{"id":678,"date":"2010-11-29T18:06:53","date_gmt":"2010-11-29T18:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2010\/11\/29\/michael-paterniti-on-narrative-voice-the-power-of-rewrite-bill-clinton-old-cheese-and-flying-spaniards\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T18:53:47","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T18:53:47","slug":"michael-paterniti-on-narrative-voice-the-power-of-rewrite-bill-clinton-old-cheese-and-flying-spaniards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2010\/11\/29\/michael-paterniti-on-narrative-voice-the-power-of-rewrite-bill-clinton-old-cheese-and-flying-spaniards\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Paterniti on narrative voice, the power of rewrite, Bill Clinton, old cheese, and flying Spaniards (part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n Veteran magazine writer Michael Paterniti visited the Nieman Foundation a couple of weeks ago for a discussion about literary journalism with Narrative Writing instructor Paige Williams\u2019 class<\/a> and other fellows. Winner of the National Magazine Award for feature writing (and a six-time finalist), Paterniti has written powerfully about everything from the crash of SwissAir 111<\/a> to the world-renowned chef Ferran Adr\u00eca<\/a>. His piece about a cross-country trip with Albert Einstein\u2019s brain became the basis for his <\/em>New York Times <\/em>\u201cnotables\u201d book Driving Mr. Albert<\/em><\/a>. He is at work on a new book about cheese. He lives with his wife, the <\/em>New York Times Magazine <\/em>writer Sara Corbett<\/a>, and their three children in Portland, Maine, where Paterniti and Corbett cofounded The Telling Room<\/a>, a nonprofit writing program for kids. Williams, who led the discussion, won the National Magazine Award for feature writing, about a young Burundian asylum seeker<\/a>, and shared a nomination the following year for a package on the unfulfilled legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This excerpt has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.<\/em>

Paige Williams: <\/strong>Now that we have the formal introduction I thought you guys might like something more intimate. Our spouses know us better than anyone, which is both marvelous and terrifying, and so I asked Mike\u2019s wife, Sara, to tell us something about Mike\u2019s writing life. This is what she e-mailed:
\u201cHe listens to music when he writes \u2013\u00a0really loud music, same song over and over again, usually one song per story. He drinks insane amounts of Starbucks iced tea while on deadline. He has a surfboard, and when he’s on deadline he loads his surfboard into our minivan \u2013\u00a0which basically means that nobody else in our family, which includes three kids and a dog, can fit in the minivan \u2013\u00a0and keeps it there, not because he’s going to actually manage to go surfing but it serves as some very oversized talisman that tells him someday he’ll get his story done and feel free again. He is obsessive and brutally hard on himself. He frets and fusses and procrastinates and complains and then eventually, usually two or three clicks past the 11th hour, will suddenly disappear. It’s like the lights go off. All noise stops. Even if he’s home, he’s not really there. The next time I see him \u2013\u00a0a day later, two days later \u2013\u00a0he’s got his story. It’s actually a pretty wild thing to watch. Because when he gets it, it’s beautiful.

\u201cThe other thing I both love and wring my hands over about Mike is that he is maddeningly, amazingly 100 percent unrealistic, all the time. His ideas and his aims are always big and odd. The same guy who told me that he thought it would be a good idea to take a 3,000-mile road trip with an 84-year-old and a famous brain has also spent the last seven years obsessing over a piece of cheese that sits in a cave in Spain. I see him reading something, or Googling something, and I start to realize it’s just another inevitability: He gets interested in a really tall man in the Ukraine and then suddenly, boom, that’s where he’s headed. Or charging off to live in a motel in Dodge City, Kansas, because two years earlier someone said something odd to him there. We hauled our three kids to Central India in the hot season because Mike had heard that the illegitimate heir to the French throne was hidden away there. We went to France and ate little songbirds once because Mike wanted to know what that would be like. People hurling themselves off a bridge in southern China? Sure, why not? Profile a chimpanzee for the New York Times Magazine? Only Mike. When people ask me what my writer-husband \u2018covers,\u2019 I usually begin by saying, \u2018Well, his tastes are a little unconventional.\u2019

\u201cIf I make it sound like Mike’s stories spring from his mind beautifully formed, I am telling only half the truth. He gets the voice of a story, writes a great draft, but then \u2013\u00a0BUT THEN \u2013\u00a0he worries over every single word and line until the very second it leaves his hands to go the printer. I’ve never seen anyone make as many changes in page proofs as Mike does. Some of us (me, anyway) have a tendency to hit a point when we think a story is done and just happily watch it go off to bed in the arms of an editor, but Mike is not that writer.\u201d<\/blockquote>
We\u2019re happy to have you here, Mike, and I thought we could start with you reading a bit from one of your pieces.

 

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Mike Paterniti:<\/strong> [Reads a passage from the Walter Benjamin essay \u201cThe Storyteller<\/a>,\u201d in which Benjamin quotes Paul Valery: \u201c \u2018Artistic observation,\u2019 says Valery in reflections on a woman artist whose work consisted in the silk embroidery of figures, \u2018can attain an almost mystical depth. The objects on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in his own inner self.\u2019 \u201d He then reads a short passage from his own Esquire piece \u201cThe American Hero in Four Acts,\u201d a line of which \u2013\u00a0\u201cAnd suddenly, impossibly, out of nowhere \u2013\u00a0you!\u201d \u2013\u00a0made Esquire\u2019s list of 70 Greatest Sentences<\/a>.]

Williams: <\/strong>You say you wrote \u201cThe American Hero in Four Acts\u201d in a voice you don\u2019t really use anymore. How do you mean? Why the change?

Paterniti: <\/strong>I don\u2019t think the change was intentional. The voice of every piece varies, but it\u2019s always a mystery how you get there, how you find that voice. Is this a big voice? Is this a little voice? Is this a New York Times Magazine voice where we just want to go straight reportage, just tell people, \u201cThis is what I found and I want you to take it seriously; I\u2019m not gonna bury it in this literary long form or creative nonfiction, whatever people want to call it, I\u2019m gonna do it as a recognizable piece of reporting so you have to contend with this because it\u2019s something that has to be contended with.\u201d

Williams: <\/strong>So how do you get there? Does part of it depend upon the publication, in that your voice changes according to audience?

Paterniti: <\/strong>Yeah. I think about a piece I did about Bill Clinton<\/a> for Esquire right at the end of his presidency, and I was with him on and off for almost three months. … I wrote a story that was really just about him, as a man. It never said his name. And it was at the end of his presidency, so came at a perfect time to sum up who he was and what maybe had motivated him \u2013\u00a0I was writing this extended obituary really. It was very freeing in some ways just to treat him as a man.

I think the thing people miss about Clinton is his rage, his anger. That\u2019s what organized a lot of who he was then. But there was a great bit of detail that came from a conversation I had with a couple of his very close aides. They said there was a myth about the [Monica] Lewinsky scandal: that he had compartmentalized the scandal and was doing the work of America. His people kept saying that, and doing these photo ops where Clinton was being very jaunty and energetic. \u2026 On a normal day when he didn\u2019t have a scandal he\u2019d be doing a crossword and someone would be briefing him and other people would be talking to him and his brain was big enough to grab the whole thing. In fact, one aide one day said to him, \u201cYou\u2019re not listening to a word I say, Mr. President,\u201d and Clinton was doing his crossword and he looked up and just sort of repeated verbatim what the guy had just said.

But on this one day, during the Lewinsky thing, he apparently was sitting at the desk. He wasn\u2019t doing a crossword. He was just moving objects around. People were talking to him and he just kept moving the objects. Finally one by one everybody left the room. At least two people who had been in the room said they thought he\u2019d really had some sort of break.

I tried as best I could to recreate the scene \u2013\u00a0it was very much in passing \u2013\u00a0but it was embedded in this voice that had been stripped of all quotes and sources. I had positioned the camera so intimately it was like an extended close-up. And you were never gonna get anything else in that scene; it was like that Bergman close-up. It\u2019s like you\u2019re gonna see this guy wince, maybe cry; you\u2019re gonna see him do what he does, which is smile and seduce, all these things he does so wonderfully, but you\u2019re never gonna know exactly why. Or there\u2019ll be a mystery to it. So that close-up committed me to that. I thought I had this amazing piece of reporting, but nobody ever commented on it. It was just totally lost. And included with the article I did this Q&A<\/a> with him \u2013\u00a0me asking a question and Clinton going on for pages \u2013\u00a0and he said three things, and those were the sound bites that got picked up by everybody.

Williams: <\/strong>What did he say?

Paterniti: <\/strong>This was a week before the election,\u00a0so one thing he said was, \u201cI\u2019ve already apologized to America for what I\u2019ve done, but the Republicans haven\u2019t apologized for what they did to me,\u201d which just brought Clinton back into an election where Democrats were trying to keep him off to the side. And so for the last week the Republicans were like, \u201cDo you remember that president that we used to have, who had those dealings with Monica Lewinsky?\u201d And he suddenly became the news story for a while. But in the end, voicewise, I was okay\u00a0with losing this great piece of reporting to the narrative that I wrote, because I had made that commitment as a writer and a storyteller. I said I\u2019m just gonna have to let that go, it\u2019s not gonna be that line in the New York Times Magazine that would have read, \u201ca senior adviser close to Clinton says.\u201d

Helen Branswell: <\/strong>Do you think if you\u2019d written it differently \u2013\u00a0not necessarily as straight reportage but with another voice \u2013\u00a0that it might have gotten more attention or was it just because of the timing, the cycle, that it got sort of overlooked?

Paterniti: <\/strong>The article and interview didn\u2019t get overlooked but that detail got buried in the flow of it. So I think yes, if I had really punched that up, that would have been the lead. Like, on the day that it came out, I went to New York and did the “Today”\u00a0show and “Hardball”\u00a0and “The\u00a0O\u2019Reilly Factor,” and we might have been talking just <\/em>about Bill Clinton\u2019s alleged breakdown in the White House.

Williams: <\/strong>A lesser writer might have taken that scene and done something sensationalistic.

Paterniti: <\/strong>I would have been curious as somebody coming to it very cold \u2013\u00a0my president had some sort of episode, or breakdown, and I want to know.

Williams: <\/strong>Is that what you came to think, though, that he actually had some sort of breakdown?

Paterniti: <\/strong>Everyone remembers differently, but I believe the guys who told me. They were very credible people who spent a ton of time with him. They were with him every day. I said, \u201cOh,\u00a0was it just one day?\u201d And they said, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just one day.\u201d

Darcy Frey: <\/strong>I\u2019m totally fascinated by this trial-and-error process of finding a voice that\u2019s suitable to the right material. You try out an oboe and that doesn\u2019t sound quite right so you try out a trumpet. Is there a point where you hit a voice that matches the subject? And how do you know that those two things have kind of synched up in the right way for you?

Paterniti: <\/strong>I think there\u2019s a moment \u2013\u00a0this Guantanamo detainee piece I\u2019m working on now is a good example. I\u2019ve written five drafts. Each one has been 10,000 words. It\u2019s taken way too long. I\u2019ve had the luxury of protection from my editor, Joel Lovell, who\u2019s been willing to move the deadline back, even though they\u2019re at this point probably very angry with me. But I just think I found it. And I think I found it because it\u2019s just coming up off the page \u2013\u00a0I can\u2019t even describe it, it seems to be lifting a little bit off the page. And the things I\u2019ve been struggling so hard to fold into the narrative have suddenly begun to arrange themselves. I think if someone said, \u201cYou just have to give it up right now,\u201d this would\u2019ve been my greatest failure. And now at least I\u2019ve got a shot. But I\u2019ve tried everything. I\u2019ve done third person, I\u2019ve done second person, I\u2019ve done first person, I\u2019ve positioned the story behind one character, I\u2019ve positioned it behind another character, I\u2019ve put myself in the middle of it \u2013\u00a0there\u2019s nowhere left to go.

Williams: <\/strong>Have you changed the tenses yet?

Paterniti: <\/strong>I\u2019ve changed the tenses. I\u2019ve changed the font! I\u2019ve changed what I was drinking.

Williams: <\/strong>Change the song?

Paterniti: <\/strong>I\u2019ve changed the song!

Michael Fitzgerald: <\/strong>So where would you typically want feedback from your editor? What\u2019s your normal process and is there give and take like Tom Junod<\/a> talks about or is it, \u201cThis all has to come out of me?\u201d

Paterniti: <\/strong>Oh, I\u2019m so open to give and take, and to talk. I\u2019ve had like a magical relationship with a couple of magazine editors. There\u2019s a story I did early on for Esquire. It started in second person and after the first section it went into a very typical magazine setup \u2013\u00a0I went to Dodge City to live in this motel because I thought this was ground zero for the new American racism \u2013\u00a0so it was this establishing graf, this nut graf, and I sent the opening to my editor and got this one line back like, \u201cYou\u2019re not interesting. Take the \u2018I\u2019 out of the story.\u201d And it just exploded, this story. I finished it very quickly. Otherwise I would\u2019ve gone down the \u201cI\u201d road. Just with that one little suggestion, I was like, \u201cThank you so very much because you\u2019ve reduced the amount of torture I\u2019ll have to go through to get this right.\u201d

A really great editor \u2013\u00a0and I would include Andy Ward, who is my book editor and was my magazine editor \u2013\u00a0is an editor who\u2019s editing the story right from the very beginning, the minute you mention the idea. And he\u2019s directing the flow of thought and what makes it important and how you\u2019re gonna excavate that, like what kind of point of view you want to take, which stance do you want to take in relation to the characters? There were a lot of times I\u2019d call Andy and say, \u201cWill you tell me why this was so interesting to you when we first talked about it?\u201d Just to hear him talk back to me for two minutes. It\u2019s not real elaborate, not real crafty stuff. Oftentimes I\u2019ll just ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s the headline for this story?\u201d A lot of times that helps me focus.

Fitzgerald: <\/strong>How do you deal with editors who aren\u2019t so great?

Paterniti: <\/strong>I\u2019ve been super lucky with editors, but when it\u2019s not working I just work harder. And also I will lean on my wife, Sara. I\u2019ll have her read or I\u2019ll have an outside reader come in, like literally my emergency readers where I\u2019ll say, \u201cHey I know it\u2019s 9 o\u2019clock on a Monday night but I\u2019m dying.\u201d But it\u2019s hard when you don\u2019t have a good editor. It\u2019s really hard. And it\u2019s really frustrating. And it does take more time. The reality of it is that you spend more time in the dark and you have to rely on yourself so much more. When you can\u2019t quite find it that\u2019s when you go through some deeper doubt about what you\u2019re doing.

Williams: <\/strong>What is it about legendary editors like Andy? What sets him apart from other editors? And what do you need from an editor?

Paterniti: <\/strong>His work ethic is incredible. He boomerangs stories back. He\u2019ll boomerang a 10,000-word story back by the end of the day. He just zeroes in on what\u2019s weak. All he has to do is bracket it. He doesn\u2019t even really have to write words anymore. I think that\u2019s what it is; he\u2019s just got a really crystal-clear sensibility of how it should work in your voice. He doesn\u2019t try to be the writer.

There are plenty of editors, and I was one of them, who wanted to be a writer, who was going to be a writer, and who starts doing some writing on the page. When I was at Outside \u2013 <\/em>back in this moment in time, when I was there, we were doing a lot of long literary pieces and working with a lot of great writers like Annie Proulx and Ian Frazier, and these guys were writing eight- and ten-thousand-word drafts. When people did stories that sort of didn\u2019t live up to the Proulx-Frazier standard we would go in and rewrite them. And I guess that\u2019s a sort of a famous saying at the New Yorker, right? \u201cEditors love to see their words in print?\u201d There\u2019s incredible rewriting that goes on in many magazines, and the editors can be very heavy-handed when they need to be, and that\u2019s what Andy tries not to do. And if a story\u2019s gonna bomb he\u2019ll pull the plug. He\u2019ll work until the point where he feels he\u2019s taken the writer as far as the writer\u2019s going to go.

Philippa Thomas: <\/strong>How many times have you walked away from a story after you\u2019ve gotten quite deep into it?

Paterniti: <\/strong>Never. I\u2019ve reported one story that I didn\u2019t end up writing, but that was because it coincided with other breaking stories that became a higher priority. If I actually start writing, it\u2019s a steel-cage death match. I\u2019m not leaving the cage. Even if I end up bloodied and it\u2019s not my best, there\u2019s no way to walk away.

Robert Rose: <\/strong>Surely the danger is to become too obsessive and self-critical, so how many times have you written something where the first draft is perfect and it\u2019s gone out? And once the story\u2019s gone out do you ever read it and think, \u201cGreat, that\u2019s the best I could have done?\u201d

Paterniti: <\/strong>No, I don\u2019t ever think that. But I have had stories that have come like that, that have come in a draft or quickly. Sometimes it\u2019s the extra leg of reporting that opens it up. There\u2019s a plane-crash piece that I wrote. It was about a SwissAir flight from New York to Geneva that crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia. I went around and talked to everybody, all the families, and I went to a lawyer \u2013\u00a0there was a family of four that died, two parents and their adult children \u2013\u00a0and he showed me all these photo albums and then said, \u201cDo you want to see what\u2019s left of the family?\u201d He slid this envelope across the table and it was, like, an ankle.

I had all this stuff and it was very powerful, but I couldn\u2019t begin to write. I finally went up to Peggy\u2019s Cove, and on the first day I went into this little fishing village, and no one would talk to me. There was this kind of hostility because they were tired of talking about this horrific thing. And I was driving out and it was spitting rain, and the sky was kind of that grayish purple, and all the clothes on the line \u2013\u00a0the wind had filled all the clothes. Sothey were just hovering.\u00a0And that\u2019s what I thought when I drove by;I thought I was seeing bodies in the air. And that was it. It was really that image that started it for me. And I just cranked it out. I already had all the reporting. I had written a lot of rough drafts sort of in my mind, like where is this supposed to start and how do I capture the grief as something tactile? But until there was the absence of bodies I didn\u2019t know what to hang it on.

The times that it has happened quickly I think have spoiled me. It\u2019s dangerous to have that happen, especially early in your career, because I think people begin to think, \u201cHey,\u00a0I\u2019m Jack Kerouac, I just type it out.\u201d The stories that look and feel like they were tossed off, oftentimes those are the ones where you\u2019re six or seven drafts in and you have to find some energy for it again, find a way back to it. And the standard is yours. I do think there\u2019s a way to dial that back a little, to maintain your sanity. Not everything has to be epic and crazily lyrical. Some stories just need to be told. And your mental health as a writer is really important. A lot of times that\u2019s why I do listen to music, something bigger and louder than me that I\u2019m feeding off of just a little bit.

Rose: <\/strong>So what song did you listen to when you wrote that airline piece?

Paterniti: <\/strong>Oh man, I don\u2019t even remember. If you go to numbers of plays on my iPod, there\u2019s a disturbing portrait of a man who can\u2019t let go of certain songs.

Williams: <\/strong>We need a play list for all your stories.

Paterniti: <\/strong>I listen to alternative music, mostly, but I have this old recording of this Springsteen song, \u201cGrowin\u2019 Up<\/a>,\u201d from “Greetings from Asbury Park<\/a>” \u2013 <\/em>it\u2019s a brilliant song and it\u2019s this guy who in one moment is seizing the world through words. It\u2019s just so beautiful. And that song has been on repeat for this Guantanamo story. Something about it is right. \u2026

It\u2019s like Blake\u2019s songs of innocence and experience \u2013\u00a0there\u2019s an incredible innocence in the ideals of this one Marine defense attorney who ends up defending an alleged terrorist, and all these dreams and delusions he\u2019s had about America kind of get crushed. There\u2019s something about that song, that hopeful innocent voice that is going to end up jaded, that\u2019s carried me through a little bit. I don\u2019t know why.

Thomas: <\/strong>When you were describing the SwissAir journey \u2013\u00a0I couldn\u2019t work out whether you were reimagining all of that detail or whether they were taking you through the scenarios \u2013

Paterniti: <\/strong>Besides one thing I\u2019ve been told might be wrong \u2013\u00a0that Rob Gordon, the reporter, doesn\u2019t really like hockey \u2013\u00a0there was this other thing that I had to guess at a little bit. In this hanger they had the plane, a schematic of it, and they were putting up dots for the people who\u2019d been lost, where they thought they were sitting. So at one point in the article I name the seats and what was happening there, and that was guessing from the names on the board and asking the families, like, what they would have been drinking. I heard from a family that said, \u201cI thought our <\/em>guy was in 14C, and he wouldn\u2019t have had that drink.\u201d We went by the official version on the wall and interviews with families. So there\u2019s always going to be some of that; no matter how much you think you\u2019ve corroborated something, there\u2019s always gonna be some nuance that somebody else might see in a different way.

[Read part 2 of the discussion with Paterniti<\/a>, in which he talks about struggling with structure, meeting William Burroughs, and the most amazing storyteller he knows.]<\/em>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Veteran magazine writer Michael Paterniti visited the Nieman Foundation a couple of weeks ago for a discussion about literary journalism with Narrative Writing instructor Paige Williams\u2019 class and other fellows. 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