The Mechanic & the Muse

Time shifters--Moviemakers and their disordered narratives

David Denby, the New Yorker’s astute film critic, focuses his attention on movies that play with time and their audiences in an article of interest to storytellers, regardless of medium.

The entire piece is thought-provoking, but one passage in particular jumped out at me; it’s an homage to narrative that is under assault in movie theaters around the world.

"Storytellers, relying on sequence and causality, make sense out of nonsense; they impose order, economy, and moral consequence on the helter-skelter wash of experience. The notion that one event causes another, and that the entire chain is a unified whole, with a complex, may be ambivalent, but, in any case, coherent meaning, not only brings us to a point of resolution; it allows us to navigate through our lives."

But Denby’s focus, propelled by this year’s Academy Award nominated “Babel,” is about movie storytellers with a different impact, leaving “the viewer experiencing reactions before actions, dénouements before climaxes, disillusion before ecstasy, and many other upsetting reversals and discombobulations.”

Just as audiences became accustomed to non-Hollywood endings that refused to give us what we wanted (enemies falling in love, sympathetic characters who were not snatched from the jaws of death), Denby says we’re getting used to structures that bend time.

“All these movies draw on a sophistication about cinema that is now almost universal. We know that a film is not a piece of life; we know that it is something made. And we’re used to being shoved around in time—we may even be doing some of the shoving ourselves.”

Technology makes “new non-narrative movies” possible, for established filmmakers as well as anyone with access to ripping software who wants to create their own structure.

“Twenty-five years ago, the videotape transfer of a film sustained the notion of a movie as a continuous track: you could run it forward or backward, but the film was “printed” on magnetic tape, and you remained on the track. Digital information, on the other hand, can be infinitely manipulated; you can jump from one place to another or cut the movie into pieces. At home, kids create “mashups”—chopping sections out of a feature film, mixing the excerpts with their own material, and posting the result on the Web as a madcap original creation. “

But all that digital time-shifting, may come with a hefty price.

“The danger of instant editing, of course, is not just disordered time sequences but glibness. Some of the big Hollywood action films move so quickly that they eliminate the most rudimentary emotional attachment to the material. It would be terrible if computer editing wiped out the proper emotional resistance to making a cut—the lingering grave affection for a face, a landscape, an interior, even the resonance of an empty space.“

Here’s a filmography of the ”topsy-turvey narratives’ Denby discusses in the piece. You can learn more about them from the Internet Movie Database at imdb.com

Babel
Amores Perros
21 Grams
Adaptation
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Traffic
Syriana
Miami Vice
Betrayal
Pulp Fiction
The Good Shepherd
Un Chien Andalou
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Muriel
L’Avventura
Memento
The Lives of Others

Holiday fiction in newspapers

The other day, I wrote in "Chip on Your Shoulder, about author Cory Doctorow's approach to selling his science fiction books by providing free downloads at the same time the printed version is on sale. Newspapers, of course, are doing the same thing, offering online versions of their paper for free, while charging for the ink on dead trees product.

My wife, Kathy Fair, and I are engaged in a similar experiment; we write newspaper serial novels, the first of which is now a hardcover book, but which are available free online. Like Doctorow, we're, in effect, in the freebie business, but banking that print and online newspaper readers will win become an audience eager to buy our story in book form.

We'll get a sense of how that experiment fares this weekend.  Kathy and I are flying to Delaware today to appear Saturday at The Holly Festival in Milton, the town that provided the inspiration for our newspaper serial and book, “The Holly Wreath Man,.” and do three signings at bookstores in the tiniest state. Delaware is said to have three counties, two at high tide; it's dotted with places called Dagsboro and Gumborow, and Little Creek, where the calendars seemed to stop in 1938 and captivated my imagination about forgotten history. It’s also where Kathy’s family lives, and where we met 30 years ago, so we’ll have a nice reunion.

Jenny Maher, a reporter for the The Delaware State News, where I worked in 1975-1977 and wrote the true story behind “The Holly Wreath Man,” published a generous advance,

And as it turns out, we'll have a new story for the freebie experiment. Starting today,  our hometown paper, the St. Petersburg Times,  is running a web-onlyof our newest serial, “Mystery @ Elf Camp,” along with podcast recordings of each chapter..The Times, owned by The Poynter Institute where I teach,  teased to it today on the front page and Floridian front.

This one’s shorter, just 14-parts, and designed for young readers newspapers are desperate to lure and keep.  We've had other sales through Universal Press  Syndicate  for this holiday season, but not sure  where. As we find out, I'l l create a new  quikmap  like the one  I made to  locate the 50  papers which ran "The Holly  Wreath Man" since  2003. (More on the value of  mapping marketing books in a future post.)

Will Delawareans (excluding family and friends) who had the chance to read "The Holly Wreath Man" in print or listen to it in podcast form still want a book?

Will they, as Doctorow says of his sci-fi audience,"treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import?" Or will they, as often happens, stop by a bookstore table where Kathy and I preside over stacks of "The Holly Wreath Man," and say, "Oh, I read this in the paper" and move on.

In the parlance of serial narratives, we've left you with a cliffhanger. Stay tuned.

 

 

 

YOU GOTTA READ THIS!

 

Kimm Montone, a staff writer for the REPUBLICAN & Herald newspaper, located in Pennsylvania's eastern coal region, is one of 12 reporters taking part in a unique online course going on now on News University, Poynter's online training site, funded by the Knight Foundation. If you haven't check out NewsU's rich collection of free online courses--just point your broswer to http://www.newsu.org--you're cheating yourself. 

The one I've involved with costs money and is closed to all but the enrolled participants. It's four-weeks long and focuses on one of my favorite and most personally Instructive subjects--the process approach to writing. It'ss the most exciting and fun teaching I've done in I don't know how long, and I've got a great teaching gig at Poynter already. A major reason: Casey Frechette, an interactive learning producer, and his Newsu colleagues. Together we've made videos, recorded podcasts, developed interactive assignments. I could go on and on and probably will someday.

Because the point of this post is to share a story.

For a coaching session this week, I asked everybody in the course to send me a story by a writer they admired and might want to emulate. There have been several great picks.

Kimm Montone's choice was this recent piece about a body collector in Detroit by Charlie LeDuff of the New York Times. It's part of his "American Album" series described as "Portraits of offbeat Americans...with videos that appear every other Monday."

Explaining his pick, Kimm wrote: "Charlie LeDuff is one of my favorite writers. His stories jump off the page, he paints vivid images and includes it into the larger picture. After reading his stories, I'm amazed by his talent and ability."

As KimM was, as I am, and, I'll bet, as you will be, too.

 

An enchanting story in word, image and sound

Readers of the Charlotte Observer found a gift in their Sunday paper.

"The Old White Oak of Matthews: The extraordinary rescue of an ordinary tree" by staff writer Elizabeth Leland is one of those stories you read and find yourself looking for someone to tell about it. (free registration may be required)

Actually, you look for someone you can read it to: a spouse, a sibling, a child.

Leland and features editor Michael Weinstein consulted me about the story, so I know that the late Shel Silverstein's classic children's story, "The Giving Tree," was an inspiration.

But "The Old White Oak of Matthews" also accomplishes a remarkable accomplishment. It uses the journalist's skills of reporting, focusing, organizing, drafting and revision, to tell an enchanting, true story with the grace and style of a literary classic.

The print version features illustrations by Jason Whitley, while an online package complements the story with a vivid photo gallery featuring the work of John D. Simmons and Jason E. Miczek and reporter Leland's interview with a pivotal character.

(Photo by John D. Simmons, Charlotte Observer)

The Heart Attack Beat: Narratives on Deadline

What else would you call an assignment that required an 800-word narrative, worthy of the front page, that had to be completed in a day's work?

Nell Lake, editor of the Nieman Narrative Digest, a must-visit site for anyone interested in narrative writing, gave me the opportunity this month to revisit my past as a deadline storyteller and share the lessons of those days.

It also enabled me to dip into my clip files for two of my favorite deadline stories, "From Jon to Lani: The Gift of Life" and "It wasn't a trap."

The bottom line: "A full-bodied narrative may be out of reach on deadline, but not the individual skills and, more important, the habits and narrative judgment that make narratives possible."

(Image via www.symptoms-of-heart-attack.com)

"Mary Ellen's will:" Combining the Power of Investigative Narrative and Transparency

The Hollywood high-concept pitch might go like this: "Sunset Boulevard," the film classic about an aging starlet's tragic twilight, meets "Dallas," the prime time soap opera about the financial and family intrigues of the Ewing clan.

But a new, four-part Dallas Morning News series,  Mary Ellen's will: The Battle for 4949 Swiss, is journalism, a powerful example of investigative narrative that combines civic clarity and literary grace.

The series focuses on a contemporary social ill-- widespread financial exploitation of the elderly, whose loneliness and infirmities make them easy prey for strangers who swoop into their lives, shower them with attention, alienate them from family and friends, and make off with as much of their wealth as they can get away with.

Investigative reporter Lee Hancock, and the project's editor, Mark Miller, have created a gripping narrative that draws attention to such crimes by setting it against a dramatic and quintessential Texas landscape.

"The Battle for 4949 Swiss" exposes a public problem by focusing on the private tragedy of Mary Ellen Bendtsen, 88, and the fight over the decaying Dallas mansion that was her treasure.  It accomplishes this feat by transforming dogged reporting into a story brought alive by vivid characters, the unrelenting accretion of status details in a society where everything seems Super-sized, and dramatic scenes that  unfold before our eyes.

(A disclaimer: I have led writing and editing workshops for Morning News staffers for several years. In this case, Miller asked me to participate in an early brainstorming session. I also read early drafts, providing "movies of my reading," a running commentary of one reader's reaction. My enthusiasm, however, derives from having watched the series develop in complexity, as Hancock and Miller demonstrated the power of indefatigable revision, and, having now seen most of the completed version; the series' final installment appears tomorrow. A takeout Sunday explores systematic flaws that make the elderly so vulnerable to con artists.)

The paper's website provides an impressive menu of companion multimedia, including photo scrapbooks, character vignettes, and videos, including a poignant hospital scene where a frail Mrs. Bendsten signs over power of attorney to two men who, relatives and investigators believe, were intent on claiming her decaying mansion.

At a time when public distrust of the media overshadows good journalism, "Mary Ellen's will" also takes enormous pains to buttress its narrative, mirroring similar efforts to provide thorough and credible levels of sourcing transparency.

In addition to a source box, footnotes stud the narrative, pointing to documents and other records; some trigger pop-up boxes with links to news articles reaching back six decades. It's yet another example of the innovative ways that news organizations's online capabilities can provide as much information and documentation that a reader could want.

Like any good story, "Mary Ellen's will" is full of twists and turns.

But its greatest strength, and public service, reflects Hancock's relentless reporting and gifted prose, and the entire project team's attention to accuracy and detail.

Their contributions make it difficult to view the "Battle for 4949 Swiss" without thinking of our own aging relatives, and wondering whether vultures circle overhead.   

Song story: Bonnie Raitt and narrative brevity

Want to amaze your friends? Impress your significant other? Be the hit of any writing brownbag? Pose this question:  What's the shortest story ever told?

Give your audience a few moments and then wow them with:

For sale.
Baby shoes.
Never worn.

Six words.

This story's provenance— the product of a bar bet waged by Ernest Hemingway—seems apocryphal, but I'm happy to be corrected by a reliable source.

But there's no question who wrote another masterpiece of brevity I've been obsessively playing on my iPod to and from work: Bonnie Raitt's "Nick of Time."

I marvel at the way the song treats universal themes--yearning, ravages of time, loss and redemption-- through a range of evocative characters, their predicament shaped by the classic beginning, middle and end triad, and, despite its brevity, a significant amount of repetition, all combined to produce a clear and compelling narrative:

A friend of mine she cries at night, and she calls me on the phone. Sees babies everywhere she goes and she wants one of her own. She's waited long enough, she says, and still he can't decide. Pretty soon she'll have to choose and it tears her up inside. She is scared. Scared to run out of time.

Verse ii
--------
I see my folks, they're getting on and I watch their bodies change.
I know they see the same in me, and it makes us both feel strange.
No matter how you tell yourself, it's what we all go through;
Those eyes are pretty hard to take when they're staring back at you:
Scared to run out of time.

Chorus
------
When did the choices get so hard?
With so much more at stake
Life gets mighty precious when there's less of it to waste.
Waste.
Hummmm...scared to run out of time.

Verse iii
---------
Just when I thought I'd had enough and all my tears were shed
No promise left unbroken, there were no painful words unsaid.
You came along and showed me how to leave it all behind.
You opened up my heart again and then much to my surprise,
I found love, love, in the nick of time.
I found love, darling, love in the nick of time
I found love, baby, love in the nick of time

--"Nick of Time." Words and music by Bonnie Raitt

A story, whole, in just 255 words. It's 3 minutes, 52 seconds of music are best appreciated by ear or earbud. (The tinny 29-second Amazon.com sample doesn't do justice to Raitt's whiskey voice or her soulful backup).

How does she do it in so short a space? That's why I enjoy listening to the song and pondering the power of its lyrics. 

Point-of-view narrative

The term is Bryan Burrough's, who knows a lot about narrative himself. He was co-author, with John Helyar, of the 1990 narrative nonfiction blockbuster turned HBO movie, "Barbarians at the Gate:The Fall of RJR Nabisco," a  page-turning exploration of the back-stabbing greed behind leveraged buyouts that made the rich richer and the working class unemployed.

Burrough calls "point of view narrative" a new hybrid of the factual storytelling genre; he uses it to describe the approach taken by Ron Suskind in his 2004 book, "The Price of Loyalty," that profiled the quixotic struggles of the Bush Administrations first Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neil. Look for his John Hancock on your greenbacks.

Suskind harvested "The Price of Loyalty"  a treasure trove provided by O'Neil: thousands of documents that passed O'Neil's desk, reconstructions of Cabinet and one-on-one meetings with the President and the notoriously tight-lipped Alan Greenspan, buttressed by the note-taking and memory banks of an extraordinarily anal-retentive retired CEO and old Washington hand who served the Nixon and Ford White Houses before signing on with Bush 43.  However well-intentioned, O'Neil's version of events can't avoid a self-righteous "tell-all" taint, especially since it was written after O'Neil was shit-canned after two years on the job for not staying on message and challenging the Bush administration's economic polices.

Doing a mega-publicized tour of Africa with Bono didn't help either.

The book provided a legendary exchange, provided by Suskind's cabinet-level fly on the wall. It came when O'Neil pushed back against a $1.35 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest 1% of the population. prompting Dick Cheney to allegedly respond: "We won the mid terms. It's our due."

As narrative, Burrough says, "The Price of Loyalty "was a fascinating exercise, essentially O’Neill’s memoir under Suskind’s byline, and suggested a new hybrid at work: the point-of-view narrative." New?  "Point of view" is one of the most controversial of the literary devices employed by narrative nonfiction writers since the 1960s. Suskind's approach also echoes the time-honored 'as told to" genre, but avoids the era's spate of ghost-written books "written" by politicians; Burrough is correct that he's taken it to a new level.

"Everybody won. Suskind was able to tell a fly-on-the-wall, insidery account of the Bush White House, never mind that he really possessed just one fly on the wall. O’Neill not only got to vent his spleen, he avoided the unpleasantries of the sour-grapes memoir — all those god-awful evenings with Larry King and Anderson Cooper — while his views gained credibility by passing through the typewriter of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist."

Reviewing Suskind's new book, "The One Per Cent Doctrine,"  in the New York Times this weekend,  Burrough detects another product of the point of view/fly on the wall narrative. The big difference this time: Suskind has more flies at his disposal, among them former CIA director George "It's a slam dunk" Tenet, and his allies in Langley's spook factory."

For all its insider glimpses, "The One Per Cent Doctrine" magnifies the dangers in point of view narrative. Burroughs says:

"The problem is that Tenet, however central, was just one horse in a crowded field. President Bush is here, as are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice. There’s no hint, though, that any of them said word one to Suskind. There’s no attribution, a concern magnified in the point-of-view format, but their every appearance clearly arrives through the eyes of Tenet or his men. It’s not so much that the text is ill informed. It’s just one set of hands on a very big elephant."

Over the last week, I've read both Suskind's books. Ultimately, they suggest to me that history is written by the first flies on the wall to alight on a keyboard,  especially one wielded by a writer of Suskind's quality, a Burrough characterization I agree with:

"That it works as well as it does is testimony to the author’s narrative skills. Suskind was a top-notch newspaperman, one of the best natural writers The Wall Street Journal (where I also once worked) ever produced, and he commands an authorial voice many journalists can only dream of. Give him an hour with a cooperative source, and he’ll give you six pages of beautiful scene-setting, scissor-sharp dialogue and a nugget or two of insight; his discussion of Bush’s view of the Iraq war as a global “game changer” is eye-opening. "

But Burrough's description of a point of view narrative's fault lines should sound a klaxon alarm for writers who venture into point of view narrative:

"Time and again his ambition outstrips his source base. Every hot button of the last five years is pressed — Tora Bora, torture, nuclear proliferation, Libya, Iraq, Valerie Plame, W.M.D. and many more — but what we get are narrative bits and pieces, inevitably scenes built around Tenet or an aide, rather than anything approaching a rigorous, detailed exploration of the issue, much less a rigorous, detailed retelling of what actually happened."

A conversational, Everyman voice is one of Suskind's strengths, making it, as Burrough ends his review, "an easy and worthwhile summer read."

That would be music to a writer's ears--and bank account--but it's a discordant note for  readers, like me, who prefer nonfiction narratives that depend on more substantial underpinnings than a fly glued to the wall.

One such book is Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001." It's as eminently readable, also Pulitzer-Prize winning, and equally alarming as "The One Per Cent Doctrine." But its rigorous sourcing documented in voluminous end notes, left me with a firmer, and more confident understanding of how we've gotten into the Middle East mess we're in today.

But that's just my point of view. 

Image Sources: O'Neil's signature-U.S. Treasury Dept.; Bono and O'Neil: SAURABH DAS/AP; Fly-Mark Plonsky

Children's Stories

The latest issue of the Nieman Narrative Digest focuses on the most vulnerable of subjects: children in trouble.

"Many newspaper narratives focus in some way on children we worry about," notes the Digest's editor, Nell Lake. "Portray children in trouble, editors know, and readers will care. The question is, how to write well about such emotionally weighty subjects?"

The issue features a new essay by Barry Siegel, director of the literary journalism program at UC Irvine, who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.  Pulitzer jurors called his story, "A Father's Pain, a Judge's Duty and a Justice Beyond Their Reach," a "humane and haunting portrait of a man tried for negligence in the death of his son, and the judge who heard the case." You can read it, as well as Siegel's wise advice to writers focusing on endangered children. His bottom line:

" 'Endangered kids' pieces? Most certainly recognize them as such -- then try to write them as something else, as something more -- as something that gets at all the reasons for why we're feeling so emotional."

The home page also features Sonia Nazario's "Enrique's Journey", Anne Hull's "Young and Gay in Real America", and Isabel Wilkerson's "First Born, Fast Grown", and Diana Sugg's "If I Die."

Think of the way children usually appear in the news: as victims or valedictorians. We owe them more: stories told with sensitivity, nuance and respect for their developing, and all too often, endangered lives. This issue of the Nieman Narrative Digest helps show us how.

War in the Desert

No, it's not Iraq.

This war was in North Africa, the date 1943, the combatants Great Britain and the United States versus Germany. Covering the war for The New Yorker was the inestimable A. J. Liebling. Read "The Foamy Fields," set on a vulnerable American airfield in Tunisia; the piece is available free of charge from the magazine's online archives.

A master at work.

  Best of all, you can get this piece and Liebling's other war reportage, collected in "Mollie and other War Pieces," at a reasonable price, at Amazon.com.

(Photo Credits: E Grove via tournamenthouse.com; Amazon.com)

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #3

On literary devices. Continuing from "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

"The third device was the so-called “third person point of view," (emphasis added) the technique of presenting every scene to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene as he experiences it.

"Journalists had often used the first-person point of view—“I was there”—just as autobiographers, memoirists and novelists had. This is very limiting for the journalist, however, since he can bring the reader inside the mind of only one character—himself—a point of view that often proves irrelevant to the story and irritating to the reader. Yet how could a journalist, writing nonfiction, accurately penetrating the thoughts of another person?

"The answer proved to be marvelously simple: interview him about his thoughts and emotions along with everyone else. This is what I had done in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, what John Sack did in M and what Gay Talese did in Honor Thy Father."

Next: Status details

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #4

The last of the four literary devices cited by Tom Wolfe from "The New Journalism," by Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

"The fourth device has always been the least understood. This is the recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving towards children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene. Symbolic of what? Symbolic, generally, of people's status life, using that term in the broad sense of the entire pattern of behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be. The recording of such details is not mere embroidery in prose. It lies as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature.

"It is the very essence of the “absorbing” power of Balzac, for example. Balzac barely used point of view at all in the refined sense that Henry James used it later on. And yet the reader comes away feeling that he has been even more completely “inside” Balzac’s characters than James’s. Why? Here is the sort of thing Balzac does over and over. Before introducing you to Monsieur and Madame Marneffe personally (in “Cousin Bette”) he brings you into their drawing room and conducts a social autopsy: “The furniture covered in faded cotton velvet, the plaster statuettes masquerading as Florentine bronzes, the clumsily carved painted chandelier with its candle rings of molded glass, the carpet, a bargain whose low price was explained too late by the quantity of cotton in it, which was now visible to the naked eye—everything in the room, to the very curtains, which would have taught you that the handsome appearance of wool damask lasts for only three years)”—everything in the room begins to absorb one into the lives of a pair of down-at-the-heel social climbers, Monsieur and Madame Marneffe. Balzac piles up these details so relentlessly and at the same time so meticulously—there is scarcely a detail in the later Balzac that doesn’t illuminate some point of status—that he triggers the reader’s memories of his own status life, his own ambitions, insecurities, delights, disasters, plus the thousands and one small humiliations and the status coups of everyday life, and triggers them over and over until he creates an atmosphere as rich and involving as the Joycean use of point of view."

 

Soup's on!

Several readers starving for a good read wished there was a site where they could find sustenance.

I've mentioned gangrey.com before, but wanted to repeat the nourishing service it offers by flagging great storytelling -- and on occasion, the stories behind it --  from all over. Up high as I write, there's a revealing story pitch from Jimmy Breslin to his editor, Jim Bellows.

(Good luck in St. Pete, Ben.)

 

What Balzac, Dickens et all Hath Wrought #2

On literary devices. Continuing from "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

...record the dialogue in full, (emphasis added) which was device No. 2. Magazine writers, like the early novelists, learned by trial and error something that has since been demonstrated in academic studies: namely, that realistic dialogue involves the reader more completely than any other single other device. It also establishes and defines character more completely than any other single device. (Dickens has a way of fixing a character in your mind so that you have the feeling he has described every inch of his appearance—only to go back and discover that he actually took care of the physical description in two or three sentences; the rest he has accomplished with dialogue) Journalists were working on dialogue of the fullest, most completely revealing sort in the very moment when novelists were cutting back, using dialogue in more and more cryptic, fey and curiously abstract ways."

Next: Point of view

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #1

Dick Cheney, hunter extraordinaire, was the ostensible subject of my recent post, "Ready, Aim, Oops." But reader Harris Salat was eager to learn the source of the final paragraph when I described a tool of 19th century literary realists that Tom Wolfe and other so-called "New Journalists" relied on in their nonfiction.

I replied that it's from a long introduction by Wolfe in "The New Journalism," an anthology edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, published in 1973. There are used copies on Amazon.com

But that seemed a stingy response, and so I copied out the seven paragraphs Wolfe used to define status details and three other device the New Journalists borrowed from their literary ancestors. I'll dole them out one by one over the next four days. The source is my hardcover edition of "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, pp. 31-32. Wolfe writes:

"If you follow the progress of the New Journalism closely through the 1960s, you see an interesting thing happening. You see journalists learning the techniques of realism—particularly of the sort found in Fielding, Smollett, Balzac, Dickens and Gogol—from scratch. By trial and error, by “instinct” rather than theory, journalists began to discover the devices that gave the realistic novel its unique power, variously known as its “immediacy,” its concrete reality,” its emotional involvement,” “its gripping” or “absorbing quality."

"This extraordinary power was derived mainly from just four devices, they discovered. The basic one was scene-by-scene construction,(emphasis added) telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative. Hence the sometimes extraordinary feats of reporting that the new journalists undertook: so that they could actually witness the scenes in other people’s lives as they took place…"

Next: Dialogue

Storytelling Manifesto

"If we intend to have jobs 20 years from now, if we intend to own any validity in our fight for progress and reform, we have to reverse the trends that infect our business." That's Ben Montgomery, a reporter for the Tampa Tribune, describing why he created a blog devoted to "prolonging the slow death of newspapers" by showcasing great writing.

In his June 2005 inaugural post on gangrey.com, he argues, "We have to tell stories like David Finkel and W.C. Heinz and Anne Hull and Ernie Pyle. We have to inspire like Michael Brick and C.J. Chivers and Kelley Benham. We have to captivate like Rick Bragg and Barry Siegel and Kate Boo and Earl Swift.

"We have to make the people who pick us up in the morning say, "Damn, that was a good story."

"We have to get better."

Meg Martin, Poynter's Naughton Fellow, turned me on to the site. His storytelling manifesto, she says, "was his first entry (and one of the reasons why I SO love this particular blog, besides the fact that it's got fantastic links to incredible journalism."

That was all I needed to know.