{"id":1288,"date":"2015-10-09T14:37:11","date_gmt":"2015-10-09T14:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2015\/10\/09\/geraldine-brooks-you-might-aspire-to-art-but-it-better-start-as-craft\/"},"modified":"2025-03-19T15:59:40","modified_gmt":"2025-03-19T15:59:40","slug":"geraldine-brooks-you-might-aspire-to-art-but-it-better-start-as-craft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2015\/10\/09\/geraldine-brooks-you-might-aspire-to-art-but-it-better-start-as-craft\/","title":{"rendered":"Geraldine Brooks: \u201cYou might aspire to art but it better start as craft\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Geraldine Brooks<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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Australian-born Geraldine Brooks was a prize-winning journalist before becoming a critically acclaimed novelist. Brooks, a Columbia Journalism School graduate and a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent who covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, is the author of five historical novels and three works of nonfiction. Her latest novel, The Secret Chord<\/em>, published on October 6, imagines the life of biblical King David during the Second Iron Age in Israel. Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March,<\/em> a Civil War-era story about the absent father in the Louisa May Alcott novel, Little Women<\/em>. Her other novels are: Caleb\u2019s Crossing, <\/em>about the first Native American to graduate from Harvard; People of the Book,<\/em> about the journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah; and Year of Wonders, <\/em>the story of a young woman\u2019s fight to save her 17th<\/sup>-century English village from the plague. Brooks is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire<\/em>, Foreign Correspondence<\/em> and The Idea of Home<\/em>. With her husband, the author and journalist Tony Horwitz, Brooks won the Overseas Press Club award for coverage of the Persian Gulf War. As she embarked on her book tour for The Secret Chord<\/em>, Brooks sat down with freelance journalist and Columbia Journalism School classmate Ricki Morell in Boston. Following are edited and condensed excerpts of that conversation:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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You\u2019re in the unusual position of having had deep experience as a journalist and a novelist. As a novelist, what have you learned about the craft of storytelling that you wish you had known when you were a journalist?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I do think that being a journalist was a fantastic foundation for being a novelist and, indeed, I could not have written the books I\u2019ve written if I hadn\u2019t had that rich experience to draw on. It is having all those varied encounters with people, as their lives are being changed and shaped by catastrophe, and then the physical experiences of being in a conflict zone and the sounds and smells of a battlefield. A long-ago battlefield has different technology but the effect of the weaponry on the human body is not different. And so I draw on those years as a correspondent all the time.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Also, from the technical point of view of the writing, I think being a journalist instills the great fear in you of the reader not turning past the jump. Understanding that the easiest thing for a reader to do is stop reading is something that my wonderful newspaper editors instilled in me. That is very useful for keeping the narrative flowing and respecting the fact that there are many demands on a reader\u2019s attention, and you\u2019ve got to grab them. It\u2019s also about not being precious about writing every day \u2013 about having the discipline and the understanding that you might aspire to art but it better start as craft.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Journalism has given me a tremendous amount as a novelist. I think it would be really bad if I took my novel-writing techniques back into journalism because it\u2019s all about making stuff up and you can\u2019t do that in journalism. In a newspaper story, when the line of fact runs out, the story stops. In a novel, often that\u2019s where it gets more interesting because then you can do the what-ifs.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What are your thoughts on the \u201ccreative nonfiction\u201d genre? Is it possible to create a piece of nonfiction that really is novelistic and sustains a story from facts?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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What used to be called the \u201cnew journalism\u201d brought writerly techniques to journalism. I came up in that era, and that was a huge breakthrough. When we talk about \u201cnarrative nonfiction,\u201d I get incandescent when people say something is nonfiction, and you get to the back of the book and find they\u2019ve changed or merged scenes and created dialogue. Then it\u2019s not nonfiction anymore. It sets the bar too high for legitimate nonfiction. It\u2019s one thing if you get a scene that you\u2019ve reported the hell out of, and you\u2019ve stayed with the person, and you\u2019ve worn out your shoe leather, and you\u2019re there when that amazing thing happens. But just to be able to make it up, to have it happen because you wish it had gone down like that, it\u2019s a betrayal and an insidious trend.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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It\u2019s certainly possible to do it properly. Look at [Tom Wolfe\u2019s] The Right Stuff. <\/em>Was there ever a better first ten pages in any book? I thought [Jon Krakauer\u2019s] Into Thin Air <\/em>was equally riveting. I totally believe you can do it. It\u2019s just very hard and extremely time consuming, and you\u2019d better be prepared to follow the threads wherever they lead you, into the dark forest, because that\u2019s the only way you\u2019ll get that really good stuff.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In what way is writing fiction harder or easier than writing nonfiction?  What aspects of the craft are similar and what aspects are different<\/strong>?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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As somebody who lived for more than a decade within the constraints of fact, it\u2019s very enjoyable to take that swan dive when the voices of the historical record fall silent. When you can\u2019t see any further in the factual record, you\u2019re able to say, \u201cThis is what I think; this is what I imagine how it might have been. \u201cThat is very pleasurable. It\u2019s a very interior thing. The hard part is that you have to have the ideas.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Some days it\u2019s very hard, but that\u2019s again the beauty of having been a journalist. On the worst day, you have the discipline to get down something even if it\u2019s really crappy, and then you\u2019ve got something to work with.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I think writing fiction is probably easier, particularly if I compare any given day in my life now, to arriving in the middle of the night in the middle of the civil uprising in Yemen. It\u2019s easier.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Could you describe your process of researching a novel?  How does it compare with reporting? What were the challenges of researching and writing The Secret Chord<\/em>, which takes place during the distant past, a time with little historical record<\/strong>?<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The process is like creating a knitted garment. I don\u2019t do the research first. I do just enough research to be able to start writing. I wait for the story to tell me what I don\u2019t know, and then I go and find it out. If you need to know what a character was wearing, then you go and research what people would have been wearing at that time. Then you come back and keep writing until you come to another roadblock. The actual business of finding out \u2013 that\u2019s very journalistic, but in a more relaxed way. As journalists, we were trying to find out things that people didn\u2019t want to tell. In a novel, you\u2019re often asking questions about people\u2019s work, and mostly people are very generous and love talking about their work. If you want to go and see how book conservators work, they\u2019re only too happy to help, so it\u2019s a bit more like the celebrity interview side of things than investigative journalism.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Accuracy is very important to me. That\u2019s your contract with the reader: I\u2019m going to take you on a journey, but the edifice that I can build out of imagination is only going to be as sound as the scaffolding it rests on, and the scaffolding is the facts. In The Secret Chord,<\/em> I so wanted to put King David on a horse because I really like horses, and kings and horses – it\u2019s what you\u2019d expect. But actually they did not ride horses. So, as much as I would have liked to have changed the facts, I had to put him on a mule.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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You do make mistakes, though. In my first novel, Year of Wonders<\/em>, I had my [17th<\/sup>-century] narrator talking about the mauve tide of the heather. That same year, another book came out called, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World<\/em> [in the 19th<\/sup> century]. So there was no way my narrator would have known the color mauve. And somebody somewhere was probably taken out of the narrative because of that.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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With The Secret Chord,<\/em> I\u2019m not quite sure I knew what I was getting into initially. I was really surprised at how flimsy the record of David is outside of the Bible. There\u2019s really only one inscription and a few ruined palaces that may or may not have been associated with a leader of his stature. So it\u2019s a completely different kind of research. If you\u2019re doing Bronson Alcott, you\u2019ve got all Bronson Alcott\u2019s journals, all his correspondence and all the references to him in his incredibly literate friends\u2019 writings. You\u2019ve got a ton of information to build a character out of. In this case, you\u2019ve just got the one fabulous Biblical story. But it\u2019s a masterpiece of concision, that one. There\u2019s not a lot of room to breathe in that sort of \u201cThen this happened, and then that happened\u201d narrative. You\u2019re trying to open it up and get some more human complexity and relationships in it. I did a lot of physical research, by going to the places and doing the things he might have done, though clearly not running people through pikes and things of that nature. But I did herd sheep and stay in goatherd tents in the desert and eat the foods of the period.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Can you talk about the editing process and revisions? How is the editor-writer relationship as a novelist different from the one you had as a journalist?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I am revising constantly, constantly. This book was one of my most egregious in that regard. I really pushed it because they let me now. You\u2019re not supposed to make substantial changes to third pass pages, but I could not let them go. I think I changed something on every other page. That\u2019s just compulsive. Take it from my cold, dead hands because it\u2019s never right. I\u2019ve already seen something in there that\u2019s really bothering the hell out of me, that I\u2019m going to have to change if there\u2019s another edition. It\u2019s a word change \u2013 I don\u2019t know how it got through.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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As far as the editor-writer relationship, now they\u2019re so much more deferential to the \u201cartiste.\u201d Not so much in the newsroom. I remember one day I was a cub reporter in Sydney, and it was my first big story. It was a mine disaster, and I knew it was going on the front page. It was very intense. It was my first death knock. It was my first everything, and I wanted to do justice to these people. The news editor was pacing behind me and he was saying, \u201cWhere is it? Where is it?\u201d And I said, \u201cI\u2019m just trying to find a way to finish it. I can\u2019t come up with a way to finish it.\u201d And he said, \u201cFinish it! Finish it!\u201d And he leans over – and it was a typewriter in those days \u2013 and he types E-N-D. Finished.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks was a prize-winning journalist before becoming a critically acclaimed novelist. Brooks, a Columbia Journalism School graduate and a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent who covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, is the author of five historical novels and three works of nonfiction. Her latest novel, The Secret Chord, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[184],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-5-questions","authors-ricki-morell"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGeraldine Brooks: \u201cYou might aspire to art but it better start as craft\u201d - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2015\/10\/09\/geraldine-brooks-you-might-aspire-to-art-but-it-better-start-as-craft\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Geraldine Brooks: \u201cYou might aspire to art but it better start as craft\u201d - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Australian-born Geraldine Brooks was a prize-winning journalist before becoming a critically acclaimed novelist. 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