Literary nonfiction: charting its ups and downs
If you've ever wrestled with how to structure a piece of nonfiction -- from a senior thesis to a long magazine article to a book -- you'll appreciate this picture. It's Margaret Knox, who collaborates with her husband, Dan Baum, mapping out Baum's book on New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, which is titled "Nine Lives." The two of them refer to "Dan Baum" as the brand, and the creation of Baum's books is pure collaboration: He does the reporting and most of the drafting; she's the editor.
I keep thinking I'll find a computer program that will make this process easier. Maybe I just need a bigger piece of paper and a blank wall.
Baum is in the process of Tweeting away his bridges to the New Yorker, which let him go in 2007. In 140-word increments, he's telling the tale of his journalistic career, which culminated with his landing a staff writer job at the storied magazine, perhaps the most coveted gig in journalism. As others have learned before him, however, that's not necessarily a lifetime gig -- as he's explaining with enough detail to make it likely we won't be reading his byline there again. (Though if I were an editor there, I'd cut him some slack: You canned him. Let him vent a bit!)*
A bonus for journalism/nonfiction geeks: Baum's Web site includes the story pitches that got him entree into Rolling Stone, Wired, and the New Yorker.
* UPDATE: Okay, it did end up being kind of weirdly passive-aggressive.
(Photo: Via the Web site of Dan Baum and Margaret Knox)
