New Yorker - A few words over

Tag: New Yorker

The Art of Writing the Tough Profile

Gay Talese’s famous “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” is a legendary profile for many reasons, perhaps most notably because the iconic singer wouldn’t talk to him directly. Talese nonetheless delivered an incredible profile of Sinatra, without the benefit of a direct interview.

I thought briefly of Talese’s story when I read Nick Paumgarten’s excellent New Yorker profile of Ninendo creative genius Shigeru Miyamoto. What is clear from the story is that Paumgarten actually had very little opportunity to spend time with the elusive Miyamoto. The only scene in which he directly interacts with his subject is in a Nintendo corporate conference room, through the use of a translator.

And yet, Paumgarten still manages to make the most of that limited access. Here’s a snippet of his really effective use of observation, description, and vivid detail:

Miyamoto, dressed in a striped button-down shirt and black pants, regarded me with a wide smile. Up close, I could see that he had freckles and a few gray hairs. His upper lip sticks out a bit, like that of a character in a Matt Groening comic strip. He was carrying a beat-up and bulging old leather diary with a painted, hand-tooled relief of a horse on its cover. A friend had made it for him. It was where he jotted down thoughts and ideas. He said he was very busy: there was a deadline looming for the release of a new handheld device with a 3-D display that requires no 3-D glasses. Also, it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Super Mario, and he was judging a competition in which thousands of players had used a Nintendo program to make and submit their own Mario animations. Miyamoto himself was to narrow these down to fifty finalists.

As Minagawa translated each of my questions, Miyamoto often buried his face in his hands or rubbed his eyes and frowned, as though Minagawa had misheard me and, instead of asking Miyamoto to parse the differences between entertainment and play, was telling him he’d gone broke. But it became clear, once he began talking, animatedly, with extravagant hand gestures and giggles of delight, that the apparent anguish was merely an expression of deep thought, a counterpoint to his ebullience in answering.

Paumgarten makes the most of a very constrained, limited interview. The doesn’t just get Miyamoto’s quotes, but we see him, hear him, and get a sense of his personality. He might be sitting in a boring conference room, but that doesn’t stop Paumgarten from still creating a vivid sense of his subject.

It’s a good reminder that we don’t always have ideal settings or opportunities to interview subjects, but that’s no excuse for doing a bad job telling the story.

Author name:: Matt
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Dissecting Gladwell’s take on Football and Dog Fighting

One of the writers I most admire is Malcolm Gladwell, a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the author of the Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. His insightful writing explores big ideas through deep research and reporting, linking together seemingly disconnected events and ideas. In one piece, he ties together the biblical story of David and Goliath, Lawrence of Arabia, and a girls basketball team in northern California… and it makes sense.

His most recent New Yorker article, “Offensive Play” asks the question “how different are dogfighting and football.” The piece is alarming, fascinating, and effective. It doesn’t just try to provoke the reader with a provocative comparison for the take of being sensationalistic: Gladwell reveals that football, at almost every level, is much more brutal and damaging than most of us fans would like to realize. He doesn’t just make an argument: he tells stories, and builds a case, piece by piece. Gladwell would have made a fine prosecutor.

Tim Wendel, one of my mentors at Johns Hopkins, once advised us that when we see an article that blows us away, we should go back and rip the story apart, dissecting it to see how the author put it together and why it works so well. Wendel described how earlier in his career, he literally cut up good nonfiction magazine stories into chunks of paper and spread those snippets out on a table to study how it all fit together.

So let me briefly do my dissection of “Offensive Play” here. First here’s a brief outline of the piece:

Scene: former NFL player Kyle Turley melts down at a bar
Description and background on Turley
Turley’s experience isn’t an anomaly: background and description of other NFL players who suffered from similar mental and physical problems after their careers
Quotes and more first-hand stories from Turley
Shift to background and summary of Michael Vick dogfighting trial and sentencing, followed by his recent reinstatement into the league
Background on dogfighting
Detailed, graphic description of a dog fight
Transition: back from dogfighting to football: what is a “morally acceptable” sport?
Shifts to medical research on dementia & Alzheimer’s; physical indications of neurological problems caused by head trauma
Introduces researcher who found connections between ex-boxers and ex-football players and brain injuries
Introduces second researcher who further found links between football players and high frequencies of neurological disorders; symptoms described echo those of Turley in the opening scene
Description of how findings of symptoms match Turley’s breakdown
Description of second researcher & her office. Would she advise her own son to play in the NFL? She’d tell him no, “Not if you want to have a life after football.”
Transition: moving from research of sports injury risks and how other sports handle them. Is the injury risk inherent to the sport, like dogfighting, or can it be reduced?
Example of how NASCAR improve safety after death of Dale Earnhardt
Background, history on football and long-standing concerns about injury risks
Examination of football injury research at UNC; how researchers determine that a routine tackle or a block can be the physical equivalent of being in a car accident
Key take-away from UNC research: it’s not just one or two big hits that damage players; it’s the cumulative effect of countless “little” hits as well
Also: Helmets can only help so much: players today are too big, too fast
Transition: back to Vick’s surviving dogs; how the most prized dogs were bred & trained for “gameness” and willingness to fight
Transition: linking the “gameness” of dogs to the “gameness” of NFL players; back to Turley and the pressure to play “all out” despite injuries; anecdotes from final, painful days of his career
Transition: Ira Casson, chair of an NFL committee on brain injuries, and the limits of what can be done
Closing thought that the sport won’t be changed or eliminated any time soon, as so many fans love the sport, in spite of what it does to the players
Echoes his closing thought with a quote from a book on dogfighting that describes the passion of the spectators

The story is just short of 8000 words, but it’s a fast, gripping read. Why does it work?

First, reporting matters. Gladwell doesn’t just sit at his laptop and argue against the brutality of football and warn that it does lasting damage to players. Above all else, the story is reported well. He talks to three medical and science experts, two former football players, a trainer who is trying to rehabilitate Vick’s former dogs, and an expert on the business of NFL football. He also digs into the history of football, the nature of dog fighting, NASCAR safety issues, and the Michael Vick case. He can quote both what the NFL commissioner said about Vick and what Teddy Roosevelt said about the sport in 1905. In short, Gladwell dug through old documents, talked to people, and asked a lot of questions to collect the raw materials for his story.

Second, scenes move the story. The piece is loaded with science, research data, and historical information, but scenes drive the narrative. By my count, there are at least twelve scenes in the story, moments that he vividly recreates for the reader.

Third, characters count. Gladwell doesn’t merely quote the people he interviews; he shows them. The reader gets a vivid idea of what Turley looks and sounds like. We see researcher McKee’s office, which includes a statuette of Brett Favre on a shelf. We don’t just hear about Vick’s dogs; Gladwell shows them playing with a trainer in Utah. All of this humanizes and deepens the story. The human characters put a face on the scientific, medical side of the story: he uses Turley’s experience as bookends to the piece.

Finally, he shows more than he tells. Gladwell doesn’t rail against football or dogfighting; rather, he lays out the evidence and the connections and largely lets them speak for themselves. He closes with the disturbing idea that we hate dogfighting because of the suffering and harm it does to the dogs, but love football, despite the apparent long-term suffering it inflicts on many of its players. He paints the connections that he discovers, but doesn’t overstep his role and hammer those findings into his audience.

Gladwell leaves the readers in a troubling spot: he doesn’t provide any real solution to the problem, but nonetheless makes the compelling case that the sport is possibly every bit as cruel and harmful as dog fighting. He shows that the reader complicit in the problem, then leaves them on their own to decide what should happen next.

Author name:: Matt
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Dan Baum and the half-empty glass

Dan Baum, a writer who’s worked for Esquire and The New Yorker, talked with the Renegade Writer blog about freelancing and the future of the magazine business.

A couple things caught my eye. First, I always feel a bit lost when I’m working on a freelance piece and someone I’m interviewing asks me who I’m writing for. I always feel a bit sheepish saying it’s a freelance article that doesn’t have a home yet. Baum, a big advocate of writing a piece for a specific target magazine, has another approach:

When you are calling people and you don’t have an assignment yet, how do you convince them to talk to you?
I say, “I’m working on a story for The New York Times Magazine.” Or “I’m working on a story for Wired magazine.”

So you don’t let them know you don’t have the assignment in hand?
No, I say I’m working on a story for Wired magazine and I am. My relationship with Wired magazine at that point is none of their business.

What do you do if they ask when the publication date is?
I say “I don’t know, that’s out of my hands; it’s above my pay grade.”

He also has some bleak things to say about the current state of writing for magazines:

Do you worry about competition — other writers coming in and horning in on your gigs?
No. For one thing, we’re kind of out of magazines. I think in a way, it’s over. I think the days of being able to make a living as a magazine writer are rapidly coming to a close.

That is so sad.
It is. I’m not boasting here, but I should be able to get work, right? I was on staff to The New Yorker for 3 years, I worked for Rolling Stone for a long time. I have written for the biggest and most prestigious magazines out there and I can’t get work. Magazines are closing, they’re shrinking, they’re going from 12 issues a year to 10 issues a year, and they’re going from 300 pages to 140 pages.

Anyway… interesting, motivating, and despressing, all in one tidy little article. Check it out.

Author name:: Matt
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Nieman Conference: Thoughts on Day Two, P.M.

Over lunch, a bunch of strangers and I tried to figure out how to save the newspaper business. We didn’t succeed in finding a solution, but the brownies were quite tasty.

For the first afternoon session, went to “Conversation on Craft” on Magazines. The conversation focused on this powerful feature story from the New Yorker: The Last Tour by William Finnegan. Interesting session, from which my biggest take away is that William Finnegan is a hell of writer.

The second afternoon session was a tough call. I wanted to attend five of the seven sessions, but ultimately wound up in Tom French’s talk on “getting organized, mapping a story, finding a structure.” This handout is a great summary. Again, I was really impressed with Tom French. A few interesting tidbits you won’t find on the handout:

The best book on structure, according to French, is the D.C. Comics Guide to Writing Comics. Seriously.
Readers are smarter and more open to new approaches than we think. Reader are often ready for a lot more than editors and writers expect. The conventional wisdom about what they read or won’t read is often wrong. Sometimes, you can bury the lede and the world wont come to the end…
Even great writers often think their work sucks, especially when their working on it. It is common, he says, to be frequently “fighting off panic and terror.” “It’s good to be scared,” French says. “That means that you’re pushing yourself.”

Author name:: Matt
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Nieman Conference: Thoughts on Day Two, A.M.

The Keynote session to kick off Day Two was a discussion with author and writer for the New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson. To me, it seemed like a little too much fawning over Anderson. Felt like I was watching “Inside the Actor’s Studio”… Despite that, I did take away a few morsels of value from Anderson’s talk.

First was the idea that he often learned a lot about the meaning of his own life’s experiences through the act of writing itself.

Second, he talked about “going the distance” as a reporter. By that, he meant that you have to keep researching, keep interviewing, keep talking to people, even when you’d rather quit and take a shortcut. If you feel like there is still more to try and unearth, you have to pursue it. His example was illustrative: when researching his book on Che Guevara, he almost didn’t bother to interview an old Bolivian military officer, but dragged himself over to do it. That man, at the end of a long interview, admitted to Che’s murder and revealed the fate of his body, which had long been a mystery.

Following that, I sat in on “From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary: Mining narrative gold in the everyday” (perhaps the longest title for any session at the conference). Interesting, well-organized panel on how three writers — Katy Butler, Louise Kiernan, and Victor Merina — developed feature articles, selecting scenes, developing structure, and spending time with their subjects.

Moderator Christine Larson kicked off the discussion with a great analogy comparing the writing process to romance. You fall in love with an idea, and fall even deeper in love with the story as you report it and talk to people and collect material for it. But then when you take it home to try and write it up, the romance fades away and you’re stuck in a troubled relationship with something that drives you crazy. I’m not doing justice to Larson’s entertaining set up, but you get the idea…

Some important ideas I took away from this session:

Kiernan talked about the importance of being “willing to embrace the gray” in our storytelling; that is, be willing to accept and write about complexity. It’s easy as writers to try and tidy up reality into a nice package, but sometimes, reality is ambiguous and unresolved, and our job is to present that in all it’s maddening grayness.
Merina described his process of visualizing his stories on paper and mapping them out, literally, so that you can step back and look at them, seeing where themes and content overlap, and where there are clear holes and missing spots that need to be filled.
Butler explained the idea of looking for turning points and key moments in your stories, then walking backward from those spots to construct a compelling narrative structure

Author name:: Matt
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