Writers and writing

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Journalists use the word "story" for most of their articles, but Roy Peter Clark argues that many are just "reports." The difference? "A report hangs on a set of reliable questions that go back more than a century: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. A story converts these elements and sets them in motion, so that Who becomes Character, What becomes Scenic Action, Where becomes Setting, When become Chronology, Why becomes Motive, and How becomes How it happened."

Nieman Reports recounts a 1977 visit to Harvard by novelist E.L. Doctorow, who died in July, and who thought journalists should embrace fiction: "I wish Bernstein and Woodward had not stuck to the factual detections of investigative reporters … With the highest scruples of investigative reporting, they ran into the limits of the form. If they had taken off from what they knew they might have gotten a greater, more comprehensive understanding of exactly what happened."

In later years, Aldo Leopold would write about seeing a "fierce green fire" in the dying eyes of a wolf he had just shot in an Arizona canyon. Leopold traced his radicalization to that moment, but Lance Richardson writes that the truth wasn't that simple: "When he writes 'My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die,' he is conflating decades of evolving thought, in the same way somebody might summarize a turbulent courtship as 'love at first sight.'"

On Nieman Storyboard, Peter Slevin discusses writing his biography of Michelle Obama, including how he built a network of sources who gave him insight into the First Lady's early life: "The outreach to prospective sources seemed endless, and it did not always bear fruit, but it forced me to crystallize my thinking. What was it again that I was hoping to accomplish? Where, exactly, did this person fit into the narrative? What was the most valuable question I could ask?"

Dan Zak reflects on his progress from nervous intern to veteran reporter in an essay that is part how-to, part confessional: "There were times when I stayed in my car instead of getting out to face the uncomfortable, or when I left a community meeting without talking to a person that I really should've talked to. That's a special kind of journalist shame. I was young. And in that way I am still young sometimes." Reaction from Mike Feinsilber.

A month after William Zinsser's death. Maria Popova excerpts science-writing tips from On Writing Well: "Imagine science writing as an upside-down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more. The second sentence broadens what was stated first, making the pyramid wider, and the third sentence broadens the second, so that you can gradually move beyond fact into significance and speculation."

The powerful creativity of the 1982 Nobel Prize winner and his "magic realism" had its roots in his early reading of authors like Joyce, Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, as well as Kafka, whose story of a man transformed into a giant insect was an epiphany for García Márquez: "It was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice."

The longtime New Yorker writer and The Orchid Thief author talks about how experience has given her more confidence, why it's important for most writers to have deadlines, and what to do when the words just stop coming: "If you’ve got writer’s block, you don’t have writer’s block. You have reporter’s block. You only are having trouble writing because you don’t actually yet know what you’re trying to say, and that usually means you don’t have enough information."

A new Joseph Mitchell biography explores his public case of writer's block: "With the possible exception of what hermetic J.D. Salinger might be doing up there in New Hampshire, Mitchell was becoming the literary circle’s biggest mystery. If anything, Mitchell’s mystery was all the more fascinating because he was being (professionally) hermetic right there at work, under everyone’s nose." Also: Mitchell made things up.

It was 1836 and the first installments of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, had sold only about 400 copies. By the end of the following year, Charles Dickens was a household name and his monthlies were selling 40,000 copies. Nina Martyris explains: "What changed? It was in this fourth installment that readers met Sam Weller, a cheerful young bootblack with a distinctive cockney idiolect — a character, in other words, in whom many readers could recognize themselves."