Chapter 105: Mad Max/A Tutorial

One of my few happy memories from high school are the hours spent in front of a Buick-sized microfilm machine at the Brooklyn Public Library scrolling through page upon page of old newspapers, ostensibly conducting research but in reality allowing myself to get hopelessly, wonderfully lost. 

My eyes would veer to the edges of the page – to ads for movies that had opened decades earlier, to small items about robberies and lost cats, to all the bits and pieces of life recounted in the paper, the day after they happened.

I was having a ball, at least until an hour or two had somehow sailed by and I was no closer to tracking down what I had come for: where was the UN General Assembly article I needed?

My homework was not designed to reflect where my curiosity took me. And while I welcomed Bs as the high water mark of academic success, I longed for more. Luckily I found it, years later, in journalism where I discovered that in the work I most liked to do I could get paid to let my eyes and imagination wander.

Getting lost is one of things I love best about this work. And while I am conscious of falling down rabbit holes, I am not always adept at sidestepping the small distractions that appear as I scroll through documents, files, and yes, newspapers that stopped publishing a long time ago. So much fun stuff to sift through. 

I want to stop myself, to stay on task. But then again, sometimes, especially in the early stages of research when I am not necessarily sure what the destination is, I assure myself that this journalistic equivalent of  “chumming” (see: Jaws, tossing offal over the side to attract a great big shark) is essential to getting a feel for the lay of the land.

So all good, yes? 

It is. Up to a point.

I am at that point. I am not alone. As I write this I am sure there are writers who are also trying to stop themselves from scrolling, swiping, and page turning as they search for something as ill-defined as love or irony.

At the risk of sounding like a character in a Samuel Beckett play: we want to stop and we don’t want to stop so how do we stop when stopping means we might miss a gem.

It was at just such a moment the other day – when I found myself deep in the archives of the Palestine Post of July 1929 – when Jay, my fiction-writing child, threw me a lifeline: Max Max, Fury Road.

Over the years Jay and I have seen a ton of movies together, and one of the pleasures is hearing his dissection of why something worked, or failed -- which Jay is deft at explaining without making me feel like a cinematic doofus. 

We’d seen Max Max when it opened in 2015 and were both struck by the relentless, violent, exploding, borderline assault of the experience. 

Terrific stuff. But a movie I had not thought about in years. That is until Jay told me to watch the trailer. With a proviso: even with so much taking place in every frame, the director, George Miller, keeps your eye focused constantly on dead center. 

I watched. And before I go on, I suggest that you do, too.

Even as you might want to peek at the corners – what are those guys on the motorcycles doing and who is the loon playing a flame-flower guitar, and… – it is all but impossible not to keep looking straight ahead.

You are at once aware of all the rest – and how can you not be, given the pyrotechnics and pounding bass – yet it somehow feels in balance: the plot is squarely in the middle. But to come alive it needs it all.

The more I watched and thought about the experience the more I was reminded that one of the key lessons of storytelling – the on-the-clock of the narrative spine and off–the-clock of essential digressions – is not limited to the writing. It is core to the reporting, too.

The best narrative journalists are, like novelists, adept at moving readers back and forth in time and location, even as they never loosen their grip on the tiller, the plot. But before any of them, or us, can begin to write we need to have reported it all – both the core that drives the narrative, and the stuff that gives the story its dimension, context, and life.

Fiction that relies on plot alone can feel arid. But stories that feel plotless can leave us with no compelling reason to read on. It is the same with nonfiction, where reporting assumes the same essential role that imagination does for fiction. Storytelling is not term paper writing. It is meant to transport. But well before a reader ever enjoys that experience, reporters – nonfiction storytellers – need to grant themselves permission to see what’s happening on the edges, to allow their curiosity to take them to unpredictable, and seemingly nonsensical places.

Which brings me back to Mad Max. I want to dive back into the Palestine Post of 1929; in fact, I feel I must and that while that can seem self-indulgent it is anything but. I want to know the important news of, say, July 31st – the chief rabbis meeting with the British authorities over an ongoing dispute in Jerusalem that would explode in deadly violence two weeks later – as well as the “Gala Dinner Dance” at the Kit-Kat in Ramallah. 

I am reporting a mosaic and in the middle of Page Eight sits a brief mention of one of the main characters of my story being “feted” by the Authors Club of Tel Aviv to mark his long-dreamed of arrival in Palestine. He is at the center, inconsequentially, to everyone but me. 

I need to remind myself to channel my elusive inner-George Miller and keep an eye on the center of the frame, while never losing sight of what’s taking place around it.

Because that is where serendipity resides – the chance encounter with a surprise that first stops you and then gets you thinking of something that might have never occurred to you.

What could be more fun than that?