Two interviews with Amy Harmon, author of a September New York Times article on Justin Canha — 21, autistic, and facing an uncertain future — delve into the challenges of building her narrative while delivering the science and policy "spinach." The interviews are at Nieman Storyboard, where a trio of editors analyze Harmon's technique, and The Open Notebook, which includes her outlines.
Writers and writing
When it's time to write, the most trivial tasks suddenly seem irresistable — balancing the checkbook, cleaning the office, looking out the window. In this blog post, Nancy Whichard offers a tip from detective novelist Raymond Chandler, who devoted four hours per day to writing. “Chandler says that during the scheduled four hours each day there are 'two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.' ”
If anyone is threatened by new online venues for long-form journalism, it's the alternative weekly industry. But its leaders say they're rushing to embrace the new technology even as their obituaries are being drafted. "It is a bit funny to read stories on the web which imply that this is some sort of recent phenomenon," says Village Voice Media executive associate editor Andy Van De Voorde. "I guess my only question to these guys would be 'What took you so long?'"
Writing in The Scientist, Bob Grant was aiming at an academic audience. But his tips for better writing offer plenty of good advice for professional writers as well. “When a new sentence begins, you need to have a detail at the beginning of that sentence that connects with a previous sentence,” to help create a narrative tone, Grant says, quoting Pennsylvania State University engineering communication professor Michael Alley.
From pitch letter to editing, Michelle Nijhuis offers a behind-the-scenes look at her July-August 2011 Smithsonian story on a deadly fungal disease that is spreading through U.S. bat colonies. "One part of the science that I was unexpectedly impressed with along the way, and that I tried to emphasize, was the sort of evil perfection of this fungus — it’s just perfectly suited to take hold in hibernating bat populations," she tells The Open Notebook web site.
An Oklahoma biology professor, Mike Kaspari blogs advice on writing and other subjects for graduate students. Journalists can benefit from his comments on Vonnegut and Lincoln, or his latest, Five steps toward constructing a better sentence: "Like great music, as Leonard Bernstein once observed, good sentences have a sense of inevitability to them – you cannot imagine it written any other way."
Susan Dominus didn't stop at neurology when writing about two little girls conjoined at their skulls. She spent days with their family, soaking up their unusual lives, as she later told The Open Notebook: "It was important to make the family as human and real as they are, especially in a story that’s as sensitive as this. In the end I think it was a much better story for actually having some more insight into how this particular family works."
Should a reporter breaks his employer's rules if it's the only way to get the story? Should he interview a patient who keeps mistaking the reporter for the doctor? Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post raised those questions in the context of personal experience during the recent Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference at the University of North Texas. From Nieman Storyboard.
David Dobbs wrote his story for the new long-form online outlet The Atavist.and talked about the experience on Nieman Storyboard, An NASW member, Dobbs describes how he settled on the fledgling site, and what he gained from it — freedom from arbitrary wordcount limits, and the ability, with help from The Atavist staff, to incorporate photos, video, audio and other Easter eggs into the iPad version (a slimmed-down version is also on the Kindle).
Nieman Storyboard can be counted on to give us something worth posting every week or two. So can John McPhee. Now, the two meet as part of a series, “Why’s this so good?” NASW member Carl Zimmer deconstructs McPhee's 1987 article on the Mississippi River, “Atchafalaya.” Says Zimmer: “I get the sense that McPhee spends every waking hour gathering observations, stories and plain facts that he stores away for articles he may not write for decades to come.”