Chip's Writing Lessons #64
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Ziva Branstetter on the loneliness of investigative reporting
Interview | 4 Questions with Bronwen Dickey
Craft Lesson | The transformation of documentation
Podcast to Savor | “Fear on Cape Cod Cod as Sharks Hunt Again,” by C.J. Chivers, The New York Times Magazine Sunday Read
Tip of the Week | Edit with your voice
WRITERS SPEAK
“There’s a particular kind of loneliness at the beginning of any big investigative project. It’s akin to steering a small boat launched into an ocean. At first, you have no maps or tools to point the way. You build them yourself.”
— Ziva Branstetter
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH BRONWEN DICKEY
Bronwen Dickey / Photo by Rebecca Necessary
Bronwen Dickey is the author of “Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) and a contributing editor at The Oxford American. Her essays and reporting have also appeared in Esquire, POLITICO Magazine, Newsweek, Outside, Men’s Journal, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, Garden & Gun, Popular Mechanics and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Artist’s Residency Fellowship, a Hearst Editorial Excellence Award in reporting, a Lowell Thomas Award in travel journalism, and in 2017 she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in feature writing. She lives in North Carolina, where she teaches journalism at Duke University.
What’s the greatest lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
When I was in college, I thought the point of writing was to impress people with all the big words I knew and all the fancy things I could do on the page. I was always grasping for others’ approval, as though the Big Arrow of Life were pointed in one direction: Toward me. I wanted to be a Writer more than I wanted to write, and that made me miserable.
That’s one of the reasons I prefer to speak about the craft in terms of “skill,” not “talent.” Skill is something you can learn and perfect if you care enough to put in the effort, whereas talent feels slippery and mysterious. The same goes for “work” vs. “inspiration.” If I waited to write until I was “inspired,” I’d never type a single word. But work? That I can show up for, again and again.
Over time, I’ve come to understand that nonfiction storytelling is not a performing art. It’s not about praise or acclaim or literary pyrotechnics. If you think about it that way, you will always feel like a failure. The best writing is not about the writer. It’s an act of generosity. It’s a humble and imperfect gift one person offers another, a way of saying to a bunch of strangers you will probably never meet, “I went out exploring and I learned something incredible. Do you have a second? I’d love to share it with you.”
That’s the greatest lesson. That the Big Arrow points the other way.
What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
That the work never gets easier. Never, ever, ever. The more you do it, the more possibilities you see in front of you, and that can make you crazy. You just have to show up and plow your acre the best you can. As I tell my students, every story is a house, but every story doesn’t have to be Versailles or the Taj Mahal. It can be a cozy one-room cabin. Your job, as the architect of the house, is to 1) make sure the roof doesn’t cave in and 2) make it comfortable enough that a stranger might want to spend some time there. That’s it!
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?
I’m a dependable, non-judgmental tour guide through the rocky—and occasionally perilous—territory of the subject.
What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
“You have to love it. Because if you don’t, the people who love it will kick your ass.” — Chris Jones.
“Write what you want to say. The questioning, the changing, the editing…that all comes later.” — my dad.
CRAFT LESSON | THE TRANSFORMATION OF DOCUMENTATION
When I started reporting for a tiny daily newspaper in 1972, a notepad, pen, manual typewriter, camera and a landline telephone were the only tools I had to collect information for my stories.
Those analog days are long gone. Today, a panoply of new information sources and outlets cram the reporter’s toolbox—as well as prosecutors’ hands. We saw it with the prosecutions of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrectionists whose own videos, text messages and emails were used to confirm their guilt.
We see it regularly in stories where journalists, especially during Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions, had to use their ingenuity to report stories from their homes.
To illustrate a family riven by a mother who bought into post-2020 presidential election and QAnon conspiracies, Washington Post reporter Jose A. Del Real, unable to travel, relied not just on traditional phoners. He “also mined digital communications, sifting through hundreds of anguished Facebook posts, emails and text messages the siblings exchanged with each other and with their defensive mother,” I wrote in a Nieman Storyboard annotation of the piece. “Del Real uses them to build an escalating series of scenes, giving his story a revealing, epistolary quality, reminiscent of 19th-century letters between families and friends.”
Jason Fagone, a narrative writer with the San Francisco Chronicle, went a step further. In “The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.,” he spliced his three-part series with eerie conversations generated by a web robot powered by a supercharged artificial intelligence program, between a man grieving the death of his fiancée and her A.I. chatbot.
Mitchell S. Jackson won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for his story in Runner’s World about the life and death of Ahmaud Arbery, who was killed running while Black in a Georgia suburb. Jackson, a novelist, created a vivid reconstruction by culling a New York Times visual investigation of smartphone videos and 911 calls of the killing taken by one of the three white men accused of murdering Arbery.
Of course, journalists have been mining public databases for decades and continue to use these digital warehouses to buttress shocking investigations. (I used one in the late 1980s to expose the paucity of arson convictions in Rhode Island when I worked for the Providence Journal-Bulletin.) But social media, smartphones and the lightning speed of the internet often outpaces such time- and labor-intensive projects now.
This new brand of journalism signals an important warning to today’s journalists. If you’re not constantly moving beyond traditional information sources and searching for innovative new ones, you’re cheating your audience of journalism that reflects a landmark transformation of documentation that has revolutionized storytelling. And you’ll be left behind.
PODCAST TO SAVOR | “FEAR ON CAPE COD AS SHARKS HUNT AGAIN,” BY C.J. CHIVERS, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE SUNDAY READ
If, like me, you’re addicted to “The Daily,” the 20-minute podcast on current affairs from The New York Times that pops into your inbox at 6 a.m. Monday through Friday, the weekend is a time of jonesing from its compelling audio stories. Happily, the paper created “The Sunday Read,” a longform podcast that showcases the best of their Sunday magazine.
On a recent weekend, “Fear on Cape Cod as Sharks Hunt Again” kept me glued to my earphones as I listened to C.J. Chiver’s scene-rich narrative about solitary attacks inflicted by great white sharks on Massachusetts and Maine coastlines popular with swimmers and surfers. The story alternates between beachside tragedies, efforts to combat the problem and the perennial human vs. wildlife debate that rages whenever the two sides come together in tragic fashion. It nods briefly to Steven Spielberg’s 1975 terrifying summer blockbuster Jaws.
I shrieked whenever the beast appeared, accompanied by that ominous score, which didn’t endear me to the woman I took to the movies on our first date, but Chivers points out that Hollywood’s version didn’t comport with the historical record. The murderous fish that swallowed Capt. Quint also chomped to death four others, “racking up a shark-bite body count equal to that of the entire state of Massachusetts since 1751.” However few the victims, the story makes clear that these attacks spark fervid arguments and, in the hands of Pulitzer winner Chivers, riveting storytelling.
TIP OF THE WEEK | EDIT WITH YOUR VOICE
That, says Marc Lacey, an assistant managing editor at The New York Times, is “my most consequential editing” when it’s done “with my voice, not my fingers.” Lacey, who used to supervise a stable of talented writers as national editor, went on: “Giving good feedback at the start and precise recommendations on how to make a piece sing is as important, or even more important, than chopping the prose or moving the paragraphs myself.” Lacey said he “was frankly amazed the first time I told a correspondent how to fix a story in a brief phone conversation and shortly thereafter saw it return transformed.”
If you’re editing a story, sit on your hands, and let the writer listen to your voice and then respond.
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May the writing go well, and may you be well.
Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
Black Lives Matter