Why do I write? Why am I driven to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and why as this haunted me since I first learned to read? Here's a post I made on the jour3441 blog a few months ago, and I think it encapsulates it well...
“There were nights during the decade that Adrian Nicole LeBlanc reported Random Family (2002) that she’d grow so fatigued she would simply hand her tape recorder to her interview subject and go home to sleep.” So begins this article in the New Journalism Review, which discusses Adrian Nicole Le Blanc’s book Random Family, the seed of which was “Landing From the Sky.” When I read that Le Blanc researched her subjects for 12 years, all I can do is be impressed with her dedication and perseverance. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be so driven by your subject, and to believe so deeply that the story that you want to tell is important enough that you would spend 12 years researching it to the point of exhaustion, and then be able to make something of the material.
I’m currently reading Pierre Berton’s The Joy of Writing, and I see a parallel here with Le Blanc’s dedication. One of Berton’s key points is that writers write because they have to. Even if it means working a 10-hour day in a mining camp as he did as a youth, then coming home to write and write and write, to the detriment of friends and family, if that’s what it takes. Writers have no other choice. Perhaps this was the case with Le Blanc.
I can’t remember a time where I didn’t believe that writing was my calling. In fact I can’t really imagine a life without writing. But when I read Berton’s book or learn about Le Blanc’s dedication, the thing that scares me is that I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt that relentless, burning drive that fuels “real” writers like Berton and Le Blanc, certainly not to the point where it became a feverish passion. Maybe my feeling that I am not a “real” writer has a lot to do with the impostor syndrome I've often written about - I seem to be scared to start a story. The blank page is so often intimidating and each time I begin, there is indeed a fear that perhaps this time, I’ll be found out for a fraud. Perhaps this time I won’t be able to do it. Often times the writing is agonizing, with me staring blankly into space, keying in a few words only to realize that the rhythm and structure are all wrong. But then there comes a point where the words and the story fall into place. I can hear their tone, their cadence, the structure works and they spill out onto the screen. From that point on, the story lives, and I can’t stop until it is all down. The afterglow of that moment where everything falls into place is the best kind of satisfaction I know.
I admire Le Blanc for her perserverance in following her subjects for such a lengthy time span and seeing the project through to its end. There must have come a point where they might have begun to feel like family. Yet I didn’t get the sense that she was emotionally connected to her subjects. The story reads objectively: here are the lives that these women have lived. Le Blanc’s story simply reads as a window into their realities over an impressive timespan. I find it funny that she received harsh criticism both from the left for not addressing the social issues, and from the right for seeming to condone these lifestyles.
I do wonder though about her methodology of simply handing the women a tape recorder and asking them to speak into it. I guess it would have been the best way to gather information from the women over such a long time span (especially if she also had a full-time job), and it might have garnered a lot more honest moments from them than if LeBlanc was just hanging around all the time. In a way, that’s the best kind of fly on the wall reporting technique. But imagine the transcription and organization that would have been required! I can only think that there could be dozens of variations of stories on the same theme, just depending on how the information was structured and what information was selected. And so I come back to my original point - this was a massive undertaking and while I’ll be frank that I wasn’t totally drawn in by the characters in the story, I am completely impressed by the methodology that LeBlanc used for this article.
I love the phrase “Jusqu’au boutiste” from Tony Horowitz's From Baghdad Without a Map. In addition to being a great metaphor for the story itself, I think it’s also a great metaphor for writers such as LeBlanc, Horowitz and Berton. Each of them are driven by such a need to tell their story that they will go to the end - “le bout” - to tell their story. Even if that means putting their lives in danger.
There’s someting oddly fascinating about Horowitz’s story - the fact that he was willing to put himself literally in the line of fire to get a real sense of what was happening in Beirut. And what made his writing all that much more appealing was what many critics have said - he has a great skill for juxtaposing the comic and the horriffic, within the space of a few lines. For instance: “I found myself sighing as each rocket shell streaked through the night. Look at the oranges! The pinks! The display was carefully choreographed.” Or: “We laughed again. The cannons boomed, twice in succession.”
I also really liked the description of the boat - the tropical showers above, and the one-armed bandits beneath…Such a marriage of contradictions, much like Horowitz’s article itself. But what I really appreciated was one moment of honesty with the reader, where he admits:
“It was one of those uncomfortable journalistic times I’d experienced many times before. After fourteen hours together, we’d become buddies. Now, having milked Marwan for all the quotes I needed, I was headed back to safety and he was headed into hell.”
This might be a moment many writers experience in the process of infiltrating their subjects’ lives - at some point, they have to leave and the subjects remain. But the fact that Horowitz decided to continue on with Marwan for a bit made me respect him all the more.
I’ve always found that there’s something oddly exotic about travel writing - wandering the world and getting paid to do it (though not necessarily if it means getting into the line of fire). Yet at the same time, it must be a challenge to balance the immersion in a place with trying to write a story. To explain what I mean, I’ll go back to a few weeks ago, when I was observing my yoga instructor for a story I was researching. I had interviewed him a few times, and was getting into the story. In the meantime, I decided to take one of his classes as I usually did.
What I found was, now that I was writing about him, I couldn’t experience the class the same way that before I had decided to write the story. There was a different part of my brain at work now, that I couldn’t turn off. Every moment was being assessed for its merit as a potential scene. As I stretched in Downward Dog, my mind was racing frantically to try to put to memory some detail I’d noticed about my instructor - a gesture, a phrase. In the same way, I imagine that traveling and writing might be the same way - a different part of my brain might be working than if I was “just traveling.”
And now I come back full circle to the theme of writers who write because they are driven to. And this makes me think that for a “real” writer, every moment, every experience is a potential story. IS a story. So if they were traveling, whether on assignment or not, I don’t think it would be that different an experience for them. Perhaps what’s more consoling to me in my uncertainties about whether I am a “real” writer is that in the past few months, a different part of my brain has been switched back on again. Now that I think about it, I have been sifting each experience in my brain, weighing its worth as a potential story. Scribbling ideas in a notebook. Driving my boyfriend crazy with my oft-repeated observation that such and such “could make a really great story.” After hearing this refrain for a few months, S's eventual reply was,
“Don’t just talk about it then. DO something about it.”
Even though at the time his honesty cut, I realize now that it was because he was speaking the truth. I talk a lot more about writing than I actually write (ok apart from the fact that my full-time job is in publishing, but writing for an organization is different than writing for yourself.) Perhaps it’s true what they say - you are your worst critic. My fear of failure may keep my writing fresh, but it’s perhaps also what makes the glow of the blank screen seem so much more intimidating. I’m getting the sense that the only true remedy is to do what Pierre Berton recommends in his book: “Write. Write. Write. Read. Read. Read. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite.”
And then go jusqu’au bout.
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