Lately I’ve been scouring the nets and local book-lenders for guidance and inspiration on writing. I stumbled on this at Nieman Storyboard [recommended, and the source of this post's title]:
Now, just as I don’t know what a story is going to be when I start out working on it, I have no idea how to write it, either. In fact, I try to preserve that state of mind. There’s this teaching in Zen called “beginner mind,” which says if you want to be original and creative, then you have to approach each new project as though you were an amateur, as though you had never done this before. And obviously, it’s not completely possible — or Zen would be easy, but I try to approach a story without knowing how I’m going to — often I honestly don’t know how I’m going to report it; I certainly don’t know how I’m going to write it…
That’s Mark Bowden, a well known long-form journalist and the author, most notably, of Black Hawk Down. His remarks resonated with what I’ve been thinking lately about writing and reading and life in general.
Last night I finally read “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” (a.k.a. “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) and before that I LMAOd through “Big Red Son,” a rather over-informative forty-eight page account of Wallace’s trip to the annual porn convention and Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. Like Bowden, Wallace wasn’t sticking to a strict plan when he researched and told those stories. No doubt he had a timetable and a sense of what he might come up with, but both stories exude innocence (and no lack of discomfort) as he finds himself participating in episodes he apparently would have preferred not to have been a part of.
The obvious precedent is the “gonzo journalism” popularized by Hunter S. Thompson. He tended to insert himself so far into a story that his presence there became the story — or created the story by taunting hapless bystanders with lies and incapacitating his associates with whiskey and Mace (e.g. “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved“).
When Gay Talese used the buffer around the subject as his angle in “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” it must have seemed radical. Now I wonder why Gay Talese didn’t spend more time on himself. Now we expect celebrity profiles to include the reporter’s account of calling on the phone to set up an interview, dealing with publicists, driving up to the house, ringing the doorbell, getting hassled by security, being peed on by the dog and having to borrow pants from someone in the entourage, etc.
I wouldn’t say it’s “self-absorbed” (at least not in a derogatory way), because they’re also giving us what we want: we identify with the naive outsider trying to find a way in.
And a lot of us want to be the outsider — an impulse that draws a lot of people to journalism and writing (and science and art and entrepreneurial endeavors) in the first place. There’s something about the human spirit that thrives in the face of the uncertain and unknown…
We’d do well to let this impulse run a little more freely, both for motivation’s sake and for improving the quality of our shared experience. Exercise the beginner’s mind instead of hiding it, learn to discover through adventure and self-discipline instead of locking it in an office [or a fixed plan].
Read the rest of Bowden’s talk. HT The Browser. There are more great magazine articles via Kevin Kelly’s collectively compiled list.
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