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Patrick doesn’t love being interviewed. He greets my opening question with an uncomfortable silence, squinting at the pot-plant behind me as if it might somehow be to blame for getting him into this. 

            “Is this going to be anonymous?”

            He doesn’t relax until we get onto the French Foreign Legion.

“You go to France and you apply, you give them your passport, and they do psychological aptitude tests, physical fitness tests. And if they decide that you’re suitable you go through basic training which is, ah, hell on earth.”

            As Patrick talks me through the gruelling selection process for the elite, multi-national French army unit, you can see him forget that I’m recording, watch him relax into visions of military parades and camouflage tents. He starts talking with his hands—not to mention eyebrows.

            “You get yelled at, abused, punched. They break you down so they can build you back up.”

            He tells me about super-marathon hikes in ill-fitting boots, unforgiving standards for uniform folding, and continual verbal abuse. One recruit, he says, was ordered to “mow” 60 metres of grass using a pair of fingernail scissors.

            “And he’s like ‘sixty fucking metres!’ But it’s not about why you’re doing it, it’s about you do what you’re told. Because when you’re being shot at, if you don’t do what you’re told, instantly, somebody’s going to die.”

            Lines like this flow of Patrick’s tongue with the ease of experience, free of self-consciousness or irony. At times, I can almost forget that he has not, in fact, ever taken a life-or-death order.

            “I mean, they only take one in nine. It’s a pipe dream, but I have to try it. ‘What if’ is way worse than actual failure.”

“Um. And after that. I don’t know. I like the idea of being a tour guide.”

How to Draw a Banana

A couple of days ago, I interviewed a friend for a brief vignette. We chatted about his dream job—French foreign legionnaire—and his experience at an Amsterdam sex show, on a Contiki tour. (I didn’t end up using the sex show story, but I sure am glad to have it on tape.) The interview only lasted about ten minutes, and I was able to bang a fun little 300-word story out of it pretty quickly.

I was struck, though, with how difficult it was to write a portrait that felt accurate, honest. Every selection of details seemed warped, no characterisation totally fair. I felt a bit cheated; I’d managed to overcome my fiction-writer’s desire to warp things, only to find that they were warping themselves! I thought maybe it was a reflection on my writing abilities. After all, we think of really good fiction writers as producing really well-rounded, believable characters. CNF uses the techniques of fiction, so if you aren’t quite up to producing a breathing fictional character, maybe you aren’t quite up to being honest about a breathing human being either.

My girlfriend suggested something pretty insightful. She said she’d done still-life drawing for an art class at uni (or college—she’s not from round these parts) and they’d told everybody that in order to draw still life, you need to forget what you know a banana looks like, and instead just draw what you actually see of the banana in front of you. And that maybe this was a bit like that.

Bloody good advice, I reckon. Perhaps, instead of trying somehow to reproduce on paper the complex and probably inexpressible feeling I have about a person, I can be more faithful to my subject by simply sticking strictly to what I actually see in front of me. Maybe it’ll actually come out with more of the person intact that way. This way of thinking about things has the added bonus, at least for certain forms of CNF, of getting the writer out of the way of the subject. 

Hopefully I pulled it off.  I’ll post the story tomorrow—for now, I have first year maths assignments to mark.

Interviewing Idiots?

Neo-nazis in Queensland? Enough of them for a white supremacist music festival? Really?

I've been looking hard for a good story for my final CNF piece for this course, and this seemed like an interesting possibility. Apparently there is a festival of "racialist music," Hammered Festival, that has been happening for the past few years on the Gold Coast. This year, it's moving to a secret location in Brisbane. One must, I suppose, convince the organisers of one's genuine and outspoken racism before being given the address. That might cause some difficulties in writing an article about the thing--I couldn't actually pretend to be on their side, even if that was what it took to gain admission. The appearance of neutrality, I could manage, but I've got a little too much hair to pull off skinhead. Even if I couldn't attend the festival itself, I imagine I could probably get interviews with some related people. The existence of Queensland locals proud of their racial hatred is an intriguing, as well as horrifying, issue--even without the added colour of the music festival.

My angle for such an article would have to involve something a bit broader than just profiling the people involved--you can't build a good story out of pure revulsion. The immediate question that comes to mind is: how did they come to think like this? How does that happen to someone in Queensland, today? However, the idea of me getting a bunch of skinheads to open up in interviews about their childhoods, their fears, their insecurities--well, it seems a leeetle optimistic. It's the sort of thing I could talk to a psychologist about, but I think the article would be a bit dry if that sort of source became to central. Maybe I could get more out of them than I think; maybe I'm just a bit frightened of the idea--although, I suppose I am pretty white. Maybe I could learn to love death metal, forge a connection that way...

Another angle I could attack the story from might be the difficulties of free speech. It's not a new idea to talk about, but I can't remember ever reading a substantial piece of CNF on the topic. I could speak to those protesting against the festival, and those regretfully allowing it to go ahead. Other groups testing the boundaries of free speech could come into it. The exact nature of the relevant Australian laws would be important, as would the reasons for their existence. I could contrast Australia with much of Europe, where public neo-nazism is illegal, or with the U.S, where free speech seems to be held even more dearly than here. The Hammered Festival would then becoming the hook for this broader issue.

The whole idea though, has illustrated a couple of problems that I've been having in my search for article concepts. The biggy is that all my ideas so far--I had another about conspiracy theory groups--have implied writing stories where I considered everyone involved a bit stupider--or nastier, or just in some way inferior--to myself. And that does not seem like a good starting point. The free speech angle does seem to avoid that problem though, in that it would involve multiple conflicting, legitimate points of view. The white-supremacists would be more of a prop. So I'll keep thinking about that possibility. I should think quickly though: the festival is on (assuming it does go ahead) in just under a month.

The Human without A Human

In what must have been the greatest present ever, I received a New Yorker subscription for Christmas. Since then, the stylish pages have been arriving in my letterbox (physical, for snail-mail and possibly even the occasional snail) once a week. But the quantity of terrific writing in each has proved slightly more than I can easily get through in a week--especially as I insist on reading the small-print theatre and gallery reviews for shows I will never see, on the other side of the world. So I'm a little behind. This is usually fine, seeing as the New Yorker isn't the world's newsiest publication, but I would like to catch up. So I've put down the novels for a moment, and have been reading New Yorker all the time. This means at least two hours a day on trains and buses, most days. Anyway, this might all translate into a fair few NY article discussions over the next few weeks.

Yesterday, I read a great article about the U.S. prison system: The Caging of America, by Adam Gopnik (NY staff writer--dream job anybody?). It addressed the weirdly, worryingly large number of people America keeps imprisoned--something like 6 million under some kind of 'correctional supervision.' The article was everything I think good CNF should be: informative, moving, challenging, and highly readable. But it lacked an ingredient that I've been thinking of as essential to these factors: an individual story. It has seemed pretty obvious to me that the key factor lifting the best CNF above journalism was a tangible human focus, the closely observed story of (at least) one specific person, even if as part of a broader social narrative. "The Caging of America" featured no such thing--no characteristic individual story to structure the social comment around, no real narrative anecdotes, not even any interviews. It's all 'she writes', and no 'she told me'. And yet I found the article to be a great success. How can this be?

I suspect part of the answer lies in the prevalence of the author's own ideas in the piece. It is not a human interest feature, but an essay. And it may be that cogent, well-researched thoughts on a profound human problem can be as engaging, thought-provoking, and even moving as a narrative account of one person's story. Another part, I think, is Gopnik's powerful activation of the reader's imagination. It is here that it becomes possible for us to connect with his topic on a level other than the intellectual. Consider his opening passage:

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

By engaging the reader's imagination, Gopnik manages to make a story of generalities, of an anonymous 6 million, as personal and affecting as memoir.

It's an excellent article, and a fascinating topic--again, I hope I'll inspire someone to read it (luckily it's open to non-subscribers). I don't know how close I've come to the real core of it's strengths; I'd be very interested to hear other people's thoughts. My CNF class looks at essays in about a month's time, hopefully that'll bring clearer insights. I know I loved it, anyway.

Private in Public

The man they call the godfather of CNF, Lee Gutkind, wrote that the genre is characterised by the union of public and private stories. Right away, this had me thinking of my own favourite writer, David Foster Wallace (whose name you’ll probably have to deal with regular invocations of if you stick with this blog). Wallace’s CNF, published in magazines from Harper’s to Rolling Stone and shared widely online, built a large base of devoted fans. I believe the primary appeal of these pieces is Wallace’s own energetic presence in the stories, his personal mental rhythms and responses captured on the page. Whether he’s describing a U.S. porn industry conference (“Big Red Son”) or reviewing an academic Dostoyevsky biography (“Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky”), Wallace always keeps himself out in front, close to the core of every story. This works because his writing voice—witty, hyper-intelligent, sometimes neurotic—is captivating.  But I think the real strength of Wallace’s CNF is that it is never just about Wallace; it is his personal interaction with big, public stories. The private individual in the public story, or the public implications of the individual story.

            “The View from Mrs Thompson’s” is the Wallace piece that popped into my head when I read the Gutkind statement. It is a memoir-style account of Wallace’s life in the week following the September 11 attacks. It is both deeply personal—telling, for example, of Wallace’s breaking down while trying to buy himself a U.S. flag—and highly relevant to public thought on the events. Its final sentence typifies what I see as the combination of the private, emotional story, and the broader public comment that makes great CNF:

“I’m trying, rather, to explain how some part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America … than it was these ladies’.”

Forgive me quoting this entirely out of context, I hope it still makes some sense. Mostly, I hope you’ll go and read the story. It’s in the collection Consider the Lobster (as are the other articles I’ve mentioned) or you can see it here in kind of messy form.

I found "The View from Mrs Thompson's" both deeply moving and highly thought-provoking. This, I would suggest, is the whole point of Gutkind’s parallel narratives. CNF like this makes public issues personal; it helps us to feel what they might really mean.

Welcome!

This'll be the spot over the next few months for my musings on creative non-fiction--which let's call CNF, for bloggy brevity. Interesting bits of the topic I'm hoping to nibble at include:

• The problems and contortions involved in making Narrative from Reality
• The opportunities and dangers of moralising or didacticism for writers
• Why I (and so many) love David Foster Wallace's CNF so much

Who knows what I'll actually get to. Most likely plenty that isn't yet even a glimmer in my eye. I think I know where I'm going to start though...