Traces of the Writer at Work:

Overcoming the Enshrinement of Craft in Journalism

by Richard Gilbert
Ernest Hemingways grim prediction about writing for newspapersIf you stay in newspapers long enough youll only see words*haunted me for a decade. He had much advice for
writers, especially for young writers, but this warning was enigmatic. I could not dismiss it, because his pronouncements were backed by accomplishment and tested in his own sweat. It was
apparent, though, that Hemingway was more than hinting that daily journalism was a dead-end
for serious writers. I went to work as a newspaper reporter anyway, but his warning came back at
odd moments and troubled me. This might happen when I had just knocked out my fourth police
brief of a morning and realized I had two more to goon a weekend epidemic of car battery
thefts, sayand it was six minutes before deadline. Usually it was satisfying, working each little
story like a jigsaw puzzle, selecting and combining information culled from the police blotter to
make each sentence solid. But was this what he meant?
Was I seeing and conveying only words? Certainly I was not bringing to life the woman, laid
off by the textile mill, turning her car key to silence in the Wal-Mart lot as scraps of paper and
plastic bags blew past. Perhaps Hemingway believed that too many of the first kind of stories
blinded journalists to the latter. I wasnt sure. Still, I tried to be a writer working in newspapers,
as distinct from being what I considered a mere reportersomeone who saw only words, not
what lay behind them.
Years passed. I propelled myself through seven newspapers, joining a new one almost every year. This was fatiguing, eventually, and professionally risky, but it did concentrate experience. I hoped I would meet my destiny sooner and somehow outrace the pitfall, imperfectly understood at best, that Hemingway had burdened me with when I was eighteen. I met good, bad,

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and indifferent journalists on my odyssey. Could I say, thoughabout any of themthat they
saw only words? Was the problem, if there was one, in us or in our medium?
At most American newspapers, reporters do not think of themselves as writers. There are
many reasons for this, not all of them lamentable. Reporters hurl themselves into events and lose
themselves in the news. They struggle to make sense of the confusing and the inexplicable. The
next day, instead of sustained reflection, there is a new story to write. A writer is someone sequestered in a log cabin up in Michigan, or an author being interviewed about the film rights to
her latest best-seller. But of course reporters are by definition professional writers. And although
many reporters would squirm if asked to apply that label to themselves, that does not change the
fact that they write for a living.
William Faulkner said love exists in spite of, not because. Good writing exists in newspapers in spite of the mediums many constraints. Reporters seldom have enough time to spend researching any one topic in order to grasp its essence fully. There will not be weeks and months to
write and rewrite but minutes and hours, occasionally several days. Good reporters work cleverly
to overcome this handicap. Hemingway recognized their difficulties when he said no one should
be judged as a writer based on work produced on deadline. But he was covering his own tail.
Having ascended the literary slopes, he didnt want to be shamed because he had stooped to writing newspaper feature articles on the way up.
The literary community that is concerned with fiction no longer considers newspaper journalism as an acceptable apprenticeship, or even as a way of earning bread, as it more or less did
in Hemingways day. Journalism in its broadest sense, however, now is less a stepchild of literature. In fact, Tom Wolfes controversial prediction in the 1970s about literary nonfiction replacing the novel as literatures main event seems to have come true. In magazines and books, nonfiction has proven to be a versatile and powerful genre for coming to grips with life and events in
our time. Daily journalism has become less literary, a profession unto itself, perhaps a stepping

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stone into longer forms of nonfiction but seldom fiction.
Yet newspapers can still be a training ground for writers. Although newspapers tend to be
coarse products, they can teach young writers the importance of research and of clear writing.
Hemingways warning still bears addressing, because quality writing in any genre depends upon
a complex set of skillscraftsmanship, in a word. Does something about the practice of daily
journalism imperil something more important than craftsmanship? Is anything more basic to
writing than craftsmanship? Yes, there is, although you would not know it from most of our nations journalism schools or newsrooms, where craft has been enshrined.
Craft exists to serve expression; it is subservient to content and to purpose. Broadly defined, craft encompasses much of what writing is about: close observation; clarity and elegance
of expression; and the rigorous presentation of researched evidence. But too many newspaper
reporters seem to believe that writing means transcribing faithfully what appears before the eyes
and of selecting details at the keyboard. As if the heart and brain can be bypassed. The book
Clear and Simple as the Truth puts this well:
"[W]riting must lead to skills, and . . . skills visibly mark the performance, [but] the activity
does not come from the skills, nor does it consist of using them. In this way, writing is like a
conversation . . . A bad conversationalist may have a very high level of verbal skills but perform
poorly because he does not conceive of conversation as distinct from monologue. No further cultivation of verbal skill will remedy his problem. Conversely, a very good conversationalist may
have inferior verbal skills, but a firm grasp on [the] concepts [of] reciprocity and turn-taking that
lie at the heart of the activity. Neither conversation nor writing can be learned merely by acquiring verbal skills, and any attempt to teach writing by teaching writing skills detached from underlying conceptual issues is doomed."
This insight did not inform the writing coach movement that swept American newsrooms
in the 1980s and 1990s. Much of the advice these coaches offered in print and at seminars was
useful, but it did not transcend craft and often struck me as superficial. Consider the beginning of
an essay called What is Good Writing, which came out of a convention at the Poynter Institute
for Media Studies in St. Petersburg in 1985.

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Good writing is clear. Bad writing is not.
Thats the biggest difference between the two. Why is the difference so important?
To begin with, clear writing holds the reader. The readers eye moves along the line of
familiar, friendly words, cruising smoothly across the page. No breaks, no potholes, and the
reader concentrates on the message. And the golden spark of communication arcs between writer
and reader.
If the writing is clear, the writer can use a whole arsenal of good writing techniqueshe
or she can make pictures, tell stories, use lively verbs, slice out jargon and unnecessary words
and cliches, put people in the story, show rather than tell.
But if the writing is not clear, the writer is out of the ballgame. He cant use any of these
techniques because the reader is gone. The ballgame is over.

This banal level of discussion about writing upset me. I could not imagine any other group
of professional writers spending as much time talking about craftand at such a primitive levelas if it were the entire purpose of writing. All the words, words, words about craft. Did anyone ever become a writer because of craft? I found more useful advice as a young journalist in a
thin book intended for fiction writers, Dorothea Brandes 1934 classic Becoming a Writer.
Brande believed that conviction is the underpinning of all imaginative writing. Writers must
know what they believe about most of lifes major issues. She wrote:
Do you believe in a God? Under what aspect? . . .
Do you believe in free will or are you a determinist? . . .
Do you like men? Women? Children?
What do you think of marriage?
Do you consider romantic love a delusion and a snare?
Do you think the comment, It will all the same in a hundred years is profound, shallow, true or false?
What is the greatest happiness you can imagine? The greatest disaster?

Her questions illuminate the problem that Hemingway alluded to in newspaper journalism.
There is no life in journalism if no ideas, emotions, and convictions lie behind it. If journalists
are uninvolvedin effect uncaringhow can they discern and include in their reports the ideas
and emotions that cause the events they cover? When words are pounded out to meet a deadline
or fill a quota, the sense is often beaten out of them in the process.
A tenet of traditional fiction is that writers are telling certain stories in certain ways to

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make specific points. This obviously means the writer is deeply involved in the subject and has
a stance toward ita message. Samuel Johnson famously said that no one but a blockhead wrote
except for money; but he also said the purpose of writing is to make the world better. For novelist John Gardner, fiction embodied an ancient but still valid kind of thought. Newspaper reporters need to know about these views, need to know that good writing relies on the writer responding to life, relies on the writer having convictions or struggling for them. Writing of any
kind must be honest above all; it must seek the truth.
The ordinary news story about a public meeting rarely seems to call for the writer who is
seeking answers to lifes great questions. The truth in these situations is admittedly ephemeral.
But I came to believe that even the city council or the school board cannot ultimately be covered
as they should be unless the reporter has a much broader frame of reference. Our response to life
determines what we see and how we see it, and hence what we write. In addition, a reporter who
tries to operate only at the surface level will overlook or be embarrassed by the role ideas and
emotions play in the lives of the people he is writing about. He will slog through meetings, ostensibly giving the public the facts in needs, while in reality merely giving editors back at the
office some copy they need to fill a blank spot on the page. The reporter who is also a writer is
seizing upon events as evidence of larger patterns and issues. She may write a straightforward
meeting story, but she is filing away her insights for that day soon when she will write a story
that people will talk about, a story that will show that those supposedly dry meetings were profound gatherings.
Of course, fiction writers and reporters do not use their inner lives in quite the same way,
although the difference is one of degree; both usually make their personal points obliquely. In
reporting and in most fiction, the notion in the head of the writer ends up being subtext. The
writers aim infuses the writing, and an overt statement would be grossly out of place. Traditional fiction derives its power from the dream state so carefully constructed by the writer that it

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feels more real than reality. Nothing shatters such an illusion faster than commentary. In newspaper reporting, the writers ideas remain below the surface because of the conventions of the
objective style.
I have spent my season ragingat newspapers five and sixagainst objectivity. Among
its many sins, objectivity allows reporters and editors to diminish their personal responsibility for
what is published. It is terribly limiting to honest, graceful expression, and years of trying to
scrub themselves out of their prose can deaden the spirits of writers. The objective writing style
also is why readers often distrust newspapers, because they intuit that reporters and editors are
shaping the newsas they mustbut denying it.
Finally, I accepted objectivity to a greater degree because I saw its undeniable strengths. In
practice, objectivity corresponds to the fiction writers imperative to stay out of the story. It may
have arisen from dubious motivesfrom publishers desire to reach the largest possible audiencebut, like the inverted pyramid writing formula that was born because telegraphs frequently broke down before the point of the story was transmitted, objectivity has proven useful and
even powerful. Objectivity remains a guiding principle of newspaper journalism in part because
reporters speak for their newspapers, for institutions. Most newspaper reporters are inseparable
as writers from their newspapers and is another reason that reporters seldom think of themselves
as writers.
Moreover, it often is intentional when the only discernable voice in a news story is the uninflected voice of the institution discharging its public duty. This has been called newspaper
neutral by Donald Fry, a Poynter Center writing teacher. Gruesome or piddling crime stories are
best handled in newspaper neutral, since the styleor lack of itdistances the reporter and the
newspaper from unsavory material. This dry prose has become the norm around which newspaper stories are written and judged, according to Fry. But because voice and point of view are vital to all compelling prose, reporters and editors must fudge on this convention as their stories

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move beyond the basic crime brief. The objective style nevertheless imposes a certain healthy
rigor on reporters. Unlike their brethren who write for magazines, especially those with ideological positions, the newspaper reporter seldom can take the easy way out and tell readers instead of
show them. If a reporter wants to let readers know the mayor is an idiot, she must wait like a cat
and pounce on scenes and events that illustrate the point.
Unfortunately, many journalists are themselves fooled by the depersonalized style of news
stories. The illusion of objectivity masks the importance of an individual reporters response to a
situation. Reporters who would thrust themselves overtly into news stories would violate the
rules of the genre, but reporters who learn how to operate as writers in the larger sense create the
most compelling articles. One essay in Coaching Writers addressed this issue. David Hawpe,
managing editor of The Courier-Journal, of Louisville, Kentucky, expressed a fondness for reporters who began their careers in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. They witnessed and experienced the basic assumptions of American life being challenged, Hawpe said. He liked the fact
that these reporters had social consciences.
Actually, I dont care about their politics and I dont care about their ideology, but I do
care very much about what they feel inside, Hawpe wrote. I care very much about a lack of
passion, about the absence of a passionate commitment to serving readers and society in general.
Not a passionate commitment to pursuing in the manner of a zealot an issue through our vehicle,
but a passionate commitment to serving readers and society in general. Because I think its the
passionate who write well in most cases. Indeed the great journalist is one who has the commitment necessary to investigate thoroughly.
I think he is right. People who become hacks cannot blame the medium. Journalism does
not necessarily destroy writers vision; it certainly does influence how they are able to express it.
Journalistic masters consistently do honorable, craftsmanlike work that is driven by passion. Objectivity forces them to use a high standard of proof.

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The enshrinement of craft, however, enables journalists to talk about writing without having to deal overtly with the mysteries and contradictions of the objective writing style. Yet the
importance of the journalist as a writer who is responding to and struggling with life ought to be
mentioned, especially to journalism students. They seem especially vulnerable to begin thinking
that their larger role as a writer does not matter, to in essence deny their humanity, because they
cannot discern traces of the writer at work in news stories.
Young journalists should understand that they must wrestle with ideas and emotions.
Whether they believe in God or Ayn Rand, whether they believe devoutly in the Garden of Eden
or passionately in Charles Darwin, reporters must think and use their imaginations. Otherwise,
they will only see words, and they will fail their readers. Having answers to lifes big questions
is not as important for writers as having questions. Journalists are paid to ask questions. Their
questions will be better if, meanwhile, they are asking hard questions of themselves.

*Recently I came across in The Paris Review Papas warning or at least this variant of it: Newspaper
work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time. . . . [J]ournalism, after a
point has been reached, can be a daily self-destruction for a serious creative writer.