That's All, Folks? Not Quite!

The Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism is drawing to a close. But it's not over yet on the blog, as your faithful bloggers will continue to post our gleanings from the weekend. Ernie is currently doing a follow-up interview with Gambian journalist Modou Nyang, who may have had the longest journey to get here. And I will be posting Flip Cam interviews with some of your favorite speakers, including Jon Lee Anderson, Mara Schiavocampo, Andrew Meldrum, and Adam Hochschild. Check back tonight or Monday for those. The folks over at the Nieman Lab have also promised a bunch of interview videos, plus a Twitter summary of the entire weekend. (Ooh la la!)

If you have questions about a panel I covered, and wonder if I might have that quote you're looking for somewhere in my digital notes, just shoot me an e-mail: lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.

It's been fun.
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More from Ifill

Ifill on White journalists who cover blacks and black issues:
“I was always expected to write about white people, so I always expected white people to write about black people,” Ifill said.
She added that it should be expected that curious journalists should be expected to get to know and write and report about people from different backgrounds.

Ifill on the Debate: Ifill gave some remarkable insights to her feelings about the criticism she received before the Palin-Biden debate.

Republicans argued that her forthcoming book had prejudiced her against the GOP.

“It was an interesting experience,” said Ifill, adding that as she was preparing for the debate, she went into intense preparation and had also broken her leg. “So I was much more concerned about my orthopedic health that what was being said on Matt Drudge. And I was surrounded by people who kept me from the chatter.”

Ifill said despite the chatter, she remained true to herself. She said she had actually finished her questions for the debate on the same day she hurt her leg.

“One thing I knew is that I wasn’t changing a word,” Ifill said. “In my head, that was important.”
Ifill said that in the end, she realized that the criticism was about her. But more about a dysfunctional campaign. John McCain, the Republican candidate for president, initially supported Ifill’s pick as moderator, but changed his tune two days later.

“People were trying to get in my head hoping that I would over or under compensate,” Ifill said. “But I said, let them have their way. Watch what I say. Read the book that I write and see.”

“I was trying to have a debate, not an inquisition,” Ifill said. “My job was to make sure I had probing questions, and if I was satisfied, I didn’t care if people had other opinions.”



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Ifill's All Over Twitter

The collected gems of Gwen Ifill's speech are on Twitter. Go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in #NNC to the search box. Voila! The high points at your fingertips. Proper grammar and spelling, maybe not so much.

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Separated at Birth?

Ifill kicked off her speech by joking that she was going to let Queen Latifah come stand in for her. The audience got a big kick out of that. But some of our international friends might not have been familiar with the context. Let’s go back to the 2008 election. Ifill scored the coup of the election by getting chosen to moderate the Vice Presidential Debate between Joe Biden and the fascinating Sarah Palin.

Interestingly enough, Ifill caught some heat from conservatives who cried that her book, “The Breakthrough,” made her an Obama supporter. Therefore, she could not be objective. Ifill’s professionalism and even moderating quickly dispelled that notion.

Well, after the debate was over, you just knew that SNL was going to lampoon it. Especially with all of the attention that Palin was getting and the buzz that Tina Fey was getting for playing her weekly. Sure enough, that following Saturday, the show spoofed the debate. But, as you might also know, SNL doesn’t have any black female characters. (notice that when they spoof The View, Kenon Thompson always plays Whoopi, but since there is no other black woman or person for that matter, Sherri is always on vacation).

Anyway, to combat that – and to save us from seeing Kenon in a dress again – Queen Latifah made a surprise appearance playing Ifill. She was brilliant. Take a look at the photos of the two.
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The great Gwen Ifill, the managing editor and moderator for Washington Week (PBS) and a senior correspondent for The NewsHour, is delivering the closing keynote address. Ifill is the author of the recent best-seller, “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.”
Aside from Obama, the book also deals with black rising politicians like Duval Patrick, Cory Booker and Artur Davis, who is running for the governor of Alabama.
“Talk about audacity of hope,” quipped Ifill,
This is her first book. She said that as she wrote, she talked to several authors, to get advice on how to write. Some told her to write early in the morning. Others told her to write at night. For everyone she interviewed, there was a different story.
“I finally decided that I was going to have to figure out how to do it myself,” Ifill said.
More to come.
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Gwen Ifill's Closing Speech: Part 1

Gwen Ifill said she's been telling the story of the "breakthrough generation" of African-Americans in American politics throughout her whole career.

Finally, she's turned it into a book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.

In one of her first internships, where her coworkers had "never seen an educated black woman before," she once found a note that said, "Nigger go home."

Her boss was horrified and knew who had written the note--but didn't want to fire him. To smooth over the incident, she was promised a job working for The Boston Herald if she ever wanted one.

Her first reaction, she said, was that she would never work for those racists. Not much later, she realized, the offer of any job sounded pretty good.

Ifill went on to cover the crisis over school desegregation in Boston and the presidential candidacy of Rev. Jesse Jackson early in her career,

"The solution for all the breakthrough candidates I've covered over the years was finding that sameness," what connected them to voters, Ifill said.

But they also realized they didn't wait for someone to summon them--they had to go and grab what they wanted. Many of the breakthrough African-American politicians had their racial authenticity questioned, and most of them lost their first political race.

"Every single one of them was told, 'It's not your turn yet,'" Ifill said.

The reason people kept asking of Barack Obama, is he black enough? Is he too black? was really because they were asking

"What they were asking were, are you representing me? Are you on my side? ...Will you speak for me?" Ifill said.


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Tips on Timing

Tips from the book publishing session:

Journalists often underestimate how long it takes to write a book, book agent Tina Bennett says, because they're used to producing on deadline and think they can just get it out. But writing a book is a different challenge, Bennett said.

Nobody--nobody--can write a book in a year, one of the panelists said.

Jane Kamensky said that the right time to write a book proposal is not when you're still playing with the idea and unsure what you're going to do. Writing you book proposal should be a time when you can already write something substantive, when you know your material and can see the shape of your book. Kamensky said that writing her 45-page book proposal was incredibly rewarding: it's when the book really came together for her. But Kamensky also warned that it may be a bad idea to write too much of your book before writing a proposal. You'll lose your spark and excitement about the idea. You don't want to start pushing the book 5 years into the project, when the idea has already been in the oven at 400 degrees for hours, and "dinner" is getting dry and overbaked.

The moment for writing your book proposal, then: when you know enough to be convincing but are still excited about charging into the research territory ahead.

Tina Bennett had similar advice, "A project really benefits from a shaping editorial conversation," she said--how to structure it, how to pace it, how to tailor it to the market.

Wendy Wolf said that getting a full nonfiction manuscript makes her nervous. But when I get a full book, I wonder, who cut this book loose? Who did they write it for originally? she said.

But she qualified that some people just have a book in them and need to get it out immediately. If what you need to do is that, do it."
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Oh Dear

Wendy Wolf, editorial director of nonfiction for Viking Penguin, once rejected a book proposal because when she met the author he wasn't wearing socks.
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PUBLISH YOUR BOOK

There are 70 people in this room. No surprise, as Rosita Boland just reminded me. Doesn't everyone think they have a book in them?

Book agent Tina Bennett, book editor Wendy Wolf and author and history prof Jane Kamensky are talking about their collaboration on publishing a single boook of Kamenksy's--the story of a large building that burned down in the early 1800s.

Kamensky just compared trade publishing, from an academic's point of view, to a man who is "in trade" in a Jane Austen novel.

When a colleague heard she was writing that kind of book, Kamensky said, she was told, "Oh, Jane, I don't envy you having to answer to The Market."

Jane Austen metaphors are proliferating here.

"This is like a marriage. The trust has to be tremendous. We're handling your money for you...we're handling your reputation," moderator Christine Larson just said, of the author/agent relationship.

Some tips from Tina Bennett:

-Don't use cute stationery with kittens on it. It goes in the trash.
-Respect people's time. Don't say, I'm going to New York, can we just have coffee and talk about some ideas? "I think it's incumbent on the writer to present some ideas in writing and not just toss ideas around."
-You have to be able to write a really good letter. One or two pages. Bennett doesn't believe in the two-line pitch.
-Be professional above all, You're a serious person, you know what you're doing, you have an idea that will be interesting beyond themselves and their family.
-Many people have bumped into stories that are deeply moving, that are authentically moving, but they won't make a good book proposal. That existential experience you had, that trauma....it ain't a book. The person who had cancer and reorganized their life, that's really important for you.
-Don't use an e-mail spam services. They get instantly deleted.
-Don't use the sensational formulaic material, opening with a sentence "so and so was bleeding on the couch."
-Use the personal approach--"I admired so and so books and noticed you were in the acknowledgments section," or, "I am modeling my book on such and such book you edited."



Kamensky said she started the project of getting her book published by doing a lot of publishing research and meeting with three agents, the last of whom was Bennett.

Tina Bennett--one of the New York literary agents--praised Kamensky's professionalism and smarts, but emphasized that a lot of getting on an agent's list is about personal compatibility. She and Kamensky just clicked. Kamensky said that Bennett was the right agent because she wed intellectual street cred with market strategy.

Once she had found an agent, Kamensky said that Bennett advised her that she couldn't write a book proposal that was just, here's my name and here's my idea, like a former National Book Award winner she knew had done.

"It behooved me as a beginning trad writer to write a proposal that was long enough" that "you could see the voice of the author, the logic and momentum of the story, and the texture of evidence that the story was based upon," Kamensky said.

The book proposal "didn't need to be a 100 pages," but it ended up being 45.

The next step was to try to sell the book to editor Wendy Wolf, who praised Bennett's approach.

The three qualities any agent should have: "Intimdating, intelligent and understanding," Wolf said.

It's important to remember that a book must be sold multiple times: from the author to the agent, from the agent to the editor...from the editor to the editorial board, from the editorial board to the sales department, from the sales department to the bookseller, from the bookseller to the consumer.

Again, Wolf emphasized the personal relationship between author and editor. "I don't care where you live," she said, "get your butt on a plane to New York and meet your editor."

An editor will want to know a lot of things--not only about your book, but about you.

"I want to know everyone you've known in your own life...How are we going to get your book reviewed? How are we going to get you on the radio?" How, even, are we going to get your book picked up by your mother's book club? she said.

"I am the huckster in the marketplace," Wolf said. " You have to look at your book as a commodity as much as a bundle of ideas."

"Who is your audience? The answer is not: the readers of the New Yorker. It can't stop there."

A book editor needs to know all those things before signing on, Wolf said.

MORE TIPS.

Wendy Wolf
-I EXPECT people to know something about me. DO YOUR HOMEWORK, it's not hard. Any first line to Tina or me, either "Jane Kamensky told me to write you," or "I admired X."
-She once turned a book down because the author who approached her was NOT WEARING SOCKS and she found that disrespectful.
-An author FORGOT to tell her new agent that she had had an agent before, and she asked Wolf: what do I do? Wolf responded; GROVEL. GROVEL and APOLOGIZE and maybe you can repair the damage.





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Dennis Palumbo on Psychotherapy for Writers

Here, far too early in the morning, Dennis Palumbo is bringing a gentle sense of humor and a touch of Goethe to one big question hovering over the conference.

As a participant asked him, how do you go from being a newspaper reporter where you’re told what to do, to a freelance reporter where you have to manage yourself and basically be an entrepreneur?

“This is a huge change for people psychologically,” Palumbo said.

“When you’re an employee it’s almost like being a child in the family,” he said, adding, “Whether or not you do it well is kind of like what grade you will get.”



Having a boss is a psychological boost, Palumbo said. It means you have someone who believes that the work you do is good—and good enough to pay for. You also have someone backing up the need for your story.

“The thing that’s so scary about being an entrepreneur, being your own advocate in the career marketplace” is you have bring your own sense of entitlement to your work, Palumbo said.

The great German poet Goethe described writers as those who must believe that the world cannot survive without what they write, Palumbo said.

“Most of us don’t feel that way, but …you have to feel that way,” Palumbo said.

“As a writer, you are taking focus, and for a lot of people, that’s very difficult,” he said. “That’s why a lot of writers are comfortable when they’re working in a staff position. They have roles, they have positions, and they’re clearly defined.”




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One Liners

"Treat your editor, if nothing else, as a canary in a coal mine."

-New Yorker Editor Amy Davidson


Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
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Jennifer Crandall's onBeing: the next Talk Stories?

For a while now, I've been wondering: why isn't there a video equivalent of the New Yorker's legendary Talk Stories? Short. Witty. Sharp. An original voice coyly avoiding the first person. You can buy whole volumes of them by Lillian Ross or Jamaica Kincaid.

Talk Stories are a distinctive brand. I thought shortform narrative video should have an equivalent: three minutes, top quality, and smart.

Enter WaPo's Jennifer Crandall.




It took her a while to find her journalistic place, she told a session audience today. Crandall likes to meet people. She'll chat up seven-year-olds at parties. She visits a bike shop and runs into a refugee from Hurricane Katrina. "Week by week," she says, she wants to "chart the human landscape."

What Crandall started to do was invite some of the people she meets to an all-white studio. She turns on a camera and has a two-hour conversation with them. Then she distills that two hours into a three-minute video clip. One ordinary person, in crystal-clear video, talking against a white background. The seven-year-old kid. A guy who admits he's trying not to be a racist even though he was raised that way. A cute former sorority girl who loves her job harvesting tissue from dead bodies. (I won't give away her many punch lines: look in the archive for Jacquelyn Einsel.)

Crandall's editing is crisp and punchy. She edits out all of the questions she asks: what was a conversation becomes a monologue, but one that's clearly been shaped by Crandall's point of view. That raised some journalistic hackles at an earlier session: was it fair, another reporter asked Crandall, to present her subjects with all of the back-and--forth context removed? Wasn't that misleading? Crandall replied that it was clear to the viewer that the clips had been heavily edited and mixed around, so the viewers wouldn't be misled.

Crandall's project, onBeing, is obviously very different from the New Yorker's Talk Stories. It may be more closely akin to another narrative all-star, Ira Glass' This American Life. But Crandall's onBeing pieces are short and smart and they have that distinctive feeling of something that's already a classic. They're charming and funny, and people at the sessions today seemed to respond to them very intuitively.

I'm surprised I didn't hear about onBeing before this weekend's conference. It seems like something that should be spread around.

Yeah, I'll link to onBeing a fourth time. Just try one.


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Audio Tip: Get Your Readers Lost

You know that TV show Lost? It has a crazy plot. The narrative is all over the place. Nobody knows what's going on. And that's exactly why people love it.

Amy O'Leary's big point for writing audio: forget the nut graf.

Our brains are primed to decode complicated narrative, she says. People like having that kind of work to do. Just look at Lost.

You can backfill later. Throw out your best quote, O'Leary says, and win your listeners in the first 15 seconds.

The point of an audio piece is to convey character and emotion, O'Leary says. Those are its strengths. Text is better for conveying the nitty-gritty of the issue: the facts, the analysis, the fine points. Audio's not so hot in this area. You want the full story, you need print. But audio can get people to care about the story--it provides the atmospherics.
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Q&A with Melissa Tavaras

Callie Crossley and I sat down with conference attendee Melissa Tavaras. Melissa works in Miami at NBC Telemundo as an assignment desk editor and field producer. She is also a writer for the South Florida New Service and a student at Florida International University.

Working in both print and television, she is becoming adept at multi-platforming

“Unfortunately, since people are downsizing there is room for people like me,” said Melissa, who focuses on international affairs and politics. “I am building work that I want to do. I consider the work that I do now, as really my work.”

Ernie: How are you enjoying the conference?
Melissa: It is fantastic. I have met so many people. I’ve learned things about honing my skills. Not only writing, but visual as well.

Ernie: Why did you come?
Melissa: I am a young journalist and I want to meet as many people as possible. It is a networking tool.

Ernie: What have you enjoyed the most?
Melissa: The one on documentaries was good, because I am a producer. Visually, I relate to it.

Ernie: Do you want to do documentaries?
Melissa: I would like to, I have an idea.

Ernie: What is it about?
Melissa: I am not telling you!

Ernie: What are you going to implement immediately when you get back to work?
Melissa: When I speak to people I tend to focus so much on them that I leave out details, like background and smells. So I am going to start implementing all of my senses. I am going to start doing that immediately.
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Amy O'Leary: Writing for Audio

Over here in the Back Bay, Amy O'Leary has been doing a for-real, nuts-and-bolts session on writing for audio. Structure is a beautiful thing. She has printed-out packets and listening exercises. I love it.

Perhaps the best part of this session was when she played a clip of NYT ethicist Randy Cohen being interviewed on NPR, versus reading one of his columns as a NYT podcast. The contrast was fascinating--on NPR he sounds great. On his podcast he sounds pretty much like a robot.

A fascinating glimpse into why the NYT needed to hire O'Leary in the first place.

One of O'Leary's big tips is that radio scripts should not be written in the inverted pyramid style, giving away the point of the story in the first graf. Instead, you may want to take what's good at the end and put it at the beginning. You want to woo the listeners in, make them intrigued, and keep them listening until the very end. Save the main point for the middle of the story--start with hook and color and build to the "point" that you would put in a news story lede.

A magazine writer asked O'Leary, essentially, "Hey! But where's my nut graf? Won't the readers feel disoriented?"

Nope, O'Leary said. In testing audio slideshows at the Times, she said, people will listen to an audio piece for 15 to 20 seconds to test it. Once you get them past that point, they'll pretty much listen until the end. You've got to get them immediately. Put your best quote up front--don't even explain it, she said. You can backfill later.

O'Leary draws a comparison to Lost. TV is doing radical things with story structure, and she says right now our brains are primed to decode complicated narrative--people like having that kind of work to do. Don't spoon feed them.

More nitty-gritty after the jump.



Tips for Radio Scripts:
-Use a big font
-Double space text
-Indent quotes
-Write out tricky words--including numbers-phonetically

Exercise 1: we listened to JJ Sutherland's "The Battle of Shok Valley" from NPR and are now doing a "close reading" of what Sutherland did to make the piece so effective.


Some points from the audience about Sutherland's piece:
-Seamless narrative
-Uses spatial directions to orient the reader
-Also reminds the reader repeatedly how much time has passed.
-Sutherland's smooth radio voice gets more excited at exciting points--subtly.
-The soldiers he talks to aren't that effusive--they're strangely detached--but
-O'Leary: Sutherland points out that Rhymer is not a great talker and that the tape isn't great.
-O'Leary: Sutherland also repeats part of the soldiers' quotes for emphasis.
-O'Leary: All the things that propel the story forward are narrative. "Then things went wrong." "Their mission had changed." There are litte moments of suspense that push the narrative forward.
-Few adjectives. A lot of short description. The whole thing is a story.

Exercise 2: Re-writing a print script "A Model Middle School" for audio. This is based on a story that ran in the NYT.

The original lede:

"At a time when middle schools across the country are struggling with performance slumps and overhauling their progams, Briarcliff middle school in northern Westchester County is one of the rare good news stories."

As revised by audience members, this prose became more conversational--sentences broken up, contractions added, cute anecdotes brought to the beginning.

Exercise 3: We listened to an NPR interview of NYT's Randy Cohen, "The Ethicist," and then read a print article he wrote on the same subject: stealing other people's wireless internet.

Exercise 4: We watched a NYT audio slideshow, "An Unwelcome Neighbor," that was photographs and audio clips of farmers struggling with a proposed coal-burning power plant next to their farms. The exercise was to take the quotes and write a script around them to transform the farmers' quotes into a true narrative.


-Photo is from one of O'Leary's official web profiles.-



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Conversations

I am dipping in and out of a few sessions today to get as many snapshots as possible.

Here are a few:

•CONVERSATIONS ON CRAFT:
Audio: Adam Davidson, an international business and economics reporter for NPR’s National Desk, had a conversation with his NPR colleague and Nieman Fellow Guy Raz about telling compelling stories on the radio. In one example, Davidson talked about the difficulty of delivering compelling stories when the topic is not that interesting. In essence, he said that it is important that even as you talk about one subject, it is important to try different avenues to get the results. In one particularly boring financial story, Davidson quotes Shakespeare and even teased his subject by telling him that he was going to “translate,” his heavy financial jargon into English. The story was a hit.

Documentary: Heidi Ewing, co-owner of Loki Films and co-director of The Boys of Baraka, and the Academy Award nominated documentary Jesus Camp, spoke with producer, director and author June Cross about documentary storytelling.
How did she sell Jesus Camp?
Ewing said most networks love development takes, because it is a small investment. So she put together a clip based on the camp’s own DVDs. She cut together a 2-minute clip and showed it to A&E. The network liked it and gave her $35,000 to develop it. She made a fresh 15 minutes clip. A&E loved it and signed her to a deal. It took about a month. So if you have an idea, get to work.

But Heidi cautioned that not every good story is a good story – at least visually. Here is what I mean. Several years ago, Heidi read a story about a group of Canadian scientists who were doing incredible research on the brain. Fascinating, groundbreaking research. The scientists were actually making people forget past bad experiences. When the article ran, the scientists got hundreds of voice mails from people wishing to erase the past. Heidi even envisioned the opening of her film. Then, she started talking to the scientists. And the more she talked to them, the less convinced she was that she could make this story compelling visually. So, instead of forcing the film, she cancelled the project. She said that she was just not able to make it happen visually.
“Maybe someone else can do it,” Heidi said. “Some stories are just better off as a New Yorker article.”
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Musical Chairs: MAGAZINES

The New Yorker's Amy Davidson is talking about magazines to a packed audience--lots of people on the floor. She's been doing a close reading of William Finnegan's Reporter at Large piece about a man with P.T.S.D. who killed his brother.

You can read the story, "The Last Tour," here.

What was the emotional challenge in editing this piece, an audience member asked?




"I was really relieved when Kellee [wife of one of the brothers] called Bill after the piece. I did want to make sure that we told this story in a way that was respectful, and that was tricky because this guy did shoot his brother. It's an awful, painful situation and you do want to make sure you are treating people who are already in a lot of pain--serving your country--you know, you want to be respectful while being brutally honest about what happened. But this is a war story, a story about people who were going somewhere and putting their lives at risk, to get at that larger meaning, to not treat this" as if they were some alien other.

Audience question: what are some things that you look for in a first draft?

"That the structure works--structure is very important, that I'm not confused, that there's not something missing in some way, that we've talked about sides of the story. Sometimes you read something and you think, I would have liked to hear from that person...is it possible that there's another explanation for this. When you raise these questions the answers are often in the reporter's notebook. A good reporter has so much more information about a story than what appears in print."

Another audience member: more tips for writers? Questions I should ask myself?

"Is it fair," Davidson said." "....have you been fair to the narrative as well." It's also important to look at the chronology, she added.

On Finnegan's mastery of how to establish intimacy with sources fast:

"It's that ability to become part of the environment. He was able to sit down with Kellee, with their father and stepmother, and just have his presence there seem very natural. I think in some parts you get the feeling in his conversation with his father and stepmother almost as if they're talking to each other, that they're thinking out loud. It doesn't feel like an interrogation. It's as if he sat down in their living room and let them talk..."

Responding to another audience question, Davidson said:

"I chose this story because I think it's a wonderful story," Davidson said. "It's not that this piece is free entirely of what you're talking about, symbolism...[but] you can let people imagine it for themselves a little bit."

An audience member asked about the love-hate relationship of writers with their editors. If a writer is writing for the New Yorker, they must have a sense that they're pretty good. But for other writers--whose writing is getting ripped apart by editors often--it's tougher. How, as an editor, do you keep writers from getting demoralized? she asked.

"First of all, every single one of my writers are wonderful and a pleasure to work with in every single way," Davidson said. "...I don't know if I always understand the psychological impact of ..."this is a great piece, we're just going to have to cut a couple thousand words."

"Treat your editor if nothing else as a canary in a coal mine," Davidson said. If they're stumbling over a sentence, maybe their solution isn't right, but someone stopped there, "their fingers stopped there on the keyboard...they're not wrapped up in it, it's stopping them." They may have had the wrong solution "but would love to see a better solution."


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Musical Chairs: BOOKS

The hard part about trying to write a history of the powerless is that they leave so few records.



This has been the challenge of Adam Hochschild's career, from trying to get a sense of the suffering of the African people of the Congo in his chronicle of a forgotten episode of European imperialism, King Leopold's Ghost, or in writing a history of the abolition of slavery in the British empire, Bury the Chains, or in his current project, in which he is writing about British conscientious objectors in WWI. It's much easier to find records for upper-class opponents of the war than the working-class ones, Hochschild said.

In the end, he said, this means that the African perspective is lacking in two books he wrote about the sufferings of African people from both imperialism and slavery.

NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan asked how Hoschschild always manages to open his books with moments or revelation or understanding or transformation.

"Sometimes the truth is messy complicated and morally ambiguous and ends badly. But I do believe that one can pick out moments that have this quality," he said.

Corrigan asked: do you ever have to stop yourself as a writer and say, I'm shaping the scene too much?

Hochschild: The danger as an author is falling in love with the hero of your story, as Hochschild admits he does, because then you ignore that character's flaws. In King Leopold's Ghost, Hochschild said, he probably did not make enough of Edmund Dean Morrell's racism or the fact that he was likely manic-depressive.

Hochschild said he wrestles with the demands of storytelling, in which the tendency is to make the heroes heroes and the villains villains.

Corrigan: How do you envision your readership? Are you ever hampered by the fact that you're going to have academics writing to you and talking about how you didn't include the necessary charts?

Hochschild: I have a surprisingly good relationship with academics. I can talk their language. I know how to do footnotes. There were no American historians who specialized in King Leopold's Congo, so it wasn't like I was treading on their territory. Historians have often read his book and made helpful literary as well as factual corrections.

We need to give a lot of academics credit for being less academic than they appear.

Corrigan: Has the digitalization of records made your research easier?

Hochschild: Not yet. Library catalogs are online, but the old documents--hundreds of pages, parchment with sealing wax, bound together with string--haven't made it yet.

Corrigan: What do you think about the future or reading and books.

Hochschild: "I worry about it some...I'm not at all sanguine that these new technologies, Kindle and Sony Reader, are going to be good for books....It feels like there's something so much less permanent about it, less heft." He's also worried about attention spans. "I do think there is a deep hunger for stories that's going to be there for a long time to come. But in some ways the easier technological availability of these things makes them less valued. Maybe there's an analogy...I spent a lot of time in Russia when it was the Soviet Union. [In those years] Russia was a country of fanatical readiers." Poets would give readings to stadiums of listeners. "People on the subway, look at the books, they're reading Camus and Dostoevsky." Once books were no longer "forbidden fruit," the amount of serious stuff that Russians read dropped dramatically. Instead they were reading, "Fluff" imported detective novels, romances. Is this the way books are in our culture now?

Audience member: What's your technique?

Hochschild: 1) An idea. 2) A year of just reading, and taking notes that would be incomprehensible to anyone else.A "significant proportion" of UCBerkeley's 10-million volume library are usually in his house. "I'll do nothing but read and take months from 6 months to a year." Then he forces himself to stop and do a rough draft. "Making the first draft is the hardest of all." He tries not to "fall off the wagon" and do more research after that, but often he does.

The remaining time is rewriting and going back to archives for more source material.

Bury the Chains: Phase 1: reading: 1 year
Phase 2: First draft: 1 year
Phase 3: Re-writing and more archive work: 2 years
Total: 4 years


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Conversation on Craft Musical Chairs: AUDIO

Planet Money's Adam Davidson has made the financial crisis "fun."

Here's the gist of what he and former NPR defense correspondent Guy Raz are saying.

Guy Raz: What makes a radio story compelling and worth a listener's time?

Davidson: I used to think: well-recorded audio, rich characters, scenes with interesting sound and action going on in front of you. "Then I started covering economics." Economics has none of the building blocks of good radio.

Ira Glass has good characters but not necessarily fancy sound...Someone on a lousy phone line telling a decent story is far better than a flat story well-recorded.

Every story needs a take. Not just he said/she said. In a six minute story, you get one point.

Make sure your sound isn't random or predictable. There's an artificiality in NPR sound that Davidson thinks should be avoided...what NPR insiders call the "cue the chicken" moment.
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At Lunch

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