Mark Bowden on discovering narrative and the value of beginner’s mind: “only if you are truly ignorant can you ask the truly ignorant question” Next up in our series of highlights from last weekend’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference is Mark Bowden.
Author of “Black Hawk Down” and a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bowden has been a nonfiction writer in one form or another for 35 years. In these excerpts from his keynote address, he talks about the police raid that launched his narrative career and the challenges of reporting and writing the story that made him famous. When I started working as a reporter for the Baltimore News American, I wasn’t particularly interested in being a newspaperman or a reporter. I had majored in English at Loyola College in Baltimore, and I wanted to write great stories, I wanted to write great books. I had been particularly inspired by some of the books that the so-called “new journalists” were turning out in the 1970s.
Ten rules for writing fiction. Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin 1 Never open a book with weather.
If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want. 2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. 3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. 4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" ... he admonished gravely. 5 Keep your exclamation points under control. 6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". 7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. 10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
Diana Athill. Young journalism, ideas, opinion. McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Nineteen Boys. He helped me find a vendor in Chinatown who sold tiny metal school buses.
It didn’t occur to me to be in love with him until, one night as we lay on his bed talking, he draped an arm over my chest. On New Year’s Eve we went to different parties and I got home to find a letter on the bed. I will miss being with you tonight… He was the first one I ever slow danced with, not counting the stranger who picked me for a snowball once at a bar mitzvah. I didn’t stop talking until the song was over and at the end of the song he said thanks. I said yes to dancing but later it made me feel ashamed, as if I’d taken advantage of him. The Posteverything Generation - Essay Blog - NYTimes.com. Nicholas Handler, is a junior at Yale University majoring in history.
Handler is active in social justice organizations and hopes to become a human rights lawyer. I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco.
That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my iPod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. 309297. WALKING SHOE. Bitch Magazine. One word. so little time. Charlotte Peel: Between the Image and the Flesh. PERSEPHASSA.com. Love letters. POMEGRANATE: ISSUE 1. New Yorker: A Critic at Large: Candid Camera: The cult of Leica. Fifty miles north of Frankfurt lies the small German town of Solms.
Turn off the main thoroughfare and you find yourself driving down tranquil suburban streets, with detached houses set back from the road, and, on a warm morning in late August, not a soul in sight. Nobody does bourgeois solidity like the Germans: you can imagine coming here for coffee and cakes with your aunt, but that would be the limit of excitement. By the time you reach Oskar-Barnack-Strasse, the town has almost petered out; just before the railway line, however, there is a clutch of industrial buildings, with a red dot on the sign outside. As far as fanfare is concerned, that’s about it. But here is the place to go, if you want to find the most beautiful mechanical objects in the world.
Many people would disagree. Vice Magazine. EXPRESS MEDIA. Memewar ONLINE : Creating conversations between disciplines. ANU Writers: Block. LOCKPICK PORNOGRAPHY by JOEY COMEAU. LOOSE TEEH PRESS.