“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” [John Gould] said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”
— Stephen King On Writing
story
story
Tom Wolfe, master of the deadline, understood that a story set in the present time is open-ended and ongoing—that, in a sense, it is completed by the public, who carry it forward into the future. So it is now with his own story.
— Paul Elie “Getting the Ending Out of Tom Wolfe” The New Yorker
narrative
The field of economics should be expanded to include serious quantitative study of changing popular narratives. To my knowledge, there has been no controlled experiment to prove the importance of changing narratives in causing economic fluctuations. We cannot easily prove that any association between changing narratives and economic outcomes is not all reverse causality, from the outcomes to the narratives.
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By analogy, the reason that writers pull quotes, especially paragraph-length quotes, and display them as I have just done is often to convey a narrative, to give the reader a historical sense of a past narrative that had impact and might again have impact on the reader if it is repeated just as it was perfectly worded.
-Robert J. Shiller ‘Narrative economics‘ Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University
The press is a political institution in the sense that it cannot do its job unless people trust it.
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Doing journalism is different than doing politics. And when you are doing politics you’re goal is to win. … And winning power is different than telling people what’s going on.
-Jay Rosen Recode Media
get the story
I was in my twenties when I learned my most important lesson from Izzy Stone: “If you’re in this business because you want to change the world, get another day job. If you are able to make a difference, it will come incrementally, and you might not even know about it. You have to get the story and keep on it because it has to be told.
-Nat Hentoff ‘Nat Hentoff’s Last Column: The 50-Year Veteran Says Goodbye‘ The Village Voice
the story
She had a sudden image of her father, reading a big stack of newspapers from all over the country every Sunday after church, muttering to himself, “That’s not the story, that’s not the story1″ as he dropped the pages in an untidy heap around his living room chair. Of course, her father had been a print journalist, back in the 1960s. It was a different world now. Now, everything was on television. Television, and the mindless chatter on the radio.
-Michael Crichton Airframe
artistry
He finds, as we all do perhaps, that the pace of life is faster today than it was a generation ago. Estates are “no longer family-transferred like before” and maintained lovingly with a deference to history and patrimony, but sold to new owners who have a different take on how things should be, and a garden’s lifespan is growing shorter. Whereas once a gardener planted with the hope that in a half-century his work would be complete — slender saplings aging into great oaks, small shrubs into immense hedges — now a gardener may only have a few years. It is an artistry whereby the artist rarely sees his vision fully realized.
-Dana Thomas ‘Gardens by France’s most revered landscape designer‘ The New York Times Style Magazine
I am able to be in the room when a decision is made. I am on the scene when a story is being covered. And I am one more voice in the room asking questions. A lot of people talk, write, and even preach about ‘converting Hollywood’ or ‘bringing morals back to television.’
And you know what? Most of the people who have written on this topic have never spent a day working in either industry. They suggest boycotts and campaigns, but I don’t think that approach always works. I think sometimes God uses us most effectively when we are involved in the day-to-day operations–when we get coffee with a colleague, work late at night on a story, or write a script with a coworker. Take a seat at the table where your voice can be heard. Organizational change is most effective coming from the inside, rather than the outside looking in.
-Megan Alexander Faith in the Spotlight
‘knight’
Sir Nils Olav, a resident king penguin at Edinburgh Zoo, was honored with the title of brigadier on Monday during a parade in the Scottish park. The bird is the mascot of His Majesty the King of Norway’s Guard and was made a knight in 2008.
‘news as news’
If I were a journalist today I would have a problem. To cover news as news, I can’t think how I would do it. I think I would have to add the philosophical dimension… meaning to go always deeper, as I’m sure some of you do, always deeper in the story — not only the what — but the why now? And how long will it last?
-Elie Wiesel ‘Elie Wiesel to journalists: Never stop the search for meaning‘ Poynter
‘literary currency’
Just when the pressure surrounding him as a virtually unknown writer had built to an almost intolerable level—financial woes, living with Hadley in squalor, fears of obscurity, excruciating writer’s block—Lady Duff Twysden had saved the day. As Hemingway watched her at the fiesta—a jezebel in Arcadia, manipulating her suitors like marionettes—he knew that he had figured out the puzzle at last.
A story began to shape itself in Hemingway’s mind—the intense, poignant story that, in short order, would become The Sun Also Rises. Suddenly every Pamplona confrontation, insult, hangover, and bit of frazzled sexual tension took on literary currency. Once he started working, he could not stop. He and Hadley moved into the Pensión Aguilar, in Madrid, where he wrote furiously in the mornings. During the afternoons, he went with Hadley to the bullfights. The next morning he would begin again. “Have been working like hell,” he reported to Bill Smith a week after the fiesta had broken up.
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“It is a hell of a fine novel,” Hemingway wrote to an editor acquaintance before the book came out, adding that it would “let these bastards who say yes he can write very beautiful little paragraphs know where they get off at.”
He was right. With the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s generation—the generation Fitzgerald had written about in The Great Gatsby the year before—was informed that it was not giddy after all. It was simply lost. The Great War had ruined everyone, so everyone might as well start drinking even more—preferably in Paris and Pamplona.
– Lesley M. M. Blume ‘The True Story of the Booze, Bullfights, and Brawls That Inspired Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises’ excerpt in Vanity Fair
‘moments’
These are honest and powerful moments because the pressure of life is squeezing these characters between the lesser of two evils. And where in a well-crafted story is pressure the greatest? At the end of the line. The wise writer, therefore, obeys the first principle of temporal art: Save the best for last. For if we reveal too much too soon, the audience will see the climaxes coming long before they arrive.
-Robert McKee Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting
The Metal Detector 