority organizations were compelled to use in order to get money out of the Poverty Program's white administrators.
Director Boynton--or the grad-grind elf on his shoulder?--says that when Wolfe's essay uses the term "point of vies," it is referring to "varying points of view," the narrator's being one. In fact, it refers to something else entirely: point of view in Henry James's technical use of the term, i.e., making the reader feel he is always inside the skin, the eye sockets, the central nervous system of some character as the story unfolds.
Director Boynton says that Wolfe thinks of "ethnic and ideological subcultures" as "terra incognita," phenomena that so baffle him, he regards them as different not just in "degree" but "in kind" from "the rest of American culture." Really? Whose hookah has the elf been smoking? The fact is, Wolfe doesn't refer in any way to" ethnic and ideological subcultures" and uses the term "terra incognita" only in reference to the physiology of the brain.
Today, just as in 1973 when Wolfe wrote his "New Journalism" essay, neuroscientists are still unable to provide a physiological explanation of consciousness, memory, language, sleep, or the effect of general anesthesia. But they do know what such brain functions are not. They are not "ethnic and ideological subcultures," whatever these 12 poor old tumble-down shabby-genteel abstract syllables may summon up in the mind of the director.
If this is the extent of Director Boynton's--or the homunculus's?--grasp of the obvious, I'm not sure I want to see how he has--they have?--handled the excellent journalists included in his--their?--upcoming book, The New New Journalism. Speaking of which, the evidence, as we have seen, indicates that he--or the little fellow?--has never read Michael Lewis's Moneyball.
It should come as no surprise, then, that he appears oblivious of something else: the "New New" locution of The New New Journalism is a haircut off Michael Lewis's brilliant Silicon Valley story, "The New New Thing."
Despite all the foregoing, I still don't believe Director Boynton or any other college department head in America would have graduate students read books for him. But should such a practice exist, it is the strongest argument yet for paying graduate-student T.A.'s professional-level salaries and lowering their workloads. They must be given greater incentive and more time for the important chores they now do for faculty members.Source: www.gawker.com
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
The Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism organized its Program on Narrative Journalism in the fall of 2001. At its center is the grand and growing — now open to 1,000 working journalists each year — Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism.
The program and its conference strive to help editors and writers understand and deploy the power of narrative for presenting the news engagingly, with depth and nuance.
After consulting with editors at the 2002 conference, we developed a second, more intimate and intensive project: a three-day Nieman Seminar for Narrative Editors for 50 to 60 top working narrative editors.
We also have two more projects:
* The Nieman Narrative Digest: An online resource with links to narrative pieces, essays about narrative and discussion of tips and techniques
* The Nieman Narrative Anthology: A how-to guide with transcripts of presentations from Nieman narrative conferences
Source: www.nieman.harvard.edul
Recognizing Narrative Journalism
Once upon a time...
there was a beautiful fusion of reporting and storytelling techniques...
"Journalism that doesn't assume the reader is a robot, that acknowledges the reader knows lots and snickers and gets wild."
Whether it's called "narrative journalism," "new journalism," "literary journalism," or "journalistic narrative," the type of writing defined by these terms is a blend of reporting and storytelling.
Although this offshoot of traditional journalism does not employ the pure objectivity that is often associated with the profession, narrative journalism upholds integrity and professionalism, as its writers, astute to the human experience, paint pictures and emotions with words. The narrative journalist is necessarily wrapped up in social realism, and is, "in fact, a Romantic Reporter, who assumes that reality is to be found by focusing on internal, rather than external, human processes and movements; that feelings and emotions are more essential to understanding human life than ideas." (Connery 17).
Whether it's called "narrative journalism," "new journalism," "literary journalism," or "journalistic narrative," the type of writing defined by these terms is a blend of reporting and storytelling.
Although this offshoot of traditional journalism does not employ the pure objectivity that is often associated with the profession, narrative journalism upholds integrity and professionalism, as its writers, astute to the human experience, paint pictures and emotions with words. The narrative journalist is necessarily wrapped up in social realism, and is, "in fact, a Romantic Reporter, who assumes that reality is to be found by focusing on internal, rather than external, human processes and movements; that feelings and emotions are more essential to understanding human life than ideas." (Connery 17).
Narrative Journalism does away with the inverted pyramid model of traditional journalism, which arranges who, what, where, when, and why from the most important to the least important. Narrative Journalism breathes life into the five W's.
Tell Them a Story! How to Grab Your Readers
In contrast to "reporting," which merely imparts information, narrative journalism creates an "experience" for the reader. In other words, narrative journalism allows factual events to play out with characterization, rising and falling action, insight, dialogue, and resolution. The term "journalism" still implies the immediacy, accuracy, and newsworthiness of the subject matter, and guarantees that the newsgathering process of observation, interview, and review of documents is wholly applicable to the genre. The word "narrative," however, suggests a "literary" flavor. According to Thomas Connery, author of A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism, narrative journalism is distinct in that "style becomes part of the meaning conveyed; the structure and organization of language interpret and inform." (Connery 15). The following elements typify a well-told story in the narrative journalism approach.
Narrative Journalism....
- Presents the "voice" of the storyteller. Unlike traditional journalism, narrative journalism incorporates subjectivity with factual details, allowing the reader to connect with the writer on the level of impressions and emotions.
- Places the action/characters in "time." That is, a context of history or mention of related events often accompanies the telling of the current action.
- Contains an underlying meaning or "symbolism." Snippets of the human experience are revealed through literary allusions, metaphors, and symbolism, rendering mental images more potent and memorable.
- Brings readers to a "destination,"and seeks to create a meaningful journey for the reader: "theme, purpose, reason, destination must be worthwhile to digest." (Nieman Program). As writer Stephen Crane once advised, "Give readers a slice of life." (Connery 7). The glimpse into humanity is the outstanding feature of the genre.
Tom Wolfe's Revenge
New Journalism, once vilified by critics, is enjoying a renaissance as "literary journalism."
By Chris Harvey
Harvey, a former AJR managing editor and a former associate editor at washingtonpost.com, teaches Web writing and publishing at the University of Maryland.
A few decades ago, feature Óriter Tom Wolfe was pilloried in print for having "the social conscience of an ant" and a "remarkable unconcern" for the facts. Only a visionary could have predicted his impact on journalism would be lasting.
Yet today, elements of the New Journalism that Wolfe so tirelessly promoted have become as commonplace as the pie chart in many newspapers, ranging from the New York Times to the Oregonian to the weekly Washington City Paper.
Practitioners don't call it New Journalism any more. They prefer the terms "literary" or "intimate" journalism or "creative nonfiction." But their stories are marked by the same characteristics that distinguished Wolfe's work at Esquire and the New York Herald Tribune: They're written in narrative form, with a heavy emphasis on dialogue, scene setting and slice-of-life details.
Jon Franklin, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes at the Evening Sun in Baltimore, says the growing interest in literary journalism can be explained as easily as a pendulum swing. Now a journalism professor at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, he says that just as the 1980s ushered in USA Today and its emphasis on the "news bite, the info-bit [and] the nonsense statistic" as tools to lure readers back to newspapers, the 1990s are being marked by a renewed interest in narrative.
"Suddenly this light bulb seems to be going off all over..that people want more than USA Today provides," Franklin told journalists in Spokane in May.
It didn't hurt, Franklin and others say, that a 1993 study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors confirmed what many of Wolfe's adherents had already come to believe. When stacked up against other types of newspaper stories, including the traditional inverted pyramid, the narrative was generally better read and better at communicating information.
But the renewed interest in the narrative is resurrecting old concerns about sourcing and accuracy. Some question whether newspapers should encourage the literary techniques, which critics argue have the potential to distort history and sow mistrust among readers.
Wolfe-like narrative stories are often told from the perspective of one or more of the main characters. Readers become privy to a character's thoughts but are not told how the thoughts were discerned by the reporter.
Sometimes, as in Bob Woodward's recent book about the Clinton administration, "The Agenda," entire meetings or scenes are reconstructed, with no clues given about the source of the information.
"One of the big problems our profession has is people questioning the validity..of what we're writing," says Francis Coombs, assistant managing editor of the Washington Times. "The minute you get to the point where the reader can't see where Bob Dole said it or Tom Foley said it..you're getting into a murky area."
Even advocates concede there is tremendous potential for abuse in the narrative form. "These are real sophisticated techniques," Franklin says. "If you're going to use them dishonestly you're going to use them powerfully."
Adds Norman Sims, a former wire service reporter who is now a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, "You cannot verify characterization. You frequently cannot verify dialogue. So forms of literary journalism that depend on those kinds of storytelling present more of an unknown factor."
But Franklin and others argue that most literary journalists are no more likely to falsify quotes or stray from the truth than their colleagues writing in the inverted pyramid style. In fact, some say that because journalists writing the long story are more likely to be veterans, they are less likely to fudge quotes or embellish a story. They have hard-won reputations to safeguard.
"The temptations of narrative aren't like the temptations of heroin," says Mark Kramer, a journalism professor at Boston University who has collaborated with Sims on a new edition of an anthology of literary journalists. "Once you taste them, you don't lose all sensibilities."
The narrative form has been controversial for at least as long as Wolfe has been associated with it. But despite his pronouncements that New Journalism burst forth simultaneously from a few magazines and newspapers in the early 1960s, many say the form was around long before that.
"I can point you to two dozen writers in this century who were using the same techniques in effective nonfiction," says Sims. Among them would be Lillian Ross, Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, John Hersey, George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway.
Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, traces the roots a bit deeper. "Any historical study of journalism will reveal the existence of powerful narrative forms of writing, going back not generations, but centuries," Clark says.
He says what distinguished Wolfe and his colleagues in the 1960s and early '70s – writers such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Gail Sheehy, Jimmy Breslin and Hunter S. Thompson – was not "a matter of doing it differently," but rather "doing more of it" and "doing it much more self-consciously than it was done in the past."
Sims agrees. "The other two dozen writers were separated by time," he says. The New Journalists "were working at the same time, looking at what each other was doing..and innovating."
Wolfe, in particular, was prolific, writing four narratives for Esquire and 20 for the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday supplement in late 1963 and early 1964.
The Herald Tribune was willing to give him latitude, the paper's editor, Jim Bellows, recalled recently, because it was trying to create a niche for itself in a competitive New York market. "We had to do something to make a character or personality for the newspaper," Bellows says. "That [New Journalism] was a help."
The goal, Wolfe wrote in "The New Journalism," was to intellectually and emotionally involve the reader – to "show the reader real life." To say: "Come here! Look! This is the way people live these days! These are the things they do!"
In his works, Wolfe chronicled subcultures – such as the hippie drug scene and the Black Panther movement – with the eye of a novelist. He toyed with extended dialogue, point of view and interior monologue. He even played with ellipses, dots, dashes and exclamation points – attempting, he wrote, to leave the illusion of people thinking.
Eugene L. Roberts Jr., managing editor of the New York Times, says Wolfe's outlook, not his punctuation, was key. "The important thing he did was bring an American studies outlook to journalism," Roberts says. "Most newspapers today take a look at subcultures in a way they never did before and I think Wolfe is responsible for that."
Wolfe and other New Journalists also "loosened things up," says Don Fry, an independent writing coach. In the 1950s, he points out, "it was very much 'nothing but the facts, ma'am.' "
Most important, Clark says, Wolfe described what he was doing in such a way that it served as a blueprint for future generations of journalists.
In decades past, however, many were not so complimentary. Wolfe "is a gifted, original writer, but he has the social conscience of an ant," wrote Jack Newfield, formerly an associate editor of the Village Voice, in a 1972 issue of Columbia Journalism Review.
Journalism reviews warned of the possibility that more than the structures of the New Journalism stories were borrowed from fiction.
Writer Dwight Macdonald was quoted as calling the form "parajournalism,..a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction."
A 1966 issue of CJR contained an article and letter to the editor condemning Wolfe. They criticized two articles he had written for New York magazine, then the Herald Tribune's Sunday supplement.
The first article, "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of The Walking Dead!" was an attack on William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker. It characterized Shawn as an embalmer of a dead institution. The second article, "Lost in the Whichy Thicket," began as a critique on the magazine's writing style and editorial values, "but developed into another atmospheric reconstruction..of the New Yorker as a smug, fusty, ingrown private club," the CJR article said.
CJR noted that many journalists were condemning Wolfe for being "irresponsibly malicious and cruel" and for allegedly describing doings at the New Yorker inaccurately. The story quoted the New Yorker's longtime Washington correspondent, Richard Rovere, as saying, "In no important respect is [the New Yorker's office] the one described by Tom Wolfe. Physically and atmospherically [it] is a place I have never visited. The editor of the magazine described by him is a man I have never known."
Repeated calls to Wolfe's home in New York were not returned. But Clay Felker, Wolfe's editor at New York, denies that the writer's pieces were full of mistakes. "These are people who are yelling and screaming because we'd insulted them... The only people who got angry were the people on the payroll," says Felker, who now alternates between consulting in New York and teaching at the University of California at Berkeley.
Felker says the pieces were controversial because of their theme or point of view. "If somebody doesn't agree with the theme, they say it's inaccurate," Felker says. But, he says, "history has shown Tom was right. What they were doing [at the New Yorker] was embalmed stuff."
The criticisms of Wolfe's 1966 pieces were only the beginning of the attacks on New Journalism.
In 1981, when Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke was stripped of a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing – after it was discovered the eight-year-old drug user in her lead paragraphs was not a real person, but a composite – a whole new round of criticisms was fired.
Writing in the December 1981 issue of this magazine, Los Angeles Times media critic David Shaw said Cooke had fallen into a typical New Journalism trap: She had spent too much time searching for "flashy metaphors" and not enough time digging up "verifiable facts and legitimate news."
Shaw added: "Janet Cooke wrote very well. Too well. She forgot she was a journalist, not a storyteller – a reporter, not a creator."
Narrative advocates say the Cooke case is a poor measure of the craft's ethics or potential. "Janet Cooke is an interesting example. You never see her name mentioned as a New Journalist until she writes a feature story in the Post and it's exposed as a fraud," says Sims. "She had no characterization [in her story]. She had no elaborate structure. She had no dialogue."
Her story was "inaccurate, standard newspaper writing," Sims says. "Why didn't people jump up and down and say standard newspaper people lie to us?"
More recently, Bob Woodward, assistant managing editor for investigations at the Washington Post, and author Joe McGinniss have been attacked for their narratives.
"Bob Woodward is the problem," Fry says when asked about the bad-boy reputation narrative writing has earned with some reporters and editors. "He doesn't bother to cite sources and he reads minds... One of the problems with Woodward is he doesn't tell you where he got it," Fry says. "All the information just floats by."
Woodward responds that he is not a literary journalist but a reporter. He says readers should be more trusting of his work, which includes the books "Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA," "The Final Days" and "All the President's Men."
"My books are scrupulously reported," Woodward said recently, noting that more than 250 people were interviewed for his recent book on the Clinton administration. "All that's missing is who said it, whose diary it's in, what memo it's in."
He says he follows the same standards when reporting his books as those at the Washington Post. He points out that his books have been excerpted in the newspaper, with accompanying explanations of his techniques.
In the introduction to "The Agenda," Woodward wrote that reconstructed dialogue and quotes came from at least one participant, from memos, or from notes or diaries of a participant in a discussion. When someone is said to have thought or felt something, that description came either from the source or from someone to whom the source said it directly.
Critics have been harsher with McGinniss, accusing him of reporting and writing practices that would be unacceptable at many American newspapers.
In his 1993 rumination on the life of Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, "The Last Brother," McGinniss often speculates on what Kennedy thought or felt, yet he has said his repeated attempts to interview the senator were unsuccessful. Critics have also charged that McGinniss embroidered quotes and borrowed freely from other works on Kennedy.
McGinniss did not return phone calls. In a note at the end of the book, he acknowledges using articles and books as a "verifiable source" from which he "distilled an essence." He says quotations in the book "represent in substance what I believe to have been spoken."
McGinniss argued that the book should be accepted for what it is: "an author's highly personal and interpretive view of his subject." He said that "when an individual is as encrusted with fable and lore as is Teddy Kennedy (and his brothers), a writer must attempt an approach that transcends that of traditional journalism or even, perhaps, of conventional biography."
Journalists writing in the narrative form will tell you they usually spend much more time reporting a story than a typical news reporter would. Three and four and five times as much.
And they say they take great pains to make sure facts, scenes and dialogue are accurate. "I personally don't believe in making up quotes or putting words in people's mouths or making up facts," says Patsy Sims, an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, which offers a master's degree in fine arts in creative nonfiction.
"I'm very strict with my students," says Sims, who has worked at newspapers in New Orleans, San Francisco and Philadelphia. "If you say somebody had on a red dress, they better have had on a red dress."
Walt Harrington, a Washington Post Magazine staff writer, says, "The basic premise is that you have to live up to all the standards of straight-ahead journalism." A single tale may take months or even years of reporting. "There are layers and layers of reporting," he says. "You have to be in a setting with your subject when not a lot is happening," he says. You "play the fly-on-the-wall role."
Techniques and standards vary from reporter to reporter. Harrington, for instance, says he won't "say somebody is thinking something," unless they "have told you that's what they're thinking."
It's a technique that the New York Times' Roberts says he approves of, adding, "You'd need to explain sometime in the story that this is where it came from."
Fry agrees. "You owe the reader an attribution."
Others say they sometimes go to greater lengths to accurately portray what a source is thinking or feeling.
Cynthia Gorney, a Washington Post Style section writer on leave to write a book about abortion, says that when trying to explain a Catholic obstetrician's beliefs, she immersed herself in his world.
"I did lengthy, multiple interviews with him," says Gorney. "I read much of the literature he would have been reading," including ethics texts written in the time he would have been in college and a journal written for Catholic physicians.
"I learned as much as I could about growing up in Catholic schools," Gorney says. Then she read her description to him. "He made a couple of tiny changes, but said I got it right."
Thomas French, a St. Petersburg Times feature writer, spent a year in a Florida high school and another year reporting and writing a seven-part narrative series that ran in the paper in 1991. To get inside sources' heads, the reporter says, he too would ask them what they were thinking "and try not to telegraph stuff you hope they were thinking. You don't want them to be making stuff up."
Like Gorney, French says he sometimes goes over his descriptions "word for word with the people involved." He explains: "I'm not 16. I've never been a girl. You're trying to write from their point of view." He says he's not handing over control of the piece to the sources, "but I want them to tell me if it's wrong."
Woodward says he sometimes relies on others to tell him what an individual might be thinking. Referring to "The Brethren," the book he and Scott Armstrong wrote about the Supreme Court, Woodward points out, "We say we never talked to Chief Justice [Warren] Burger. And [yet] we'll have things saying,..'He was determined to get control of the building.' "
How, as reporters, could they confidently write what Burger was thinking? "There were only 16 people he told that to," Woodward says. They talked to 15 or 16 of them, he says, adding, "All of his actions supported that."
Reconstructing dialogue from scenes the reporter didn't witness can be trickier. But, says Franklin, if you've got several people from the scene who are willing to talk and a working knowledge of psychology, it's possible. People can remember surprising amounts of detail from traumatic or emotional occasions, he says. "A person can often remember quite a lot of detail about a wedding day or a day he buried a parent. If you were in a serious accident, you can remember the bug smears on a truck."
To gauge the accuracy of their memories, Franklin asks the sources details he can check. "If it's a funeral, ask about the day and the weather, and go back and check. If they're accurate in those kinds of details, it certainly makes me feel better, and suspicious if they're not."
But Shaw, the Los Angeles Times media critic, says it's not enough to talk with most of the sources. If a reporter is recreating a private scene – such as a conversation between two people in their bedroom – he says the reporter must speak to both people. The reporter must also make it clear in the story who the sources are and that this is their recollection of the conversation, Shaw says. "I'm opposed to reconstructing dialogue without sources."
Memories are imperfect, Shaw adds. For instance, he says he and his friends had a "completely different take" on a conversation they had the previous evening. Shaw says he heard what one person said, while the man's wife "heard what he meant."
Roberts believes higher standards should apply to nonfiction in newspapers than in books. "I think there's a sharp dividing line between newspaper journalism and book journalism," he says. "When you're buying a book you're buying a product of one individual, and it purports to be nothing more or less than that. But when you're picking up a newspaper you're picking up a product of not just individuals, but an institution, with a past, present and hopefully a future. And the institutional integrity is all tied up in it."
Despite the apprehensions of some, »nterest in the narrative form is growing. The University of Oregon's journalism school and its creative writing program are launching a master's degree in creative nonfiction this fall.
Scripps Howard's California television production company is working on a newsmagazine its executive producer, Craig Leake, says will display the artistry and intimacy of New Journalism. "Every week we would hope to have a reporter who had a really special passion about a story tell that story," says Leake, adding he hopes to find a spot for his show by mid-season.
Meanwhile, the 13th Annual Key West Literary Seminar in Florida this January will focus on journalism for the first time, featuring literary journalists such as Pulitzer Prize winners David Halberstam, Madeleine Blais and Anna Quindlen.
And newspapers such as the Oregonian in Portland are explaining narrative techniques in an in-house newsletter.
Fry, who is affiliated with the Poynter Institute, says he understands the interest. He says editors "are looking for anything that might get people to read." They should be. The Newspaper Association of America reports that the percentage of adults reading daily newspapers on weekdays has dropped from 78 percent in 1970 to 62 percent in 1993.
"Our competitors are masters of this," says Oregonian senior editor and writing coach Jack Hart of the narrative. "Television. Hollywood movies. [Even] the computer game is interactive storytelling. It has a protagonist and challengers and story structure and rising action and..a denouement. It's one reason kids are so addicted to this form."
ýhe form is compelling, advocates say, because unlike the inverted pyramid style, it gives readers a reward for making it through a story. "The pleasure and knowledge that come from reading come from making predictions of what will happen in a story," Clark f the Poynter Institute says.
The form is also easily recognized by readers, because "people in general, in their own memories, use narrative all the time," Clark says. "They use it to learn, to understand, to remember and find meaning."
Many journalists say the narrative form Wolfe, Talese and Capote helped popularize will be only one of the forms in newspapers of the future. They also predict more diversity of story formats and sizes, based on what suits a particular event best.
The short, inverted pyramid form will continue to be needed for some stories written on deadline. "But it's hopefully going to be one perspective in our quiver, instead of our whole ball of wax," Roberts says. "We ran..off the cliff with translating USA Today journalism into our whole paper" during the 1980s.
Tom McNamara, managing editor for news at USA Today, says even his paper is evolving. "It's dramatically different" than when it first rolled off the presses in September 1982, when stories averaged eight to 14 inches, he says. Although the average story now runs about 15 inches, "it's not unusual to see 25- or 30-[inch stories], and every once in a while 50 or 60."
The articles have gone from "cookie cutter to individual voices," McNamara adds, noting the paper has even printed "first-person stories."
Clark says he hopes to see "a greater reconciliation" of forms such as the narrative and the inverted pyramid. "I'm kind of eclectic, in terms of my tastes and also in my understanding of how these forms can be used," he says. "I think people are wrong when they talk about forms being inherently good or bad. The forms are a frame. What's more important is the execution."http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
Kramer of Boston University says an even greater reliance by newspapers on literary journalism would help readers sort out the complexities of life. "The thing that's wrong with most newspaper stories is they're missing the human context," he says. "You wonder what kind of person was that robber."
Sims at the University of Massachusetts agrees. Traditionally, he says, newspapers have not valued "the report on the ordinary life and everyday culture of their own towns." They haven't covered ordinary lives. They have covered "extraordinary foul-ups."
Narrative stories, on the other hand, often bring the ordinary to life. If newspapers valued "local culture and local community more highly," Sims says, they would invest more in narrative nonfiction. [source: www.ajr.org]