by Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post
Aptly subtitled "In our modern click-and-skim world, there's dwindling time and space for the expertly crafted narrative", Joel Achenbach's piece explores long-form writing - particularly
Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith’s long-form features - competing against today's quick-read, data, chatter and noise.
See article online: Nov. 1, 2009-
The vestigial tale: In our modern click-and-skim world, there's dwindling time and space for the expertly crafted narrative by Joel Achenbach,
The Washington PostGary Smith writes very long stories for a living. They run 8,000 words. He crafts four of them a year for Sports Illustrated. He is a throwback in what we will call for the millionth time the Age of Twitter.
Narrative these days competes against incrementalized information — data, chatter, noise. Smith doesn't think he's a dinosaur, but he does fear that the long-form narrative doesn't quite work on a computer screen.
"You're on the Web and the Internet all day, and you got your trigger finger on that Scroll Downbutton. And you're looking to move material across the screen. Move-and-skim is the mood you're in."
And that's no way to read a story.
"A story curls you back into yourself," he says, "and you need a special time and place and setting and mode for that. If it becomes all one smear with your work life and checking your e-mail, your Facebook, it's lost all its reason for being."
Smith is speaking by phone from his back porch in Charleston, S.C. This is where he writes, on a teak picnic table, with a view of a small back yard with fruit trees. The loquat, he says, still has a few pieces of fruit.
Yeah, an irrelevant detail, but notice how your brain reflexively inserts other details, like the humidity and the lizard scampering across the walk and the languid cat on the fence post. Stories are collaborative; the listener paints the backdrop.
Smith is 55, and his work has been heavily anthologized. His favorite story, "Damned Yankee," was about a baseball player who might have been the next Yogi Berra but for all the guilt he felt from having accidentally thrown a javelin through his uncle's head. (Now that's a story!)
There's endless talk in the news media about the next killer app. Maybe Twitter really will change the world. But Smith is betting that there will still be a market, somehow, for what he does. Narrative isn't merely a technique for communicating; it's how we make sense of the world.
The storytellers know that the story is the original killer app.
To understand the magic of narrative, you have to ponder the rise in Japan of "mobile phone novels," written on a cell phone keypad. The reader up-loads the novel one screen at a time.
There are two ways to look at this situation: One is to make the electronic gadget the star of a heroic tale called The Changing Media. New gadgets can do anything! They can not only put you in touch with friends, they can store your photo album, tell you your longitude and latitude, and write fabulous novels.
But another way of describing the situation is to say that you can't keep a good story down. The story, not the gadget, is what's irrepressible. So powerful is the story that it will sprout even in a cell phone.
There's a furious adapt-or-die mentality among media organizations. Researchers say we're becoming a "society of scanners." They say the Internet is a "link medium." Newspaper executives have embraced a new format known as "charticles," which are, in the words of the American Journalism Review, "combinations of text, images and graphics that take the place of a full article."
There is much confusion about what, precisely, should vanish in this broad media makeover. Is it print? Or just long stories? Or just bad, boring stories?
Complicating the situation is that the online world is both increasingly dominant and, for many media organizations, stubbornly unprofitable.
The sages say "content creation" no longer pays; only "aggregation" is profitable. It's a freak variant of Darwinism — the survival of the parasitic. But obviously there will be little of value to aggregate if only rich people and dilettantes can afford to type up their thoughts.
Facebook is another big challenge for narrative. It's hard to sustain a story on a page designed to put you in contact with your 1,374 close personal friends.
Bloggers aren't storytellers. They are partisans, ranters, linkers. Bloggers give away their entire plot in the first sentence.
Good stories take time to craft. Good writers, editors, copy editors, photographers, etc., all expect a living wage. The real question is whether there's a business model that can support good stories.
"The great stories will survive. But the question is who's going to pay for them," says Norman Sims, journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "This is not fast food. This is slow food. And it's expensive."
Story-loving isn't just culture; it's biology. The human brain has evolved in such a way as to enable the construction and comprehension of narratives.
"We experience our lives in narrative form," says novelist Jonathan Franzen. "If you can't order things in a narrative fashion, your life is a chaotic bowl of mush."
Roughly around age 4, psychologists say, the human child develops a "theory of mind." The child suddenly grasps that other people have feelings, thoughts, just like the child's own.
From this great mental leap comes a secondary, almost accidental talent: We can get inside the heads of people whom we never actually meet except in stories. This is why fiction works. Huck Finn and Harry Potter seem real enough.
Steven Pinker, Harvard's guru of evolutionary psychology, says our interest in stories comes in part from a "thirst for gossip" — we need insider information about our social world.
Narratives give gossip shape and meaning. And stories let us experiment, safely, with novel social arrangements that might otherwise blow up in our face. Think of all the adultery literature. "The Scarlet Letter." "Madame Bovary." "Anna Karenina." Usually someone dies. Don't try this at home.
Stories have certain basic rules.
Author Mary Pope Osborne says of her Magic Tree House books: "The protagonist really wants something. There are obstacles. The protagonist goes through a crisis, most often, and either fails or succeeds."
Another key element: The payoff is delayed.
"You're not just reporting information but you're revealing an unfolding of information," Osborne says.
Kids today have no attention span, we are told — and then devour all seven of the Harry Potter books multiple times.
Storytellers will have to be more disciplined or get a new line of work. This is not a crisis, this is progress. Fewer quote-dumps and overwriting by frustrated novelists.
"There's this inevitable movement toward shorter, tighter, quicker," says Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists.
The Internet can be an accelerant, not a retardant, of great narrative. "The Girl in the Window," a recent long feature in the St. Petersburg Times about a 7-year-old feral child, has received more than a million hits.
Even with the best stories, Gary Smith is correct: It's a drag, usually, to read a long story online.
The best feature of print is that it doesn't interrupt you. It doesn't try to link you somewhere else. Sometimes you want to read a story that doesn't heckle you as it squirms in your lap.
"People crave stories too much. It's kind of the pipeline to the heart," Smith says.
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, tells us, "I can't imagine a world in which the only thing of interest is the brief, the ephemeral, the flickering and the tweeted."
Humorist Dave Barry says by e-mail: "You can't really read Twitters. I mean, I don't see anybody ever going to the beach with a big old mess of Twitters. Gotta have a plot. The big change from Jane Austen is that now the plot has to have really hot vampires."
And here's media sage Walter Isaacson, whose Rolodex would be a thing of wonder were anyone to still use Rolodexes:
"The good Lord is pretty smart, and He also knows better than most of us how to communicate and get his Word out there. Thus in the Good Book he presents to us, he MAKES IT A NARRATIVE!"
In the beginning ...
Yeah, that's a narrative all right. Sold like mad.