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Telling True Stories
Navigating the Challenges of Writing Narrative Non-Fiction
By Matthew Ricketson Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2014 Matthew Ricketson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-853-3
CHAPTER 1
Why true stories matter
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is. Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize-winning South African writer
Our very definition as human beings is very much bound up with the stories we tell about our own lives and the world in which we live. We cannot, in our dreams, our daydreams, our ambitious fantasies, avoid the imaginative imposition of form on life. Peter Brooks, Laws' Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law
Telling true stories is a powerful form of public communication. Researching what is going on in people's lives and in the world around us unearths fresh, even revelatory, information that at its sharpest will speak truth to those in positions of power and authority. A well-crafted true story explores events in their complexity and people in their full humanity. Using a timely, narrative approach to write about actual people, events and issues for a broad audience produces works that lodge deep in the reader's gut and resonates in their mind. They prompt reflection; some true stories stay with the reader for months, even years. Some spur readers to action. That action may mean simply sharing the true story with friends and strangers. It may mean the upending of long-held views. It may mean joining a group or even setting one up to address a particular issue. It may mean even more far-reaching changes in a person's life. However a reader might be affected by reading true stories, the act of researching and writing true stories and of readers engaging with them is of profound importance in a democratic society.
True stories may be published in newspapers or magazines, or in multimedia online productions; they may be written at book length or they may be its visual equivalent — the documentary film. 'True stories', which is a broad term for an activity that goes by various names — such as long-form journalism, literary journalism, narrative non-fiction and creative non-fiction — has a longer history than is often thought, is more widely practised than is recognised and, in my experience, produces some of the most vibrant writing available today. True stories can encompass a variety of forms, including bestselling, agenda-setting work from high-profile journalists, like David Marr's Power Trip, his 2010 Quarterly Essay about the then prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd. It can include deeply researched, explanatory books, such as Gitta Sereny's account of Mary Bell's murder of two small boys in England, Cries Unheard. It can also take in beautifully written ruminative works, such as Anna Funder's Samuel Johnson award-winning Stasiland, which excavates the experiences of ordinary East Germans since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These are but three examples among thousands, many of which are discussed in this book. This field of writing is most developed in the United States but is practised across the English-speaking world. It is also found in numerous non-English-speaking countries, as two studies, Literary Journalism Across the Globe (2011) and Global Literary Journalism (2012), illustrate, but except for the few that are translated, these true stories are less well known in English-speaking countries among those of us who don't have any other languages.
I come to this field both as a practitioner and as an academic. My interest, which has long since become a passion, stems from experience early in my career when I began to see what journalism struggled to communicate. In 1983, soon after completing a cadetship at The Age newspaper, I was among several staff sent to cover what became known as the Ash Wednesday bushfires, the worst natural disaster in Victoria in nearly five decades. After interviewing survivors in Lorne and Anglesea, on the coast south-west of Melbourne, what struck me most and what I still remember today is the gap between the enormity of the event and the means at my disposal to communicate it — a short news article. The people I interviewed, which included a builder and a family with two teenage children who had lost their homes, were in what I now see was a state of shock. They could not find the words to express how they felt, but emotion was fairly radiating from them in waves. Confusion, emptiness, a sense they had been picked up like a flake of ash and thrown helter skelter — that's what I intuited, but that could not be put in a news piece so I pushed more questions on them and eventually got some 'quotes', as they are known in the news media industry, and duly filed. As 'quotes' they were fine, but they fell far short of conveying what I thought needed to be reported that day, which was at least some sense of the intense emotions survivors experienced.
By its nature the inverted pyramid form of the hard news article prioritises not emotion but information, and certain kinds of information at that — election results, natural disasters, burglaries, gold medals, company takeovers, scientific breakthroughs and the like. Hard news focuses on the concrete rather than the abstract, and on action rather than reflection. It has proved an extraordinarily durable means of conveying important information quickly and concisely. Even the most recent communication form — the 140 character-long tweet — is used by journalists to report news as it breaks. The rapid dissemination of important information in hard news and in journalistic tweets, though, strips out emotion and vaults over analysis; it fails to attend to the breadth of readers' needs and tastes.
In time I learnt that numerous other journalists had bumped their heads on hard news' low ceilings, and some had spoken about it publicly. As a young reporter working on The New York Herald Tribune in 1963, Tom Wolfe was sent out to get person-on-the-street reactions to the assassination of the American president, John Kennedy. He found people of various ethnic backgrounds blaming each other for the killing and faithfully reported their comments, only to find that those comments never made the paper. He realised that, almost by osmosis, a 'proper moral tone' for a presidential assassination had been decided upon. 'It was to be grief, horror, confusion, shock and sadness, but it was not supposed to be the occasion for any petty bickering. The press assumed the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman' (Flippo 1980, p. 56). David Simon, a former crime reporter for The Baltimore Sun, now best known for creating a brilliant, innovative drama for television, The Wire, expresses a similar view. 'For four years I had written city murders in a cramped, two-dimensional way — filling the back columns of the metro section with the kind of journalism that reduces all human tragedy, especially those with black or brown victims, to bland, bite-sized morsels' (1991, p. 627). His experience prompted him to take a leave of absence from his newspaper to spend time observing the inner workings of the city's homicide squad. The result was a landmark work of book-length journalism, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.
After working in Australian newsrooms for eleven years I had experienced the tangible excitement and pleasures of journalism and still strongly believed in the news media's fourth estate role, but had become frustrated by the gap between the richness and variety of what I saw, heard and felt on the road and the narrowness and sameness of the forms in which I was allowed to write. It was only after I began teaching and studying journalism, in 1993 at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), that I began to appreciate the depth of its history and just how supple and enlivening are the various forms of journalism.
I began incorporating what I learnt into my own work, first as a freelancer and years later as a staff journalist when I returned to the industry as The Age's media and communications editor. Like many before and since, I imitated Tom Wolfe's 'hectoring narrator', in a 1996 profile of playwright Hannie Rayson for The Weekend Australian Magazine, in ways that make me cringe today. More successfully, researching and writing a biography published in 2000 of Australian author Paul Jennings enabled me to explore a subject in depth. In recent years the stories I have probably most enjoyed doing are those where I was able to spend time hanging around with the subjects and then write the pieces in a narrative style, such as one about television journalist Ray Martin, for The Monthly in 2005, and another about The Chaser comedy team, for The Age in 2007.
Over those years I also saw the virtuous circle that can be formed between practice and theory. Reflecting on my practice improved it; researching and writing stories raised questions that prompted more study. This in turn also made me see the narrowness of what I had been taught at the university where, as an undergraduate, I did honours in English. The only kinds of writing we had studied were poetry, drama and fiction. If journalism was mentioned at all the adverbial 'mere' was welded to it. The idea that there could be anything creative about nonfiction was not even discussed. I still enjoy reading fiction, but in the last two decades narrative non-fiction has provided some of the most intense and enlightening reading experiences of my life. I remember being deeply moved reading John Hersey's Hiroshima half a century after it was written and half a world away in the Australian bush one summer holiday. I was in awe of Ted Conover's commitment to discover the reality of America's prison system by working undercover as a guard for a year to produce Newjack. And after reading Chloe Hooper's The Tall Man I felt shame at my apathy about the lives of many Indigenous Australians.
These are only three examples among hundreds of articles and books I have read that have opened my eyes to the sheer variety and richness of writing beyond poetry, drama and fiction. Some of these articles and books investigate the issues of the day while others are moment-by-moment excavations of processes as mundane as building a house. Some are biographies of people who are still alive while others are accounts of journeys that take the writer inward as well as outward. Others still are books that explore a particular idea, as English-born, Canadian-raised Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point famously did. Many of these articles and books are written by journalists, but many are written by novelists. One background is not necessarily better preparation for writing true stories than the other; nor does the field belong to one or the other. In that way of thinking lies energy-draining turf wars. Much more useful, I think, is to see what various backgrounds enable practitioners to bring to the task, and what they can learn from each other.
I discovered in my own work, as well as in others', that because so much of journalists' energy is taken up with finding the news, they have less energy, not to mention little time, to devote to the subtleties of storytelling. This shortcoming can be disguised in a 1500-word feature article hooked to big news events, but the demands of a book-length narrative exposes it to a harsh light. Novelists understand storytelling, but most have had little experience with the demands of finding and verifying information people don't want you to know. Beneath experience and training lie the temperaments that characterise practitioners in the two fields. Burning curiosity drives journalists out into the world to discover what is really going on; a novelist's curiosity is more often directed inward. What they observe goes into creating their own imaginary worlds. A prime focus on the external world, coupled with precious little time to reflect on what they do, leaves journalists under-prepared to make sense of or express with any sophistication how they feel about the subjects of their stories. Conversely, novelists can become so preoccupied with their emotional and imaginary worlds that it overshadows the needs and desires of the actual people, events and issues they are writing about. These are, of course, generalisations; there are journalists such as Conover who have an acute sense of their subjectivity, and novelists such as Hooper who venture out into forbidding terrain. It is an observation, though, that helps when analysing the issues that arise in this area of writing practice.
The combination of practice and reflection has led me to the view that the finding and telling of true stories provides a solution to problems besetting the news media and public debate. Not the only solution, and not a total solution, but one solution to two of the news media's particular problems. First, the limited time and space available to print and broadcast media necessarily means daily coverage is superficial. A good journalist can cover a lot of territory in one day, but it is those journalists able to spend more than a day on an issue who provide the most searching coverage. Second, the internet's virtually unlimited space dissolves one of journalism's perennial limits, but its capacity to be updated instantly has yoked the news media to even tighter deadlines, which has had the effect of creating what Dean Starkman calls 'the hamster wheel' (2010). That is, newspaper journalists write many more news articles than they did a decade ago. They also need to be able to produce audio and video reports as well as those for the next day's newspaper, and they use Twitter to gather and present news. At the same time, the threat posed by the internet challenges the business model that has long sustained mainstream media and has forced newspapers to shed many staff. Fewer journalists filing more news reports on more platforms intensifies conditions in the news media that lead to superficial coverage. Critically, Starkman identifies that news organisations have a choice about jumping on the hamster wheel or deploying their resources to focus on finding and writing stories other outlets do not have; this would give them a chance of drawing audiences to them ('the hamster wheel').
I may be a strong believer in the virtues of telling true stories, but the power inherent in the form throws up important and knotty issues. For instance, how do practitioners balance their need to maintain editorial independence with the closeness to key sources that comes from gaining the deep level of trust usually required to construct a narrative non-fiction work? Are there any limits to the kinds of narrative approach practitioners can take when representing actual people and events? Can you, for instance, write interior monologues, or are a person's innermost thoughts and feelings the province of fiction? Is the omniscient authorial voice appropriate in narrative non-fiction when, by definition, practitioners cannot know everything about the people and events they are writing up? And, how do people read true stories in books as distinct from reading them in newspapers or magazines or on websites? If practitioners present their book in a narrative style, is their work read as non-fiction or, because it reads like a novel, is it read as a novel?
Overwhelmingly, the books written about this form of writing are either scholarly analyses or how-to guides. Scholarly works have certainly made important contributions to understanding the history of narrative non-fiction (Tom Connery's A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism, 1992), have charted the extent of its practice (Norman Sims's True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism, 2007), and have theorised its particular aesthetics (John Hartsock's A History of American Literary Journalism, 2000), but these works were not written primarily for current or aspiring practitioners. How-to guides — such as Lee Gutkind's The Art of Creative Nonfiction (1997), Peter Rubie's The Elements of Narrative Nonfiction (2009) or Jack Hart's Storycraft (2011) — provide much useful advice, but such advice comes primarily from the individual author's perspective, with little context or discussion of competing views. The key difference with the book you have in your hands is that it combines the two. That is, it is a practical guide to researching and writing narrative non-fiction and it is underpinned by an understanding of the critical debates and practice issues surrounding this form. The former is grounded in my experiences as a practitioner, the latter in academic study including, but not limited to, a doctoral thesis.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Telling True Stories by Matthew Ricketson. Copyright © 2014 Matthew Ricketson. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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