Mike
The Sunday New York Times Book Review on June 30 had an interesting essay by Adam LeBor about writing a spy novel; these two grafs talk about the difference between journalism and fiction:
“The essence of journalism is revelation and explanation: We present the causes and consequences of an event for the reader. We answer the questions, convey the complexities, and do the thinking so you don’t have to. Or not too much.
“The essence of fiction, especially thriller writing, is exactly the opposite: obsfuscation, mystery, and deception loop through a maze of switchbacks—ideally strewn with the dead bodies of double agents, dupes, femmes fatales, sinister businessmen. ‘It’s important to be judicious with the facts in a novel,’ the writer Alan Furst told me in a phone interview. ‘Not to give too much away too soon and to move the story along to keep the reader hooked.’
LeBor says the reader finds pleasure in making the connections himself. In your years with UPI and the AP, I assume that’s not an idea you wrestled with. Wasn’t your mindset to make things as direct and clear as possible so the reader could instantly understand the story? Did letting the reader think ever get talked about?
Jack
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Jack
“Did letting the reader think ever get talked about?” You bet. Most stories out of Washington are about ongoing situations; nothing ever gets finished. I argued that reporters can’t assume readers had read, or remembered, yesterday’s story. They have lives outside of Washington, outside of the news. They’re reading the paper at the breakfast table, the baby is crying, the phone is ringing, the car pool is coming in five minutes. So I crusaded for clarity, and for summarizing the background high in the story.
I also argued that people don’t mind being told what they already know. On the other hand, and this I think isn’t contradictory, I preached that readers don’t want to be told what to think, what to conclude. If you write that a proposal is “daring” or an outcome was “surprising,” you robbed the reader of the opportunity to think “Gee, that’s surprising.” You’ve told him what to think.
Mike
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Mike
You’ve hit on something when you say don’t tell the reader what to think. I edited several writers who were savvy researchers-reporters and were good at explanatory pieces. Their problem was they couldn’t resist scattering topic sentences throughout their stories. A high school or college English teacher had drummed into them the need for topic sentences to help the reader understand what he’s reading—English teachers say such sentences add cohesion and help organize ideas. To explain something in the story for us, the writer would get a good quote from someone knowledgeable and then the writer would add a sentence in front of the quote telling the reader what the quote meant. They couldn’t break the habit. Repeatedly I’d strip out the topic sentences—the reader didn’t need any help understanding the quote—and repeatedly the writer would do it again next time.
But beyond not telling the reader what to think, consider this situation. One of the great stories The Washingtonian ever published was titled “Hope All Things, Endure All Things” and there was a fairly intense editor-writer debate about one sentence. The writer was John Pekkanen, a National Magazine Award finalist for this story.
The story deck said: “Dr. Paul Adkins glanced at the clock above the lightbox. It was 3:10 p.m. on Wednesday. He took a final look at his x-rays and the thought hit him: ‘I am looking at my own obituary.’” The Pekkanen story then told how a surgeon coped with a lung cancer that he had spent his entire career treating. Dealing with the cancer became a battle between a man’s head and his heart, what he knew and what he hoped.
Late in the story, Paul Adkins’s son Mark was rushing from New York City to Washington because he’d been told his father didn’t have much time left. Pekkanen had written, “Mark raced from the airport terminal to the subway and got off at the Foggy Bottom stop. He ran up the steps of the long escalator. As he approached the top he had a full view of the front of GW hospital. The flag at the entrance was at half-mast. Paul Adkins had died.”
I wanted to cut the last sentence. I thought it’d have more emotional impact if the reader just was told the flag was at half-mast. John resisted cutting the sentence but finally said okay. He accepted the idea that the reader didn’t have to be told what the flag at half-mast meant—it was better to let the reader make the connection.
I saw it as one of those 50-50 decisions—it could have gone either way. As an editor, what would you have done?
Jack
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To be continued.
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