Notes
The Offensive Traveler, by V.S. Pritchett. Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.
But whatever place you write about, go there often enough to isolate the qualities that make it distinctive. Usually this will be some combination of the place and the people who inhabit it. If it’s your local bowling alley it will be a mixture of the atmosphere inside and the regular patrons. If it’s a foreign city it will be a mixture of the ancient culture and the present populace. Try to find it.
A master of this feat of detection was the English author V.S. Pritchett, one of the best and most versatile of nonfiction writers. Consider what he squeezes out of a visit to Istanbul:
One realizes there are two breeds in Turkey: those who carry and those who sit. No one sits quite so relaxedly, expertly, beatifically as a Turk; he sits with every inch of his body; his very face sits. He sits as if he inherited the art from generations of sultans in the palace above Seraglio Point. Nothing he likes better than to invite you to sit with him in his shop or in his office with half a dozen other sitters: a few polite inquiries about your age, your marriage, the sex of your children, the number of your relations, and where and how you live, and then, like the other sitters, you clear your throat with a hawk that surpasses anything heard in Lisbon, New York or Sheffield, and join the general silence.
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The moral for nonfiction writers is: think broadly about your assignment. Don’t assume that an article for Audubon has to be strictly about nature, or an article for Car & Driver strictly about cars. Push the boundaries of your subject and see where it takes you. Bring some part of your own life to it; it’s not your version of the story until you write it.
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If you master the tools of the trade—the fundamentals of interviewing and of orderly construction—and if you bring to the assignment your general intelligence and your humanity, you can write about any subject. That’s your ticket to an interesting life.
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Technology, however, is only technology, Peterson reminded me. “Many people think good equipment makes it easy,” he said. “They’re deceived into thinking the camera does it all.” He knew what he meant by that, but I needed to know why the camera doesn’t do it all. When I pressed him with my “Why not?” and my “What else?” I got not just one answer but three:
“As a photographer, you bring your eye and a sense of composition to the process, and also warmth—you don’t shoot pictures at high noon, for instance, but at the beginning or the end of the day. You’re also mindful of the quality of light; a thin overcast can do nice things. Knowledge of the animal is also a tremendous help: anticipating what a bird will do. You can anticipate such activities as a feeding frenzy, when birds feed on fish traveling in small groups. Feeding frenzies are important to a photographer because one of the basic things birds do is eat, and they’ll put up with you a lot longer if they’re eating. In fact, they’ll often ignore you.”
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At such moments I ask myself one very helpful question: “What is the piece really about?” (Not just “What is the piece about?”)
Fondness for material you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to gather isn’t a good enough reason to include it if it’s not central to the story you’ve chosen to tell. Self-discipline bordering on masochism is required. The only consolation for the loss of so much material is that it isn’t totally lost; it remains in your writing as an intangible that the reader can sense. Readers should always feel that you know more about your subject than you’ve put in writing.
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