Writers and writing

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Michael Lewis dives into the New York Public Library's archives for a profile of the New Journalism icon at 85: "It was as if there were, in the United States, two realities. There’s the reality perceived by ordinary people and the reality perceived by Tom Wolfe — until Wolfe writes his piece or book and most people just forget their original perception and adopt his. He might be forgiven for believing that he is in the possession of some very weird special power."

Ricki Morell interviews Pulitzer winner Geraldine Brooks on how coming from journalism helps her in fiction: "I think being a journalist instills the great fear in you of the reader not turning past the jump. Understanding that the easiest thing for a reader to do is stop reading is something that my wonderful newspaper editors instilled in me. That is very useful for keeping the narrative flowing and respecting the fact that there are many demands on a reader’s attention."

Kathryn Schulz writes that the author of Walden was "self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control," and his account of his months in the wilderness is closer to a "semi-fictional extended meditation" than nonfiction: "Thoreau did not live as he described, and no ethical principle is emptier than one that does not apply to its author … The hypocrisy is that Thoreau lived a complicated life but pretended to live a simple one. "

Michael Blanding writes about practitioners of slow journalism, in which writers work on stories for years: "Like the 'slow food' movement from which it gets its name, slow journalism stresses openness and transparency, laying bare to audiences its sourcing and methods and inviting participation in the final product. It also provides a complement and corrective to breaking news, where amid the pressures of ever-present deadlines, conjecture can often replace reporting."

The Washington Post's David Finkel discusses his pair of books on the Iraq War in an appearance at the Nieman Foundation: "The thing I want to emphasize, all of this stuff, whatever you might think of writing or longform writing or 'feature writing' or immersion writing, the term I prefer is reporting. Every sentence in this book is, first and foremost, an act of and a result of reporting. Every line in this book, there’s nothing assumed. There’s nothing imagined."

Devon Maloney gave up the freelancing life for her dream job as a pop music editor at one of the nation's biggest newspapers. Four months later she quit. Maloney writes that she isn't second-guessing her decision: "When I left, I had little to no nest-egg to live on. I had a few prospects, but nothing sustainable. Now I’m up to my ears in credit-card debt. I haven’t received a paycheck in weeks. I also can’t recall a time in my adult life when I’ve been happier."

Maria Popova examines "the artist’s universal and necessary dance with fear" via a quote from Woolf's novel Orlando: "Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished."

Maria Popova quotes from a lecture by author Neil Gaiman on what makes stories last. Gaiman argues that the best stories can live for millennia: "Do stories grow? Pretty obviously — anybody who has ever heard a joke being passed on from one person to another knows that they can grow, they can change. Can stories reproduce? Well, yes. Not spontaneously, obviously — they tend to need people as vectors. We are the media in which they reproduce; we are their petri dishes."

Michelle Nijhuis interviews Kathryn Schulz about her New Yorker story, “The Really Big One,” on the risk of a major earthquake from the Cascadia subduction zone off the Pacific Northwest coast: "When you first think about this story, you might think, 'Oh, what could be easier? People love natural disasters, this thing’s going to write itself.' But what I realized almost right away is that it’s very difficult to tell the story of something that hasn’t happened yet."

The New Yorker legend calls on sources from Shakespeare to Hemingway and Trillin, as well as his younger self, to explain how a writer decides what to leave out of a story: "The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed … It’s as if you were removing freight cars here and there in order to shorten a train — or pruning bits and pieces of a plant for reasons of aesthetics or plant pathology, not to mention size."