Reading response: How to make a profile?
What Mark Kramer says in Telling True Stories about setting the scene in pieces was really relevant and helpful for me: “Scenes can convey and authenticate irrational, emotional, and nuanced information more efficiently than can explanation.” Conveying is the key. Recreating scenes, feelings, emotions, giving meaningful details are all elements that guide the reader and pull him in the piece with the character. Being able to show instead of telling seems to be a determining element of a good piece. That’s why details are so important. Paying attention to details also guides the journalist who is doing the piece, and helps him to know better the character he is talking about. Sometimes they reveal the truth of the character and have meaning as Harrington shows it: “Everything in the house related to deeds they had done for others”. “Such details make the subject’s interior world clearer to us.”
In this regards, the piece about Cohen is a great example. The journalist, Strauss, makes a great job recreating Cohen s’ world, showing how he is physically and in his mind. He also makes him talk through dialogs. In the end, the effect is that we get a chance to meet the character and not only read about him.
Clark and Scanlan emphasize the importance of details too: “Good writers use telling details to help us see, hear and understand”. Gorney’s work on Seuss’ life is an example of this extensive use of details. For example, Gorney knows that “on occasion San Diego children will pack up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and set out for the summit” of the hill where Dr Seuss lives. She makes a great description of Seuss and the environment in which he lives.
Details are an important tool for good pieces.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Susan Orlean: The American Man at age ten
The writer makes an impressive job recreating the world of this little boy. She is like a fly observing him. We discover his family, his neighborhood, his school, his friends, his games and we rediscover our own childhood through the piece. She does not only observe, she has empathy toward this boy and has this maternal tone that makes the reader sympathize with her. I had a good time reading this story because lots of memories were coming back to me (the fact of having to take care of a fish or a bird in the classroom for example). It was also interesting on a cultural aspect; I could see the similarities and differences with French children.
The writer makes an impressive job recreating the world of this little boy. She is like a fly observing him. We discover his family, his neighborhood, his school, his friends, his games and we rediscover our own childhood through the piece. She does not only observe, she has empathy toward this boy and has this maternal tone that makes the reader sympathize with her. I had a good time reading this story because lots of memories were coming back to me (the fact of having to take care of a fish or a bird in the classroom for example). It was also interesting on a cultural aspect; I could see the similarities and differences with French children.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
In Telling true stories
Jacqui Banaszynski underlines this idea that reporters have to write about a place they don’t know, about people they don’t know and for people who will probably never go in that place. That’s what is so interesting in this job; your life is other people’ lives. Actually, being a narrative writer makes you be a part of those ordinary people’s everyday lives. And your life becomes theirs…at least for a while. They matter for you, you build relationships with them and Gay Talese underlines the risks of sharing their privacies: “..trying to avoid work, so I could get my mind off the miserable life that I was living.”
Jacqui Banaszynski underlines this idea that reporters have to write about a place they don’t know, about people they don’t know and for people who will probably never go in that place. That’s what is so interesting in this job; your life is other people’ lives. Actually, being a narrative writer makes you be a part of those ordinary people’s everyday lives. And your life becomes theirs…at least for a while. They matter for you, you build relationships with them and Gay Talese underlines the risks of sharing their privacies: “..trying to avoid work, so I could get my mind off the miserable life that I was living.”
In Telling true stories
Jacqui Banaszynski underlines this idea that reporters have to write about a place they don’t know, about people they don’t know and for people who will probably never go in that place. That’s what is so interesting in this job; your life is other people’ lives. Actually, being a narrative writer makes you be a part of those ordinary people’s everyday lives. And your life becomes theirs…at least for a while. They matter for you, you build relationships with them and Gay Talese underlines the risks of sharing their privacies: “..trying to avoid work, so I could get my mind off the miserable life that I was living.”
Jacqui Banaszynski underlines this idea that reporters have to write about a place they don’t know, about people they don’t know and for people who will probably never go in that place. That’s what is so interesting in this job; your life is other people’ lives. Actually, being a narrative writer makes you be a part of those ordinary people’s everyday lives. And your life becomes theirs…at least for a while. They matter for you, you build relationships with them and Gay Talese underlines the risks of sharing their privacies: “..trying to avoid work, so I could get my mind off the miserable life that I was living.”
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Here is the link to a blog on Darfur: http://platform.blogs.com/passionofthepresent/2007/03/the_wars_of_sud.html
Blogs are a good way to sensitize people about certain issues..this is a kind of "blogging human rights activism".
Blogs are a good way to sensitize people about certain issues..this is a kind of "blogging human rights activism".
My writing process
I had this topic in mind from the beginning. I tried to find other ones, but they did not mean as much to me as this one did. It was not really easy to open myself and the idea that this piece would be read by others quiet disturbed me. Though, this part of my life means a lot for me. When I wrote my piece, I really felt I had enough hindsight to bring analysis to facts. This experience that I talk about in my piece has not changed me but has really made who I am. That was I think the most engaging piece I could have written. I had one of my friends reading it and I was amazed by the effect on her. It literally opened her and she started talking about herself and her own experience. She was kind of uninhibited after the reading. That was an interesting observation to make.
I had this topic in mind from the beginning. I tried to find other ones, but they did not mean as much to me as this one did. It was not really easy to open myself and the idea that this piece would be read by others quiet disturbed me. Though, this part of my life means a lot for me. When I wrote my piece, I really felt I had enough hindsight to bring analysis to facts. This experience that I talk about in my piece has not changed me but has really made who I am. That was I think the most engaging piece I could have written. I had one of my friends reading it and I was amazed by the effect on her. It literally opened her and she started talking about herself and her own experience. She was kind of uninhibited after the reading. That was an interesting observation to make.
Monday, April 9, 2007
Violence from nowhere
I’m half Turkish and half French. This Turkish part is what inspires in me an all range of feelings. Turkey means fear, passion, curiosity, reluctance, fascination and frustration to me. That’s a beautiful country, an in-between country, between Europe and Asia, between modernism and tradition. This country makes the transition between the Christian world and the Muslim one, an aspect that is now the focus of passionate debates about Turkey’s future integration in the European Union. This is all I am about, fear and passion. My father left Turkey when he was twenty years old as lots of his fellow citizens did. France needed a cheap labor force and those people coming from East were the answer to this shortage. My father was a solution to an economic problem; he was an imported worker. Both sides were winners, my father had the plan to send money back home and French companies made benefits thanks to him. That was a nice deal, a beautiful consensus. But the consequences were not even thought about. The reality was that Turkish Muslim migrants from countryside villages were moving in a Western industrialized country with Christian traditions. This consensus did not work for long. Apart from the economic aspect, what about the people and their integration? What was meant to be a temporary wave of migration became permanent newly settled inhabitants of France. That’s how my father settled down in France. When he first arrived in the seventies, he was living what we could call the “French dream”. He had a job, money to send to his family in Turkey and he married a French woman who turned out to become my mother.
As I told previously, the consensus did not last long. I left home with my mother when I was eleven years old because this union between two countries, between my mother and my father did not work anymore. Just the same way as my father had fled his country twenty years later to live a better life, my mother and I were now escaping his violence. My two siblings had known him as a father who enjoys life. I remember seeing him like that until my sixth birthday. From then on, he was not the same man. First, he didn’t come on vacations with us anymore. What he was waiting for all year long was the month of September. At that time of the year he went back to who he really was, to his roots, to his past, to life. He moved back to Turkey for approximately two months each year. This was the only relief he was expecting. He was violent with my mother because something was wrong in his life. He was scary to me. His black eyes were frightening to my mother and to me. But it was not a random violence. With time I got to understand that this was all about culture differences and integration. He did not know why he felt so bad inside. He didn’t have the words to express his discomfort and uneasiness with me, with us and with his life. As he didn’t like where he was and who he was, he didn’t have the strength to give love.
But during my childhood I did not know what all this violence meant. That’s from that period of my life that I learnt that children have to be protected and taken care of. They feel with lots of sensitivity what adults do and suffer. The impact of anything is much stronger on them than on adults. The pain hurts in their souls and resonates in their heads. But they are powerless. That experience made me receptive to children and gave me the patience and sensitivity needed to understand them.
My father did not have that skill and that empathy toward us. He was facing another culture that he did not understand. As I was part of this culture, he could not understand me; he did not manage to understand his own children. We ate Nutella on bread; we ate chocolate and candies, pork and more generally Western food. My mother worked. We often ate dinner late because my siblings and I had practice for swimming at night, and “was it really necessary to do sport?”… He simply blamed us for being part of this French society and for not behaving in the Turkish way. He didn’t have enough control on us, and on his own life. We were becoming strangers to him. He felt rejected. As I was growing up, he often called me “my mum’s ally”. When I turned eight he wanted to go to Turkey with my siblings and me. It would have been the first time we would have met his family. I was totally terrorized by this idea. He almost took me with them. I don’t know how though, I ended up staying in France. As a child it’s hard to understand what’s going on. I just didn’t understand. But the facts and the images were there. Was there a way out? For me that was clear, my father had to die or to leave.
When I was eleven, my mother told me that we would be moving soon. “I have saved enough money, we’re going to live not too far from here, keep it for you now, your father must not know, we don’t know what his reaction will be”. One month later, I was living in an apartment with my mother in the suburbs. I was living with lots of other immigrants this time. They were from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Cameroon, Turkey and we were all living in blocks. I was simply happy, released…free at least. I was enjoying the life there; I had no fears anymore and soon had lots of friends among those communities. But the cycle of violence started again. Our car was stolen and burnt probably by some teenagers of our neighborhood. Few months later, a 16-year old teenager living in my block broke into our apartment. From that moment, I figured out what was the meaning of that violence. It was all about culture and integration once again. It was just like a cycle. But I was confused. I was half the peer of the members of those communities living in my block and half different from them. Obviously, this half part was not enough to live in peace with them. Those children “from the suburbs” are lost between their host country and their home country, they are somewhere in between. As they told me so many times: “when we go back there, they think we are rich and that we are different from them. And when we are here, we are told we are from there”. I heard the same from my father: “I don’t speak the same language as Turkish people because I don’t evolve with them anymore. But I don’t speak your language either.” My father was like those children, he was lost. He did not want to get older in France. I remember hearing him saying that he would move back to Turkey as soon as he was retired. For me the explanation of this cycle of violence is that individuals and communities feeling isolated or marginalized express their resentment through violence.
In spite of all the pain the word Turkey inspired in me, I was passionate about this country; I was more than looking forward to know its people, its customs and its language. Thus, I went to Turkey when I was fourteen with my father and my siblings. At last, I got to understand my father. I then took Turkish classes, and decided to go back there by myself two years later. It was the sign for my father that I respected him, and that I was willing to know who he was. Now he has a grandchild to whom he gives all his love. He wants to stay in France to see him growing up. He is cured. My mother, my siblings and me have spent lots of energy to get to know him and understand who he was. Those efforts have made is way back with us possible.
I’m half Turkish and half French. This Turkish part is what inspires in me an all range of feelings. Turkey means fear, passion, curiosity, reluctance, fascination and frustration to me. That’s a beautiful country, an in-between country, between Europe and Asia, between modernism and tradition. This country makes the transition between the Christian world and the Muslim one, an aspect that is now the focus of passionate debates about Turkey’s future integration in the European Union. This is all I am about, fear and passion. My father left Turkey when he was twenty years old as lots of his fellow citizens did. France needed a cheap labor force and those people coming from East were the answer to this shortage. My father was a solution to an economic problem; he was an imported worker. Both sides were winners, my father had the plan to send money back home and French companies made benefits thanks to him. That was a nice deal, a beautiful consensus. But the consequences were not even thought about. The reality was that Turkish Muslim migrants from countryside villages were moving in a Western industrialized country with Christian traditions. This consensus did not work for long. Apart from the economic aspect, what about the people and their integration? What was meant to be a temporary wave of migration became permanent newly settled inhabitants of France. That’s how my father settled down in France. When he first arrived in the seventies, he was living what we could call the “French dream”. He had a job, money to send to his family in Turkey and he married a French woman who turned out to become my mother.
As I told previously, the consensus did not last long. I left home with my mother when I was eleven years old because this union between two countries, between my mother and my father did not work anymore. Just the same way as my father had fled his country twenty years later to live a better life, my mother and I were now escaping his violence. My two siblings had known him as a father who enjoys life. I remember seeing him like that until my sixth birthday. From then on, he was not the same man. First, he didn’t come on vacations with us anymore. What he was waiting for all year long was the month of September. At that time of the year he went back to who he really was, to his roots, to his past, to life. He moved back to Turkey for approximately two months each year. This was the only relief he was expecting. He was violent with my mother because something was wrong in his life. He was scary to me. His black eyes were frightening to my mother and to me. But it was not a random violence. With time I got to understand that this was all about culture differences and integration. He did not know why he felt so bad inside. He didn’t have the words to express his discomfort and uneasiness with me, with us and with his life. As he didn’t like where he was and who he was, he didn’t have the strength to give love.
But during my childhood I did not know what all this violence meant. That’s from that period of my life that I learnt that children have to be protected and taken care of. They feel with lots of sensitivity what adults do and suffer. The impact of anything is much stronger on them than on adults. The pain hurts in their souls and resonates in their heads. But they are powerless. That experience made me receptive to children and gave me the patience and sensitivity needed to understand them.
My father did not have that skill and that empathy toward us. He was facing another culture that he did not understand. As I was part of this culture, he could not understand me; he did not manage to understand his own children. We ate Nutella on bread; we ate chocolate and candies, pork and more generally Western food. My mother worked. We often ate dinner late because my siblings and I had practice for swimming at night, and “was it really necessary to do sport?”… He simply blamed us for being part of this French society and for not behaving in the Turkish way. He didn’t have enough control on us, and on his own life. We were becoming strangers to him. He felt rejected. As I was growing up, he often called me “my mum’s ally”. When I turned eight he wanted to go to Turkey with my siblings and me. It would have been the first time we would have met his family. I was totally terrorized by this idea. He almost took me with them. I don’t know how though, I ended up staying in France. As a child it’s hard to understand what’s going on. I just didn’t understand. But the facts and the images were there. Was there a way out? For me that was clear, my father had to die or to leave.
When I was eleven, my mother told me that we would be moving soon. “I have saved enough money, we’re going to live not too far from here, keep it for you now, your father must not know, we don’t know what his reaction will be”. One month later, I was living in an apartment with my mother in the suburbs. I was living with lots of other immigrants this time. They were from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Cameroon, Turkey and we were all living in blocks. I was simply happy, released…free at least. I was enjoying the life there; I had no fears anymore and soon had lots of friends among those communities. But the cycle of violence started again. Our car was stolen and burnt probably by some teenagers of our neighborhood. Few months later, a 16-year old teenager living in my block broke into our apartment. From that moment, I figured out what was the meaning of that violence. It was all about culture and integration once again. It was just like a cycle. But I was confused. I was half the peer of the members of those communities living in my block and half different from them. Obviously, this half part was not enough to live in peace with them. Those children “from the suburbs” are lost between their host country and their home country, they are somewhere in between. As they told me so many times: “when we go back there, they think we are rich and that we are different from them. And when we are here, we are told we are from there”. I heard the same from my father: “I don’t speak the same language as Turkish people because I don’t evolve with them anymore. But I don’t speak your language either.” My father was like those children, he was lost. He did not want to get older in France. I remember hearing him saying that he would move back to Turkey as soon as he was retired. For me the explanation of this cycle of violence is that individuals and communities feeling isolated or marginalized express their resentment through violence.
In spite of all the pain the word Turkey inspired in me, I was passionate about this country; I was more than looking forward to know its people, its customs and its language. Thus, I went to Turkey when I was fourteen with my father and my siblings. At last, I got to understand my father. I then took Turkish classes, and decided to go back there by myself two years later. It was the sign for my father that I respected him, and that I was willing to know who he was. Now he has a grandchild to whom he gives all his love. He wants to stay in France to see him growing up. He is cured. My mother, my siblings and me have spent lots of energy to get to know him and understand who he was. Those efforts have made is way back with us possible.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
What is narrative journalism?
I found interesting to link the article Pattern of Migration and the readings for the class to better understand what narrative journalism is.
In her article, Trish O'Kane briefly talks about her own life and her perception of what home is. As she has lived in different countries and different parts of the United States, her own experience shows how the concept of home has become important for her. It seems that there is no specific aim to this piece. The only goal is to share a bit of herself with the readers.
Generally we tend to be more interested in general topics that do not deal with individuals for themselves but individuals as a whole. In the newspapers, topics are far from individuals and from what is common to us. The main interests are politics, economics, society as a whole and countries as entities.
But, with the narrative genre, a new interest is given to the individual. This is a kind of common trend now in our Western societies to give more importance to common people. More shows deal with lives of common people, their problems and the way they chose to overcome them. Reality TV and blogs are examples that highlight that nowadays we give more importance to individuals. There is a growing need to share individual experiences and to interact.
How to explain it then? Knowing about other people’s lives and experiences can be helpful. It is useful and reassuring to see that other people have been through a similar situation as yours. Also, reading about others is a way to know more about ourselves and about who we are. For example, this woman who got a tattoo as a token for her fight against cancer (see Badge of Courage) shows that cancer is not an end; what is important is to have the strength to build this bridge towards recovery.
Finally, literary journalism is interesting in that it gives an idea of what are in people’s minds at a certain time and an idea of how they live too. This journalism can also be a kind of anthropological work. Traveling and living in new places and writing about one’s own experiences is a good way to give more insights of a specific community or society. That’s what Ted Conover did (The art of literary journalism, Norman Sims). According to him, living with hoboes or Mexican immigrants is the only way to really know who they are. In this new style of journalism, what makes the news is one’s personal experience.
Though, everyone can write his experiences in a diary but not everyone can make an art of his experiences. It seems to me that writing a narrative piece requires analyses. There might be a goal or a message. Also, writing about oneself is not an easy task and there are lots of dangers. One can be tempted to embellish reality or on the contrary to make a situation look more tragic than it was.
Then what is the aim of narrative journalism? Writing about others’ realities and lives or your reality?
It seemed to me that there are three different types of narrative journalism and thus three different aims:
1) Writing about yourself and what you have been through.
2) Writing about other people who you’ve lived with for a while. This is still your own experience that is important. For example, living with a family in a foreign country makes you aware of their culture, traditions and beliefs. The goal here would be to write about others thanks to your personal experience.
3) Writing about others. The aim is to become part of a community, observe them. What is important here is the understanding one wants to get of a specific group.
Here are my first thoughts after the readings. :)
In her article, Trish O'Kane briefly talks about her own life and her perception of what home is. As she has lived in different countries and different parts of the United States, her own experience shows how the concept of home has become important for her. It seems that there is no specific aim to this piece. The only goal is to share a bit of herself with the readers.
Generally we tend to be more interested in general topics that do not deal with individuals for themselves but individuals as a whole. In the newspapers, topics are far from individuals and from what is common to us. The main interests are politics, economics, society as a whole and countries as entities.
But, with the narrative genre, a new interest is given to the individual. This is a kind of common trend now in our Western societies to give more importance to common people. More shows deal with lives of common people, their problems and the way they chose to overcome them. Reality TV and blogs are examples that highlight that nowadays we give more importance to individuals. There is a growing need to share individual experiences and to interact.
How to explain it then? Knowing about other people’s lives and experiences can be helpful. It is useful and reassuring to see that other people have been through a similar situation as yours. Also, reading about others is a way to know more about ourselves and about who we are. For example, this woman who got a tattoo as a token for her fight against cancer (see Badge of Courage) shows that cancer is not an end; what is important is to have the strength to build this bridge towards recovery.
Finally, literary journalism is interesting in that it gives an idea of what are in people’s minds at a certain time and an idea of how they live too. This journalism can also be a kind of anthropological work. Traveling and living in new places and writing about one’s own experiences is a good way to give more insights of a specific community or society. That’s what Ted Conover did (The art of literary journalism, Norman Sims). According to him, living with hoboes or Mexican immigrants is the only way to really know who they are. In this new style of journalism, what makes the news is one’s personal experience.
Though, everyone can write his experiences in a diary but not everyone can make an art of his experiences. It seems to me that writing a narrative piece requires analyses. There might be a goal or a message. Also, writing about oneself is not an easy task and there are lots of dangers. One can be tempted to embellish reality or on the contrary to make a situation look more tragic than it was.
Then what is the aim of narrative journalism? Writing about others’ realities and lives or your reality?
It seemed to me that there are three different types of narrative journalism and thus three different aims:
1) Writing about yourself and what you have been through.
2) Writing about other people who you’ve lived with for a while. This is still your own experience that is important. For example, living with a family in a foreign country makes you aware of their culture, traditions and beliefs. The goal here would be to write about others thanks to your personal experience.
3) Writing about others. The aim is to become part of a community, observe them. What is important here is the understanding one wants to get of a specific group.
Here are my first thoughts after the readings. :)
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