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There was an interesting article in the LA Times today about the downward trend in freelance rates. I would write more about it, but I have a story due tomorrow (one that I am getting paid for) and I need to get writing! So, I’ll just post the link to the article, Freelance Writing’s Unfortunate New Model, here.
“When you first start writing, you never fail. You think it’s wonderful and you have a fine time. You think it’s easy to write and you enjoy it very much, but you are thinking of yourself, not the reader. He does not enjoy it very much. Later, when you have learned to write for the reader, it is no longer easy to write. In fact, what you ultimately remember about anything you’ve written is how difficult it was to write it." — Ernest Hemingway
The sidebar to a feature story I wrote on warehousing technology is up online. You can read it on Transport Topics’ Web site here.
Like I said in yesterday’s post, best-selling author Loraine Despres and I had such a great conversation last week, it warranted a two-part blog post. Today she tells us about her experiences as a writer.
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I am so excited to present part one of a two-part Q&A with best-selling author Loraine Despres. Loraine is the author of The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc, The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell and The Southern Belle’s Handbook, Sissy LeBlanc’s Rules to Live By. If you read my post about The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc, you know that I fell in love with the book. The writing is beautiful and the plot lines are engaging. Prior to writing novels, Loraine wrote for television and is known for writing the "Who Shot J.R.?" episode of DALLAS.
Loraine was nice enough to talk with me about the novel and her experience writing it. She also sent me autographed bookplates, and I’m giving away two this week to some lucky readers. Just leave a comment by 5:00 Eastern on Friday, Oct. 16. I’ll announce the winners on Monday.
Today I’m pleased to present a Q&A with Tim Wendel, who is the author of seven books, including RED RAIN: A NOVEL and HIGH HEAT, which will be published this spring by Da Capo Press. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, USA Weekend, National Geographic Traveler, Washingtonian and Esquire.
Tim teaches fiction and nonfiction at Johns Hopkins University and was nice enough to share some of his expertise with us here.
Q. You have written novels, narrative nonfiction and news articles. How do the skills you’ve learned for one genre compliment the others?
A. Joseph Conrad was once asked his definition of quality writing. His reply was, “If I can make you see.” In other words, can I write the piece with enough details and urgency so the reader can picture a scene similar to what I’ve witnessed or brought together in my mind? In essence, are we sharing the same dream?
Once you consider writing in that way, a good story becomes a good story, regardless if it’s technically fiction or nonfiction. Quality interviewing can result in great sensory details that then can be fully utilized by employing techniques that until a few decades ago were the domain of fiction writers.
When potential readers have so many other ways to spend their time (watching reality TV, serving the Internet, etc.), it’s up to the writer to make a story – fiction or nonfiction – as full and as vibrant as it can be.
Q. Are there any dangers of cross pollination?
A. Sure, looked what happened to James Frey and others. The fields of memoir and even essay can often be a slippery slope. That’s why it’s so important to fact-check your story along the way. Sometimes there just isn’t enough there to call it nonfiction – no matter how much research you’ve done. That’s what happened to me with my first novel, CASTRO’S CURVEBALL (Ballantine/University of Nebraska). On my first trip to Cuba, people there told me how much Fidel Castro loved baseball, how he’d once been a baseball pitcher, how he had perhaps tried out for several U.S. major-league teams. When the research didn’t go as far at that, I turned the book into a novel. That said the descriptions of Havana at night, the infatuation Cubans have for our so-called national pastime, what the lush countryside is like remained rooted in fact. Those come directly from the interviews and observations I did during my three trips to the island.
Q. What techniques can nonfiction writers learn from fiction writers and vice versa?
A. So much of quality writing comes down to scene-setting. In a way, this dovetails back to Conrad. I tell my nonfiction students to read novels and watch film. That can help with everything from dialogue to voice. I tell my fiction students to get out and talk with people, see if you can then mimic their speech patterns or how they act. All of that is necessary if you want to write effective scenes because that can translate into those times when you’re reading and everything around you seems to stand still. You miss your Metro stop or you stay up past your bedtime because you’re so wrapped in the story. That’s when you’re a part of what John Gardner called the “vivid continuous dream.” All of the above and then some is needed to pull it off.
Q. Do you have any books you recommend writers read and, if so, which techniques should we be watching for as we read?
People should read what gets their juices going. Life is too short to do anything different. We should all have writers that we’d walk over broken glass to get a hold of their next work. Richard Ford once said many of us get into this field because we read something that’s so good, so memorable, that we have to give it a try. So, we do and perhaps we get hooked.
If that’s the case, find the connections between writers. Who do they read, even hang out with? Thomas McGuane, for example, is good friends with Jim Harrison. They’ve influenced each other. Richard Ford keeps an eye on what Robert Stone is doing. So, if you enjoyed a McGuane or Harrison work, allow that progression to lead you to a Ford or Stone.
Q. As a reader, I often get caught up in the story and often forget to pay attention to the techniques a writer is using. You are currently teaching two classes–nonfiction techniques and a nonfiction workshop—at Johns Hopkins University. What advice do you give your students on recognizing techniques as they’re reading?
Whether I’m teaching a fiction or nonfiction class, I tell my students to pay attention to the moments when a piece they’re reading really takes off. Certainly you race ahead to finish it. It’s a good story and you can’t help it. But then go back and try to dissect the best passages. Can you determine, at least in part, what the writer was doing? When I read something that blows me away, I become the curious kid who takes apart the washing machine. Maybe I cannot put it all back together again, but I have a better understanding of what went down.
Also, be open about what you read. For example, in the novel class I teach at Johns Hopkins (the powers that be allow me to teach fiction and nonfiction) I often assign Cormac McCarthy’s CITIES OF THE PLAIN. Invariably, some will roll their eyes at this news. At first blush, they consider the assignment a macho novel filled with violence. And it is. But it’s also a compelling love story with characters that are more alive than some people you see every day. In many ways, McCarthy’s novel is Romeo and Juliet set along the mysterious borderland between the U.S. and Mexico. Several students have told me later that they never would have read that book if it wasn’t assigned.
And, finally, seek out people you can learn from. I’ve been lucky during my career to work or study under Alice McDermott, David Granger, Nicholas Delbanco, Alan Cheuse and Oakley Hall. Each one taught me something valuable about writing. But a small part of that was me going out of my way to be in their path.
To read more about Tim or read his stories, go to www.timwendel.com.
Best-selling author and attorney Charles Brandt was nice enough to speak with me from his home in Idaho about his book I Heard You Paint Houses, which I wrote about yesterday here. We also talked about his research, the writing life and what he is working on now.
Q. I came away from the book really liking Frank even though he was a mafia hit man. Since you were a pallbearer at his funeral, I’m assuming you liked him as well. Did that ever get in the way of your research or did it work to your advantage?
A. Let me start by saying I’d known Frank for many years before the research for the book ever began. In Wilmington, Delaware, he was our local gangster. He was the head of the Teamsters and we had no gangsters in Wilmington, Delaware. When he became a Hoffa suspect in 1975, he was very unlikeable. He was a very mean fellow.
The Frank Sheeran who I got to know in the last five years of his life was a man who had already begun to change. That was a man who was feeling remorse and wanted to get it out and get it on the table. When people want to confess they want you to work for it. They don’t want to just spill the beans. At times I would be very exasperated with Frank Sheeran, but during that time I grew to like him a lot. I think that grew to help the book. As a trial lawyer, I always had to be objective, but me liking him helped him and made him comfortable knowing that I liked him.
My wife said that she had to pinch herself when she would leave him and remember that he was a killer because he was so charming and so engaging and had a twinkle in his eye.
Q. You spent five years conducting research for the book. How did you organize your material?
A. When you really get familiar with material as a trial lawyer, for example, and you know how you want to present it, the device that most lawyers use is the outline. I did work a lot on the outline—I worked it and reworked it. The outline was very important. There are some writers that don’t like the outline, but for this book that structure worked very well. I might move a chapter without ever writing a chapter. I wanted to structure this outline that you knew the man first. You knew him first and you knew what he did. You truly understood him as a child and as a young man and as a war veteran. The structure was to try to show in the early chapters what he was like and what he grew to in the later chapters.
Q. How did you decide what to leave in and what to take out?
A. I was guided by Frank. What he didn’t want made public was left out. He would say, for example, ‘Now what I just told you about Russell, you can’t use that.”
Q. Were you ever afraid as you were researching the book or after it was published?
A. I take precautions obviously. There were things I left out of the book. I talk about a ring that Russell made up for himself, Frank and one other person. The other person was Billy D’Elia. Billy was a successor to Russell Bufalino and was Russell’s nephew–but I don’t use Billy’s name. That is one example of exercising caution. I can tell that now because Billy is in jail. I also kept my role out of the book as best I could. I didn’t want anyone thinking I was convincing Frank to talk.
Q. I love narrative nonfiction and the way real life can read like a novel. What did you learn from your experience with fiction that helped you tell this story?
A. My first book was fiction. In 1988 I wrote the book The Right to Remain Silent. There is a line in it that confession is a basic human need. Frank Sheeran read that book and said to me that he was tired of being written about in all the other books on Hoffa. He wanted to tell his side of it and he wanted me to write it. That was in 1991. Right then and there I knew that he wanted to confess because you don’t say that without wanting to confess.
I think I always had an ear for dialogue and Frank would say memorable things I would never forget. It was like a tune melodies on the piano. He would say tremendous things.
Q. I read that the book is being made into a movie. Martin Scorsese will direct the film and Robert DeNiro will star as Frank. How involved will you be with the film?
A. They’re the pros. They have a great screenwriter, Steve Zaillian. He won the Oscar for Schindler’s List. Paramount flew me to New York to meet with Martin Scorcese, Robert DiNero and Steve. The purpose was for me to give them material that wasn’t in the book to help polish the screenplay. The meeting was supposed to last an hour. It was a 5:30 meeting. Finally at 9:30 I said I had to go to the bathroom. They kept putting off their own personal dinner plans and they just peppered me with a lot of questions. Now I am free to answer these things because so many years had gone by and people who might have been concerned are either in jail or dead.
Q. What else have you been working on?
A. I wrote another book after I Heard You Paint Houses—I co-authored with Joe Pistone Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business. I just finished writing a book that will be out in December. It is about a FBI agent who was framed on four homicides by the mafia. It is called We’re Going to Win This Thing.
You can visit Brandt’s Web site at http://hoffasolved.com/.
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Years ago my dad told me I needed to read “I Heard You Paint Houses”: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the Last Ride of Jimmy Hoffa. “It’s a book about the mafia and Jimmy Hoffa,” he said. I normally listen to the fatherly advice my dad gives me, but I tucked this little bit of information away and didn’t pick the book up until last week.
Like usual, my dad was right. Author and former prosecutor Charles Brandt digs deep into the Hoffa mystery and compiles a great story based on years of research and interviews with Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran who confesses to killing Hoffa.
To paint a house is to kill a man—the paint is the blood that splatters the walls and the floors, according to the book. Sheeran painted houses for Hoffa and the mafia. He was also a WWII veteran, a Teamsters official and a ballroom dance instructor. Brandt does a great job of explaining what made Sheeran the person he eventually becomes. After learning more about him, Sheeran actually comes off as likable.
Sheeran unknowingly begins associating with mafia boss Russell Bufalino who helps Sheeran one day when his truck is broken down. The relationship continues to grow until Sheeran is eventually doing “favors” for the mafia. Sheeran eventually gets a job with the Teamsters.
Brandt explains who the major players in the mafia were and how they all interacted with Hoffa. I’ve never known much about the Hoffa disappearance, but the roles everyone played were clear. I learned a lot about the Kennedy’s and their interaction with the mafia, too.
The book, which was published in 2004, is currently being turned into a movie that will star Robert DeNiro as Sheeran. Martin Scorsese will direct the film and Oscar winner Steve Zaillian is writing the screenplay. It should be out sometime in 2011. I definitely recommend the book, but let me warn you, you might find yourself repeating some mafia sayings for a day or two.
You can read a 2004 New York Times review of the book here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/books/killing-him-softly.html.
I was able to speak with Brandt about the researching and writing of the book. Tune in tomorrow for a Q&A with the best-selling author.
My story on the national diesel mechanic shortage ran in the Sept. 21 edition of Transport Topics. The piece is up online at TT’s Web site here.
A fellow freelancer and a member of my alumni network, Maya Payne Smart, is co-presenting a series of free Webinars through the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism on how to be an entrepreneur as a business journalist. Joe Grimm, a visiting journalist at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism and a blogger will present along with Smart. The interactive course will be taught one hour a day from Nov. 16-20 and will cover the nuts and bolts of setting up a business from legal and accounting questions to branding and marketing yourself. There will also be a live chat with five successful business journalists turned entrepreneurs. I registered and thought other freelancers or potential freelancers might want to as well. Visit http://www.businessjournalism.org/seminars/2009/entrepreneur1116/ for the details.