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 Lake & Chris 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.

"In the Garden of Beasts" by Erik Larson

Around the time I completed Love Wins by Rob Bell, I also finished reading the Erik Larson book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin.



Larson writes historical non-fiction and previously did the excellent Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck and Isaac's Storm, all of which I posted on close to three years ago. I've wondered at times just how much of the detail in Larson's books is real and how much extrapolated, but I've decided as a reader that it's both entertaining and real enough, with what I've read at the very least passing the smell test around authenticity.

In the Garden of Beasts looks at the rising power of Hitler in prewar Germany through lens of new U.S. Ambassador William Dodd and his mid-20's daughter, Martha Dodd. It's well researched and along providing a view of prewar Germany, chronicles how Hitler and his ascent could well have been kept in check had the U.S. and other countries taken a less isolationist (and interested in German repayment of debts) view and and censured Hitler's anti-Jewish actions.

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While reading Larson, I found myself thinking of The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. It was based on the fictional premise of Charles Lindbergh defeating Franklin Roosevelt for the Presidency in 1940 and the U.S. taking dual paths of isolationism from the war in Europe and discrimination against Jews here at home.

Roth's work was fiction, but based on real possibility as there were groups in the U.S. who firmly wanted to let Germany do what they will (a "not our problem" approach) and also wanted to curtail opportunities for Jews.

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Going back to the Larson book, this early U.S. attitude of not making waves with Hitler and the German government helped clear the path for his consolidation of power and growth of the German war machine. Obviously, the U.S. later entered the war in Europe and Germany was defeated, but it perhaps Hitler could have been stopped earlier.

All conjecture of course, but an interesting thing to think about and Larson does a good job in his book of writing about Ambassador Dodd and his daughter Martha as vehicles to detail Germany at the time and Hitler's taking of control.