Category: Writing Life

writerly thoughts & activities

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Did you read Charles R. Cross’ review of Peter Guralnick’s new book in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times? It sounds like Guralnick was between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

“Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke” must be considered the authoritative rendering of the singer’s short life. Ten years in the making, filled with both minutiae and a sweeping backstory, “Dream Boogie” is a testament to Guralnick’s skill as a researcher, even if at times that very strength diminishes the story’s narrative arc.

Narrative arc is a crucial structural element in good storytelling, and it requires a sharp editorial knife to excise all that is not relevant to THE story, whatever that is defined to be. It seems that the best memoirs and biographies — best meaning most readable and engaging for the average person — are those that focus on a theme or particular revelation/transformation. Those weighty soup-to-nuts tomes, even when well-written, are likely to be lauded only by academicians and aficionados; they’re a hard ad heavy read for John and Joanne Doe.

Not that I’m agreeing with Cross — I haven’t read the book yet.

Cross also wrote:

The biggest problem with “Dream Boogie” is not one of Guralnick’s making: The more we learn about Sam Cooke, the less we like him and, correspondingly, the less we care about his music.”

If that’s true, it is sad, because Guralnick cared enough to spend ten years writing the book and, as Cross points out, “Cooke was a truly groundbreaking artist…” But nobody wants to hear a story about someone they don’t care about — audiences need to identify with, love and cheer for, or love to hate the main character — indifference is fatal.

There’s another fine line to be walked; it’s the line between straight reporting and explaining, the latter of which may include value judgments. In Cross’ opinion, Guralnick may have cared too much. Cross writes:

Much as he did when writing about Elvis, Guralnick relies on a straightforward style of narration that leaves no room for judgment or explanation of Cooke’s life. But whereas Guralnick had enough distance from Elvis to give readers a fly-on-the-wall feel, here he seems at times affected by a biographical Stockholm syndrome — so in love with his subject that he can excuse any character flaw. Guralnick is clearly enthralled with Cooke…

So what’s a writer to do? Should we stick to the facts and let readers draw their own impressions? What if the guy/gal is not so likeable, but is important and interesting if the story can be told — should we then offer more explanation? If we do, will readers and critics say “who made you judge and jury, or protector?” And going back to the beginning dilemma, if we sift through a life to bring you THE story as we see it, will we not be pilloried for insufficient research and leaving out facts?

Delicious dilemmas or hellacious headaches for the narrative biographer.

Betrayals Along the Path to Truth

On September 9, 2003 Newsday published a piece by Aileen Jacobson titled Taking Liberties: With true-life novels, literary journalism and courses in creative nonfiction, the land between fact and fiction is publishing’s booming neighborhood. And she opens with an italicized caveat:

This article is a work of nonfiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s reporting and are used factually. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely intentional.

Once upon a time, I was safe in the assumption that what was printed in a newspaper was factual, unless of course it was on the op-ed page in which case it was opinion or propaganda. Who, what, where, when and why. The same was true for television’s news programs. The lines are blurring such that it is no longer possible to know anything with certainty. The evening news was once the purview of Huntley and Brinkley or Walter Cronkite types — hard-bitten journalists that worked their way up to the anchor desk with years of field reporting and sleuthing under their soles — and we trusted them. (Okay, so I’m dating myself.) Today we get airbrushed talking-heads reading Teleprompters and regaling us with infotainment.

Nonfiction books were also purported to be the truth, and nothing but the truth, that’s what made them different from historical fiction and other novels. Historical fiction used to be my favorite genre – but even as a teen, devouring works by works by Leon Uris, Irving Stone, and Robert K. Massie, I knew that I was reading fiction even if I assumed that the basic historical facts were accurate. And if I did make such an assumption, no matter the depth or bredth of that author’s research, I still would not have dreamed of using Exodus or Lust for Life as factual sources for a research paper. Whether it’s biographical fiction, or just the inclusion of famous people in stories other than their own, a la E.L. Doctorow, it matters not to me, as long as you admit that it’s a figment of the writer’s imagination.

In response to Mr. CultureSpace’s Capote posting, Darren of Long Pauses responded with a comment in which he quoted Doctorow as saying “I’m absolutely convinced everything in my novel is true even if none of it ever happened.”

The arts, when well-crafted, have great powers, among them the ability to make one believe or to suspend disbelief. And those who wield power have a responsibility to use it wisely, fairly, and honestly.

Jacobson’s Newsday article also mentions the ruckus reported on Salon.com over some remarks by Vivian Gornick. The title of the Salon piece (written by my colleague and fellow Goucher alumna Terry Greene Sterling) asks the crucial question:

Confessions of a memoirist: Acclaimed writer Vivian Gornick admits fudging the facts to a roomful of journalists. Did she exercise creative license — or betray her readers?

In the case of memoir, Ms. Gornick makes “a definite distinction between what the writer of personal narrative does, and what the writer of biography, newspaper writing, or literary journalism does.” She writes:

To state the case briefly: memoirs belong to the category of literature, not of journalism. It is a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting or in literary journalism. What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand.

I may applaud her goals, but I don’t think readers misunderstand; they are misled. It is the author’s right to set the terms of the contract with his or her readers, and the author’s obligation to make those terms clear. That’s the crux of it for me – betrayal is where I draw the line. Or at least I try.

Authors should not, and need not, lie to their readers. Nor should they lie to their sources, and that brings up another can or worms related to narrative nonfiction. A certain degree of trust must exist between the subject and the writer, but is it possible for a writer earn that trust without misleading the subject? The simple answer is yes, but in practice it is not so easy. Leah Garchik in her column in Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle writes about an interview with Mike Wallace and journalists’ use of the phrase “between you and me” to elicit conspiratorial confidences even when cameras and tape recorders are rolling. “Isn’t saying “between you and me” somewhat duplicitous?” she asked. Not surprisingly, she also asked Wallace if he’d seen Capote (he had not).

Janet Malcolm opens her slender put powerful work — The Journalist and the Murderer — with the following statements:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson.

Oh no, not me, I say. But in truth it’s a sliding scale: some are more or less deceptive than others, and few, if any, are pure. On the more benign end of the scale, our lies are usually ones of omission – we keep our reactions and judgments to ourselves. It’s a balancing act: if you like your subject, you still have an obligation to your readers to tell the whole story, show the whole person, warts and all; and if you don’t like your subject, you still have an obligation to illuminate all sides of a story. Malcolm wrote:

“What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.”

This balancing act is one of the things that make writing narrative nonfiction so difficult. As usual, the grass is always greener on the other side. Novelists need not abide by the rules….well, that’s not really true, they just have a different set of rules. Malcolm describes the difference between fiction and nonfiction:

…the writer of fiction is entitled to more privileges. He is master of his own house and may do what he likes in it; he may even tear it down if he is so inclined…But the writer of nonfiction is only a renter, who must abide by the conditions of the lease, which stipulates that he leave the house—and its name is Actuality—as he found it. He may bring in his own furniture and arrange it as he likes (the so-called New Journalism is about the arrangement of furniture), and he may play his radio quietly. But he must not disturb the house’s fundamental structure or tamper with any of its architectural features. The writer of nonfiction is under contract to the reader to limit himself to events that actually occurred and to characters who have counterparts in real life, and he may not embellish the truth about these events or these characters.

Whichever path you choose, be true to yourself, respectful of your subjects, and honest with your readers.

Fact or Fiction? Go Write A Novel

Okay, I’m at least twelve hours late. I intended to post a quick entry this morning about Capote, the movie, which I saw and liked very much, but along the path to posting I got waylaid thinking about the fact versus fiction argument that springs eternal, especially when Capote’s name is mentioned. Before I lead you through my own digression, let me say that the acting in the three main roles — Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, Catherine Keener as Nelle Harper Lee, and Clifton Collins Jr. as Perry Smith — was outstanding. Their characterizations were incredibly understated and immensely powerful, no small feat, especially for the role of Truman Capote.

The movie is based on the book Capote by Gerald Clarke, which I have not read. Actually, I had not even planned to read it, but after reading Capote: A Biographer’s Story, a two-page essay in the Sony Pictures press kit (pages 5 and 6) in which Gerald Clarke explains how he came to write the book, with Capote’s cooperation, I think I will read the biography. In a process that lasted more than thirteen years, Clarke personally met and got to know all the main characters, except of course the two killers who were executed so he based his knowledge of them on the lengthy letters they wrote to Truman.

Clarke reports that he worked closely with screenwriter Dan Futterman, allowing him to use the letters to create dialog for the movie. Bennett Miller, the film’s director, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Truman, peppered him with questions about Truman’s habits and gestures, and Hoffman studied audio tapes of his conversations with Capote to recreate Truman’s voice patterns and inflections. Clarke believes that Hoffman “has done more than impersonate Truman. For the length of the movie he has resurrected him.”

That’s a ringing endorsement if I ever heard one, so I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the movie or the book…unless I choose to question Clarke’s ability to ferret real fact from Truman Capote’s self-serving, ego-aggrandizing reflections and recollections, or wonder if Clarke’s relationship with Capote was fraught with the same quality of duplicity that permeated Capote’s relationship with Perry.

It would be an easier existence if things could simply be right or wrong, true or false, fact or fiction, but like water is to earth, 70-75% of life seems to fall within the gray area, neither black nor white, fish nor fowl.

Mr. CultureSpace says

I don’t know how accurate Capote is, and, to a certain extent, it doesn’t matter. A film, I have always believed, must work within its own parameters; its faithfulness to its source material is secondary, if it matters at all….

To which Terry Teachout replies

O.K., I take the point—but what if the “source material” is the historical record? Does it “matter” if an artfully made docudrama contains significant distortions that large numbers of ordinary folk come to regard as the whole truth and nothing but?
Just asking.

I draw a line between the fictive nature of one’s memory and the conscious manipulation of information. I also draw a line at lying to one’s readers. I was outraged when I learned that Capote had created a fictional ending for In Cold Blood, but Edmund Morris’ use of a fictional character in Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, did not bother me because he not only disclosed, but explained the use of this literary license up front, describing it as ” a literary embodiment of the biographer’s own persona.” In the case of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, I was disappointed to read his admission, at the very end, that he had “taken certain storytelling liberties, particularly having to do with the timing of events.” At least he did not keep it secret. His rationale? “Where the narrative strays from strict nonfiction, my intention has been to remain faithful to the characters and to the essential drift of events as they really happened.”

When writers say things like that, or use phrases like “the greater truth,” I have to wonder what a writer can possible do to make the truth greater than it really is. Some writers talk about the narrative needs, good storytelling forms and conventions, to which I say, if you can’t tell a story the way it really happened, go write a novel.

Yes, I know that’s my simplistic side talking, the one who sees only right and wrong. So when in doubt, I consult the masters of my craft, people such as Roy Peter Clark and Lee Gutkind.

Clark is a Senior Scholar at Poynter Institute, a non-degree school for journalists in Florida. In his piece titled The Line Between Fact and Fiction he wrote:

Hersey [author of Hiroshima] draws an important distinction, a crucial one for our purposes. He admits that subjectivity and selectivity are necessary and inevitable in journalism. If you gather 10 facts but wind up using nine, subjectivity sets in. This process of subtraction can lead to distortion. Context can drop out, or history, or nuance, or qualification or alternative perspectives.

While subtraction may distort the reality the journalist is trying to represent, the result is still nonfiction, is still journalism. The addition of invented material, however, changes the nature of the beast. When we add a scene that did not occur or a quote that was never uttered, we cross the line into fiction. And we deceive the reader.

This distinction leads us to two cornerstone principles: Do not add. Do not deceive.

Gutkind, despite being derisively dubbed the “Godfather of Creative Nonfiction” by James Wolcott in a Vanity Fair article a few years back, is a much respected author and teacher – actually the first to teach a creative nonfiction writing course at the university level. In The Creative Nonfiction Police, a December 2001 article in AWP (Associated Writing Programs), Gutkind asks:

Are we more deceived by Truman Capote, who did not take notes and relied on memory to retell the horrible story of the murder of the Clutter family in In Cold Blood, or Michael Chabon who disguised real characters and situations in his novel, Wonder Boys?

Maybe the issues are cloudy and the answers gray, but Gutkind does have a prescription for creative nonfiction writers:

First, strive for the truth.

Second, recognize the important distinction between recollected conversation and fabricated dialogue.

Third, don’t round corners—or compress situations or characters—unnecessarily.

Fourth, one way to protect the characters in your book, article, or essay is to allow them to defend themselves—or at least to read what you have written about them.

His conclusion:

Wherever you draw the line between fiction and nonfiction remember the basic rules of good citizenship: Do not recreate incidents and characters who never existed; do not write to do harm to innocent victims; do not forget your own story, but while considering your struggle and the heights of your achievements, think repeatedly about how your story will impact on and relate to your reader. Over and above the creation of a seamless narrative, you are seeking to touch and affect someone else’s life—which is the goal creative nonfiction writers share with novelists and poets. We all want to connect with another human being—as many people as possible—in such a way that they will remember us and share our legacy with others.

My conclusion:

Amen, and have a great weekend.

And oh, if you haven’t seen Capote yet, go.

Ken Page

At noon today I will be renewing my acquaintance with Ken Page, a wonderful actor who won a Theatre World Award for his role as Nicely-Nicely Johnson in an all-black revival of Guys and Dolls — and that was his Broadway debut.

Ken’s credits include his role in the original cast of Ain’t Misbehavin (garnering a Drama Desk award), and the role of “Old Deuteronomy” in both New York and London productions of Cats.

I’ve read that he auditioned for Ain’t Misbehavin because a friend of his told him that he looked a lot like Fats Waller; today I’ll find out if that’s true. But mostly, we’ll be talking about Luther Henderson, and how Luther, with choreographer Arthur Faria and the five cast members, envisioned that show.

Lunch with Lainie

When I first moved to California in the late 1970s, I worked briefly for a screenwriter who had an office next door to Lainie’s office, so we first “met” back then. Several years later, when I was publicist for Joe Williams, our paths crossed again — though perhaps not in person — when Joe worked in Lainie’s Room and Lainie’s Room East, night spots in the Playboy Clubs in Los Angeles and New York, respectively. During those early publicity years I was also friends with another publicist who was a good friend of Lainie’s and talked about her a lot – still no person-to-person meetings. So here we are, twenty-five-plus years later, having a bite to eat and chatting away like old friends

Lainie Kazan is a multi-award winner in film, television and on stage, but she exhibits none of the kiss-kiss Hollywood bs. She’s warm, funny, and down to earth. It has been written (here) that she “began her career as Barbra Streisand’s understudy in the Broadway production of Funny Girl and soon thereafter became the “chanteuse” of her native New York, appearing in nightclubs and as a guest on virtually every top variety and talk show on television.” But she actually had two shows under her belt before Funny Girl. First she played Theodora in The Happiest Girl in the World at the Martin Beck Theatre (4/3/1961 – 6/24/1961), and almost a year later she appeared at the Broadhurst Theatre as La Contessa in Bravo Giovanni (5/19/1962 – 9/15/1962), which is where she first met Luther Henderson. Luther was the dance arranger collaborating with choreographer Carol Haney. I haven’t researched this yet, but I suspect that when Haney was hired to do Funny Girl (her credit for that show reads “Musical Staging by Carol Haney”) it was she who suggested (or perhaps insisted) on hiring Luther to do the dance arrangements.

For those of you under a certain age, you may remember Lainie better from the 1982 movie My Favorite Year starring Peter O’Toole who played a bad-boy movie star (the story was loosly based on Errol Flynn’s appearance on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows). And if you’re too young to remember that, think Toula’s mom from the romantic comedy movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Or if you’re a tv buff, you may have seen Lainie on lots of programs including Will & Grace, Touched by an Angel, Veronica’s Closet, and The Nanny (she played the recurring role of Aunt Frieda).

I’ve been having a blast interviewing all kinds of people who worked with Luther in one capacity or another. So far everyone has been really nice, and each and every person seems to have adored Luther. Next I’m looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with Ken Page, one of the original actors in the Broadway musical Ain’t Misbehavin’. I’ll tell you more about Ken next week.

Protecting the Digital Rights of Authors

The Authors Guild recently sent out a message to its members that should be of interest and concern to all Internet savvy people, not to mention all writers. The Guild, which has come out against Google’s Library Program, seems to have hope for the plans of a new coalition that includes Yahoo. The message said:

A coalition including Yahoo, Adobe Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and the libraries of the University of California and the University of Toronto announced today that they’re launching a book-scanning project that would make digitized texts searchable through Yahoo. Yahoo’s coalition took care to state that only works for which it has the rightsholders’ permission or are in the public domain would be included. Although we haven’t reviewed the details of the program yet, it sounds as though they’re going about this in a sensible way.

Yahoo’s new venture is further demonstration that the right to store books in digital form is commercially valuable, a right that should be licensed rather than appropriated.

The email also included a copy of a letter to the editor from Authors Guild President Nick Taylor, published by The New York Times, in response to an op-ed piece by Tim O’Reilly, a member of a Google advisory board and publisher of computer manuals who supports Google’s Library venture.

To the Editor:

Tim O’Reilly (“Search and Rescue,” Op-Ed, Sept. 28), who is on the publisher advisory board for Google Print, informs us of the many benefits of the Google Library program.

The program, which would digitize and store millions of books, has its merits, all of which can be achieved through proper licensing. Google knows its business; it expects to profit from this project. Certainly some of those profits should go to the authors who created the books.

By digitizing mountains of copyrighted books without permission, Google is exercising a renegade notion of eminent domain: Google decides what’s good for us and seizes private property to get it done.

Legitimate eminent domain is exercised by elected officials, however. And the property owners get paid.

There’s a better way: let’s build a real digital library, not just “snippets.” Writers are willing, but not at the cost of our rights.

Nick Taylor
President, Authors Guild
New York, Sept. 29, 2005

For further information, visit The Authors Guild.

And yesterday, in a e-newsletter I receive from Publishers Weekly, I read:

The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group has pulled the company’s titles from the Google Print program to protest the scanning of copyrighted materials in the Google Library program. RLPG president Jed Lyons called Google Library’s scanning policy a “flagarant violation” of copyright laws, and has told Google it wants the books that have been scanned as part of Google Print removed from its database and the books returned.

Scarecrow Press, the publisher of my Henderson biography in progress, is under the umbrella of Rowman & Littlefield.

New Words?

The reader who chided me (tongue-in-cheek) for using the word “derivated,” wrote in again to report:

“about 55,700” results you find when typing “derivated” into google! 🙂 Great Stuff! [see for yourself]

I haven’t checked, but I don’t think “derivated” made the new edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. However, the M-W lexiographers have green-lighted a bunch of new entries — “Chick Flick,” “Civil Union,” “Bikini Wax” and “Brain Freeze” are now official dictionary entries. (Hmmm, is green light a verb?) Read about the new words here, or jump straight to A Sampling of New Words and Senses on the Merriam-Webster web site.

Finally, A Signed Contract

On August 15th, in a post I wrote about Luther Henderson titled Why Him?, I wrote, “I am pleased to say that I have been offered a contract, am in negotiations right now, and hope to announce the signing very soon.” Actually, I knew back in June that the contract was coming, and it arrived in the mail in early July. Who knew negotiations would take so long?

Well I am now pleased to be able to announce that I have signed with Scarecrow Press to publish Seeking Harmony: The Life and Music of Luther Henderson. While this project is near and dear to my heart, the publishing industry powers that be did not foresee a commercial potential significant-enough to interest an agent, so I was left to my own devices. I had been shopping the proposal to various houses for ten months before Scarecrow exhibited interest. From then on it was back a forth negotiations between myself and the house editor regarding contract issues — a time-consuming process.

Of course, the original contract offered was to their advantage. Over the years I have gained a generally familiarity with book and record contracts, but not enough to know what is current industry standard for this genre. As for the process of negotiation, although I do seem to be good at it, I detest the basic construct. It’s like haggling over prices — why some people can fly first-class for the price of coach and others have to pay through the nose makes no sense to me from the consumer standpoint. Similarly, for two authors with roughly the same track record or similar projections for their books in similar genres to end up with far different royalty rates, for example, seems basically unfair. Still, that seems to be the way the game is played, so I needed to bone up on the rules and expectations.

Enter my knight on a white horse: The Authors Guild. I had written several technology trade books in that qualified me for Guild membership, but it was not until my post-cancer days when I began to think of myself as being a Writer with a capital W that I joined. The best benefit they offer (aside from medical insurance, which is no small thing) is their legal support. Any member can send them a publishing contract and receive back a lengthy written analysis indicating which clauses are in line with currently acceptable practices, and suggestions of what could be better. The Guild does not represent the author, but because they see contracts from all the houses, they are in a position to tell you with some authority what is happening in that world; that kind of knowledge is power in a negotiation. Of course, this is exactly what I don’t like — the idea that the company (be it publisher, record company….) tries to benefit from the artist’s or writer’s ignorance. But, as I said, that’s the way it is. So, thanks to The Guild, I was well-prepared.

The consultations are part of what made it so time consuming, plus we did it all in writing — nothing by phone. The publisher sent me a contract. I sent it to The Guild, they responded to me, and I in turn wrote a long letter to the publisher (my house editor) addressing each and every contract clause. I imagine that the editor had to discuss my requests (I never demanded) with “the publisher” and/or the legal department, then prepare a counter offer and send it to me. Then we started all over again, with me going back to The Guild, countering their counter and so on.

One of the clauses I felt strongly about changing was the one prohibiting me from directly selling any copies of the book. From my experience with my last book, Men, Women, and Girl Singers, I know that I can personally sell lots of copies at private parties, jazz concerts, and speaking engagements for schools and organizations. The people at these events are people who buy on impulse, and because I am there. I suggested that unlike the Monterey Jazz Festival where we had our wonderful experience selling the book through the Tower Records booth, my making these types of event-based sales was clearly not in competition with their retail channels. I wrote, “Why should you and I both lose out on such sales? It seems like a win-win situation to me. ” And they agreed.

To me, this is the epitome of a good working relationship, and while I am no expert, I suspect that pursuit of win-win situations may be the key to productive negotiations. I have to say, and did say to my editor, that while the process may have taken longer than I had anticipated, the editor’s pleasant and professional demeanor made it relatively painless. Did I get everything I wanted? Of course not, but I’m not an already-famous writer, and my subject is not Elvis. Still, I will make out alright in the long run if you all buy the book when it comes out and then recommend it to your friends. I’ll give you an advance peek now and then to whet your appetite, so all I ask is that you keep visiting me here at DevraDoWrite.com.

What! The weekend is over?

Good morning. I’m having trouble getting my engines started this morning, or as Steven Wright once quipped, “I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.” So I was trolling for inspiration and started with proverbs:

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
~ Japanese Proverb

Talk doesn’t cook rice
~ Chinese Proverb

The first step binds one to the second.
~ French Proverb

It is not enough to know how to ride. You must also know how to fall.
~ Mexican Proverb

Frankly the proverbs didn’t do the trick. So I turned to these guys who had some pretty straightforward advice:

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.
~ Leonard Bernstein

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
~ Jack London

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn’t waste time waiting for inspiration.
~ Ernest Newman

Well: time is short; waste not, want not; and all that jazz. I’ve got to get some work done and then I’ll be back with more postings.

Interview Process: Technicalities

Regular readers know that I’ve conducting a lot of interviews lately with people that knew Luther Henderson — nine interviews, totaling sixteen hours, in the past two weeks alone. I’ve met with Sheldon Epps, director of the Pasadena Playhouse and creator/director of Play On!; the wonderful golden gal, Bea Arthur, who Luther coached in her ingénue days; actress Armelia McQueen, who was in the original cast of Ain’t Misbehavin’; Luther’s daughter, Melanie; and composer/arranger Billy Goldenberg,who was a Broadway colleague of Luther’s is also a good friend of Bea Arthur and accompanist for her one-woman show. By phone I’ve talked with Liza Redfield, the first female conductor on Broadway; David Alan Bunn (mentioned here a few days ago); Polly Bergen, who, from the mid 1950s until Luther’s death in 2003, would not work as a singer without Luther as her musical conductor; and Susan Birkenhead, the lyricist/collaborator who, with George Wolfe and Luther, created Jelly’s Last Jam.

I know a few writers who have the ability to either take extremely comprehensive notes and/or retain everything they hear, including the best snatches of dialogue. I take notes, but I don’t feel so skilled, and I don’t need the pressure, so I record all of my interviews. For years I used to use a cassette recorder and rejoiced when they came out with a model that had auto-reverse, thus saving me from having to stop and turn over the tape. My euphoria evaporated on the day of a particularly long interview when I lost track of the time and auto-reverse kicked in for a second go round, recording over the first side of the interview. I didn’t even notice until I got home. A year or so ago, I asked Maria Schneider what she was using to record her audio notes and interviews for her ArtistShare website and she showed me her Sony mini disc recorder. I bought one, a Sony MZ-NH1. It’s small (3-inches square and half inch thick), lightweight (4.5 oz with a disc inside), each disc holds a few hours of audio (depending on speed) and the rechargeable batteries are long-lasting as well. Even better, the recording is digital and the sound quality is terrific. The microphone, which is only an inch long and the thickness of a pencil, picks up everything. For the telephone interviews, I use a Radio Shack gizmo (this one or that one) that connects the telephone to the mini disc microphone jack.

It’s the post-interview process that becomes a bit cumbersome. I want to save the interviews on compact discs so that they will last for a very long time (longer than audio tape) and take up very little physical space. Unfortunately, the mini disc recorder is not meant for uploading files to one’s computer, so in order to store the audio on my computer (and subsequently burn the files on CDs) I have to run a cable from the mini disc headphone jack to the microphone jack of my computer, launch my recording software, hit play on the mini disc and “capture” the sounds. Once the whole audio file is on my computer, I can save it in smaller pieces, making each a track to be stored on an audio CD. (I could save the files on a data CD, but then I would not be able to listen to them on a CD player.) Ironically, once I have burned the CD (I use the discs that hold 80 minutes of audio), I turn around a dub a 90-minute cassette tape that I send off to my transcriber – she likes her foot-pedal-driven cassette transcribing machine. (Radio Shack foot pedals don’t work with portable CD players or the mini disc player….Yes, I did try it.)

It might seem like it would be a waste of time, a triplication of effort, but I find it useful. I don’t listen avidly to an interview while it’s being copied to tape — I’m usually multi-tasking, reading articles, making appointments, following up on this or that — but I do hear it on some level, and snatches of it often grab my attention prompting me to jot down occasional thoughts as they occur to me. And, I might add, these are the kind of thoughts that seldom if ever come to me when summoned — flashes of insight, connections between seemingly disparate events or people, ideas for structure, shape, and transitions….answers to questions I otherwise might never have thought to ask.