The Mechanic & the Muse

Her 15 percent's worth

Finally, we hear from James Frey's agent. In an exclusive interview with Publishers Weekly, Kassie Evashevski reveals she's dropped faux-memoirist Frey as a client. She also wonders now if what we need is a "nonfiction memoir," and adds:

"One can fact-check facts, but how do you fact-check memory and perception? I'm less clear on whether or not I think publishers have a responsibility to carefully check nonfiction works of a journalistic nature.Ultimately, I feel an author should be responsible for his or her own work, but I leave that to the legal minds."

The whole experience "will definitely make me more cautious," Frey's agent said. "But, at the end of the day, I guess I hope I'll still be able to take people at their word--even while I'm checking out their stories."

Editors taking writers at their word is where the newspaper and magazine industries got Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and a host of serial plagiarists and fabricators. Now it's dumped "A million little pieces" of distrust on the book publishing industry.

During the 2003 Blair brouhaha, I took this stand on the question of trust:

"Journalism, even the creative kind, is built on lots of things, but trust wouldn’t top my list. Good journalism is built on passionate inquiry, indefatigable pursuit of evidence, healthy skepticism, obsession for accuracy, and a near-pathological fear of error—a determination to get things right no matter what it takes.

"Jayson Blair was wrong. As was Stephen Glass. Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle too.

"But so were editors who trusted them. If anything good can come from this, it won’t be pretty, but it will be good for journalism.

"It's an editor's job to vet stories. To role-play the reader. To have the dirty mind and see the double-entendres the writer is blind to—or perhaps thinks would be cute to get past the desk."

"It’s not an editor’s job to trust a reporter."

Or in light of James Frey's self-admitted liteary deceptions, here's a mashup of my thoughts in 2003 and today's reflections on his agent's remarks:

It’s an editor’s job (or for that matter, maybe an agent's too, at least if neither wants to end up staring into the business end of a smoking gun or a steely-eyed Oprah) to challenge, to probe, to prosecute a story, to be the ally, not of his or her colleague, (or client) but ultimately the advocate for readers who deserve to get what they think they're paying for.

Digging deep in San Jose

Many of you, like me, have  read about this already in Romenesko, but I wanted to make sure to bookmark the San Jose Mercury News investigative series, "Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice" (registration required but it works for all Knight Ridder papers) produced by a team led by Rick Tulsky, who shared a 1987 Pulitzer at the Philadelphia Inquirer for a probe disorder in that city's court system. 

Given the exhaustive attention to detail as evident in its online package, and the attention the work is getting, along with the Pulitzer board's acceptance of online content in submissions, I'd expect the package to be in the running next year.

Married to online's tools, such as this Flash presentation of cases, the cross-platform presentation may have its greatest impact online.

In any case, it's the kind of public service journalism (go to the Pulitzer site  and search by category)that Knight Ridder used to be famous for, and the reason I was so proud to work for the chain in its Washington Bureau for 5 years in the early 90s.

A side note: Given the dismaying news coming from KR's business side, it's also heartening to see the valuable work on the Iraq war that's emerged from the Washington Bureau.

A Million Little Credits

I've yet to see James Frey's author's note for "A Million Little Pieces," that he and his publisher promised the public after Oprah shattered Frey into shards of mea culpas last week. I'm looking forward to it.

In the meantime, I've been on the lookout for examples of author's notes. I came upon two close to home.

When I published "The Needle" an excerpt from a novel-in-progress set in a military hospital at the tail end of World War II, I was mindful of novelist Thomas Mallon's standard for historical fiction:

"Nouns always trump adjectives, and in the phrase 'historical fiction,' it is important to remember which is which."

So, my author's note provides source material from contemporary magazines and documentaries that I hope buttresses the reader's sense that fiction has its roots in fact, small details that buttress the imagination. It's at the top of the story.

When I published "The Only Honest Man," another excerpt from a memoir in progress about my grandfather and his son, the author's note reflected a desire to give credit to a writer who had already tilled the historical soil, making my job of recreating my grandfather's shady past an easier task.

"Anyone trying to reconstruct the Tammany Hall investigations of the 1930s is dependent on the work of Herbert Mitgang, the long-time New York Times journalist and biographer. I have relied extensively on his 1963 biography of Samuel Seabury, "The Man Who Rode the Tiger: The Life and Times of Judge Samuel Seabury," and his newest treatment, "Once Upon a Time in New York: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt and the Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age," published in 2000

We live in an age of transparency where smoking guns are more and more difficult to conceal. As James Frey has learned so painfully,  it's far better to be open--about your sources, about the accuracy of your story, about what Walt Harrington, himself a memoirist, calls "the multiplicity of perspectives and the watery quality of memory."

Harrrington is not afraid to rely on memory. "But the truth is that in writing memoir, we are often going to rely on our memories. The rule I set was that I wouldn't pretend to have memories I didn't have. I wouldn't embroider them with fiction. In that sense, they are correct."

This interview I did with Harrington about his memoir,  "The Everlasting Stream: A True Story of Rabbits, Guns, Friendship, and Family," reveals book industry attitudes about the memoir that helps explain how Frey landed in such hot water.

Fortunately, Harrington also talks about ways to use memory in an honorable fashion. Bottom line: you don't have to make it up. It's a lot more work, but you can sleep better.

Eustace Tilley's Early Bird Special

    Impatient readers of The New Yorker, heads-up! A sampling of this week's issue is online.

• A Web-only Q&A with Katherine Boo that focuses on her time spent with poor young mothers in Louisiana, along with a link to a 2003 piece on the impact of marriage on welfare
• A short story by Tobias Wolff
• Another one of "The Tipping Point's" Malcolm Gladwell provocative stories: this one asks the question: what can pit bulls teach us about profiling
• a short take on the Hamas Victory, Louis Menand's review of a new novel by Jay McInerney.

For non-subscribers, these represent a few freebies, but bear in mind, they will disappear next Sunday when the new magazine's highlights are posted.

Of course, if you subscribe you can just hold on for mail delivery later this week.

Otherwise, get 'em while they're hot---linked.

Reading to feed your Mechanic & Muse

In the magazine rack of my college library, I discovered two sources of inspiration. The New Yorker and The Writer continue to feed me to this day.

The New Yorker sets the bar for excellence in reporting and criticism. I have to crane my neck to see the bar for fiction; I have the rejection slips to prove it. I get the print edition every week, but like to beat our mailman by checking in Sunday night for the few pieces they share online.

Today, The Writer is a far different magazine than the issues I first read in my youth and collected for years. Under Sylvia Burack, who edited it for 40 years until her 80s, the magazine was visually drab but lit up with advice from real writers.

One of my biggest thrills came in 1998 when Mrs. Burack accepted a piece of mine, but not before it went through several rewrites. After one revision, she wrote me a letter, pecked out on a typewriter,  that said I was close. But, she added, as St. Augustine said when he prayed for a celibate life, "not quite yet." I got the message and went back to the computer. Aware of her high standards, a  second piece made it through fewer revisions, I recall.

Mrs. Burack died in 2003. In her obituary, The New York Times listed the rich and famous writers who appeared in the magazine, including Stephen King, Sue Grafton, and Sidney Sheldon. But what resonated with me was the comment from Wendy Dager, a newspaper columnist: "She and The Writer treated us lesser-known writers as if we were just as important as those with household names."

"We're not going to make anyone a Pulitzer Prize winner," Ms. Burack told The Boston Globe in 1987. "But we can tell writers about the basics — the dos and don'ts."

The Writer changed hands in 2000. Its new editor, Elfrieda Abbe, has kept alive Ms. Burack's spirit, but has brought the magazine into the 21st century with a more visually appealing design that features "before and after boxes" that demonstrate how implementing the lessons of an article can improve a story, resource boxes that include online as well as print sources, along with a web site (magazine subscription required).

Like its predecessor, its value continues to reside in the stories that writers tell about their successes and failures, their rituals and rejections, and most of all, the lessons they have learned about the writing craft. (A disclaimer: I was fortunate enough to place a story, about the value of old newspapers as research tools, in the new Writer in 2003.

For example, in The Writer's January 2006 issues, I found an article on fixed-form writing stories that appeals to my Mechanic and the Muse.

Just as poets rely on the sonnet and the villanelle and other fixed forms, so can prose writers. Bruce Holland Rogers describes several, among them the "69er"-- stories that are exactly 69 words long--and the "369" which consists of "three 69-word stories that share a common theme or subtheme."  I've got an oft-rejected story that might do well fixed by those formats. I'll let you know how it works out.

What are the lessons here about my relationship with these two magazines? Several, I'd say.

• The importance of libraries
• The value of community
• The power of lessons learned
• The challenges of craft
• Most of all, the way excellence corresponds with longevity.

So, what magazines or web sites feed your writer's Mechanic?

What James Frey should have written

During Oprah's evisceration of "memoirist" James Frey yesterday, Nan Talese, who edited and published "A Million Little Pieces," said that Frey has written an author's note for future editions. In them, he will acknowledge what the first, best-selling edition failed to tell readers, namely that "parts of the book that have been changed."

Before he hits the send button, Frey might take a look at how Maria Dahvana Headley handled disclosure for her memoir, "The Year of Yes," which recounts what happened when she decided to accept every invitation for a date for a year.

Here's her author's note:

"This is a true story. That means that within these pages are plenty of people who actually exist. Some of these people are completely out of my life, and have been for years. Others, I still know and adore. In neither case do I want to break up any marriages, pry open any barricaded closet doors, or otherwise ruin any lives. Therefore, names have been changed to protect the indignant, the infantile, and, of course, the innocent (all three of you). Pretty much the only names I didn't change are my own (because I have no problem with muddying my own character), and Big White Cat's, because he is housebound and doesn't care if I tell the world his secrets.

One more thing. This book has been reconstructed from memory. My memory. Subject to vagaries, hangovers, emotional meltdowns, and the occasional unrequited vendetta. Some of the people in this book are gonna be happy about this, and some of you aren't. I've tried to be kind where I could be, and if I couldn't be entirely kind while still telling the truth, at least I've edited out some of your bad dialogue and made you wittier than you are."

As cops say, let's put out a BOLO (Be on the lookout) for other author's notes for memoirs that represent truth in advertising.

I learned about Headley's author's note from my editor, Julie Moos. If you know of any others that do a credible job of letting readers know what they're getting, please let me know.

Do you take this Jarhead for richer...?

Driving home last night I heard a startling radio story on "Marketplace," which follows "All Things Considered" on our local public radio station.

The subject itself--"marriages of convenience" between US military and spouses who may not even know each other but hook up to split bennies (off-base housing, dependent health care)--came as a surprise.  Hadn't heard about that one.

But what made it even more impressive was the reporter, a young woman named Sophie Simon-Ortiz, a staffer for Youth Radio, billed as "a station created by young people training for careers in media."

Now this may be old news to everyone else, but it was the first time I'd heard about this scam. The story used some unnamed sources, including one military "wife" who described marrying a soldier at a Vegas chapel; the honeymoon was breakfast at an IHOP.

But it also featured well-balanced reporting: a Navy spokesman who bemoaned the situation but said the fraud was tough to crack, and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who chose not to go the marriage route but understands why others might take advantage of the system.

It got me wondering if it took a young person to find and get people to talk about their involvement in the fraud. MSM is so worried about demographics. Stories and reporters like Ms. Simon-Ortiz make me feel confident the next generation can produce stories just as good as the boomers who are doing the job now.

A case study in tenacity

For 30 years, Larry Welborn, a legal affairs writer at the Orange County (Ca.) Register, refused to let go of a story: a young woman had been found hanged in her apartment under suspicious circumstances. Haunted by a photo of the victim, Linda Cummings, Welborn pursued the case and ultimately persuaded law enforcement officials to take a closer look. Last month, Welborn chronicled the ups and down of this cold case file in a riveting 8-part series, "Murder by Suicide?"

I interviewed Welborn for my "Chip on Your Shoulder" column, the latest in a series of interviews with journalists and writers. His story behind the story is as inspiring as the series itself is gripping.

My advice: Read the series first, then the Q&A.

Then ask yourself, is there a story you can't let go of?

If the answer is yes, hold on tight and don't let go until it's resolved. Tenacity is a character trait that separates those who get stories written from those whose writing life is littered with unfinished stories.

But as Welborn reveals in an accompanying tip sheet on courting sources, so does being human and honest.

"Ly" detectors and The Passivator

Like my friend and new media mentor, Sree Sreenivasan, I'm using this blog as a repository for cool things I find online and that I think will help writers. Here are two items for the Mechanic:

Gina Trapani's "ly detector" which helps root out adverbs whose presence often betray the weakness of the verb they're modifying. And the re-tooled code Gina inspired, Paul Ford's "The Passivator." Like the "ly detector," Ford uses color to highlight passive verbs as well as adverbial offenders. Casey Frechette of Poynter's NewsU staff has created some terrific revision tools in our free online course, "Get Me Rewrite: The Craft of Revision."

When it comes to verbs, I keep in mind George Orwell's ban: "Never use the passive where you can use the active."

As for adverbs, my favorite and most memorable put-down of the adverb remains one uttered by Kevin Spacey in the 1995 plague movie, "Outbreak." Encouraged by his boss, Dustin Hoffman, to add "alarmingly" to a status report, Spacey refuses:

"It's an adverb. It's a lazy tool of a weak mind."

That dig aside, avoid an all-or-nothing approach to grammar and style. The adverbs can also be a hard-working tool of a lyrical mind.

Hope I'm not too late

Writing is full of paradoxes. Here are ten contradictions writers face. It's an incomplete list. The title and focus of this blog draws on another one.

To succeed as writers, we need skills and knowledge that come from working steadily with words, sentences and paragraphs. We also benefit from occasional gifts of inspiration.

A mechanic. A muse.

A wrench. A wand.

Grammar. Freewriting.

Since November 2002, I've written a weekly writing advice column called "Chip on Your Shoulder" for Poynter Online, the website for the journalism school where I've taught since 1994 after spending 22 years as a newspaper reporter and occasional magazine freelancer.

I'll continue with columns, as with this Q&A with Larry Welborn, a legal affairs writer for the Orange County Register, but on a more occasional basis.

For now, I'd like to try my hand at blogging, writing bite-size prose items that track my continuing quest to master the writing craft. I intend to share my passions and the lessons that every act of writing contains, along with my encounters with mechanics and muses over the years.

I begin blogging with not a little trepidation; I know I'm late to the party . There are blogs I love for their wit, their eclectic and passionate interest, most of all for the way the best bloggers make you feel they're speaking exclusively to you or lead you to destinations you'd never have imagined. And then there are blogs that I visit once or twice and then take up rent-free space on my blogroll. I'd prefer to be the former.

I have an ulterior motive. In addition to writing about journalism, I publish fiction, personal essays, screenplays and memoir, some of which you can find scattered about on the left rail, in a kind of virtual clip file. I hope to attract readers to my work, past, present and future.

Among my works-in-progress is a novel set in a military psychiatric hospital at the end of World War II and what I think of as an "investigative memoir" of three generations of flawed Irish-American fathers.

At the moment, I'm behind deadline on the second edition of a journalism textbook that I hope will serve 21st century journalists. There's lots about the world of new media that I don't know, but which writers like me, and their editors, will have to master, or, at least, respect. I'm hoping you will help me narrow that knowledge gap.

In that spirit, here's a question: what does it take to write a good blog?

Thanks for stopping by.

Chip