'Brevity's Pull'

This was in the Sunday NYT. It's a thought provoking read about the resurgence of the short story. Brevity can get dumped on at times (just think of all the Twitter jokes you've heard), but almost all our greatest novelists excelled at it.

The best parts of this NYT review are at the end. It recognizes changes that are going on in our industry and the publishing world but manages to find a bright spot in it.

Here's my favorite line:

The death of the novel is yesterday’s news. The death of print may be tomorrow’s headline. But the great American short story is still being written, and awaits its readers.

Why do we do this? This is why.

Miami Herald editor Nancy San Martin's newsroom is being hammered by layoffs. But for journalists, as she says here, the mission remains.

Long-form narrative lives at the L.A. Times

Got to this via Gangrey. Talk about a story that just pulls you through ... and to be this long, it really has to grip you right off the bat and never let up. Check it out.

A quarter-century marriage to a man behind bars - Los Angeles Times

Not that the Times appears to be all that excited about the series. Just try to find it on the home page.

Serial & graphic-novel storytelling

I may be the last person to figure this out, but the New York Times' Sunday magazine has some cool storytelling -- serial narratives (fiction) and graphic 'novels' or strips that run in multiple episodes. They're here.

A little bit of Jack Hart

I just started Jack Hart's book on writing, and he mentioned Tom Hallman, the Oregonian's Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. So that's an excuse to link to some Hallman stuff like The Boy Behind the Mask and the classic Life of a Salesman, and to say that you won't be sorry if you read both of those stories right now, and to shed a little light on Hallman via Hart, the Oregonian's writing coach.

Years ago Hart posted drafts of Hallman stories online, as a way of shattering the idea that there's some kind of magic to great writing that allows people like Hallman to instantly write awesome stories while the rest of us stare slack-jawed and drooling and wondering how he did it and knowing we'll never find out.

"Tom's fellow journalists were astounded to see how far the story developed over the last three drafts he produced. They, too, had been victims of the writing mystique, assuming that someone of Tom's accomplishment would spin webs of gold the first time his fingers hit the keyboard. What they saw, instead, was a damned good writer hard at work, applying his method and honing his craft.
"Tom's first draft was just that, an initial run at the story that mixed great promise with plenty of disappointments. The second draft tied up loose ends, tweaked the structure, and sharpened the character development. The third polished the language, refined the imagery, and pushed through to the final level of excellence. Seeing that progression, one editor told me, was the most instructive lesson he'd ever had in newspaper writing."

Note from Boston

I'm up here at the Nieman conference for narrative editors at Harvard. Keynote speaker yesterday was David Talbot, founder of Salon.com, who is now on to other ventures, all that involve telling stories.

Someone asked if there's a future for traditional long-form journalism, i.e., narrative, whether it be in newspapers or wherever. He does, he said, because "readers do like that campfire feeling or bedtime feeling of being swept up in a great story. ... It's hard-wired in people: Tell me a story. If you can hook a reader like that over time, you really own them."

I'll try to post more thoughts from the conference today and tomorrow if I can.

Overheard on the Titanic

A new way to tell stories with newspapers - and my other passion, a black Sharpie.

My favorite is "Overheard on the Titanic."

You have to see them to believe them. Check it out. I'd love to see how many of us could come up with one of these from the Daily Record.