MAGAZINE WRITING
The Curse of Tom Wolfe
What went wrong for the magazine story
First, a story. Or rather an "anecdotal lead," which seems essential when writing about magazines — in this case, where they've gone wrong and how maybe they might recapture one of the great pleasures they've lost: the story. Not the article. Not the piece. The story.
A year ago I received a packet of a dozen stories from which I was to pick three, to be sent on to the second round of reading for the National Magazine Award for feature writing. I assumed this would be difficult. The reading, however, went too quickly.
I began in earnest, prepared to read each one in full, but soon found myself stopping and reaching for the next. The stopping was instructive in that I slipped into reading like a reader, not, self-consciously, as a judge. I stopped not because the stories were bad; in fact, none of them were. Rather, I stopped because I found I had lost the desire to read further. The point had been made, or the idea explored. I got it. The unfinished articles were executed with many of the same techniques as the handful that drew me in — the aforementioned anecdotal lead, the scene, the digression, the proverbial "set-up" paragraph. They were fine. But they were flat. They stayed anchored to the page.
I thought: I'm being harsh; these pieces reflected work and time. There was not a hack job among them. But when I gathered with the other screeners in a New York hotel room a few weeks later to choose the five finalists, I discovered that I was not alone. My partner and I — each story had two readers — took only a few minutes to cull our top three. We disagreed on none of them. The other readers had a similar experience. We managed in less than an hour — with time allotted for an extra read-through — to cut the entries down to under thirty. We had started with over 160.
The collective reaction to those pieces reinforced what I had come to see as a disquieting trend in the magazine trade: a dullness, a numbing predictability, a growing sense of stories crafted less with a desire for greatness than with an eye for avoiding mistakes.
Over the years I had heard the same complaint from others, and not just from my over-forty crowd: magazines were a bore. At the end of the day, at the grown-up version of "story time," people found themselves reaching not for a magazine, but for a book. The reaction was more one of disappointment than anger, as is often the case when change occurs so gradually that it is difficult to recall a particular moment when things began to shift.
But then a story would appear. And people would begin talking about it — how they loved it, or hated it, or heard that they had to read it, as was the case in the summer when the first installment of William Langewiesche's trilogy on the post-9/11 fate of the World Trade Center appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Here was the first of what promised to be 70,000 words on an event of which, it might well have been assumed, people had had their fill. And yet the story arrived with a discernible buzz, one that carried over to the second installment and then the third. The Atlantic nearly doubled its newsstand sales in August. Taken together this suggested in the most unscientific way that there were still people who wanted a magazine to be a place that told them a wonderful story.
Such talk, of course, is all well and good for the presumably graying readers of the Atlantic, or The New Yorker, or Vanity Fair, and those other remaining titles that keep alive the flame of wonderful magazine writing — so much so that year after year they dominate the writing categories at the National Magazine Awards. But these are not the only magazines that carry stories. In fact, it is difficult to find a magazine that does not run at least one story an issue — a narrative, a yarn, a tale. That so many do reflects a desire by even the most puerile magazines somehow to transcend their reason for being and provide something more than their listings, their service, or their tips on good gadgets or good sex.
In September, Simon Dumenco wrote in Folio: that magazines, as we have come to know and buy them, are not, strictly speaking, magazines anymore. They are, instead, repositories of artfully photographed products and life-style accoutrements. Case in point: Condé Nast's Lucky. Dumenco makes a fair argument, but only up to a point. Magazines still hew to what might be called the Playboy Principle: you will buy this magazine for the nudie pictures, but you will discover wise and interesting things here, too. Maxim itself may have told us all we ever needed to know in August about the model Cash Casia's aversion to "butt-floss thongs." But it also ran the harrowing tale of an angry young man from Honolulu who ended up fighting in the anti-Russian jihad in Chechnya. Editors still try to lure people and money to their magazines by rolling out variations on a familiar theme: eye candy in the front of the book; followed by columns, how-to, confessionals; and finally, as the ads peter out, the well, where the big stuff sits.
Still, the conventional wisdom argues that the well is dying. No one, especially young people, wants to read anymore. And even if they do want to read, they don't want to read anything long. And yet the premature assumption of the demise of the substantial story is delayed by announcements from newly installed editors about what their magazines should aspire to be: "I would love to see more terrifically memorable features in there" — this from Rick Tetzeli upon his ascent as the new managing editor of Entertainment Weekly. Yes, EW. "Memorable features?" The man was talking not only of stories, but of stories that lasted. What gives?
But just because there are stories in the well does not mean the well is healthy. It is not, which is a shame for many reasons, most practically because, if the case of 70,000 words in the Atlantic is any indication, people will buy a magazine that promises to tell them a story they cannot put down.
You might argue: so what? The big fellas — The New Yorker, GQ, The Times Magazine, Texas Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, et al. — still carry the very sort of memorable stories you're talking about. That is true. But it is not enough, just as it is not enough to accept that just because The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are terrific newspapers all is well in American newspapers. A generation ago, the New Journalism helped transform much magazine journalism into the must-read of its time. But now a field that prided itself on its daring offers too many mere approximations of that sometimes breathtaking and often groundbreaking work.
What went wrong for the magazine story? And how, for the sake of readers, editors, and bookkeepers, might magazines win back their storyteller's swagger?
1. To the Barricades
In 1973 Tom Wolfe paused to draw breath long enough to look back on what had happened to journalism and to him in the previous ten years and wrote a lengthy essay on what by then had been codified as The New Journalism. The essay was typically Wolfean: bursting with excitement, accompanied by bells and whistles, festooned with imaginative use of punctuation, and, yes, somewhat overstated. It is hard to fault him: Wolfe was waxing nostalgic on his own journalistic youth with the joy of a man all but shouting, Gather 'round kids and let me tell you what things were like in the Golden Time...
And what a time it was, as he and such Legends of the Trade as Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Rex Reed, Hunter S. Thompson, Garry Wills, Joan Didion, John Sack, and George Plimpton were setting the Great American Novelists back on their bench-crafted heels and proclaiming that the age of nonfiction social realism had begun. If you wanted to be a player in the literary game, By God, you went out and practiced what Oscar Wilde had once proclaimed unreadable: journalism. And not the tweedy journalism of Arthur Krock and Walter Lippmann, not the journalism in which the coin of the realm was "datum," but a New Journalism, in which the story ruled.
The novel, Wolfe proclaimed, was so passé that novelists themselves were abandoning the insulated world of their own imaginations and, notebook in hand, taking to the streets. Journalists of all stripes and pedigrees were stampeding across the country — and soon enough, the world — coming back with stories. Yes, stories, which, as Wolfe delighted in telling, were built upon the very same techniques whose use had been limited primarily to writers of fiction: scenes, dialogue, fully realized characters. Journalism, the domain of drunks and hacks and Front Page poseurs, had seized the great ferment of the 1960s and defined what writing and storytelling should be. Wolfe was telling nothing less than the story of a revolution in American letters.
Nowhere was this revolution more apparent than in magazines. For magazines had the space, the time, and just enough visionary editors — chief among them Harold Hayes at Esquire and Clay Felker at New York — to allow Wolfe and his band of merry contemporaries to transform the journalistic landscape. Magazines were not saddled with the burden of comprehensiveness that forced newspapers to cover every last planning board meeting (and in further other action at its plenary session . . .). Magazines could do, if they were bold and so inclined, whatever they damned well felt like doing, so long as people bought them and advertisers knew it. This is not to say that every glossy from McCall's to Field & Stream was lighting it up, month after month. But enough of them were lighting it up to set off an all-but-across-the-board reinvention of what was possible.
Wolfe insisted that all writers were denying themselves a great trove of literary possibility if they declined to hit the pavement. This sin of omission, he went on, was as applicable to the garret-dwelling novelist as it was to the gentleman-in-the-grandstand journalist who refused to mix with the common folk. And yet certainly in the Paleozoic era of magazine narrative (the turn of the twentieth century) that was generally how things were done. Magazine writing in such places as Harper's often read as if inspired by that great literary drone, the British regimental history. Here, for instance, is no less a practitioner than Richard Harding Davis at the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in Moscow: "There were probably someone or two of that great crush who enjoyed the coronation ceremonies, but they enjoyed them best, as every one else does now, in perspective . . . ." That, alas, is as intimate as it gets.
The medium, then, was ready for a change, ready for Wolfe and the others to come racing through the common room, tossing over chairs, spilling glasses of sherry and screaming, Get off your duff, Pops. And at no magazine was this transformation more dramatic than at Esquire. Because the prefix "Golden-Age-of . . ." is so often associated with Esquire (read: 1960s), it is hard to recall that Esquire in the 1950s could be silly, pretentious, and filled with the post-war advice on cool (very cardigan-vodka-martini-Borkum Riff pipe tobacco) that made it, in many ways, the Maxim of its time. To be fair, there were the Nobel Laureates' short stories and the occasional biting essay. But the stories, the narratives, were by and large of the clip-job-phone-interview variety. No one even thought it necessary to find the great man in his hotel room.
It is startling, then, to open a meaty library folder of Esquires of a decade later and see, month in and month out, just how profoundly the New Journalism had come to define the magazine. Writers were not merely telling; they were showing. Consider Elaine Dundy on Richard Burton's ex-wife Sybil, 1965:
Sybil arrives at Sardi's East at four in the afternoon for tea. Tea being breakfast as well, she orders Eggs Benedict along with it. She is got up very much in what we have come to accept as le style Sybil: glittering white hair sprigging high from a side part and ending abruptly in short, straight edges just below her ears, a smooth, creamy "English" complexion, a short, sleeveless, brightly colored shift from which emerge plump rounded arms and legs, and no jewelry except for a large gold wedding band.
"Big, isn't it?"
It is easy to read this small slice of a magazine profile executed thirty-seven years ago and see a direct connection between it and the work of today that I have so maligned. But that would be a mistake. Because what you cannot see is that the scene is a mere part of the piece, that this wonderfully rendered moment occurs at roughly the 1,000-word mark. That, in fact, what precedes it are the author's words, broken by a few piercing quotes, delivered without the slightest trace of feeling the need to somehow adjust to form. The lead: "Sybil Burton Christopher, heroine, easily may be the most revolutionary character of the Sixties for having proved — and acted out in public for all to see — that you can be a perfectly nice, perfectly sensible, perfectly ordinary woman and still land on your feet. Certainly whatever happens she is more authentically Girl of the Year than pseudo-events like Baby Jane Holzer . . ." and so on. The point is not the scene. The scene is a means to an end. The end is that Elaine Dundy, God bless her, has learned something about Sybil Burton; she's watched her and talked to people about her and thought about her and made up her mind about her, and while Sybil Burton is, alas, no longer a nom du jour, Elaine Dundy's work stands up quite nicely as an example of a journalist's using the techniques of fiction to bring an idea alive.
Wolfe wrote as much: "I am talking about technique; as for the rest, from character to moral consciousness (whatever that may be), it depends upon the writer's experience and intellect, his insights, the quality of his emotions, his ability to see into others, his 'genius,' to use the customary word — and this remains so whether he is working in fiction or in journalism."
A small point, or so it appeared. And yet it is this point, this message, that would one day curse so much of the very sort of storytelling that Wolfe's essay celebrated.
It is important to note that Tom Wolfe and his crowd did not, strictly speaking, invent the New Journalism. In fact, hints of what was to come had been around well before Wolfe ever set eyes on Junior Johnson, his Last American Hero. Walter Lord used many of the same techniques in 1955 in his recreation of the Titanic's sinking in A Night to Remember. And in 1959, the great British journalist Cornelius Ryan published his masterwork, The Longest Day, in which he told the story of D-Day through the eyes of its participants. Even in the seemingly stultifying 1950s, it was possible to turn to, of all things, a newspaper, and read techniques-of-fiction prose, particularly in what Red Smith ruefully called "the toy department": the sports pages. Here is Milton Gross of the New York Post in October of 1956, following Don Newcombe of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who has just surrendered two fatal home runs in the seventh game of the World Series. Newcombe is on the verge of tears as he gets into his car with his father. And with Gross.
"I'm sorry, Pop," Don mumbled as we drove away.
His voice was so low, his father couldn't hear.
"What?" he asked.
"I'm sorry," Don repeated.
"What have you got to be sorry for?" James Newcombe said to his son.
Dialogue? On the sports pages, no less? In fact, virtually the entire column is dialogue, as Gross tells the story of Newcombe's long drive home, an odyssey that ended with his dropping off Gross at the train station. Five boys spotted them — one white, the others, like Newcombe, black.
"That Newk?" one asked.
"How'd he get here so soon? The game just ended."
"He left early," I said, and the white boy giggled.
"Don't laugh," one of the Negro boys said. "Just don't laugh."
Milton Gross was doing the literary thing a full six years before the young and eager Wolfe opened a copy of Esquire to find Gay Talese employing the very same device in his profile of the aging Joe Louis — a trick of the pen, as it were, so seemingly revolutionary that it left Wolfe panting: "What inna namea christ is this . . ."
Wolfe did concede the presence of his ancestors. In a section grudgingly titled "Not Half-Bad Candidates," he notes that this tradition of observational reporting can be traced back to Boswell's trailing of Dr. Johnson, and on through the 1950s in such magazines as The New Yorker and True. But when you are chronicling a revolution it is understood that a) an ancien régime was in need of overthrow, and b) to avoid being labeled a "counter-revolutionary," you become a true believer in the New Order.
Orthodoxy, however, is dangerous in that it breeds rigidity in thought: there is one way to do things.
Tom Wolfe lamented in his essay that while the New Journalism was certainly recognizable by the 1960s — and already an object of derision in such publications as this one — the revolution had no manifesto. Yet the 1973 essay itself neatly served the purpose. He had not only chronicled the revolution and told the stories of the revolutionaries themselves but had delineated the defining principles of the New Journalistic Order: Technique. Technique. And Technique.
In fact, he waxes so rhapsodic on the virtues of technique that, late in the essay, he takes what in retrospect can be seen as a dangerous turn. He writes that the New Journalism had altered the standard for writerly competition: ". . . the proof of one's technical mastery as a writer becomes paramount and the demonstration of moral points becomes secondary."
His argument brings to mind, of all things, the title of the movie composer Henry Mancini's autobiography: Did They Mention the Music? The music, of course, is an element, an important one, in a movie. But it is not the reason you are in the theater. You are there for the story. The music makes the story better, just as the technical mastery of storytelling does.
But go tell that to a writer whose first and, truth be told, only question is: How'd you like the writing?
So it was that a generation of magazine people came to journalism with Wolfe's The New Journalism tucked under their arms. Though many flocked to the work to be Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, others came because they had read Joan Didion's "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," or Joe Eszterhas's "Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse," or Hunter Thompson at the Kentucky Derby and said to themselves, I want to do that, too.
Each piece had appeared in the anthology that followed Wolfe's essay. And that book, in turn, came to represent the canon of journalism as it was going to be. This was as much a function of default as it was of the remarkable work Wolfe had included; no other volume then so effectively captured the sound and spirit of the revolution. The New Journalism appeared to contain all that any aspirant to nonfiction literary greatness needed.
Wolfe wrote:
Let chaos reign . . . louder music, more wine . . . . The hell with the standings . . . . The top rung is up for grabs. All the old traditions are exhausted, and no new one is yet established. All bets are off! the odds are canceled! it's anybody's ball game! . . . the horses are all drugged! the track is glass! . . . and out of such glorious chaos may come, from the most unexpected source, in the most unexpected form, some nice new fat Star Streamer Rockets that will light up the sky.
And so this generation, my generation, the ones who haunted bookstores like the Strand in search of journalism to read and be inspired by, stepped to the register gripping this manifesto and hearing this battle cry. But in the great and penetrating rush of Wolfe's words, it was difficult to see that the canon was not limited to Wolfe and his people. The storytelling canon was all around, in the miles of books, of stories told well and sometimes brilliantly. And they were not always told the same way.
2. Ministry of Fear
I spent my summer reading a lot of magazines. They flowed across my desk and spilled around my side of the bed. I put them in a box but the box began to overflow.
I read everything, or tried. I read Maxim, The Source, Atlanta, Glamour, The American Scholar, Fortune, Orlando, Chicago, Black Book, Details, Sports Illustrated, McSweeney's, Texas Monthly, New York, ESPN the Magazine, New Jersey Life, Mother Jones, Men's Journal, Outside, GQ, Rosie, Vibe . . . you get the picture. I read current magazines and back issues. My reading spanned the decades. The front of the book did not interest me. I read only the stories. And there were stories in every magazine.
I read some wonderful recent ones, among them: David Samuels's account in Harper's of Woodstock '99, Robert Sam Anson retracing Daniel Pearl's final days in Vanity Fair, Lawrence Wright's portrait of al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in The New Yorker, Richard Hoffer in Sports Illustrated on the nineteenth-century prize fight between John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain, Dave Gardetta on the new Valley Girls in Los Angeles, Mark Jacobson's journey to Angola in Outside.
The presence of these pieces did not surprise me. Nor did the others, the ones I let go by, barely touched, the inevitable clunkers.
Then there were the solid pieces. Every technique that Wolfe had so feverishly explained in his essay was on display. But the experience of reading them felt like meeting a perfectly attractive person whose features could not later be recalled.
What made it worse was sensing just what had gone wrong. I had spent too many years as a magazine writer not to recognize the telltale signs of a journalist writing not from confidence, but from terror. Not the ambient terror of failure. The terror of not getting paid.
That was a terror I well understood. Almost every magazine writer I knew had faced it. My first encounter came in 1980, when I was writing my first piece for The New York Times Magazine. The piece was about a group of physics grunts, graduate students living on caffeine and too little sleep as they searched for the subatomic particles called neutrinos at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, just outside of Chicago. I was then working in the Outer Hebrides of newspaperdom: the suburban section of the Chicago Tribune. But here, at last, was the moment Wolfe had promised — the journalism of endless possibilities. I used my vacation to report and wrote at night, and when the piece at last was done I packed it in an envelope and mailed it to my editor and waited . . . .
She called a few days later. She had a question.
"Have you ever read this magazine?" she asked.
"Since eighth grade," I replied.
"Then haven't you noticed that all the stories are written the same way?"
"I thought I'd try something different," I replied, wincing now at the memory of a lead that was not anecdotal.
Try again, I was told. And so I did. And though the piece never did appear, I had learned the essential lesson of those who wished to make magazines a career: write to form, or go to law school. So, I wrote to form.
Now you can argue that that was the Times Magazine, whose reputation back then was as the black hole of journalism — a publication where stories went and were never seen again. But I came to believe that the Times Magazine of 1980 was simply the apotheosis of a trend that was dangerously well along: technique ruled! just as Wolfe had insisted. Except now it was not merely technique. Technique slid slowly, maddeningly, and seemingly inevitably into The Form: anecdote; set-up graph; scene, digression, scene, quote from Harvard sociologist. And time and again if a story did not conform to form it did not run. Kill fees do not pay the rent. And so you adjusted, which is a gentle way of saying that you edited yourself — making sure to give them what they wanted.
Yes, the old, fussy order had been overthrown: Magazines certainly looked different and sounded different. But in the very place where the revolution had begun — the stories — it had not only stalled but ossified. The Form became a crutch. It became the fallback position, the safe route to the last paragraph. If you wrote, or edited, according to form, you minimized the risk of failure. You could avoid mucking around in the dark, losing sleep, rereading your notes, staring at the wall, staring at the screen — you could avoid the potentially treacherous business of using the story as a way to explore something large. And messy. And elusive. You could avoid the clutter simply by conceiving of, reporting, and writing a story according to the clear and immutable lines of expectation that The Form dictated.
The fear was not limited to writers. Time and again editors of all rank and responsibility approached the work reactive not only to what they believed their superiors wanted, but what they came to assume were their readers' sensibilities. They listened to focus groups, to media buyers. They tried to get a handle on the zeitgeist. They tried to anticipate the trend. In short, they became tentative, which, in turn, made them fearful. They wanted sure things. They turned to the Form.
Writers, anticipating what editors wanted, were left to focus their energies on technique. The bolder stylists played with words and grammar and, as Wolfe himself had done, punctuation. They used the first person, or attempted interior monologue, just like Gay Talese. They used lots of naughty words.
And if they were still confounded by editors who kicked back their pieces with such vague directives "it needs more texture," they could fiddle with the top, add a scene, tighten the dialogue and make the piece acceptable. And all the while they could sense that something was missing.
The work had been primarily focused on the means, not the end, which meant that even grading on a curve it was, in the end, a solid B+.
Which is where we find things now.
3. Let a Thousand Stories Blossom
So whattaya know . . . The novel did not die. Not only did it endure, but Tom Wolfe himself joined the Fiction Club. Joe Eszterhas became a screen writer. Jimmy Breslin wrote novels, and so did Joan Didion. Norman Mailer returned, time and again, to the form that had first made him a star.
If you are thinking that I am about to accuse these folks of treason, of having sold out the cause of Social Realism for fiction, you are mistaken. I liked The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full. I admired the reporting in both novels. Those books bring to mind a star-struck conversation I had in 1977 with Jimmy Breslin, when I was a year into the business. I had a chance to drive him back from New Jersey, profiling him for my small daily. I drove and he talked and at one point I asked a rookie newsman's question.
Why had he turned to fiction in World Without End, Amen? Had he turned his back on journalism?
Nah, he replied. And then he explained that the novel provided him with a way of a getting at a deeper level of journalistic truth.
The form, in other words, was not the point. The idea, the question, the thing he needed to know, was the point.
It is, in the end, as simple as that.
The embrace of technique sets writers and their stories off in a direction from which it is often impossible to turn back. A first step that is comforting and reassuring — thank God I know where I'm going — but fated. But by setting out over the uncertain terrain where an insight or idea may, or may not, lie, writers deny themselves and their readers the great thrill of the work — an attempt to answer a difficult question, a discovery of something illuminating.
I look back at the pieces I read and loved this summer and see a pattern: a complete absence of self-consciousness. The stories just began:
- "The reporter who comes to Karachi, Pakistan, is given certain cautions." (Robert Sam Anson, Vanity Fair)
- Or, "The drunken soldier in the airstrip waiting room put down the AK-47 he'd been pointing at my head and picked up a pair of bricks. This was progress." (Mark Jacobson, Outside)
- Or, "In the winter of 1992, I was invited by a major national magazine to travel to Liberia and write an article about what I found there." (Denis Johnson, Harper's)
Each story took me someplace. But the sense of being physically transported was not the only thrill. Things happened along the way — not only encounters with interesting people, but discoveries that the authors made. Anson followed Daniel Pearl's journey to try to understand his path to death. Jacobson appeared to need to know why so physically glorious a place as Angola was so cursed. And Johnson, in the spirit of Joseph Conrad, found himself on a misbegotten journey to the heart of darkness, Liberia's and his own.
The stories read as if written by an author who had been left alone; the best work seldom shows an editor's hand. But that is an illusion. Good work often has undetectable editor's fingerprints all over it — undetectable because much of the editing happens not on the page, but before so much as a word is written. The work in bringing an ambitious story to life is a task that no writer should have to pursue alone. Many prefer the solitude. Many also prefer that the first drafts be left untouched. Dream on.
But most writers I know will admit, even grudgingly, how they long for an editor with whom they can talk, about distilling an idea or question, about the path to answering that question (read: reporting), and about the best way to tell the tale. This is, of course, a tricky dance in that writers desire both to be left to do what they want and to know that they have a hand to hold when they get lost. To pursue a story without risking getting lost is to preclude the possibility of real discovery. Getting lost, then, is a good thing, but only when there is someone at your back with a flashlight.
Editors, in turn, deny themselves, their writers, and their readers the possibility of a wonderful story if they assume that the true nature of their work is in preparing a finished piece for publication. The pencil-to-paper part of the work is essential, but no amount of moving words and paragraphs can retrieve from mediocrity a story written before it is thought out. Because then the editing becomes only about words and structure and organization — about technique.
she path to stories that last begins with a question or an idea, either of which is likely to be fuzzy. It is the crucial moment in a story's fate, and the point at which too many of the pieces I read went wrong. Think of Anna Karenina as a magazine story. Wonderful yarn, to be sure. But where to take it? In its extreme, The Form would suggest an anecdotal lead and nut graph that reads something like: Ms. Karenina's story reflects a growing trend among Russian women who, fed up with their aging husbands, are leaving their families, taking up with handsome young men and, when things go badly, eventually falling under moving trains . . .
Here a writer may well need an editor to say, gently, Your point is fine but narrow. Aren't we really talking about something transcendent — a story of disappointment? And skip the sociologists. The story will tell us all we need to know. Take us on her path to the fateful day.
The story will not "write itself." Stories never do. The writing will depend on what the writer learns. To use Wolfe's words, "the demonstration of moral points" is not secondary.
You are thinking: This sounds like magazine Eden, and that is not where I live. This is all too idyllic and fails to account for the harsher realities of the magazine world.
To begin with, it takes time to do a story well, time not only to hang around, and play with ideas, and report, but time to think and ultimately to write. A 6,000-word story is, when well executed, a loss leader: you may be getting paid two bucks a word, but unlike lawyers and plumbers you are not allowed to bill by the hour. Which means you are being underpaid. There is no getting around the fact that the money for writing nonfiction prose is not nearly as good as the money for writing, say, screenplays. Magazine writers know this. Some move to Hollywood. Some hold their noses and make ends meet by spinning out celebrity profiles. Some teach. But all — with the exception of those with staff jobs or particularly lucrative contracts — cobble together a writing life, balancing work that pays the bills with work that pleases the soul.
Money, or the lack of it, is an excuse. So too is the numbingly familiar lament of the changed magazine landscape. The "general interest" magazines gave way to titles that were ever more specialized, which meant that fewer places published pieces just because they were interesting. So stories had to be interesting to certain people. A tightening of the lens, to be sure. But then most writers clever enough to stick around learn to find ways to make the ideas that excite them work for, say, either Elle or GQ: Is the death-seeking skydiver in the piece to be a man or a woman, twenty years old or late thirties?
Then there was the problem with celebrities, whose stories — and more, importantly, photographs — became so essential that it was as if Mephistopheles had hung a shingle on Fifty-seventh Street that read: Pacts With the Devil Here! But it is too convenient to blame the demise of magazine writing on the hagiographic profile. Because in those same magazines there are pages for stories of consequence and accomplishment. Britney or Madonna on the cover is no different than Hugh Hefner's Miss August (". . . I like purple sunsets and hate people who tell lies . . ."): they are the light in the window, nothing more.
Bad things will always happen to stories. They will be killed. Editors-in-chief will change their minds, as is their right, or pieces will live but not quite live up to their early promise. The reporting will feel thin, or the writing uninspired. The idea will never quite take flight. It happens in books, and newspapers. And it will go on happening in magazines, too.
But in casting off the shackles of technique, a revolution that lost its way might yet find its way to the promised land. So let the readers and advertisers sign on for the service, for the advice columns, for the tips on dating and fashion and living the happy life. Let editors-in-chief worry about getting Tom or Arnold or Julia for the cover. Give the lads their tasteless jokes, and tell them what women want. But in return allow readers the possibility of turning to the beleaguered well and finding a story whose author had something to say. Give the magazine a chance again to be the subject of the conversation that begins, Did you read the story about . . .
