The web demands no decency when we disagree with strangers. We can hurl vicious critiques, slurs, and threats at people who, if we choose, will never even know who we are.
It’s different with friends. If someone we like and respect writes something online that upsets us, it’s awkward. That kind of awkwardness has hounded me since Friday when Doreen Marchionni, who used to be an editor at the newspaper where I used to be a reporter, blogged some career advice to a teenager interested in journalism. The teenager, who blogs as nessieonthelane, had submitted this question to Doreen:
Hiya! I’m 16 and would most certainly need help in the career path of Creative Non-Fiction Journalism…I have been fascinated with this category of Journalism since, I began to learn the creative side of writing…although, I do not want to be involved with media base Journalism, especially the news. But, I would love to work with publishers etc. If, you could kindly help me to begin my journey…that would be great!…I am in no clue…where to start…
Doreen’s blogged response started like this:
I’m not quite sure I know the kind of journalism you’re talking about, but let me take a stab at answering your question, and if I misunderstood, just let me know.
Back in the 1960s/70s, a different kind of journalism developed called “New Journalism.” It basically consisted of writers doing non-fiction reporting but filling in the gaps of a story, so to speak, with fictional elements to make the story read more like a novel. Lots of these writers became wildly famous, among them Truman Capote. Beautiful, intoxicating writing.
Many traditional journalists were deeply offended, and this type of journalism quickly fell out favor. That’s because one of the core principles of journalism is accuracy and not making stuff up to tell a better story. It’s ingrained in what we do.
If by “creative non-fiction” you mean “new journalism,” I’d encourage you against building a career on it. You’d probably have a tough time getting published in journalism circles. On the other hand, if you simply mean non-fiction reporting on human-interest feature stories, as opposed to hard news, I’d definitely encourage you to go for it.
Doreen’s response went on from there, but the quote above includes everything that upset me. If she’d been a stranger, I would have blogged an immediate rebuttal, called her out on Twitter, and tried to contact the teenager to give some very different advice. But Doreen is not a stranger. I didn’t blog, didn’t tweet, didn’t go behind her back and tell the teenager that, of course, she can practice, work, and study her way into a career writing nonfiction that is creative, factual, and as hard as the hardest news this big, bad world has to offer.
No, I didn’t do any of that. I e-mailed Doreen.
First I sent this (which I’ve souped up for this post by adding links to what started as plain text):
Hey, Do.
Sorry. This is going to be curt. I’m away from my computer and I hate typing on my phone.
Unfortunately, you’re way off the mark in your post on creative nonfiction. Think John McPhee, Susan Orlean, Jon Krakauer. Also, I'm pretty sure the “new journalism” people just borrowed storytelling techniques from fiction. If some of them also faked facts, that wasn't something they acknowledged publicly. It was supposed to be journalism.
Google a book called “The New New Journalism” for a great overview. The book has a fine website. I also wrote several posts about the book.
Sorry to keep this so short. Hope things are great for you guys.
- Quigg
Then, after Doreen wrote back unconvinced, I sent this:
Who fudged facts, though? Really. Or who is fudging facts now? Please rethink this, Do.
Pretty much anything in The New Yorker fits into the category the 16yo is asking about. If you want to make the case that the nonfiction in The New Yorker is partly fictional, you need some facts of your own to prove the allegation. If you prove that, it will certainly be a massive bombshell in the worlds of publishing and journalism. David Remnick would certainly get fired.
Don’t take my word for any of this. Ask around. Read about McPhee's longtime class at Princeton. I think you’ll find that a lot of the best project journalism at, say, the Seattle Times grows out of this tradition. It’s not something you need to warn a kid to avoid.
Sorry to rant. I respect you and like you. This is the sort of thing that’s best to correct before some jerk who doesn’t know, like, or respect you decides to tee off on you online.
- Quigg
P.S. Please please please speak up if you ever notice I’ve got my facts wrong in a post.
It was at that point that Doreen wrote back, stuck to her guns, praised my passion, invited me to post a comment on her blog, encouraged me to write a post of my own, and signed off with a smiley face. I thanked her and told her I’d send her a link when I wrote my post. I did not sign off with a smiley face, which may mean I’m not a very nice person.
Next, I did what journalists – or ex-journalists or whatever I am – do: I sought information from people who know more than me. Susan Orlean was one of those people. Orlean is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most famously, of The Orchid Thief. She is markedly less famous for being one of the three writers I invoked in my first e-mail to Doreen.
In an e-mail to Orlean, I quoted from Doreen’s post, linked to to it, stressed the amicable nature of the disagreement, and asked for a reality check: Was I correct in my understanding that absolutely everything must be factual in her brand of journalism?
Orlean’s answer, which came Sunday morning, went like this:
Hi David,
Just a quick reply here, but I have to say this topic makes my blood boil. I don’t understand how there can be a confusion between fact and fiction. Stories that are made up are fiction, even if there is a core in them (as is very often true of good fiction) of fact and detail that’s accurate and authentic. Non-fiction – whether you call it journalism, creative non-fiction, reportage, whatever! – is the delivery of factual information. It might – and indeed is – subjective, in the sense that it can’t pretend to be the work of an all-knowing omniscient narrator – but to the best of the ability of the writer, it is TRUE. When there are gaps, they are acknowledged and treated artfully but never artificially. AAAAAARGH this makes me so insane. I can’t believe it’s even a topic of discussion — and yet it manages to be. Somehow we haven’t made the idea of truth as bullet-proof as it should be.
Cheers
Susan
I am tempted to edit out the “AAAAAARGH,” but Orlean is active on Twitter and the world realizes by now that she, like anyone worth hanging out with, sometimes expresses herself in ways that are beneath the dignity of ACaslon Regular.
Maybe terminology deserves some blame for Orlean’s lament that “we haven’t made the idea of truth as bullet-proof as it should be.” After all, it was nessieonthelane’s reference to “Creative Non-Fiction Journalism” in her question to Doreen that started all this. Doreen, making an honest guess at what the term meant, basically came up with this string of equivalencies: creative nonfiction = New Journalism = filling in reporting gaps with fiction = you’ll never work in this town again.
Doreen isn’t alone. Lee Gutkind, who publishes a journal called Creative Nonfiction, wrote this in the introduction to his book Forever Fat:
Journalists have, over the years, been so stifled from being creative that they don’t exactly understand what the word creative might signify beyond the parameters of fiction. William Zinsser, author of the highly respected text On Writing Well, has acknowledged his uneasiness with the phrase “creative nonfiction” because he associated “creative” either with fiction or with writers who “fudge the truth.” Young writers, he fears, will take the word creative as a license to fabricate. Zinsser agrees that nonfiction can be creative when “a writer raises the craft to an art by imposing an interesting shape or organizing idea on it,” which to me is one of many ways in which writers can write with style without sacrificing substance. But clearly he doesn’t have much confidence in the intelligence of our young people, if he thinks that students will take creativity as a license to lie.
It really is a curious response to the term “creative nonfiction.” If I hear that there’s “creative food” at the new restaurant around the corner, I won’t expect “creative” to nullify “food” and cause the chef to prepare grilled linoleum with cyanide salsa.
Maybe this is all the fault of “New Journalism.” It’s New Journalism, according to Doreen, that “basically consisted of writers doing non-fiction reporting but filling in the gaps of a story, so to speak, with fictional elements to make the story read more like a novel.”
But, as best as I can determine, that’s not what the New Journalism people thought they were doing. Quite the opposite, really. I didn’t know this with any confidence before last night, when the marvel that is the Internet permitted me to read something Tom Wolfe wrote for New York magazine way back when I was literally still a fetus: “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe” in the magazine’s February 14, 1972 issue. Wolfe wrote:
We were moving beyond the conventional limits of journalism, but not merely in terms of technique. The kind of reporting we were doing struck us as far more ambitious, too. It was more intense, more detailed, and certainly more time-consuming than anything that newspaper or magazine reporters, including investigative reporters, were accustomed to. We developed the habit of staying with the people we were writing about for days at a time, weeks in some cases. We had to gather all the material the conventional journalist was after—and then keep going. It seemed all-important to be there when dramatic scenes took place, to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expressions, the details of the environment. The idea was to give the full objective description, plus something that readers had always had to go to novels and short stories for: namely, the subjective or emotional life of the characters. That was why it was so ironic when both the journalistic and literary old guards began to attack this new journalism as “impressionistic.” The most important things we attempted in terms of technique depended upon a depth of information that had never been demanded in newspaper work. Only through the most searching forms of reporting was it possible, in non-fiction, to use whole scenes, extended dialogue, point-of-view, and interior monologue.
But the writers anointed as the heroes of New Journalism weren’t always so rigorous, according to Marc Weingarten, who wrote The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution. In a 2006 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Weingarten fingered Jimmy Breslin as someone who “used a lot of made-up dialogue with impunity.”
When you read what Wolfe wrote about Breslin in that 1972 New York magazine piece, though, you realize that making up dialogue would have amounted to a betrayal of the New Journalism virtues that got Breslin invited into Wolfe’s little club to begin with:
A crucial part of Breslin’s work they didn’t seem to be conscious of at all: namely, the reporting he did. Breslin made it a practice to arrive on the scene long before the main event in order to gather the off-camera material, the byplay in the make-up room, that would enable him to create character. It was part of his modus operandi to gather “novelistic” details, the rings, the perspiration, the jabs on the shoulder, and he did it more skillfully than most novelists.
Wolfe explained how he tried to do the same:
Sometimes I used point-of-view in the Jamesian sense in which fiction writers understand it, entering directly into the mind of a character, experiencing the world through his central nervous system throughout a given scene. Writing about Phil Spector (“The First Tycoon of Teen”), I began the article not only inside his mind but with a virtual stream of consciousness. One of the news magazines apparently regarded my Spector story as an improbable feat, because they interviewed him and asked him if he didn’t think this passage was merely a fiction that appropriated his name. Spector said that, in fact, he found it quite accurate. This should have come as no surprise, since every detail in the passage was taken from a long interview with Spector about exactly how he had felt at the time.
Doreen or anyone else might reasonably question whether even the best reporting is up to the challenge of “entering directly into the mind of a character, experiencing the world through his central nervous system throughout a given scene.” But pushing reporting to the breaking point – and even unwittingly beyond the breaking point – is not the same as what Doreen described as “filling in the gaps of a story, so to speak, with fictional elements.”
The basic message isn’t changing much here from Wolfe to Gutkind to Orlean to Doreen. Wolfe: “gather all the material the conventional journalist was after—and then keep going … (Be) there when dramatic scenes took place, to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expressions, the details of the environment.” Gutkind: creativity is not “a license to lie.” Orlean: “Non-fiction – whether you call it journalism, creative non-fiction, reportage, whatever! – is the delivery of factual information.” Doreen (in a passage I haven’t quoted yet): “great journalism is built on one thing and one thing only: great information-gathering.”
Here’s one other thing. Reporting is just way more fun than making stuff up and trying to pass it off as fact. I’m not talking about writing fiction and labeling it – honestly – as fiction. That’s a joy and a rush.
But there’s another joy, another rush to be found in getting paid to notice the real world, to take notes as real people do things, say things, wear things that no journalistic fraudster would have dreamed up.
Think of it like this: Journalism is to “filling in the gaps of a story … with fictional elements” as a vibrant social life is to South Park’s Eric Cartman having a tea party with Polly Prissy Pants. This has all been so respectable until now. Please treat the Cartman reference as my version of an “AAAAAARGH.”
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UPDATE (8/18/10): After seeing my post, Doreen wrote a response called “Fiction, Non-Fiction and the Art of Journalism." In it, she is "struck by how much we agree on the value of sophisticated reporting.” She discusses how transparency, which she calls “one of the least understood or appreciated concepts in journalism,” helps build trust with readers. She praises Susan Orlean and David Remnick. Her full reponse is here.
