A Place Called WriterL: Where the Conversation Was Always About Literary Journalism

A Place Called WriterL: Where the Conversation Was Always About Literary Journalism

First edition. July 5, 2022.

Copyright © 2022 Jon Franklin, Lynn Franklin and Stuart Warner

Edited by Stuart Warner, Jon Franklin and Lynn Franklin

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

About the Editors

Stuart Warner , who retired after 50 years of daily journalism, supervised the team of journalists that won the 1994 Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service for a series about race in Akron, Ohio.  He also edited Connie Schultz’s Pulitzer-winning columns and was the lead writer on a team that won the 1987 Pulitzer for its coverage of the attempted takeover of Goodyear Tire and Rubber.  He is the author of JOCK: A Coach’s Story and co-editor of Akron’s Daily Miracle. He was recently inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame.

Jon Franklin  is a journalist, author and educator who won the first Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1979, for Mrs. Kelly’s Monster about brain surgery,[5] and won the first Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1985, for a series about molecular psychiatry, The Mind Fixers. The Canadian television film Shocktrauma is based on the book Franklin co-wrote with Alan Doelp. His other books include Writing for Story and The Wolf in the Parlor. He is the co-founder of WriterL with his wife, Lynn.

Lynn Franklin is a writer, gemologist and dog trainer who has combined her multiple loves into several books, including Epic Book Awards finalist The Carolina Emerald, part of her Kimberly West Gemstone Mysteries series.  She was the co-founder of WriterL with her husband, Jon, as was responsible for organizing and editing the original posts for 15 years.

Introduction

What the ‘L’ Was WriterL?

Back before the turn of the century, before Facebook, Twitter and Zoom, nonfiction writers from around the country could gather around their computers on email message boards to discuss their craft, often referred to as Literary Journalism.

One of these message boards was called WriterL, run by two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist and author Jon Franklin and his wife, the mystery novelist Lynn Franklin.  An article in The New York Times likened the site to the Paris of the 1920s. Discourse was passionate and stimulating – if mostly sober and distant.  Alas,  the process was slow  – it often took a few days  to get your thoughts posted and see the response from fellow members.

In addition to the Franklins, the group included a number of outstanding nonfiction writers, editors and educators. Among them: Pulitzer-winning editor and writing coach Jack Hart; Pulitzer-winners Connie Schultz and Sheri Fink;  award-winning authors  Michael Capuzzo, Caitlin Kelly, Don Obe, Mark Kramer and Mark Pendergrast; author, educator and former Washington Post magazine senior writer Walt Harrington and Poynter Institute writing guru and author Roy Peter Clark. 

Their discussions could go on for days, weeks, even months. Some debates, like the value of first-person writing, lasted years.

Jon and Lynn began the site when he was a professor at the University of Oregon in 1994.  They lived on about 50 acres in a rural county with little contact with writer friends.

And therein lies a tale of how WriterL got its name.

The Franklins wanted to find a way to share their thoughts about nonfiction writing and hear from others.  The internet was still fairly new, so Jon went to one of the university’s information technology folks and asked if it were possible to set up some kind of electronic message board where writers could converse through emails.

Within hours, the IT guy came back with a listserv program that could be shared with a group. Back then it was common to name such programs with an L for the type of listserv it was.  Like DogL for canine enthusiasts or KitchenL for cooks.

So naturally the technician called the Franklins’ listserv WriterL.

I hated the name, Jon recalls.

But Jon’s reputation – two Pulitzer Prizes and his seminal book on narrative nonfiction, Writing for Story – quickly drew writers to the new site.

After we had gotten it up and running, we asked people to suggest ideas for a new name, Lynn says.  And that created an uproar.  People loved the name.

So WriterL it was forevermore.  Or at least the next 15 years.

The Franklins originally intended the site for newspaper journalists, but it found a much wider audience among all descriptions of writers – nonfiction and fiction authors, freelance magazine writers, children’s books authors, educators, etc.  To weed out participants who weren’t serious, the Franklins charged a $20 annual fee, and most gladly paid. 

The electronic conversations, which included several hundred writers over the years, continued through the Franklins’ move to the East Coast but finally came to an end around 2013 as the news industry began to disintegrate.

That might have been the last of WriterL but during a moment of boredom during the pandemic, I scrolled down to the end of my AOL.com email basket just to see what was there.

I joined the group in 2002.  For some reason I had saved a couple dozen WriterL posts from 2005.  Curious, I read through them.  The emails contained a fascinating discussion on the vision of nonfiction writers: Could you teach vision? Did nonfiction writers actually have the same kind of vision as artists in other mediums? If so, did art make good journalism?

The discussion lasted from early June through the end of August of that year.  I wondered what the contributors’ comments would sound like if I arranged them as if the writers were sitting around a table with Jon or Lynn debating the issue in real time; making sure not to take any of the posts out of context.

That thread led to a 10,000-word piece on what is now the first chapter of this book: Oh, Say, Can You See the Writer’s Vision?

I showed it to the Franklins and they both loved it.  Jon suggested publishing it as a short story. 

In the meantime, though, I discovered that I had saved more than 100 additional WriterL posts in another email account, which I no longer used.  It was easy to see at least two or three more topic threads that would make interesting chapters.

I asked Jon and Lynn if they had saved any more WriterL posts.  Lynn did a deep dive into her computer drives and found posts from seven more years.  We didn’t have everything but we had at least a million words from some of the country’s best writers.  The posts may have been 15 to 20 years old but the wisdom had only been enhanced by time.  Why not a book about the WriterL discussions?

It seemed like a daunting task ... a MILLION words?  But as I began to sift through the digital files I realized that Lynn had edited them so well and organized them so efficiently with appropriate topic labels that I easily could pull together the threads with simple document searches.

In fact, it took me longer to locate the 60-plus contributors whose posts we used than it did to pull together 16 chapter threads – unlike me, most of them didn’t keep their AOL email accounts that were so popular back then. 

We wanted to make sure the writers saw their posts and that we were using them in context.

Everyone we contacted seemed enthusiastic about the project.

At that point, all we needed was a big finish.  I remembered a section of Jon’s book A Wolf in the Parlor. I had used it several times in writing presentations as an example of why emotion-centered nonfiction writing could have a powerful impact on readers.

Jon agreed to share it and we had our book. 

The result, we think, is a series of robust conversations about the art of nonfiction writing, conversations that may have taken place 15 to 20 years ago, but are still relevant and enlightening to writers today.

We hope you enjoy as well as learn from them. As Jon would say, cheers.

––Stuart Warner

Editors’ note: We tried to reach every contributor to the conversations, but couldn’t find a few from 15 to 20 years ago.  Where there are more than one writer with the same name and we couldn’t firm the contributor, we withheld the WriterL contributor’s full name.  If we can confirm these names we will add them in updated editions. Also, if you spot an typos or errors in this edition, please forward to [email protected].  Thanks for reading.

Also, a special thanks to volunteer proofreaders Kathleen Schuckel, John Higgins, Anne Saker, Deb Van Tassel Warner, Erin Scullion, and Joel Grossman.

Section I

The Art of Narrative Nonfiction

Chapter 1

Oh, Say, Can You See the Writer’s Vision?

One of the liveliest and longest discussions on WriterL was a dialogue on the concept of a writer’s vision.  It began in June of 2005 and continued well into that August.

Vision was a nebulous term then for journalists and other nonfiction writers.  Jon Franklin sees  incorporating vision into your writing as the difference between the work done by the beat cop and Columbo. Plain reporting is what a uniformed street officer does, Jon says. "Seeking vision is like being the detective.

"Most reporters think briefly about their stories and then run with it. Hell, some don’t think at all beyond 32-word leads full of active verbs.  That’s an entry level skill, guys.  It gives you a cut on the story, but only that.

"If we’re going for vision, which is the cigar, you think better, longer and deeper about it.  You think history, and ask how and how these events, these people, came about.  You tap into psychology, especially black box stuff.  ‘Black box psychology’ requires that you NOT try to model anyone’s mind, and to assume that everything he or she did was to bring about the outcome.  Then, when you’ve got that, you back up and put it in the context of your broader knowledge.  You will be shocked at how often the two match.

So vision is a mixture of open mind with all this other stuff. When I was writing about a patient, for example, I always tried to get the history and future prospects for their disease firmly in my mind.  History, psychology and the facts often give you the sentence, or even the word, that crystallizes the story in your mind.  Suddenly you can tell the story eight different ways if you want to.  You see all the perspectives, understand all of the emotion, and you may have to rewrite your story only a half-dozen times.  And then something tells you which of these many stories you should write ... some might call it wisdom, but to a writer – anywhere in the arts, the proper word is ‘vision.’

Not everyone agreed and the ensuing debate about vision in nonfiction writing was soon flowing.

Can You Teach Vision?

A short post by Jon on June 8, 2005, about teaching vision to his students at the University of Maryland ignited the debate on WriterL.

Health and fitness author Sarah Wernick, who died in 2007,  jumped in and the conversation soon turned to whether you could teach vision. Journalist/author Walt Harrington, writing coaches Jack Hart, Stuart Warner and Roy Peter Clark, Pulitzer-winning journalist Shari Fink, writer-photographer Erik Sherman and others contributed their thoughts as  the back-and-forth  took detours to whether literary journalism is art, and do art and vision make for good journalism.

Jon Franklin:  I have a short unit (at the University of Maryland) where I talk about the nature of artistic vision, and their eyes tend to glaze over. It sounds all too much like academic theory.

Sarah Wernick:   Or perhaps – and this is my objection to the discussion of vision – it sounds too much like religion, with the writer of narrative as Joan of Arc.

To me, writing (at least writing intended for publication) is more like being a tour guide than a visionary.  The writer's task is to take the reader on a journey.  This journey has some purpose – whether it's to explore the meaning of being human rather than animal, as in Jon's example, or to explain how to get fit in just 15 minutes a day, to plug one of my collaborative books.

Given the purpose, the writer could approach the task in many different ways.  There's the specific route selected – which might start with looking into the eyes of a lemur, or by telling a memorable anecdote (like Jane Goodall's account of a primate squeezing her hand to reassure her).  It might go straight through the territory or loop around and surprise the reader. 

The writer selects the scenery to point out, the parts of the route to linger over and the parts to sprint through; the writer adopts a voice that's intimate or more formal, uses words that are plain or fancy.  And so on.  Lots of decisions, lots of ways to get the job done well.  The basic point is to keep the reader moving along on the path until the end, rather than saying, Well, thank you, but I think I'll go home now and take a nap.

Good writers, like good tour guides, develop many techniques to keep the reader engaged.  As a prescriptive writer, I use bulleted lists – which are not part of the toolkits of narrative writers.  Literary writers of nonfiction use surprising metaphors, which are not common in prescriptive nonfiction.

Jon Franklin:   My take on this is that journalism, whenever it comes close to being an art, does so not because of the reporter's fancy use of language but because of her use of that third eye.  In this sense vision, like sight, can be trained.  For example, if you  know leaves and trees, you can spot a maple from a block away just by its gestalt.  If you don't, all trees look like trees.

The difference is that, if you have devoted the time and discipline to learn trees, you have learned to recognized patterns of leaves, color, growth and whatnot.  There is nothing magic about it.

This is especially important to those of us who teach.  We learned this stuff the hard way, and if we don't talk explicitly  about it each of our students will have to learn, at considerable personal cost, that the artistic principles we so love to look down on are, actually, critical to our success.  Why should writers, unlike say scientists, doctors, and accountants, have to re-invent their profession every generation?

Sarah Wernick:  [Jon] seems to be asking how you can teach students the writer's equivalent of learning to recognize a maple.  But, oy vey, he's making it so complicated by dragging in vision and artistry and his unexplainable experience with a lemur.

To a prescriptive writer, the task is simple.  As Jon says concerning the maples, you can identify patterns of leaves, color, growth and whatnot.  Distilling the corresponding patterns for effective narrative writing is challenging, but it's not nearly so difficult if you eliminate the mysticism.  You can't deconstruct it completely, but you can certainly come up with key elements – enough for a significant head start.  And then you present the students with a bulleted list and lots of specific examples.

Walt Harrington: Jon's brave foray into the big question of vision – I would call it imagination – has always been the elephant in the room when it comes to literary journalism, or whatever you want to call it. We go on and on about teaching craft and technique, but the dirty little secret is that given equal amounts of intense effort some people will be better at it than others.

That's where this big question of vision comes into play.

Sarah Wernick:   All this is true  – but I don't see it as a problem for teaching or as a dirty little secret.  Doesn't everyone realize that talent/vision/whatever you want to call it is not distributed equally?  Haven't we all noticed that we're not as gorgeous as (fill in name of appropriate movie star) or as brilliant as (fill in name of rocket scientist)?

Jon Franklin:   I don't see myself quarreling with the statistical realities that someone will always come out on top.  But my point, and I stand by it, is that many of the mysterious abilities often attributed to talent are in fact learnable.  I believe that vision is one of these, if for no other reason than that I've taught it and I've seen students blossom as what seems to be the result.

Talent aside (since I certainly don't have any), success would seem to go to the writer who invests her time and energies wisely.  This includes a lot of things, from studying history to learning to ‘see’ instead of just looking.  It's a mental discipline and yeah, it comes harder to some than to others, but if you want it badly enough I think you can get it.

If you know something of how your own mind works, for example, you can more easily set aside your prejudices (assuming you want to).  If you follow certain principles (like always asking yourself for alternative explanations for what you observe) you will be a better reporter.  From the outside, this looks like vision.  That's fine, as we advertise ourselves. But it makes the newcomer who hasn't got a clue feel pretty helpless. 

He's not helpless.  There is a discipline.  This stuff is learnable.

Walt Harrington: I agree with Jon that people probably can be taught to think more expansively and creatively. Yet, again, if you teach creativity to 1,000 motivated, hardworking souls, a couple of them are still going to be better at it than the others. I don't know what accounts for that, although reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Creativity or Donald Hall's Life Work does give us some good hints.

Clearly, all of us are made better and raise our level of play when we seriously master craft. But most of us will be forever crafts-people – unless we can find a way to get in touch with our own visions, our imaginations. I've tried to write a bit about the relationship between storytelling craft and the author's vision in an essay in River Teeth (a narrative nonfiction journal) titled The Writer's Choice.

The power inherent in novelistic storytelling is not only the power of plot and character and scene. Certainly it's true that drama, intrigue, and tension hold readers. That's good in itself. But the elements of story are not only tricks but tools of inquiry, devices that direct our vision to the many nuances of real life. There's a reason we still read Robert Penn Warren's book, All the King's Men." It isn't only because Warren can turn a nice phrase and because the book's plot is compelling and its characters fascinating. It's a brilliant novel because it captures the depth and breadth of human experience – passion, greed, decency, selfishness. It portrays Depression-era Louisiana politics in ways that ring true. And it does so by evoking the richness of lives and culture through not only intellect but through emotion and sensory experience – through the full array of human experience.

The novelist's eye for detail and attention to moral complexity is not just a bag of techniques. It is a way of seeing, a kind of theory of human behavior. When we inquire with what we think of as the needs of storytelling embedded in our search, we are actually attuning ourselves beforehand to that human richness so often missing in our journalism. When used properly, the novelist's eye opens our eyes and heads and hearts to the breadth of what we can and should be looking for in our reporting. It doesn't take us away from the truth, as some traditional journalists fear. It helps us better see and hear and touch and feel the truth before us.

Jack Hart:   Some writers are simply better at finding meaning. Their habits of mind find connections that other writers miss. They discover patterns in what others see as chaotic thickets of information. And they have a knack for explaining their findings in ways that relate to the lives of their readers.

No doubt some of that ability flows from God-given talent. A good education counts for something, too. But the ability to find meaning is also a skill. Any writer can get better at it.

One route to improvement is to copy somebody who's already mastered the skill. And the most analytical writers I know, the ones who make stories significant by finding connections that make them more meaningful, follow specific strategies.

One of the most successful exploits the ladder of abstraction, a concept popularized by S.I. Hayakawa a half-century ago. The semanticist's book, Language in Thought and Action, still makes good reading for reporters and editors.

The idea is that everything falls into a hierarchy that ranges from the most concrete – individual objects in the visible world – to the most abstract – the sweeping ideas that have broad application to the whole universe of experience.

The first rung of a typical abstraction ladder might represent Hugo, my neighbor's cocker spaniel. The next rung might represent spaniels. The next: dogs. Then mammals, animals and so on.

As a reader, I may have no particular interest in Hugo. But if a news feature begins with Hugo, and ascends the ladder of abstraction to a generalization about all dogs, then maybe I can see how it connects with Speedy, my ill-behaved Dalmatian. If it can help me keep Speedy off the couch, I'm interested.

Roy Peter Clark: Jon, I think you are on to something with the vision thing. My inclination is to define it more practically: the writer's vision of the story.  I might define vision as the ability to see the potential for story in the experience of the real world. 

When does a poet realize that he's got a sonnet here, as my friend Peter Meinke once described for me.  So I guess this must be related to genre.  When we learn genre through reading, it fills our heads with a shape that can be recalled for re-use.  I  suppose the story container can also be distorting, as we sometimes try to stuff the matter of life into a sonnet or serial narrative.  I'll be eager to see what you come up with as you focus your binoculars.

Lynda C. Ward: Where I find myself disagreeing with Jon (as this topic develops) is in his belief that vision most certainly can be learned (or taught). I do think if someone is open and willing to learning vision, then it can be learned. But the very fact that someone is open and willing to learning (vision or anything else) makes them a person with vision potential, doesn't it? I'm a trained theologian who has worked as a minister, teacher, and spiritual guide for many years (so perhaps my vision is WAY too clouded), but from my experience, I'm not sure that things like an unpopular degree of humility can always be taught. And really, can someone be taught to be honestly and rigorously self- reflective – or, for that matter, to simply be honest?  This is where I start to get a bit skeptical.

Erik Sherman:  But I think you could say that about anything. To learn, one must be willing to learn. And if I am willing to learn – really willing – then I will, including those things that I might  not have expected. Humility comes in part from seeing our position in the world and our own limitations. As you start to see, then you begin to see more, and humility comes, not in the feigned sense that appears so often when people are acting for show, but in