Sunday, February 24, 2013

Writers on writing - Jones, Montgomery, Lake, Tullis, Lamott & Gilbert

I frequently post about writers on writing and there's been a few recent compelling pieces about writing from three different sources to note here.

The first was "Getting the Story: A roundtable discussion", an e-mail discussion from the magazine Creative Nonfiction moderated by Matt Tullis with writers Ben Montgomery, Thomas LakeChris Jones. Topics covered all dealt with nonfiction writing and while the entire piece had some great content to it, below are some of the notions that stood out the most to me:

From Tullis on whether creative nonfiction and journalism operate on different ends of the nonfiction writing spectrum...

"Some of the best creative nonfiction I've read over the last five years was actually journalism, and by that, I mean stories written about the lives of other people, reported by people who know how to report and synthesize what they have reported, then craft a story that captures a place, a time, a person—sometimes all three—to give readers an experience they won’t soon forget, one that reaches truths which fiction and memoir strive for but often fail to reach."

From Montgomery on the question of whether the right term for this type of writing is "creative nonfiction" or something like "narrative journalism"...

"I’m not really concerned with how we categorize it or what we call it. Seems like there’s a new name for it every year. In the end, it’s a stack of facts and reported detail and dialogue ordered to give life to a story. It’s journalism. Narrative journalism seems redundant."

From Jones on the import & process of reporting...

"True nonfiction, the sort of nonfiction that might last and has a chance to matter, is built on a foundation of reporting. And not just a little reporting. Whenever anyone asks me what I do, or whenever I have to fill out a form that asks for my profession, I usually answer “reporter.” A writer can be any number of things. A reporter can be only one thing: a finder of facts. That’s what I love most about my job, that’s what I think I’m best at, and that’s what I most want to be. I want people to read my stuff and think, That guy’s a reporter."

"Reporting really is a two-step process: find your sources, and then mine your sources for material. I usually try to make a list of the people I want to talk to. That list will change because it’s useful to ask the people you talk to who they might talk to if they were writing the story, and they will give you names that you've never heard before. And then I talk to people, a lot."

From Lake on when to stop reporting...

"When you see the story in your mind, from beginning to middle to end, and you can write down that structure on a blank white sheet of paper and there are no gaping holes. I should clarify: This does not actually mean you stop reporting. What it means is you can start writing. But you keep reporting as you write because the act of writing reveals these little pinholes in the reporting, these places where you don’t know quite as much as you should. So you keep making phone calls right up to the end. You solidify, you deepen, you seal all the leaks. You may never actually be done until the thing shows up in print."

From Jones on writing a story...

"I usually have a rolling Word document filled with contacts and ideas and sentences that have popped into my head. I don’t outline, but like Ben, I write from memory first. I don’t go back to all that stuff until after I have a first draft. Then, I go back and correct my mistakes and find plaster for the holes. Otherwise, I get too bound up, reading back over everything. I want my story to feel natural, not constructed, if that makes sense."

Excellent content from this piece for Creative Nonfiction Magazine and another interesting piece on the subject of writing was from Gretchen Rubin who wrote the self-help bestseller The Happiness Project. On her Happiness Project blog Rubin posted "14 Writing Tips from Anne Lamott" with wisdom from Lamott's book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. The tips from Lamott that Rubin passes along are very solid and reminded me of reading and reviewing Bird by Bird last year.

Final piece on writing to note here was from Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, with her essay for the website Bookish. Gilbert offers a response to novelist Philip Roth who spoke of how writing an "awfulish field" to work in. Roth is a renowned author of many books, including The Plot Against America that I enjoyed quite a bit, and it's certainly his prerogative to be down on the field of writing, but was also interesting to read Gilbert's thoughts in support of writing as a profession. The part that struck me the most was the following...

"Writing is a voluntary act. Becoming a novelist, then, is not some sort of dreadful Mayan curse, or dark martyrdom that only a chosen few can withstand for the betterment of humanity. Writing is just a thing. It is a lovely thing, mind you, and it personally means the entire world to me, but I still recognize that it is just a thing. It is a thing that you can choose to pursue with your life because it excites you, or because you have a flair for it, or because it seems more rewarding than toiling away in an office. Sometimes it even works. Not always, but sometimes. If you're lucky, you might be able to make a small living out of this thing. If you're exceedingly lucky, other people might come to appreciate your gifts. If you are phenomenally lucky, you might become lionized in your own lifetime, like the great Philip Roth himself."

Some really great material on writing and the producing of it from these three sources.