...Magazines still hew to what might be called the Playboy Principle: you will buy this magazine for the nudie pictures, but you will discover wise and interesting things here, too.
...Consider Elaine Dundy on Richard Burton's ex-wife Sybil, 1965:
Sybil arrives at Sardi's East at four in the afternoon for tea. Tea being breakfast as well, she orders Eggs Benedict along with it. She is got up very much in what we have come to accept as le style Sybil: glittering white hair sprigging high from a side part and ending abruptly in short, straight edges just below her ears, a smooth, creamy "English" complexion, a short, sleeveless, brightly colored shift from which emerge plump rounded arms and legs, and no jewelry except for a large gold wedding band.
"Big, isn't it?"
It is easy to read this small slice of a magazine profile executed thirty-seven years ago and see a direct connection between it and the work of today that I have so maligned. But that would be a mistake. Because what you cannot see is that the scene is a mere part of the piece, that this wonderfully rendered moment occurs at roughly the 1,000-word mark. That, in fact, what precedes it are the author's words, broken by a few piercing quotes, delivered without the slightest trace of feeling the need to somehow adjust to form...The point is not the scene. The scene is a means to an end. The end is that Elaine Dundy, God bless her, has learned something about Sybil Burton; she's watched her and talked to people about her and thought about her and made up her mind about her...
...In fact, he (Tom Wolfe in a 1973 essay) waxes so rhapsodic on the virtues of technique that, late in the essay, he takes what in retrospect can be seen as a dangerous turn. He writes that the New Journalism had altered the standard for writerly competition: ". . . the proof of one's technical mastery as a writer becomes paramount and the demonstration of moral points becomes secondary."
His argument brings to mind, of all things, the title of the movie composer Henry Mancini's autobiography: Did They Mention the Music? The music, of course, is an element, an important one, in a movie. But it is not the reason you are in the theater. You are there for the story. The music makes the story better, just as the technical mastery of storytelling does.
But go tell that to a writer whose first and, truth be told, only question is: How'd you like the writing?
...Yes, the old, fussy order had been overthrown: Magazines certainly looked different and sounded different. But in the very place where the revolution (in story) had begun — the stories — it had not only stalled but ossified. The Form became a crutch. It became the fallback position, the safe route to the last paragraph. If you wrote, or edited, according to form, you minimized the risk of failure. You could avoid mucking around in the dark, losing sleep, rereading your notes, staring at the wall, staring at the screen — you could avoid the potentially treacherous business of using the story as a way to explore something large. And messy. And elusive. You could avoid the clutter simply by conceiving of, reporting, and writing a story according to the clear and immutable lines of expectation that The Form dictated.
...But most writers I know will admit, even grudgingly, how they long for an editor with whom they can talk, about distilling an idea or question, about the path to answering that question (read: reporting), and about the best way to tell the tale. This is, of course, a tricky dance in that writers desire both to be left to do what they want and to know that they have a hand to hold when they get lost. To pursue a story without risking getting lost is to preclude the possibility of real discovery. Getting lost, then, is a good thing, but only when there is someone at your back with a flashlight.
Editors, in turn, deny themselves, their writers, and their readers the possibility of a wonderful story if they assume that the true nature of their work is in preparing a finished piece for publication. The pencil-to-paper part of the work is essential, but no amount of moving words and paragraphs can retrieve from mediocrity a story written before it is thought out. Because then the editing becomes only about words and structure and organization — about technique.
..The path to stories that last begins with a question or an idea, either of which is likely to be fuzzy. It is the crucial moment in a story's fate, and the point at which too many of the pieces I read went wrong. Think of Anna Karenina as a magazine story. Wonderful yarn, to be sure. But where to take it? In its extreme, The Form would suggest an anecdotal lead and nut graph that reads something like: Ms. Karenina's story reflects a growing trend among Russian women who, fed up with their aging husbands, are leaving their families, taking up with handsome young men and, when things go badly, eventually falling under moving trains . . .
http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2002/6/mag-shapiro.asp
It's a quality piece--read it if you get the time. I found it on Kiko and Vincent's blog.
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