Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burrough on writing narrative: “people are dying to put down your article”

In what might be the only performance of Texas stand-up comedy about narrative writing, Vanity Fair writer Bryan Burrough recently offered practical tips for long-form storytelling to a Mayborn Conference audience. Prior to his magazine career, Burrough spent several years reporting for The Wall Street Journal; he has also written five books, including “Public Enemies” and “Barbarians at the Gate.” In these excerpts from his talk, Burrough addresses the best transition word ever, presents his strategy for avoiding writer’s block, and reminds you that “your words are not nearly as great as you think they are.”

I want to talk about craft. I want to talk a little bit about how I do what I do, and maybe give you some pointers, stuff I wish people had told me when I was just starting out.

There are essentially three venues we can work in: newspapers, magazines and books. I’ve done all three. I’ve done all three very well, and I’ve done all three very poorly. I can supply examples of each. I’ve written five books, one of which was number one on the New York Times bestseller list and two of which were read by about 17 people, most of whom were my relatives. I have been interviewed on Larry King, I have been interviewed on The Today Show, and I have sat in bookstores in Denver and had the guy say, “You need to quit signing now. I don’t think we can sell any more of those.” So, I have had the best and the worst.

Narrative journalism is the best way to get noticed in journalism; it’s the best way to get ahead. They’re the most memorable stories, bar none. I’m talking about a story, as we used to say at the Journal, that’s beginning-middle-end. It’s not an analysis of the Federal Reserve or anything else. It typically starts with a real-time lede, an anecdotal lede. It breaks out into a part that at the Journal we used to call the “nut graf”; at Time magazine I think they always called it the “billboard,” which is essentially a quick one or two paragraphs saying “this is what the story is,” a section where you say “this is why the story matters.” And then you get out of the way and get into the story and tell it as fast as possible.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Aug 6, 2010 | posted in words | comments (3)
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Gary Smith on intimacy and connecting with subjects: “Any uneasiness you bring is going to cost you dearly”

On the last day of the Mayborn Conference, Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith read from and discussed “Shadow of a Nation,” his 1991 story about a Crow basketball player named Jonathan Takes Enemy. Smith has been at Sports Illustrated for nearly two decades, winning more National Magazine Awards than any other writer. He’s known for his ability to connect with his subjects, and so we were very interested in the answer he gave to a question about how he enters others’ worlds as an outsider and develops intimacy:

To become a longform writer and to kind of immerse yourself in different worlds, it’s almost like a double-railed track. Not only do you grow as a writer, but that other rail of the track is huge. Part of it is something you’re developing – some sense of self, getting a little more at ease in your own flesh and bones. So much of what happens in the interactions between you as the writer and the subject hinges on their trust in you, their confidence in you. And so much of that hinges on how comfortable you are. Any uneasiness you bring is going to cost you dearly.

I’ve sensed that and felt it and seen it as the years go by. The more at ease I became, the more the trust grew in that interaction, the more goods, the more treasure came back. It’s almost like you need to be very aware of both sides of that railroad track. If one is lagging behind the other, you’re going to really shortchange yourself in everything you get as a writer. That’s not the reason to do it — there are a zillion other better reasons to go on that trip. But that’s one of the biggest benefits of it.

As you’re walking as an outsider into these worlds all the time, how comfortable are you in doing that? If they feel your uneasiness, how easy are they going to feel about handing you their most intimate stuff to write about?

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by Andrea Pitzer | Aug 2, 2010 | posted in words | comments (0)
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Mark Bowden on discovering narrative and the value of beginner’s mind: “only if you are truly ignorant can you ask the truly ignorant question”

Next up in our series of highlights from last weekend’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference is Mark Bowden. Author of “Black Hawk Down” and a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bowden has been a nonfiction writer in one form or another for 35 years. In these excerpts from his keynote address, he talks about the police raid that launched his narrative career and the challenges of reporting and writing the story that made him famous.

When I started working as a reporter for the Baltimore News American, I wasn’t particularly interested in being a newspaperman or a reporter. I had majored in English at Loyola College in Baltimore, and I wanted to write great stories, I wanted to write great books. I had been particularly inspired by some of the books that the so-called “new journalists” were turning out in the 1970s.

And so I knew what it was that I wanted to do — and I tell this to my students today, that I was pretty much in the same boat that they are now, in that I knew what I wanted to do, but I just did not have a clue how to get to that point. But it seemed to me that getting paid to write stories was closer to that goal than running a cash register at the supermarket. So I took a cut in pay, and I became a newspaper reporter.

My first job was covering Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Every morning I would drive from my home in Baltimore down to Annapolis, which was the capital of Anne Arundel County and where my office was. And halfway down was the county police headquarters. I got in the habit of breaking up my drive down to Annapolis by stopping in to police headquarters. And it was a really podunk operation.  They had this unfortunate guy, Captain Lindsey, who had been given the very unenviable job of dealing with the press, which pretty much consisted of me and a number of other amateur reporters. And he got to like me. Every morning he’d have a cup of coffee waiting for me, and he had a stack of police reports from the night before.

And let me tell you something: a police department is a terrific reporting organization, because all they do is cruise around and look for trouble, and when something untoward happens, they have to write a little report. So many a morning, I would read through the stack of reports and I would come across a story that I would then spend the rest of the day following, and I often had stories that other reporters didn’t.

Well, Captain Lindsey admired my initiative, and so one morning he asked me if I would like to accompany a crack swat team from the county police who were going to be hitting all of, as he put it, “the major drug dealers in Anne Arundel County” one night some weeks hence. So I said, “Sure, sign me up. I’ll go.” So I showed up. I was 22 years old. I showed up in the parking lot of the police headquarters at about three in the morning, and here were all these Anne Arundel County detectives in civilian clothes drinking beer. They had cases of beer, wandering off to the bushes to urinate, having a good old time. And I thought, “I wonder if this is the way police always do drug raids?” But, you know, I was new to this, so I took notes.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jul 30, 2010 | posted in words | comments (6)
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Mary Karr on truth: “the least of my problems as a memoirist, as a writer, is getting my facts right”

Author Mary Karr showed up Friday in Grapevine, Texas, in the middle of a thunderstorm to talk about telling the truth. The first keynote speaker at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, Karr addressed an after-dinner crowd of hundreds. Best known for “The Liars’ Club,” “Cherry” and “Lit,” she is also a Pushcart Prize-winning poet and essayist. Karr’s remarks focused on the place of memoir in nonfiction writing and the elusive hunt for the kind of truth that consists of more than getting the facts right. Here are excerpts from her talk:

I actually pray about what to write, so if you think my success is unlikely, maybe you ought to pray. No, I’m kidding. Pray to me about what to write, and for the right amount of money, I’ll tell you.

I do actually pray … I pray, “Let me write one true sentence,” which is what Hemingway used to say. It’s the application of your ass to the chair and then you just try to write one true sentence. What is a true sentence? We’re talking about what lies between what is actual lived experience.

The experience on the page is not for you, the writer. This is a mistake people make about memoirs – that if you have had a bad enough ass-whipping, you should make a lot of money. Now, I think we should all make a lot of money, but that’s a topic for another evening.

But in therapy, say, you pay them. In memoir, hopefully, they pay you. That suggests that you are supposed to give them something: an experience – that distilled experience. You’re supposed to create a world where things that perhaps sound strange on Jerry Springer actually begin to sound feasible or possible.

You read the “Black Hawk Down” book, for instance. You suddenly almost believe that you understand what happened in Somalia. There’s an immediacy to that kind of writing, and to any good writing, I think.

It’s sort of suggested that memoirists have extremely venal motives. I don’t write my memoirs for charity; I really do write to generate income. I’m not Oprah, would that I were. But some people suspect us. I think of the William Gass line: “To have written a memoir is already to have made yourself a monster.” Clearly a guy whose novels didn’t sell.

And Gass makes a good point. We’ve all read these memoirs — we’ve got the James Frey example, right? He assumes that we’re going to betray confidences, we’re out to settle scores, we’re going to display our wounds in the marketplace, we’re going to try to evoke pity.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jul 28, 2010 | posted in words | comments (2)
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Narrative tips for nonfiction writers: more from the 2010 Mayborn Conference

by Tom Huang | July 28, 2010

I recently led a writing workshop at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, and talked to students about finding the meaning in their stories and going deep – while at the same time writing in a simple and clear way. Here are some tips.

FINDING THE STORY

  • Every story has its surface-level meaning. Let’s say the surface story for “Titanic” is that a huge ocean liner goes down. But what is the theme of the movie? What is the real meaning of the story? Theme, at least in my view, is the underlying meaning of the story.
  • Stories can have several thematic strings, and especially powerful ones are layered in that way. As a writer, I think you want to figure out what is the most important one, the one that you want to spend the most time on.
  • When doing narrative, you have to sharpen your focus and figure out what your story is really about. Think about one set piece, performance, play or wedding – something that takes place within a set amount of time. There are also natural journeys like a road trip, or internal journeys, like addiction or abuse.
  • If you’re the narrator, we need to see you and to understand who you are.
  • When you’re trying to get readers to care, to get readers in on that, they have to see some of what you have seen. Try to figure out what it is that the reader really needs to know.
  • If you decide to write about deeply personal things, you have to go all the way. If there’s painful stuff you’re holding back, it won’t work. If you’re not ready to go there, that’s fine; maybe let the story sit for a while.
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Meanwhile back at the ranch: The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference and a trip to Larry McMurtry’s private library

Heading northwest out of Dallas before morning rush hour, glass and concrete slip away to nothing but shrubs, scattered trees and long, low rises that are not so much hills as the memory of hills. After nearly three hours and an impressive number of cows, the landscape resolves into a crossroads called Archer City, where a woman standing next to a trash dumpster passes along directions to the house of writer Larry McMurtry.

McMurtry lives in the town where he was born. But he has added his own brand to the place by opening a collection of bookstores on or near the main drag and filling them with hundreds of thousands of books.

His devotion to creating and preserving stories has made him the patron saint of not only Archer City but also the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, which took place last weekend in Grapevine, Texas. And so it happened that on the opening day of the conference, a group of attendees made the annual pilgrimage to Archer City for a visit to McMurtry’s bookstores and private collection.

McMurtry's private library (click to enlarge)

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jul 26, 2010 | posted in words | comments (1)
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Flow

by Peggy Nelson | July 23, 2010

Nothing prepares you for your first time. You’re out with someone, maybe a date, maybe just friends, everything’s fine, and then he whips it out, right in front of you — at a restaurant, on the street, anywhere. You try not to look at it, you try to look absolutely anywhere else — finally he finishes and puts it away and continues on with the conversation, just like nothing happened. Or maybe he airs it out for awhile, or even — casually — holds onto it, in case it vibrates.

You know, the phone.

It fits in your pocket, why shouldn’t you carry it? It’s always on, why shouldn’t you answer it? Why shouldn’t you text someone the minute you think of something, or check to see what they’re doing? Why shouldn’t you be available, to everyone, all the time?

Availability at a distance often means rudeness in person. Showing up means you’re already over. Presence pales before possibility. It isn’t good enough to be with who you are with, you should be on your way to the next fabulous party, like Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol. Exactly like them, in fact; it’s the Cult of the New writ small, personalized. Anything is meaningful if it’s New. Anything is better if it’s New. Anything is worth having if it’s New.

Except that it isn’t. I don’t mean it isn’t new. I mean it isn’t just consumption. It is a new etiquette. And it is changing not only the stories we tell, but the environment in which they are told — and who feels authorized to tell them.

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Joe Donnelly on Slake, long-form journalism and launching a vision: “it’s about finding the right rhythm and the right way of presenting it”

Last month, we heard rumors from the West Coast of a new magazine devoted to long-form storytelling – a magazine that existed in print only and had no digital presence. The ghostly enigma turned out to be Slake, an upstart publication run by an editing team formerly with the L.A. Weekly. (Slake has since rolled out a minimal website.) We spoke this week with Joe Donnelly, Slake’s publisher, who also shares editing duties. In his previous life, Donnelly reported for the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and helped edit a variety of publications. In these excerpts from our discussion, he tells us what a Los Angeles magazine can offer the world, shares the silver lining from his divorce and describes why he decided to commit to long-form narrative when so many outlets have abandoned it.

What is Slake?

Slake is a quarterly, and it’s just an expansive experiment in narrative journalism, storytelling, art, poetry, fiction – kind of all the things that we’re supposed to not have time for anymore. But the emphasis is on storytelling in its many forms, including deeply reported long-form journalism – even a piece by yours truly.

We’ve been describing it a couple ways. First, it’s an experiment in “slow lit” or “slow journalism.” The other way to think about it is that to my partner Laurie Ochoa and to me, words and images are for more than just information. We seem to be in a completely information-driven age, and information doesn’t always have context. We believe that words and images and art are as much for experience as they are for information.

When you take the experience out of the equations, sometimes something is lost. There’s definitely a place for fast information, and instant dissemination is important as well, but it’s not “either/or,” it’s “and/also.” This is our attempt to provide the “and/also.”

What publications do you admire? What do you hope to do with Slake in the long run?

I admired the L.A. Weekly under Laurie and me – I was her deputy editor there. I admired all the things it did: its openness, its lack of an institutional voice, its respect for the voices of its writers and reporters, its desire to be honest and not have a stuck point of view, its willingness to be sort of freewheeling. It reflected the Los Angeles I knew – with all the diversity of talent, ideas and interest. It’s just a wild, exciting and rich place. It’s the biggest culture mashup – it’s like a big mixed tape out here. And the L.A. Weekly reflected that for a while.

And of course, I love The New Yorker. The presentation isn’t quite suitable for out here, but I like all the things that it does. I like its ambitions and what it tries to tackle. I used to read Harper’s and The Atlantic a lot more. In the past, I liked Esquire and Rolling Stone magazine a lot – Rolling Stone has been a venerable go-to since I was probably 12 or 13. Although I was a music geek and all that, I loved the political coverage. I loved William Greider and Hunter S. Thompson. It’s actually a great American publication, a uniquely American publication. I think that GQ, Esquire kind of got lost in that “how to be an über-man” bullshit of the ’80s and ’90s. I find that completely uninteresting.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jul 21, 2010 | posted in words | comments (1)
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Audience storytelling from “Star Wars” to “Top Secret America”: interactivity across the spectrum

Chewbacca and Washington Post reporters may have more in common than you think: both might get an assist from the general public on in-depth projects that are in the news this week.

“Top Secret America,” The Washington Post’s massive effort to identify a network of secret facilities blanketing the nation, has garnered particular attention today. For the last two years, Pulitzer Prize winner Dana Priest and fellow Post reporter William Arkin have been using public information to establish the locations of sites devoted to homeland security in the post-9/11 era.

The project includes an article, a U.S. map of facilities and a graphed network of the relationships between government agencies and contractors, as well as a trailer from collaborator Frontline for what will become an October show on PBS. With months until airtime, the Post and Frontline are inviting audience help in getting the full story. The Post site has contact information and a “submit” button inviting people to “contribute to this ongoing project.” Frontline’s dedicated page for the project says “Help our continuing investigation of “Top Secret America,” and offers its own phone number and email address. It is not the first time that Frontline has collaborated on posting material and asking for tips, sometimes well in advance of knowing what the final angle or story will be.

detail of a scene from "Star Wars: Uncut"

So what does that have to do with “Star Wars”? Well, it is almost a galaxy far, far away from national security, but the 2010 Emmy Award Nominees were announced a few days ago, and “Star Wars: Uncut” was included in the category of “Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media.”

The project, a user-generated retelling of the first “Star Wars” film, involves users grabbing their favorite 15-second clips from the movie and recreating that scene in some form – whether via Legos, a suburban setting, animation, or dog actors – and uploading the homemade version to the site. The site then reconstructs the movie as viewable in one long narrative of bits created by the audience. See this explanation of the project to view some choice scenes and discover all the versions that ensued after the summer 2009 launch.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jul 19, 2010 | posted in interactive narratives | comments (0)
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Rebecca Skloot on narrating history: “looking for that one family, that one person, that one moment that will help hold everything together”

We spoke this week with Rebecca Skloot, author of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” A longtime science writer with a commitment to narrative, Skloot has written for The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; and Discover, among other publications. Her book recounts the story of an African-American tobacco farmer whose cancer cells have transformed medical research again and again in the decades since her death. Showing how the cells came to be taken without Lacks’ knowledge, Skloot follows the family’s struggle to understand Henrietta’s legacy and to come to terms with her treatment. In these excerpts from our chat, Skloot talks about folding a multi-narrative structure into a single arc, her reluctant use of the first person, and readers who assume she made up parts of the book.

Skloot used the film "Hurricane" as a model for the multi-narrative structure of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." Above is her coded system breaking down the stories of both (click to enlarge).

When you turned the book in, what were your hopes for it, and have they changed given its success?

My hope when I turned the book in – which I think is the hope of any writer when they turn their book in – is that it would get out there into the world. I know so many writers who’ve spent decades of their lives working on books that are incredible and that don’t ever get press coverage, or the book just doesn’t take off because of the time of year that it’s published or because of the other books published at the same time. There are so many factors that are out of the writer’s control.

I knew all that going in, but for me, the story itself – just the facts of this story – were so incredible, I always felt like if I could get them out to people, if people could read them and learn this information, they’d have the same reaction I did, which was “Oh, my God. I have to tell people about this.”

As a writer, one of the things that I thought a lot about and that weighed on me as I wrote and revised was wanting to do justice to the story. The simple facts of the story and the narrative of the story are so amazing that I felt in some ways like the only thing I could have done was to screw it up. And so much of my job was to take this incredible natural story and tell it in a way that let readers experience it in the way it really happened, to bring it to life as much as I could while staying out of its way.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jul 16, 2010 | posted in words | comments (4)
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