Writerland, Chapter 59: Reporting Lessons from Tony Hawk
Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.
First, a quick apology for last week’s missing newsletter: Blame it on Covid. But better now and back to work.
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Every so often, actually too often, a book appears with this sort of caveat: Although this is a work of nonfiction…
The operative word is although. Because right there you know there is going to be a problem. In this instance the prologue continues: “the author has changed dates, timelines, and the names of individuals in this work, except for the identities of certain public officials.” The author goes on to say that the “characters’ physical appearances and circumstances” have been changed and that the author “has created composite characters or events.”
That this was done to protect the privacy of people involved in a particularly sensitive legal drama is admirable, from the standpoint of kindness and sensitivity. But taken together these changes mean that the book is not a work of “nonfiction.” Yet in a glowing review in no less a bastion of journalistic integrity than The New York Times Book Review, it was praised as “literary nonfiction at a high level.” Literary I will grant. But nonfiction? Sorry but this book falls into the same category as a movie “based on a true story.”
I do not doubt that the author reported the story. But I am troubled, as I have written in an earlier newsletter, by the ongoing practice in which a story is presented as nonfiction but as is the case in this instance, readers are left to wonder whether a character is a real person or an amalgam, and whether events are being described as they happened.
It is understood and accepted by readers that journalists change names to protect the safety and reputations of people who have shared their stories with them. But that practice comes with an explanation by the writer as to why anonymity is being granted and the assurance that the person they are meeting is indeed a real person, that the circumstances and timing of events they are describing did, in fact, occur.
When the Times itself recounts, say, the story of a refugee who has escaped the horrors of his or her pursuer, they will add that the account was consistent with stories of others who have endured the same thing at the same time at the hands of the same people. In other words, the reporter is saying, I have taken the steps necessary to assure you that this is true.
I do not believe that the author of this book intended to deceive; quite the opposite – to this author’s credit, the caveat came at the beginning of the book, as opposed to “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” whose author John Berendt, waited until the end of his phenomenally successful “nonfiction” book to advise readers that all that they had read was not actually as it happened.
"Though this is a work of nonfiction, I have taken certain storytelling liberties, particularly having to do with the timing of events," he wrote. "Where the narrative strays from strict nonfiction, my intention has been to remain faithful to the characters and to the essential drift of events as they really happened." Berendt later admitted, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, that he fabricated some scenes and changed the sequence of events, placed himself in Savannah before the murder and even met the victim. But in fact, the Chronicle reminded readers, he didn't arrive until a few years later.
“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. But it did not win. As the Prize’s then-administrator Seymour Topping told the Times: "The Board did take cognizance of the author's note and it did have some bearing on the decision not to consider the book for the prize in general nonfiction."
Still, Berendt’s success opened, or rather re-opened the door for playing with and inventing facts under the maddening pretext of “storytelling liberties.” Suggesting that it’s within the rules of “literary nonfiction” to play with facts to suit the narrative grants permission to cut corners, to get lazy, and even to veer into invention, the lowest form of journalistic cheating.
But even in those instances where darker impulses are not at play, the success of nonfiction that really isn’t, undercuts what is at the heart of narrative nonfiction: reporting.
Reporting is hard, for a host of reasons, beginning with the word reporters hear more often, and in more ways than any other: No. But to be a first rate narrative nonfiction writer (yes, you can call it literary, too) you have to want to report. You have to be willing to deal with rejection, frustration, and occasional humiliation. You have to be resilient. You have to find ways around endless obstacles, roadblocks, impediments, and danger.
It is not for everyone. But if you want to be a true literary journalist, if you want to practice as the best in our craft do, you have to want to report.
Note that I am not using the word should. Should suggests a desired way of behaving – akin to figuring out what will please the teacher. Sadly, I can often tell when a student is really not cut out to be a top notch reporter when they ask, how many sources do I need for my story? That question is akin to asking “what’s passing?”
Just passing can make you an adequate reporter. But it will never make you a great one. And to report true, and not corner-cutting, fudging-the-facts nonfiction you have to want to throw yourself into, yes, the thrill, and the joy of reporting.
Which means you have to be honest with yourself. You have to ask yourself – do I really want to report that deeply? If you don't, that's okay. But it means you need to acknowledge the limits of the stories you can tell.
And that leads me to Tony Hawk. You might well ask what the greatest skateboarder in the history of the world can teach about reporting. Actually a lot. Not in words, but in what he does best.
Just as the best representation of what music looks like can be found in watching Fred Astaire dance, so too do I believe that the work of reporting is best captured by watching Tony Hawk fail and fail and fail again.
So watch this clip. In it Hawk is attempting a trick known as a 900 – as in degrees of spinning. Consider it a self-diagnostic tool. Hawk is at the X Games. The 900 is eluding him. Watch what he does:
Then ask yourself, Am I willing to do that to get the story?
There is only one way for Tony Hawk to nail the 900 and there is nothing easy about it.
There is only one way to be a true literary journalist.
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.