On Pain

Terri Schiavo died this morning. But what I wanted to write about is Schiavo’s problems with bulimia, which I have not really seen expounded upon by anyone. Did find this AP piece that states, “It is a cruel twist lost on no one close to the case: A woman who is said to have struggled with an eating disorder is now in the middle of a court battle over whether her feeding tube should be removed so that she can starve to death.”

On Pain and Death

A friend turned me on to the blog No Milk Please. Hilarious. I wish I could write as wittily as the author.

So coming upon the following quote makes me feel that I can actually improve as a writer, despite all the edits on the latest draft of an article:

There have now been many studies of elite performers — concert violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth — and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the amount of deliberate practice they’ve accumulated. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself. K. Anders Ericsson, a cognitive psychologist and an expert on performance, notes that the most important role that innate factors play may be in a person’s willingness to engage in sustained training. He has found, for example, that top performers dislike practicing just as much as others do. (That’s why, for example, athletes and musicians usually quit practicing when they retire.) But, more than others, they have the will to keep at it anyway.
–Atul Gawande, “The Learning Curve,” The New Yorker, Jan. 28, 2002

In addition to writing for the New Yorker, Gawande has a book out called Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. I haven’t read it yet, but from what I’ve read in the New Yorker, Gawande is an excellent writer. He really makes the field of medicine accessible to lay readers.

[Later in the day]

Was listening to the Brian Lehrer Show today and heard the tail end of a discussion on “whether doctors work for profit or for the benefit of their patients.” Apparently an article by Gawande in this week’s New Yorker prompted the discussion. So that might be worth checking out.

And then on the Leonard Lopate Show, Garret Keizer spoke about issues surrounding the Terri Schiavo case. He made really good points, which I’ll try to post here later. But Keizer’s article, “Life Everlasting,” published in the Feb. 2005 issue of Harper’s magazine, can be read here. In the article, he makes such points as the following:

Women in Media Pt. 2

I’m writing a short article on Robert Boynton, the director of the graduate magazine journalism program at my school and author of The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft. I’ve read some of the book, and it’s very handy for someone who’s still trying to feel her way around journalism. Instead of discussing journalism’s literary qualities, Boynton asks questions about the nuts-and-bolts of journalism: How do these journalists get their ideas? Do they tape record interviews? Where do they conduct interviews? When do they do their research? What are their writing routines? etc.

The book is reviewed in the Columbia Journalism Review. At the end of her article, reviewer Julia M. Klein asks, “Which brings us to one final, important matter: Why is it that just three of the nineteen writers in this book — [Adrian Nicole] LeBlanc, Susan Orlean, and Jane Kramer — are women? … Is the culprit rank sexism? Male editors hiring their male buddies? Or else the magazine’s preference for subjects such as war and politics that draw more male writers? Do women writers, facing rejection, discourage more easily? (I’ve heard that thesis proposed.) Or, as devoted mothers and daughters and wives, are they simply unavailable to devote the months and years of zealous, almost superhuman effort required by immersion journalism? There is surely no single, and no easy, answer. But it would have been nice if Boynton, in this otherwise probing book, had thought to raise the question.” You can read the entire article here.

I’d forgotten to mention something that some of my female classmates said about LeBlanc, whom I wrote about in an earlier post after she came to speak to my class. Basically, they thought it was pretty incredible that LeBlanc did what she did, spent 10 or so years with this family so she could write about them for her book. My classmates thought that would not have been possible if LeBlanc had been married (I believe LeBlanc said she had a boyfriend though) or children.

I guess with any art or passion, journalism can take over one’s life. With immersion reporting, one can’t work a 9 to 5 shift and then go home at the end of the day. The reporting is constant: the journalist has to experience life as his or her interviewee experiences it. (I couldn’t help but think of the movie Almost Famous while LeBlanc was talking about how she’d spend inordinate amounts of time with her subjects.)

Anyway, I don’t think women have reached the point where it’s socially acceptable for them to pursue their craft while the children are at home with just their father. There’s still this expectation that a woman’s love for her children must trump everything else. I’m sure some women would rather be with their children than do anything else. But I suspect there are other women who, while they love their children, would rather be out doing their own thing and pursuing their own interests.

The Psychology of Space

In an article in The New York Times Style Magazine Spring 2005 issue from last Sunday, Karen Moline wrote, “I have always written in other people’s houses: a flat in London, a cattle station in Australia, a ramshackle guesthouse in Izmir, Turkey. … My rationale is simple: I need the disorientation of someone else’s property, furniture, sheets and gewgaws to escape from mundane reality, to make it easier to inhabit my characters’ imaginary worlds.” Later in the article, she quotes some other authors, including novelist Francine Prose, who said, “‘When I’m surrounded by my things, I can ignore them, but when I’m surrounded by other people’s things, they take on a maddening presence.’”

I’ve been thinking about space a lot and how I seem to write better in some than in others. I’m sure some people would argue that it’s all about discipline, that a good writer can write anywhere. But as for finding inspiration or being able to feel more motivated than usual, I’m a writer along Moline’s lines. I find it almost impossible to concentrate on work at home. Part of it is that I don’t have a good work space, only a small, short desk that can accommodate at most my laptop and a single pen. The TV’s blank eye always stares at me. I’m also sort of a neat freak, so I’ll find any excuse to sweep, mop, and dust before I have to sit down to work. I’ve also realized that having high-speed Internet access at home is a mixed blessing.

"I am Aslan, and I’m a symbol for God!"

“I am Aslan, and I’m a symbol for God!”

I still remember that’s what one of the troupe members said at a performance of Improv Olympics. Over Spring Break, I had the chance to reread some of the Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. I first read the books when I was young and in love with fantasy, before I knew that Aslan the lion was a symbol for God. This time around, I was able to catch some of Lewis’s allusions. (And would I be correct in saying that Aslan is actually a symbol for Christ? I don’t know enough about Christianity to say for certain.) From the way Aslan willingly gave himself up to be killed in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (as in the Crucifixion), to the way he allowed only the good creatures to enter the real Narnia before the old one was destroyed in The Last Battle (as in the Apocalypse), I appreciated what Lewis had accomplished because I had a deeper understanding of his stories.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, spoke in my long-form nonfiction class last night. I haven’t read Random Family yet but have read her piece, “Falling,” about the boy who was dropped out of an upper-story window at a Chicago public housing complex.

LeBlanc spent 10 years writing Random Family, supporting herself by borrowing money and basically going into debt. She originally conceived of the book as being a profile of a drug dealer and his empire, and she got an advance from a publisher for that book idea. But she decided to shift the book’s focus to some other characters, and several publishers rejected that. Now that the book’s been published (by Scribner), it’s received a lot of praise and won rewards.

“Really trust what interests you,” she said.

It was also nice to hear from someone who has written about topics that are not mainstream. For once, someone was not telling us budding journalists that we had to choose timely topics of interest to a specific audience. By following her instincts as to what would make a good story, LeBlanc was able to, as my teacher Ron Rosenbaum put it, set the peg for what the media would cover.

The class also asked her about the danger of over-reporting. LeBlanc made this comment: “When I sense the possibility of all these disparate things that I’ve been carrying around … it [writing] becomes a pleasure.” It was nice to know that an established writer could still feel reluctance about starting to write! (That’s what I’m experiencing right now as I struggle with two papers I have to write for this class.)